The Hunger

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Mary named the snowshoe party Forlorn Hope because that was what they were: the wagon party’s last hope. In the end, only eight of them set out: Mary and Stanton; her sister Sarah and her husband, Jay; Franklin Graves, though he seemed too sickly and had lost half his weight; Salvador and Luis, the two Miwoks who had accompanied Stanton from Johnson’s Ranch; and William Eddy.

The Murphys and the Breens refused to participate, which Mary found a relief. They ridiculed the idea and predicted the group would be back in a day—if they didn’t freeze to death. It was unclear if Salvador and Luis really wanted to go, their loyalty to Stanton at its limit, but they didn’t seem to want to stay behind with the men who had just killed the Paiute boy.

The ones leaving were reluctant to take much; there were so many remaining who needed to be fed. Patrick Breen and Dolan said that they should leave with nothing. They were going to die anyway, and whatever they took would go to waste.

They chose their provisions carefully. They were weak, and every ounce would matter if they needed to run. They packed an ax, some rope (tied around Eddy’s waist like a belt), and a blanket each, worn over the shoulders like a cape. Stanton and Eddy each took their rifles. Margaret Reed and Elizabeth Graves snuck them a few days’ worth of dried beef. At the last minute, Mary saw Stanton slip some extra items in his coat pockets, though she didn’t know what they were.

It wasn’t snowing the morning they left, a good sign. Elizabeth gave Mary’s father a brief kiss, the first sign of intimacy between them that Mary had seen in a long while. The loss of both William and Eleanor had been almost too much for her mother to bear.

Mary found it was harder to say good-bye to her remaining siblings. This was the first time in their entire lives they would be separated. The three younger Graves sisters and two boys hugged Mary and Sarah tightly. “Don’t cry. We’ll send help and then we’ll all be together again,” Mary said, hugging them in return. She wasn’t sure if she really believed what she was saying.

As the dawn broke over the horizon, bright pink with a fine edge of blue, they started toward the mountains.

CHAPTER FORTY

Stanton had grown old in a week. He was dazzled by snow, sunblind and sore—a vast, unending series of heights and valleys, all of it made identical beneath a blanket of white. They walked ten hours a day, by his estimate, but only seemed to make a few miles. They would need over a month to reach help.

They had rations for five days, and so had begun eating only at night.

Mary kept track of the days by knotting a length of string, a long brown thread pulled from the hem of her skirt, and each knot seemed to tie down something fluttering inside Stanton’s chest—some tiny part of him that still awoke to the idea of love. He was amazed she could make the knots at all, that her fingers could still bend when his, brittle, blackened by frostbite, were often useless even after he’d warmed them by the fire.

Evenings he gathered wood, compelled through his exhaustion by a stubborn animal force that wanted him to live. They slept sitting up, hunched by an open fire, when they could sleep at all. Charles, Eddy, Franklin Graves, and Jay Fosdick took turns standing watch at night, though Graves was failing quickly and sometimes could hardly be roused in the morning.

Usually, the fire melted out a hole beneath itself. By morning, the snowshoe party would lie encased at the bottom of a pit six or more feet deep, and the climb to the surface of steep white walls used energy they could little afford to waste. Stanton feared the day when one of them would be too weak to make the climb.

For days they had had no sign of the wolves—or beasts of any kind.

But as they began to weaken, Stanton sensed a change. He began to hear noises in the woods—whispers, the hiss of quick-footed movement through dead trees. He knew how predators tailed injured animals, dying animals, and waited for them to falter. The snowshoe party was dying, slowly but surely, and the diseased wolves had picked up the scent.

Another day of darkness transmuted into a landscape of dazzling white: Stanton welcomed the night, if only because he could rest his eyes. Often he felt as if they were bleeding, or as if someone were tickling them with a knife; when Eddy had lost his vision altogether temporarily, he had had to walk with one hand on Stanton’s belt.

Mary collapsed next to him. They huddled together under the same filthy blanket, though it did little good. It seemed he was always wet, always cold, always hungry.

