her grandmother’s pipe, thinking about all the people she would like to hurt, Geoffrey Van Cleve being high on that particular list.
In a cabin that should have had Margery O’Hare in the heart of it, two people sat sleepless on each side of a rough-hewn door, trying to work out a route to a different outcome, their thoughts like a Chinese puzzle, and a solid knot of anxiety too huge and weighty pressing down upon each of them.
And a few miles away, Margery sat on the floor with her back against the wall of the cell and tried to fight the rising panic that kept pushing up from her chest, like a choking tide. Across the hall two men—a drunk from out of state and a habitual thief whose face she could recall but not name—called obscenities at her, and the deputy, a fair man who was troubled that there were no segregated facilities for women (he could barely remember the last time a woman was kept overnight in Baileyville Jail, let alone a pregnant one), had strung up a sheet across half the bars to shield her a little. But she could still hear them, and smell the sour scents of urine and sweat, and all the while they knew she was there, and this lent the confines of the little jail an intimacy that was disturbing and discomfiting to the point where, exhausted as she was, she knew no sleep would come.
She would have been more comfortable on the mattress, especially as the baby was now of a size where it seemed to press down on unexpected parts of her, but the mattress was stained and full of chiggers and she had sat there for a full five minutes before she had started to itch.
You want to peel back that curtain there, girl? I’ll show you something that will get you to sleep.
You cut it out, Dwayne Froggatt.
Just having a little fun, Deputy. You know she likes it. Written all over her waistline, ain’t it?
McCullough had come for her after all, his loaded weapon his own bloodied body, her library book a written confession on his chest. He had followed her back down that mountain as surely as if he’d done it with a loaded gun in his hand.
She tried to think of what she could say in mitigation; she hadn’t known she had hurt him. She had been afraid. She had simply been trying to do her job. She was a woman, just minding her business. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew how it looked. Nancy, without knowing it, had sealed her fate by placing her up there, library book in hand.
Margery O’Hare pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath, feeling the panic begin to rise again. Through the bars she could see the blue-mauve of encroaching night, hear the distant birdcall that marked the dying embers of the day. And as the dark fell she felt the walls press in on her, the ceiling lowering, and she screwed her eyes shut.
“I can’t stay here. I can’t,” she said softly. “I can’t be in here.”
You whispering to me, girl? Want me to sing you a lullaby?
Pull back that curtain. Go on. Just for Daddy.
A burst of drunken laughter.
“I can’t stay in here.” Her breath bunched and gathered in her chest, her knuckles whitened and the cell began to swim, the floor rising as the panic built.
And then the baby shifted inside her, once, twice, as if telling her that she was not alone, that nothing was to be gained from this, and Margery let out a half-sob, placed her hands on her belly and closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath, waiting until the terror had passed.
TWENTY
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
• THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Word had got round by morning, and a few folk took the trouble to walk down to the library and say how crazy the whole thing was, that they didn’t believe ill of Margery and that it was a darn shame the police were treating her so. But a whole lot more didn’t, and Alice felt those whispered discussions all the way from their little cabin by