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  Dorrie crossed her arms. “Mother Hammer doesn’t like you being here.”

  The girl didn’t budge.

  “It’s dangerous.”

  Still nothing. Josephine stood shivering, snow sifting in around her, dusting the raw wood floor. Her eyes wide and wary, she took in the hare, the knives in their neat array. What harm if she did come in and warm her small hands by the stove? None, except that Dorrie had come over all gooseflesh. From the wind, yes, but only in part.

  It was something about the girl’s size—perfectly normal for the six- or seven-year-old she was then. Dorrie had worked on smaller specimens, creatures whose translucent ribs would seem mere filaments alongside the finger bones Josephine harboured in her mittened fist. Still, the child’s body seemed insufficient, vulnerable in the extreme.

  A nauseous ache took hold of Dorrie by the shoulders. She reached for the hare and held it out at arm’s length.

  “Run away, little girl,” she squeaked, bobbing the rigid ears. But her stepdaughter was already long gone.

  There’s a dream Ruth has—not often, perhaps once a month. Save the past four. Save any she’s passed while in the family way. It will return, she tells herself. Once I am delivered of my burden, it will return.

  Lying atop the covers, she cups a hand to the rise of her condition. Still months to go and already the thing is stoking her blood to blazing, weighting her steps, making a dull sponge of her brain. She shifts onto her side, her temple seeking a fresh spot on the pillow. How is she meant to rest? More to the point, how is she meant to work?

  She’s seen through five whole seasons, egg to moth, but never while carrying a child. Sister Thankful gave her those good years, arriving when Ruth was fit to burst with Baby Joe and thereafter keeping their husband to herself. It was all but painless, being cast aside. Five babies in as many years had gone a long way to dulling what little wifely feeling Ruth had known. By the time Hammer took his third wife, his second was dwelling more and more frequently on the life she’d led before meeting him. Or, more precisely, on the sense of future she was then possessed of, the promise she had yet to fulfill.

  Of her actual life, she missed nothing. Not London—though in truth she knew little of the great city beyond her home district of Spitalfields. Certainly not the close quarters she’d shared with her mother until her sixteenth year, when the older woman died gasping in her sleep.

  Every day but Sunday, Ruth navigated the pinch and racket of Brick Lane. Weavers’ cottages stood chockablock, their high banks of windows fitted not for anyone’s pleasure, but to keep the workers within from going blind. Mr. Humphrey ran as good an operation as any. Ruth knew a decade’s employ there, from the time she was nine years old. Her mother had started six years before that. The pair of them would sit back to back in their corner of the attic loomshop, each tying on a warp. Until Ruth sat alone. Fifteen thousand threads give or take. A donkey’s workday. A pauper’s wage.

  As she turns to cool the other temple, the face of her employer rises unbidden, long and wavering as a wraith’s.

  Miss Graves, you strike me as an intelligent young woman. Tell me, are you interested in silk?

  I am, sir.

  She answered without pause, without gauging the layers of his intent. He was old enough to have fathered her—to have fathered her poor dead mother, come to that. And he was married, even if Mrs. Humphrey, martyr to a trick heart, rarely left her bed. Ruth sees now how it ought to have been clear to her. It was fitting that an employer should stoop close to inspect his worker’s technique, but no man’s eyesight is that near.

  “In that case I shall instruct you in the subject. It is, as you can well imagine, a particular passion of mine.” He smiled thinly. “Come down to my office when you finish here.”

  So began an education. Weeks passed without so much as a hint of suspicion to cloud her mind. This was in part because Mr. Humphrey advanced upon her at a glacial pace—knuckles brushing her elbow, then nothing for days—but in the main because the matter of his talk so stirred her imagination that she grew dull to her actual surrounds.

  One lesson in particular impressed itself upon her mind.

  “You will recall, Miss Graves, the topic of our last discussion, the domestication of Bombyx mori.”

  “I do indeed, sir.”