Her face was sunburnt, her nose raw and peeling. She reached into her pocket and brought out a strip of dried beef. “Your dinner.” She always said that, dinner, though it was his only meal of the day. “Eat slowly.”

“How much is left?” It hurt to eat. His stomach recoiled and grasped all at once. His teeth sang with the cold, and the slow decay of too long with too little. “Enough for how many days?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think about it, not now. We’ll find something.”

The sky was darkening fast, but the fire wouldn’t catch; the wood was wet. Eddy took his turn with the flint, then Stanton, and then Jay. Stanton stood back and saw the sun pooling behind the mountains, saw daylight pouring, melting away, and his exhaustion turned to a primal kind of fear.

“Take the ax,” he told Jay. “Get a tree down. Get branches down, get something down.” He went toward the woods at nearly a sprint, despite the clutching pressure of the snow. He had thought an hour ago he could not walk another step, but now he was electric with fear; without fire, they had no chance. They’d freeze in their sleep. And fire seemed to keep the wolves, or whatever was following them, at bay.

The thwack of the ax head rang through the hollow. Slow, though—too slow. Even if Jay could fell a tree they would never split the wood in time. Stanton plunged into the deep shadows of a stand of solemn, stooped evergreens. He ducked beneath the branches to feel for wood dry enough to burn; he found twigs, kindling, nothing they could use for any length of time. He kept going, losing sight of the camp, desperate, half mad—from the snow, the endless climb, the hunger, the pointlessness of a fight they kept fighting.

Beneath a massive pine he found some wood largely protected from the weather by the funnel of branches above them. He collected as much as he could; it would last them an hour, maybe more, long enough for Jay to split some wood from a tree.

He had turned back to camp when, from the corner of his eye, he saw movement. Fast, like a wolf running between the trees.

But they were not wolves.

Another shadow, another dark thing moved fast between the trees.

He dropped the wood in the snow, keeping hold only of a stub of pine. He struck his flint against it. Catch, damn you. Sparks flew harmlessly into the snow. His fingers were clumsy, frozen stiff. He almost dropped the flint but managed to grab it at the last second.

He heard the thing behind him only seconds before it would have jawed his neck.

He turned blindly, swinging the branch like a club. Heard it connect, saw the dark and twisted thing, half man and half beast, fall back between the trees.

A kind of demon. A monster.

There was no other word for it.

Stanton ran—or as close to it as he could in the knee-high snow. Sweat poured down his face, instantly freezing in place, pulling at his cheeks, forcing his mouth into a grimace.

Panic surged through him, mingling with disbelief.

Tamsen had been right.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.

Now, his mind raced, his blood flowed too fast in his veins. He strove for breath as he fumbled for his rifle on his back. Where was his rifle?

It had never been a pack of diseased wolves preying on them, attacking the cattle, looming in the tree line. Had it?

It had always been… these things.

No. No. He was coming unhinged. He slowed and looked back at the trees, squinted.

The shadows darted and lunged, morphed into the snowy night.

Where was his rifle?

Then he remembered he had propped it against the trunk of a tree at the edge of the woods. He would have to sprint to reach it. The snow here was over his knees now; the darkness had come.

He threw his weight into each step. Don’t look back, just go. His blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it: a wet kind of panting, a ragged excitement, as if whatever was pursuing him had to breathe through thick, damp rot.

Closer. Closing in on him.

Whatever had attacked him, whatever he’d seen, it was real. They were real.

I’m sorry. He didn’t know what for—for not believing the tales Tamsen had spread through the party? For not protecting them?

For a life wasted not in sin, not really, but in the strangling belief of sin?

He could see the rifle now, and beyond it a thin trail of smoke, the beginnings of a campfire. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him.

He was only feet from the rifle when the thing sprang. He felt the swipe of something sharp and painful on his calf; it felt as if someone had pressed a red-hot brand to his flesh. Then burning pain in his right calf, too, and he was wallowing in the snow like a baby. He tried to crawl forward on his hands and knees, but something had his legs and was dragging him backward. Another slash to the back of his head, the pain so intense he saw white flashes.

He could not die this way.

Not now.

Not yet.

