Chapter Three
Two days ago, the land had made sense.
In Nebraska, a person from Missouri could still look at the country and know, roughly, where they’d found themselves.
Not anymore. Sometime in the night, the prairie had made way for—she pressed closer to the smudged window to be sure—brown ridges and flats and low, silver-green scrubs.
Aunt Mae had told her to expect them last night and called them sages, as if you just knew a sage like you did oak or hickory.
June had taught geography for four years and not once named a single plant outside this window.
She folded her gloved hands in her lap.
It’ll be fine.
People went west all the time. In fact, people had been going west for fifty years.
Most of them, surely, had looked out of train windows at some point and felt…
well… whatever scrunched the bottom of June’s stomach right now.
Only, in books, you never had this part. Looking out of the window like this.
“You’re squintin’ again.”
She looked at Aunt Mae. “Huh?”
“Specs on, child.”
June fished them out of her reticule and set them on her nose.
The car smelled of coal smoke and the boiled coffee a peddler had been selling two stops back.
Fine, pale grit had gotten into the seams of her traveling dress and the pages of Persuasion in her lap.
An hour ago, she’d still brushed at it. Not anymore.
Hopefully, her journey would end at a place where she could clean herself.
She ran her fingers over the edges of Mr. Calloway’s letter in her reticule.
She’d read it in Hannibal so many times that the creases had begun to soften, and thrice more since boarding the train at Omaha. She would not take it out again. No, she only pressed her palm flat against her traveling dress and let the words play out behind her eyelids.
He’d thanked her for her honesty and said that he had no objections to a wife who read, provided that she not be cruel to his children.
As if she would ever. In return, he offered her his roof, his name, and his protection.
Then, near the end, the sentence his unhurried voice—one she completely imagined, of course—kept repeating the final line of his response.
I have noted it in the advertisement, but I must, once again, ask you to come with no romantic illusions, Miss Sinclair, as I have none myself.
He’d used her name!
Miss Sinclair. Not Madam, which would’ve been only proper, nor did he leave her with no salutation at all, which would’ve been only honest. He’d chosen to use her name.
He’d sat down and considered what to call her.
Time and effort he could’ve used on something else had gone to that, and he had decided on her name.
So, as Wyoming ran past her window, and Aunt Mae’s knitting needles ticked across from her, June’s mind wandered.
It really oughtn’t have. Any sensible woman of twenty-six, who had seen in writing what kind of marriage awaited her, would have considered only the best approach to teaching those kids their letters.
Doubly so for a woman who the town of Hannibal—and visitors, apparently—had decided to thoroughly convince just how much of a spinster she was.
She just couldn’t help it.
He’d come down to the station on a horse, or even a horse each for the three of them, and go still when he saw her.
Just like Mr. Rochester had at Thornfield before he’d known Jane’s name or she his.
He’d say You’re not what I expected, Miss Sinclair, and she’d answer Nor are you, sir, though I confess I had less to go on.
Then, he’d look at her, really look, and she would know, as Jane had known that—
“June.”
She looked at Aunt Mae.
“You’ve that look about you again.”
“What look?”
“Your book look.” Aunt Mae set the knitting down in her lap. “He wrote you a plain letter, dear.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Aunt Mae looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “I’d not see you let down out here.”
June opened her mouth, closed it, and went back to looking through the window.
Honestly, you couldn’t even have the privacy of your own foolishness anymore nor finish a thought in your own head without having your aunt recall you like a child at her sums. Across the aisle, Aunt Mae picked up the soft tick of her needles again, the same sound that had carried Jun through the long winter after her parents’ deaths and the even longer summer after her failed engagement.
June set her jaw against that sound and frowned at the pronghorns leaping outside.
“I’ve been jilted once already, Aunt Mae. I’ve not forgotten how it feels.”
“I know, dear.”
“Then why—”
“Because knowin’ a thing and feelin’ it ain’t the same.” Aunt Mae lowered her head. “And you’ve always been a sight better traveler in the first.”
June followed a pronghorn until the curve of the track took it away from her.
What, exactly, is the harm in it?
Aunt Mae—whether she purposely avoided the question of if she’d just not thought of it—really ought to consider that.
If a woman of twenty-six, who understood perfectly well where she was going, could not allow herself the small indulgence of hoping for a little more, she might as well give up on life right now.
Even if disappointment came before the week ended, June would bear it as she had everything else that had happened in her life.
Jane hoped. Elizabeth Bennet hoped and rather more rashly than this.
Even sensible Jo, who had refused her own dearest friend to hope for something truer, could hope for it, and she had not regretted it.
“My heart is beatin’ harder.” Aunt Mae pressed her hand to her chest. “Must be the altitude.”
“Are you sure? We could—”
“No, no, I’m fine, I promise.” Aunt Mae smiled. “They did warn me about this back at Cheyenne.”
June nodded and opened her book.