  “Excellent. Now, common as this little fellow is, you mustn’t imagine his to be the only species responsible for producing the world’s silk.”

  Mr. Humphrey had in his possession a selection of books, the pages of one of which he now laid open. Coming to stand alongside Ruth in her chair, he lowered the exposed folio into her line of view. The engraving thereon was so delicate, so compelling, she couldn’t help but trace it with her finger’s tip.

  “Life-size, if you please,” he murmured.

  Here were no pale, captive insects. The Tusseh silk moth of India spanned an entire page, fully six inches from wing tip to wing tip. The caterpillar was an arching monster, strung together out of sacs rather than segments, bristling with starry tufts of hair. What was more, the species was untamed, untameable. Those who would harvest its fine produce were obliged to watch over the great worms wherever they chose to spin.

  In the dream it is Ruth who stands shepherd to the pendent cocoons. The jungle is hot and dark. For a time all is quiet.

  The bats come first, chittering patches of night. Then their opposites, the white and whistling birds. Snakes brighten the leaf litter. Cats—several times tabby-weight—balance in the overhead boughs. Mangrove, crepe myrtle—marvellous names for mysterious trees. There are even dogs, thick-shouldered, bristling with copper fur. To reach the cocoons they must leap to heights quadruple their own. And they will, if no one stops them.

  But this is no nightmare. The dream-Ruth is fearless. She plucks leathery wings from the vine-draped vault, crushes hissing tongues beneath her heel. She is equal to the leaping red dogs, equal to everything that comes on.

  Close to sleep now, Ruth shifts her loosely shut eyes, bringing the ghost of that engraved page clear. Such moths. Bodies like furred, truncated thumbs. Wings made lovely by brave design—primitive figures of stark, unblinking eyes.

  Thankful wakes with a start, her neck awry. She’s alone in the parlour. Night has fallen and no one has bothered to wake her—they haven’t even left her a candle. The half-worked bodice lies across her lap. She can’t fathom its colours in the gloom—black appliqué on velvet of a midnight blue. A garment her mother’s milk-and-coal colouring would have rendered lethal. One she would have judged sinful to wear.

  Thankful may not have the complexion, but there are other ways to make a dress work. She has a character firmly in mind: a French noblewoman driven by circumstance to depend upon the charity of strange men.

  In the dark, Thankful locates her last stitch, knots the thread and bites it through. The pincushion is a cool and spiny thing. She sticks the needle in deep and sets her work aside, making sure to arrange it bosom-up on the side table, where it will rankle in Mother Hammer’s eye. Rising, she finds her neck is well and truly cricked. She must carry herself with care or risk a headache. Foolish to have dropped off like that, upright in the midst of them all.

  She navigates across the parlour, arms waving like the fronds of some underwater weed. Once through to the dining room, she feels her way from chair back to chair back, pausing to turn and peer at the hunched shadow of the clock. Its face is silvery, the placement of its hands unclear. She suffers a wash of imbalance, clutches the chair at hand—the youngest boy’s place—and clings there a moment.

  Overhead, a floorboard sounds its weakness. The room directly above Thankful ought to be empty, it being the bedchamber she calls her own. It can’t be Hammer—he’s away in the city overnight. Letting go of the chair, she moves blindly into the front hall. Before her the kitchen stands in darkness. Mother Hammer abed then. Or not. A quarter turn, half a dozen sliding steps and the toe of Thankful’s slipper touches stair. She gropes for the ban
ister and ascends.

  Light-footed or no, she’s not fool enough to imagine sneaking up on the first wife—there may as well be bat’s ears under that whitening hair. Still, she proceeds softly. At the round of the landing, the wall before her bristles with framed mottoes. She sets three of them askew before continuing on.

  Ruth’s door stands at the head of the stairs, then more of the first wife’s embroidered words. Thankful takes a breath and steps into the wash of weak light escaping her chamber’s open door. Backlit by a lamp, Mother Hammer rises up on her knees before the gleaming dresser. Every drawer gapes, several spilling their bright insides. Thankful pictures the front-heavy dresser toppling, crushing the first wife where she kneels.