His fingers grazed the very end of the rifle stock. Slipped. But the thing had him now, had a mouth around his ankle—Stanton gasped in terror as he saw human eyes, a human nose…

Whatever it was, it had been a human once.

And yet it was not human now, this creature. Its teeth weren’t human; Stanton felt them hook deep beneath his skin, down into the muscle, and something wet and terrible probing between them that he knew must be a tongue.

He kicked the thing once, hard, in the face. It didn’t let go, but for a moment he had a little more room and, twisting, he got a hand around the gun.

He rolled again onto his back and brought the rifle to his chest, firing directly at the eyes.

The monster released him. Stanton didn’t wait to see if it was dead. He struggled to his feet, and the pain when he put weight on his right leg blacked his vision. There were more of them, massing in the trees. He fired again, blindly, not sure whether he was aiming at the shadows. He stood there shaking and bleeding into the snow, and saw them regrouping, flowing into a dark fluid mass. He lifted his rifle again when a sudden movement made him turn: One of them had sprung at him from the left, had ambushed him, and before he could aim it was on top of him, driving him backward into the snow and knocking the rifle from his hands.

It smelled like a corpse left too long in the heat. But its fingers were cold, and slimy, and wet—rotten. He choked on the smell. He tried to throw it off but he was pinned and too weak to fight. Its mouth seemed to double, its jaw unhinging like that of a snake. He saw teeth sharpened like iron nails, and too many of them, far too many—a long slick of throat, like a dark tunnel, and that horrible tongue slapping like a blind animal feeling for its prey.

Then an explosion split his forehead in two. The thing recoiled—Stanton tasted vomit—it scuttled backward, half its face hanging like a broken shutter. It moved. It was alive.

There was shouting. Mary was at his side, knees down in the snow, tugging him. Crying and screaming. “Why did you leave us? You know it’s not safe. What were you thinking? Why did you leave?”

William Eddy was right behind him, holding a smoking rifle. But his eyes were fixed on Stanton’s leg, and his expression didn’t lie.

“Pretty bad, huh?” Stanton asked. “The monsters got me.” It sprang from his mouth before he realized how crazy it sounded.

Was it crazy?

Maybe that was the curse of these mountains—they turned you mad, then reflected your own madness back at you, incarnate.

Like some sort of biblical punishment.

Mary kept hold of his arm, as though he might get up, climb to his feet, and walk away.

Stanton could feel the disease as it entered him, the shiver of something dark and slick and alien in his veins, so cold that it burned. How long would it take, he wondered, for him to turn? Several days? A week? He would be dead by then, at least, frozen to death or consumed by the monsters when they returned.

And even if it hadn’t been the disease—it didn’t matter now. As injured as he was, they’d never get him back to camp, or close enough to the ranch to get help.

“Go,” he said to Mary. “Run. There are more. They’ll be here any minute.”

“I can’t leave you,” she said.

Did she believe him? Could she possibly understand? It was too cold to cry, but even in the dim light from the distant fire—they had gotten it burning, after all—her pain was visible. There was no part of her face it didn’t touch.

“You have to.” He looked to Eddy. The urgency and horror still swam inside him, making him dizzy, sick. He had to rest his head… “Go. Get as far from here as you can.”

Eddy picked up Stanton’s rifle. “You want me to reload it?”

“No, take it with you. You’ll need it. I’ll be fine.” To Mary: “Go now. I want you to live, Mary. Without that, there’s no point. No point at all.”

Still, she wouldn’t move from his side. “I won’t leave you. I won’t.” Her voice was like the crack of ice; she was breaking. They were all breaking.

His mouth began to sting and water. His vision began to glaze and sparkle. Mary’s pale face loomed so close. He wanted so badly to kiss her.

But he didn’t trust himself. Who knew what the taste of her lips might do to him?

Who knew what the sudden hunger singing in his veins might do to her?

“Go,” he said, one last time, a final surge of certainty moving through him, taking the rest of his strength with it. He was glad that Eddy hooked her under the arms and hauled her to her feet. He wouldn’t have had the will to ask her again. He might have pleaded with her to stay with him. He might have begged her to lie down in the snow, her arms wrapped around his chest, until the beasts came to devour them.

