Chapter 6
The carpet bag hadn't left Ella's side since Wheatrow, and she kept one hand resting on its handle even now, hours into the journey, as if someone might still be coming to take it from her.
She had chosen her seat carefully when she boarded, the same way she'd chosen everything since the moment the boy had told her about the mine, with a kind of hurried assurance that left no room for looking back.
A window seat. A car with respectable-looking families in it, nothing rough.
She'd smoothed her skirt and folded her hands and told herself that whatever waited at the end of this line, she would arrive as the sort of woman who belonged there.
The woman across from her, a Mrs. Pemberton by her own introduction, had been pleasant enough for the first hour, the two of them trading the usual nonsense about the weather and the poor quality of the coffee sold at the last station.
It was Mrs. Pemberton who asked, eventually, what took Ella so far west.
"My sister passed a few years back," Ella said. "Left behind two children, a boy and a girl. Their father's done his best, but a man can only do so much alone. I've decided to go to him, to see if I might take my sister's place. Be a mother to them, since she can't."
She had said some version of this sentence perhaps a dozen times in her head since leaving Wheatrow, turning it over until the words came smooth and certain.
She didn’t believe them herself. Not quite.
But that belief was on its way, and in the meantime, she still needed to be able to convince others of her intentions.
She watched Mrs. Pemberton's face for the warmth she expected to find there.
What she found instead was something more careful. Mrs. Pemberton's smile stayed in place, but her eyes had become little gleaming orbs of assessment, like she was hearing something that contradicted what she saw, and she needed to search for evidence that proved one of them true.
"That's a generous notion," Mrs. Pemberton said. "Awful generous. You must have loved your sister a great deal.”
She said it as though she was humoring Ella, not because she believed it.
"I did.” Ella did everything in her power not to sound defensive.
"And the children. You must be close to them already, having lost their mother together, the way families do.”
That was a test. It was plainly obvious, but Ella didn’t know how to pass it.
"We were," she said, and heard, even as she said it, how the tense sat wrong in her own mouth.
Mrs. Pemberton didn't say anything to that.
She only looked at Ella a moment longer, the way one might look at a coin held up to the light, checking for the telltale dullness that gave away a counterfeit, and then she turned her attention to the window.
The conversation, such as it had been, closed itself quietly like a door.
Ella felt heat climb into her face. She told herself it was the closeness of the car, the dust coming in through the gap in the window frame, anything but what it actually was, which was the impotent fury of being seen and not believed.
For a long and frustrating moment, she felt it build inside her, until she knew it would burst out no matter how much she tried to resist.
"You don't think me capable of it," she said, before she'd decided to say anything at all.
Mrs. Pemberton turned back, mild surprise on her face. "I never said any such thing, Miss Canning."
"You didn't have to say it. I could see it plain enough.
" Ella heard her own voice rising and couldn't seem to bring it back down.
"It's a hard thing, losing a sister, and harder still trying to do right by what she left behind, and I'll thank you not to sit there deciding what sort of woman I am after a quarter hour's conversation. "
"I've decided nothing of the kind," Mrs. Pemberton said, cool now, drawing back into her seat. "I only asked after your sister's children out of politeness. If you'd rather not discuss it further, we needn't."
They rode the next several miles in silence.
Ella stared out at the scrubland going by and hated, with a heat that surprised even her, how easily the woman had looked past her words and seen what was underneath them.
She hadn't said anything untrue, exactly.
She just hadn't said all of it. That was different from lying, she told herself.
If a stranger on a train could look at her and doubt her in a quarter of an hour, what chance did she have with Samson?
He had known her for years already, and had never much cared for her even when Livvy was alive.
Not enough to build a meaningful bond anyway, the way a man might with his wife’s family.
She would have to do better. She would have to be more careful, softer, less quick to bristle when someone's eyes lingered too long on the gap between what she said and how she said it.
When the train stopped to take on water, Ella gathered her bag and moved two cars up, choosing a seat beside an older gentleman who was absorbed in a newspaper and showed no interest in looking up from it.
"Warm day for traveling," she said.
"Mm," he said, not lifting his eyes from the page.
"I'm going out to see family. My sister's children, actually. She passed a few years back."
"Mm," he said again, turning a page.
It went better this time, she thought, watching the scenery slide past the window.