  It’s not the first time Mother Hammer has run her big hands over Thankful’s things. God knows what she thinks she’s looking for—a length of rubber piping, perhaps. A bottle of vinegar or soapy spirits. Some pronged, indelicate device. What does she take me for? Thankful leans against the jamb. Let the witch snoop, watch her slink away.

  Mother Hammer keeps on about her business as though unobserved, rifling through the bottom drawer, shaking out item after item as though searching for insects in their folds. She stands with the last of these still in hand, assuming her full height fluidly, like a lamp wick turned up high. The garment is a precious one, a bed jacket of buff and grey feathers worked in a cunning design. Thankful fashioned it four years ago—she remembers, it was more than a month’s work. Its front panels mimic the face of an owl. Two well-placed holes allow her nipples to stand in for the glowing eyes.

  “Careful with that.” She smiles. “It’s one of his favourites.” Then she sees that the other hand too holds something in its grasp. A shape like an unnamed organ, pale pink and shimmering. Thankful feels her smile stiffen. Mother Hammer lets the owl jacket fall and, in a counter motion, brings the small, scented pillow hard against her nose. Thankful’s breath deserts her. She’s grateful for the support of the jamb.

  “You think this will hide it?” The first wife gives the sachet a violent squeeze before casting it to the floor. “You think a few petals can cover the stink of your sin?”

  Silence swings like a footbridge between them, and then Thankful giggles, a sound that surprises them both. It shakes the older woman. She snatches up her lamp, says nothing as she pushes past.

  Thankful watches her shunt away down the hall. “Sleep well, Mother Hammer,” she calls softly. She can’t help herself. The first wife hasn’t a clue.

  The Tracker sits cross-legged before his fire, loosing the leather-bound book from his thigh. It’s been in his possession for a decade, and though he has paged through the journey it depicts a thousand times, he has yet to do so by the light of day. Tonight he confines himself to those drawings that move him distantly, taking care not to smudge the dark lines of which they’re made.

  One, about a third of the way in, shows a wide plain peopled with giants. It is the only buffalo herd the Tracker has known, his own land closed in by mountains, the great beasts present there in legend alone. So much meat, so many heavy hides. Little wonder the people of the plains are mighty.

  Turning several pages in one, he lands on a drawing that never ceases to make him frown. A stone-faced Mormonee stands with his arms knotted across his chest. Behind him countless sacks spill corn. His stance is familiar to the Tracker, a certain stiffness that comes of refusing a hungry stranger food.

  Closer to the end of the book, the Tracker finds a picture he cannot help but like. A white man, young and keen, drives a path through waist-high grass. The Tracker is neither white nor nearly so young, but he has lived this drawing untold times. His earliest memories are set in such meadows, deep sinks of grass girded by slopes of juniper, piñon, sage.

  The first time he was allowed along on a rabbit drive, he plunged into the high growth to one side of the path and found himself in over his head. A panicked spinning on the spot wound the four directions into one. He came close to yelling, reducing himself to a nuisance—or worse, a funny story to tell the women and elders—but managed to bite back the cry.

  Only then, heart in his mouth, hammering at the backs of his teeth, did he remember the fifth direction—sky. Suddenly all was open. The sun hung where he’d left it, climbing up from the land beyond the camp. Turning the back of his head to its glow, the Tracker brought his palms together and parted the way, keeping on until his own thin path met the beaten-down track of the men. Rabbits are not buffalo, but still he gloried in the hunt that day. Still the People were fed.

  — 5 —

  May 15th, 1867

  Dear Daughter

  Forgive my wretched lettering. My every finger has puffed up fat as a field mouse. Do you recall the set you left behind Dorrie? The papa mouse sitting up on his heels begging. The mama with her cheeks full of seeds. Such fine work. Such a clever girl. But I lose my thread. The way my thoughts wander these days your poor mother cannot help but fear this cursed swelling has found its way to her brain.