He might have kissed her until he’d devoured her himself. He curled his fingers into the snow, trying to cool the rising heat in his veins, making him burn.

For a long time he could still hear her shouting, screaming his name, calling for Eddy to release her. Finally it became as distant as the whistle of wind through the peaks.

He waited until he could not tell the difference before reaching into his pocket. He’d brought two items with him, sentimental indulgences. One was his tobacco pouch; it held his last twist of Virginia gold. He had to blow hard on his hands to put any motion in the joints; then, he carefully took a sliver of paper and placed the last shreds of tobacco in it. Licked the end of the paper and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. Somehow got the flint to strike, caught a lucky spark. Babied the tiny spark into a flame. Took a deep breath and carried the spicy, warm smoke down into his lungs. Good. A last good thing.

The heat inside him was all-consuming now, but he tried to still his mind. Memories passed through him like shadows over water: His grandfather, usually so stern and unforgiving, counseling a parishioner for grief over the death of his wife. The rain running hard on the roof in the attic of Lydia’s house, how she pressed against him, her hair tickling his face when she leaned down to kiss him. His life could’ve stopped at that moment and he’d have been fine with it. He had failed her, and had struggled to make it right ever since; maybe, after all, this was his penance. The mills of God grind slowly, yet grind exceedingly fine. He wondered where Edwin Bryant was, and hoped he was alive.

He forced himself not to think about Mary—not yet.

Finally he had smoked the cigarette down to his nail beds and released it to the snow. From his other pocket, he took out a small pistol. Mother-of-pearl inlay, pretty as a piece of jewelry. He’d held on to it, thinking it the perfect reminder of Tamsen Donner. Beautiful but deadly. He checked the chamber for a bullet.

Only now did he close his eyes and imagine Mary’s face. He coaxed it up from the darkness of his mind and held it, let it burn there like a star, his final memory.

The gun was small, and fit nicely between his teeth.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The remaining seven members of Forlorn Hope were halfway up the next ridge when they heard the shot ring over the valley.

By then, Mary had stopped screaming. She stumbled only once. Then she kept walking, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of blinding snow.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

God had abandoned them, Tamsen knew. She only wondered how long they’d been left to the mercy of a godless world—had it been so since the very beginning? Had it happened the night she took Jeffrey Williams, the family doctor, as her first lover, or long before then? Had the devil followed her all this way? Or maybe the devil was in her, and had been since the day she was born.

Maybe it was the devil who was keeping her alive.

THE NIGHT HE WAS BITTEN, Solomon Hook, Betsy’s son by her first husband, had been taking a tin cup of hot water to the watch-standers. Until that moment, it had been a peaceful night at Alder Creek. Tamsen and the rest of the family heard his cry from inside the tent and went running out into the cold and wet to find him on the ground, a shadowy figure darting away toward the woods.

Tamsen screamed and when Walt Herron pulled a rifle and shot in the creature’s direction, she didn’t feel any kind of vindication, only a new depth of terror. There could be no denying that something deadly and inhuman was out there, inching in on them.

Jacob rushed his stepson into the tent and Tamsen looked to the boy’s wounds while Betsy stood to the side, crying into her hands. A foul smell clung to the boy from the creature like a miasma, a bad omen. The boy didn’t look too bad but there was a tear on the side of his neck that worried Tamsen, and even as she cleaned the wound, she sensed something was wrong.

Solomon revived the next morning and by afternoon, it was as though nothing had happened. He went with Leanne to gather firewood, scooped snow in a bucket to melt for water. He had a good appetite. He seemed indefatigable.

By night, his cheeks were red and hot to the touch. He was damp with sweat.

The next morning, he rushed about, knocking his brothers and sisters over in the cramped tent. When Betsy chided him, he rushed out into the cold without his coat or mittens and wouldn’t heed their demands to come back inside. He wouldn’t let Tamsen check his wound or put on a fresh dressing.

His eyes were bright and dancing, his mouth crooked in a strange, faraway smile. The memory of Halloran pulsed in her mind. It frightened her but she didn’t know how she would explain it to Jacob or the boy’s mother. She decided to say nothing and keep an eye on him. He was, after all, a teenaged boy. Children recovered quickly.

