Chapter One #2
“I have to leave,” Anna said when she had finished.
Her voice came out steadier than she expected.
Calmer. The weeping seemed to have clarified her feelings, the way a heavy rain clarifies the air.
“I can’t stay here, Mama. I can’t… I can’t be in this town, and pass his building on the street, and…
” She stopped, swallowed. “I need to go.”
Her mind reeled. Where could she go?
“Oh, honey… maybe you could go to Jane?” her mother said.
“To Jane.” The thought of her sister warmed her shuddering heart. “She’d have me, I know she would, but I don’t want to arrive on their doorstep and be a burden to them. They have the baby coming, and Liam’s ranch to manage, and—”
“Anna.” Her mother took both her hands. “You would not be a burden.”
“I’d feel like one.” She looked down at their joined hands.
The pearl ring caught the kitchen light, and she slid it from her finger with a swift, decisive movement and set it on the table between them.
“I need to find my own way. Something that’s mine.
Not… not depending on anyone else’s charity, even if the charity is kindly meant.
” She lifted her chin. “I’ll find work. I can sew anywhere. ”
She stopped.
Because there, beneath her mother’s abandoned letter and the folded cloth Anna had set on the table when she came in, was the corner of the newspaper.
She reached for it without entirely knowing why, smoothed it open on the table, and began to turn through the pages, looking for something, though she couldn’t quite have said what.
Employment advertisements. Rooms to let. Goods for sale. A notice about a missing horse. A church fund.
She turned another page.
Her eyes moved down the columns, scanning, searching—for what?
And then stopped.
brIDE AUCTION—Shreve, Ohio. Married to the highest bidder. Escape to a new life, a fresh start. Respectable women aged eighteen and over sought for forthcoming auction. Travel arrangements provided. Inquiries to Box 14, Shreve.
Anna read it twice.
Then she read it a third time, more slowly.
Shreve. She pressed her memory for the geography of it—her sister’s letters, the map she had studied before her autumn visit. Shreve was close to Ashland. A different town, a different county, but not far. Not far from Jane at all.
The idea was absurd. She was perfectly aware that it was absurd. She was a respectable woman with a trade and a mother who loved her. She surely had options beyond this particular one, and the notion of entering herself in a bride auction like a… like a…
But being a wife was what she had dreamed of for all these months, so a wife she would be.
That would be something Ethan wouldn’t be able to take from her.
And part of her took some satisfaction in thinking of how jealous he would be when he found out.
How he would regret his betrayal when she was really and truly gone.
And she would be near Jane. And she would not be a burden.
She’d have her own home, the home she had yearned for.
A family, in time, perhaps. And she would be away from here, from this town, from the smart building with the brass plate on the door, from every street corner that had taken on the poison of that morning’s catastrophe.
She would have a home that was her own. Or as close to her own as made very little difference.
Her hands were shaking, she noticed, as she reached for her writing paper. A fine, barely visible trembling.
She wrote the letter to Box 14, Shreve, before she could think about it long enough to talk herself out of it.
She kept it brief and factual—her age, her occupation, her good health, and respectable character.
And then she signed it with her name and her mother’s address.
Then she folded it and sealed it before she looked at it again.
Then she took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote to Jane.
This letter was harder. She sat with the pen hovering for a long moment, trying to find the words that would explain everything without causing her sister undue alarm.
The dashed hope, the discovery. In the end, she simply wrote it plainly, because Jane had always preferred plain truth to careful half-truths.
I have answered an advertisement, she wrote near the end.
A bride auction in Shreve. I know what you’ll think, and you are probably right.
But I am not afraid, and I am not acting without thought, though I understand if it looks that way from where you are.
I will write to you again the moment I know more.
Please don’t worry. You know I always land on my feet.
She folded the letter. Addressed it. Set it beside the one to Shreve.
Her mother had not spoken in some time. Anna looked up to find her watching from across the kitchen.
“I’ll be all right,” Anna told her.
Her mother looked at her for a long moment.
Then she crossed the kitchen, pressed a kiss to the top of Anna’s head, and went to put the kettle on.
Anna watched her moving across the kitchen, her dark hair pinned just so, her dress that she had made herself.
Her mother was quite a woman; she was lucky to have her and, she thought fleetingly in spite of everything that was going on, lucky to be like her in so many ways.
They were both, after all, more than a little strong-willed, and both of them could do anything with a needle.
Anna looked at the two sealed letters on the table in front of her. Then she looked at the pearl ring, sitting where she had left it, catching the light.
She gathered up the letters and left the ring where it was.