Creek. Miss Eleanor is staying with her sister so she won’t need new books this time round. And, Izzy, if you could take the MacArthurs? Would that work? You can cut across that forty-acre field to tie in with your usual routes. The one with the falling-down barn.”
They agreed without complaint, sneaking glances at Alice, who said nothing, her attention fixed on some unidentified point three feet from her toes, her cheeks burning. As Izzy left she put out her hand and squeezed Alice’s shoulder gently. Alice waited until they had packed their bags and mounted their horses, and then she sat, gingerly, on Sophia’s chair.
“You all right?”
Alice nodded. They sat and listened to the sound of hoofs fading up the road.
“You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?” Margery said finally. “Ain’t the hurt. It’s that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it don’t matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them, period. It’s when you realize they can always just shut you up with a fist. Just like that.”
Alice remembered how Margery’s demeanor had changed when the man in the bar had placed himself between them, how her gaze had landed hard where the man touched Alice’s shoulder.
Margery pulled the coffee pot from its stand and cursed as she discovered it was empty. She mulled over it for a moment, then straightened up, and flashed Alice a tight smile. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”
* * *
• • •
Despite the daylight hours being now so short, the day ran lengthy and strange, the little library filled with a vague sense of suspense, as if Alice were not quite sure whether she should be waiting for someone or for something to happen. The blows hadn’t hurt too much the night before. Now she grasped that was her body’s reaction to shock. As the hours crept by, various parts of her had begun to swell and stiffen, a dull throb pushing at the parts of her head where it had made contact with Van Cleve’s meaty fist or the unforgiving table-top.
Margery left, after Alice assured her that, yes, she was fine, and, no, she didn’t want any more people missing out on their books, promising to bolt the door all the time she was gone. In truth, she needed time alone, time where she didn’t have to worry about everybody else’s reactions to her, as well as everything else.
And so, for a couple of hours, it was just Alice in the library, alone with her thoughts. Her head ached too much to read, and she didn’t know what to look at anyway. Her thoughts were muddied, tangled. She found it hard to focus, while the questions of her future—where she would live, what to do, whether even to try to return to England—seemed so huge and intractable that eventually it seemed easier simply to concentrate on the small tasks. Tidy some books. Make some coffee. Step outside to use the outhouse, then return swiftly to bolt the door again.
At lunchtime there was a knock on the door and she froze. But it was Fred’s voice that called, “It’s only me, Alice,” and she raised herself from the chair and slid back the bolt, stepping behind it as he came in.
“Brought you some soup,” he said, placing a bowl with a cloth draped over its rim on the desk. “Thought you might be getting hungry.”
It was then that he saw her face. She registered the shock, suppressed as quickly as it flared, to be supplanted by something darker, and angrier. He walked to the end of the room and stood there for a minute, his back to her, and it was as if he were suddenly made of something harder, as if his frame had turned to iron.
“Bennett Van Cleve is a fool,” he said, and his jaw barely moved, as if he were having trouble containing himself.
“It wasn’t Bennett.”
It took him a moment to absorb this. “Well, damn.” He walked back and stopped in front of her. She turned her head away from him, color rising in her cheeks, as if it were she who had done something to be ashamed of. “Please,” she said, and she wasn’t sure what she was asking of him.
“Let me see.” He stood before her and lifted his fingertips to her face, studying it with a frown. She