But every hour he got worse. More agitated, more aggressive, more manic. Tamsen saw Halloran in everything Solomon did and said, the hostility and impatience. She was tense in his presence, waiting for him to snap. The moment came when he lunged toward little Georgia, one of Tamsen’s daughters. Quick as a hawk, she darted between them and shoved Solomon away. Jacob’s eyebrows shot up while Betsy rushed to her son’s side.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “You could’ve hurt him. He’s injured, or have you forgotten?” But Tamsen had seen the look of horror flash on Solomon’s face. He knew what he had almost done. It was his last cogent human thought. He dashed out of the tent before anyone could stop him and disappeared into the night.

It took two men to keep Betsy from running into the darkness after him.

That was the beginning of the end for Betsy. She was mad at everyone at first for keeping her from trying to save her son. “He was beyond saving,” Tamsen tried to tell her, but Betsy refused to believe her.

“We got to find him. He can’t survive out there on his own,” Betsy pleaded with her husband. She was clearheaded enough to know she couldn’t go after him alone, at least. “Whatever’s out there, they’ll kill him. They’ll rip him to pieces.”

He was seen two nights later. One of the sentries—the luckless Walter Herron again—was attacked when he strayed too far from the bonfires. The creatures scattered into the darkness when John Denton, the second watchman, arrived but not before Denton saw wild-eyed Solomon Hook with them, a clumsy wolf pup at his first hunt. There could be no mistaking it, Denton swore on his life.

Betsy wailed and threw herself at Denton, calling him a liar, but Denton stood firm. “Your boy’s… changed.”

Tamsen swallowed. “He’s become one of them.”

No one argued with her.

They understood how it worked now.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Christmas: Dawn, low on the horizon, was just visible on either side of the smoke blackening the sky from the fire.

Mary wouldn’t have known which day it was if her sister Sarah hadn’t told her. Mary had lost the knotted thread three days ago; she had left Stanton behind, she had heard a gunshot, and she had simply let the thread fall, and let her thoughts fall with it, her memories and hopes.

She was an animal now. She rose when they told her, followed the person in front of her like a mule on a pack train, sat when they were done for the day. When she was thirsty, she would melt snow in her mouth. The ache of hunger had transformed into a different pain: She couldn’t eat, she would never be hungry again. There was something bestial in her stomach, a terrible pain ripping her apart. She couldn’t feed it.

Sarah wouldn’t stop talking about the Christmases on the farm in Springfield. “Do you remember the year Mama made matching dresses for us out of that red calico? Didn’t we think we were something special in those dresses? I wore mine until it fell apart and she used the skirt panels in a quilt.”

Stop, Mary wanted to say. But she didn’t want to speak, either. She couldn’t stand to hear her own voice, unchanged, carried on the stillness of a world that no longer held Charles Stanton.

Since she’d abandoned Stanton, her sister had taken care of her as though she were an invalid: Sit here, not too close to the fire, try to sleep. Keep hold of the end of my blanket and follow me. Sleep was elusive. It was the only thing she looked forward to—oblivion, a silence so complete she didn’t have to think about what had happened.

Sometimes during the day she would startle into sudden awareness—When had it started snowing? When had they passed into the peaks?—and she’d realize she’d been dozing as she’d walked.

On and on. They had inched their way over the summit, where winds were so strong the snow blew sideways, and were now working their way down. It was difficult to know how many days had gone by because they were all the same, just mile after mile of snow. Luis had fainted several times in the past three or four days. Most mornings, her father was too weak to make it to his feet and had to be lifted or carried and set upright, staggering on like a corpse compelled by witchcraft to walk.

Now, on Christmas, he could go no farther. He fell to his knees several hours before nightfall, and could not be brought again to his feet.

Through the haze of the campfire smoke, Mary saw her sister and brother-in-law bent over her father. Their voices, too low to hear distinctly, tickled the edges of her consciousness. Luis and Salvador, the Miwoks, huddled miserably together under the same blanket, like skeletal birds interlinked by a single ruche of feathers. They seemed to be living off of leather scraps they trimmed from their clothing, chewing and chewing to soften it in their mouths and make it last.

Sarah broke away from her husband and came to sit beside Mary. For a long time she was silent.

“Papa’s dead,” she said at last.

Mary tried to reach down, to pull up some thread of sadness or regret. It was as if the mountain cold had reached into her center and frozen her through the core. “We have to bury him,” she said.

Sarah shook her head. “We must keep moving.”

But it was as if something had snapped in Mary. She held her ground. “I’m done,” she said. “I want to go back to the rest. There are too few of us now. They’ll pick us off, all of us. We have no chance.”

Sarah gripped her sister’s shoulders between icy fingers. “There’s no way back now, Mary. We’ve come too far.”

“We put the others at risk,” she said, realizing now that it was true. “We wanted to march ahead to seek help, but we’ve cut the party down in size. The shadows will come for them as they’ve come for us. Don’t you see? We separated ourselves into smaller groups, made ourselves easier targets. We doomed ourselves, and by doing so, we’ve doomed the others, too.”

“Mary,” her sister was saying, and she was shaking her, hard.

Or was it the cold causing her to shake?

She could easily picture lying down, letting the snow swallow her up. Surrendering to the cold. Numbness spreading to her fingers and toes, ears and nose, throat, and finally her chest.

But she hadn’t imagined it. She was lying down.

Sarah had gone somewhere. Maybe she had never been there—maybe none of them had.

Snow fell on Mary’s eyelashes, stiffening them, tiny icicles fracturing the firelight. Or was it sunlight? Somehow morning had come. There was no hunger left in her—no feeling at all.

The snow was dazzling, endless.

Sarah appeared before her, lifted her, forced her to her feet, and took her hand.

They trudged on, into the blinding light.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

It was sudden and overpowering: the smell of burning hair. Acrid, unearthly.

Tamsen screamed… and dropped her curler on the floor.

Quickly, she doused it in water and breathed a sigh of relief as steam rose and the iron tong cooled.

She was nervous, distracted. Luckily, she hadn’t lost much hair, only singed a few strands.

She had risen early to get ready for the ceremony, but in truth, she hadn’t been sleeping anyway. It was as though she could feel the weight of the rest of the house sleeping around her. She’d grown up here, and now it was her brother’s home. Every night, he lay in the big four-poster bed just through the far wall. If she listened hard enough, she imagined she could hear him breathing, hear him thinking. Was he having the same thoughts that she was?

For as long as she’d been back, sleeping in this old room, she’d been haunted by memories that seemed to have been burned into her skin since she first left.

Beauty, at least, was her solace. She tried again with the tongs. Back in North Carolina, she could always find someone to help fuss with pomade and tongs, someone who enjoyed fawning over her and receiving her attentions, but here in Illinois she had no women friends, no female admirers who looked up to her, as if hoping her beauty and intelligence would somehow rub off on them. Here, in her brother’s home, she was on her own.

Tamsen chose her second-best dress to be married in, a blue wool challis with a pleated bodice and full sleeves. Her best was a sage-colored broadcloth, but green was unlucky for weddings. Ever since she had read of the English queen’s wedding in Godey’s Lady’s Book a few years back, she had dreamed of a white dress if she were to remarry. It wasn’t the expense that had stopped her—George Donner had offered to send to Chicago for any dress she wanted. But marrying George Donner meant she would be living on a farm and would not have many occasions for a white dress. It would be a highly impractical purchase.

Still, that wasn’t the reason, either. She knew that one extraordinary thing was bound to make the ordinariness of her life all the more painful.

Besides, she didn’t feel clean enough on the inside for white.

Through the window, the wheat fields of her brother’s farm were bowing and rising like the tide of a golden ocean. The sky was a perfectly clear cerulean. Her heart swelled. It was so beautiful, the gold gently reaching up to kiss the blue. It made her want to cry. When she next came to Jory’s farm, it would be as a visitor, a stranger. Another man’s wife—again.

When Tully died, her brother had begged her to come to Illinois, pretending it was to help him, though really she knew it was his way of helping her. He didn’t want her to be alone.

But she was. Marrying George wouldn’t change that. She would always be alone, in her heart. Her first marriage had proven that.

Being back here, with the brother whom she’d tried to forget, proved it, too. How she ached with everything she could never say.

Jory was suddenly in the doorway, as if conjured by the heat of her thoughts. His broad shoulders looked a bit squeezed-tight in his best suit of brown wool, the one he saved for Sundays. “You’re a vision, Tamsen.” She noticed a slight strain in his voice, and her breath leapt in her chest.

Of course, it was natural for him to be emotional on a day like today, wasn’t it?

“The wagon is ready whenever you are.” He cleared his throat. She watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall. She thought how funny that word was—Adam’s apple. Hadn’t it been Eve’s?

To avoid his eyes, piercing and bluer even than her own, she stared instead at the stubble along his jaw and nodded.

She stood up and followed him to the door, then took Jory’s hand as he helped her into the wagon, and in the warmth of his palm she felt an impenetrable sadness. She didn’t want to let go, but forced herself to as she slid next to him on the bench. He placed a cloak across her lap to protect her from the morning chill.

The wedding would be held in the Donner farmhouse since it was nicer and bigger than her brother’s. Jory’s three children—two girls and a boy, none older than eight—sat in the wagon bed behind them, whispering among themselves as if they sensed their aunt’s tension but did not understand what it meant. Jory had asked Tamsen to come west for the children’s sake after their mother had died. I can’t raise daughters on my own, he had written. They need a woman to bring them up right. What Jory had not said outright, but she could tell from his letters, was that he wanted badly to see her, too. He had been devastated by his dear Melinda’s death.

They’d tried everything within their power to save his wife. When the only doctor in the area said nothing more could be done, Jory had given most of their savings to a traveling merchant, a smiling German who claimed his tonics would cure her.

He was nothing but a snake oil peddler, Jory had written bitterly afterward. We did just as he told us but it was no good.

Tamsen was ashamed to admit the way she felt when she first got the news of Melinda’s death, so near to the timing of her own husband’s. Ashamed to admit that it had felt, for a moment, like fate. Ashamed to accept the way it broke her open all over again, the idea of seeing her brother after all these years apart and separately married.

Ashamed that her first thought was that the snake oil peddler, the scam artist from Germany who’d led, however indirectly, to Jory’s wife’s death, must have been sent by the devil himself to torture Tamsen, to reawaken long-buried thoughts.

Jory had not been wrong to make the request, of course. Tamsen had been at ends after her first husband, Tully Dozier, had died. It was hard to be a young widow in a small town—men assumed things about women who had known a man’s attentions and suddenly had to do without. There had been incidents. All of them heady and exciting at first, but then ultimately empty.

Still, when Jory’s invitation came, Tamsen was torn. She planned to tell him no, but the bolder part of her heart had agreed—for his children’s sake, she told herself.

Now, she watched as Jory’s strong hands flicked the reins over the horse’s back, nudging her into a trot. He stole a sideways glance at his sister. “You’re prettier than a picture today, Tamsen. I hope George Donner knows what a lucky man he is.”

“I’m sure he does.” She forced a smile.

Jory fidgeted with the reins. “Are you sure this is what you want, though? It’s not too late to change your mind.”

“Now, where is this coming from?” She tried not to sound upset.

“You don’t know this man, not well. It’s only been three months.”

No, she certainly didn’t know George Donner well—but she’d never know any man as well as she knew Jory. He ought to realize that.

“I know enough.” Tamsen knew that her future husband had means: two large farms that belonged to him and his brother Jacob. Fruit orchards—apples, peaches, pears—and cattle. A nice house on eighty acres.

“He’s so much older than you. Do you think he can make you happy?”

She didn’t answer. The question felt far too weighted. She wondered if Jory could possibly sense that. But if he didn’t—if he didn’t understand why it hurt when he protested her marriage—then he couldn’t possibly feel the way she did.

And Donner—he would give her security. A roof over her head, a place in a community, money in the bank. With George Donner, her life was set, her worries would be gone. He was handsome, too, in his own way—though she wasn’t moved by his looks, hadn’t felt excitement rise in her when he’d been bold enough to kiss her.

Nothing like the tingling sensation she felt now, in anticipation of turning this new leaf—and leaving everything else behind.

“I know what’s best for me,” she said quietly. “George Donner is best for me. It’s not like I can just live with you forever,” she added.

Jory cleared his throat. Something flashed across his eyes, and she wondered what it was. “All I’m saying is you shouldn’t be in such a rush. I’m sure you could do better. And I know the children will miss you.” He paused. “We all will.”

She bit back the anger that wanted to lash out and transform itself into sobs. How could Jory be so thoughtless, so unaware? She needed something to hold on to right now. George Donner would be her anchor.

“I know what I’m doing, Jory. My mind is made up. Now, let’s talk no more about it,” she said, pulling the cloak tighter around her. She moved along the wagon’s bench, so that their legs were no longer touching, and felt the chill where his heat had been.

Jory took her at her word. There was no more discussion the rest of the way to Donner’s farm.

THE TIN ROOF on the Donners’ farmhouse gleamed silver in the morning sun. George Donner owned a big house, twice as big as Jory’s. Unlike Jory’s, it was freshly whitewashed, scrubbed, and well-tended. A stoneware jug filled with a great clutch of wild asters stood by the front steps, a welcoming note. This lifted Tamsen’s spirits somewhat, as did the way the guests all glanced sideways at her, admiration and envy in their eyes.

Jory helped the children down from the wagon while Tamsen stood to the side, suddenly hesitant. Sounds drifted through the open windows, men’s and women’s voices, muffled knocks and bangs as chairs were being set up in the front parlor for the ceremony. George’s cook would be preparing the wedding breakfast, frying up bacon and eggs, putting a pan of biscuits into the oven to bake. Plump apple pies, George’s favorite, would be cooling in the larder.

The door opened suddenly and out stepped George Donner. Such a big man, he looked constrained in some way by his somber black suit. His eyes blinked in surprise or amazement as he looked in her direction. He had a kind face and kind eyes. She reminded herself that she had made the right choice.

“My dear—you are a vision.” Donner’s words were just like what Jory had said to her earlier, and yet they seemed to fall, lifeless, through the air. His lips trembled as he kissed her hand. “How have I been so blessed, that you have agreed to be my wife?”

His young daughters Elitha and Leanne stood behind him. They had been babies when their mother died and now Tamsen was to be not even their first stepmother but their second. No wonder their eyes were guarded; mothers were transitory creatures. It didn’t pay to become too attached.

Elitha, the oldest, stepped forward and held out a clutch of flowers, stems tied together with a broad satin ribbon. “For you, ma’am,” she said, her voice as faint as a whisper. It was an odd assortment; flowers, yes, but a bit of everything else, too: herbs, grasses, even weeds. A strange offering for a wedding day.

“They gathered it themselves,” George said when he saw the confused look on Tamsen’s face. “Because of your interest in botany. Remember, you told me that you wanted to write a book one day about the flora in this area, on medicinal plants? When Elitha and Leanne heard this, they gathered an example of every kind of plant they could find on the property and made this bouquet for you.”

Tamsen had forgotten that she’d told him that. He hadn’t laughed at the idea of a woman writing a scientific book like some of the men she’d told back in Cullowhee. George had remembered and what’s more, he had shared the idea with his daughters. That meant more to her than the offer to buy her a fancy dress.

Suddenly, his kindness made her want to cry. Instead, she bit it back and smiled at him first, then at his daughters. “Thank you, girls. I’m touched by your thoughtfulness.” She took the arm George had extended to her. It was solid and strong, and still, she felt like she was floating on air—or becoming air. Disappearing.

She risked a glance toward Jory, but he was looking after the children and did not catch her eye. At that moment, something within her shattered. It was a kind of knowing.

Love was not meant for everyone.

She held on to George’s arm to steady herself and took a deep breath. “Shall we go in, Mr. Donner? I believe it’s time to start the ceremony.”