  Why on earth should they call it dropsy? A word better suited to a skinny creature with hair falling out in clumps than to this bed-load of lard I have become. If only it were true fat and not fluid. Do you know I pressed the pen to my forearm before I began writing and the pit is still there. If I could reach my sewing basket and pluck out a needle I should be sorely tempted to auger holes in this flesh of mine. In any case it would do no good. The fluid does not run like the water in a creek but settles like that in the creek bed. I am drowning yes but not in water. In mud.

  Dorrie there are times when I can scarce pry up an eyelid and why should I wish to when all about me I see nothing but disorder and dirt. The girl has made her mark on the place all right. You would not recognize the kitchen. The last time I managed to drag myself out there the sight gave me such a pain up under my ribs I was certain I should faint dead away. Do not think me ungrateful. I know it is she who turns me in the bed and lifts me onto the pot and washes my most secret parts without a single unkind word. But must the cloth she washes me with always be left to moulder in the basin when it ought to be rinsed and wrung out to dry? Must the sheets when she finally comes round to changing them always be stiff and scratchy straight off the line? Must they be grey?

  Do you remember how white you and I brought the linens out my girl? Mother’s little laundry maid. The first time you helped me pin pillow slips and tea towels to the drooping line I so looked forward to fixing the pole and hoisting the laundry high. I was certain the sudden fluttering would delight you. Forgive me Dorrie I should have thought. I never would have dreamt a child of seven years could cover such ground. It took all the breath I had in me to catch you and gather you up wailing in my arms.

  You were always such a help to me. Even after you started work on your animals you never once troubled me with your mess. I don’t believe I picked up so much as a curl of down or a tuft of fur. The girl could take a page from your book. I can see her out the window now standing on a potato plant watering in the full sun. But why concern myself when I feel certain I will no longer tread the earth by the time she’s grubbing up her stunted crop.

  Dorrie can I hope to set eyes on you before I die? I do so hate to harp but you are three years married now my girl and you have never once come home. Will Mr. Hammer not allow it? You never say if he is a good husband to you. You write so seldom and when you do your letters are so very thin. Always you mention your latest specimen. I believe a badger was your last. The rest I am left to guess at.

  Daughter are you well? Have you one friend among Mr. Hammer’s other wives or perhaps among their children? You were a child yourself when you married him after all no matter what your father claims. Dorrie I cannot bear to think of you living as your mother does in the midst of others and yet alone.

  Is Mr. Hammer kind to you? Does he treat you with any sort of care? He did not impress me overly with his character. You will know this Dorrie. You will have heard me argue the point with your father. That w
as before he gave up all right to the title by bartering you away.

  My girl I should not write this but I do. On my wedding night I bled so I believed I was dying. Your father No I shall call him Mr. Burr from here on. To think I ever called him by his Christian name. Lyman. I have not spoken it aloud in three years. I shall never do so again.

  On the night of the day that saw me sealed to him Mr. Burr rose from the bed and left me to my bleeding saying it was not for a man to have knowledge of such things. The flow stanched in the end but not before I had watched myself turn pale as a lily in the mirror that stood across from our bed. The same bed I lie in now. So many years I shared this rickety iron boat with that man. So many nights I woke to his howling and lulled him back down only to lie staring myself.

  But Dorrie your mother was a woman when she married. Nineteen or twenty I can’t think which. You were fourteen years of age. I pleaded with him. I told him time and again how it would break my heart and when that didn’t work I tried to frighten him by saying you were too frail for the marriage bed. I insisted you could not possibly weather the trials of confinement let alone the tortures childbed can bring. I should have known by his answer. And what would you know of it woman? Confinement? Childbed? What would you know?

  I should have seen then that he had but little feeling left for his family. That he had already plucked out his heart to bestow it elsewhere.

  Dorrie these pages are all I can manage for now. I will not send them yet. You have only ever written one letter to my dozen so I might just as well save up a bundle before I send them and hope for one in return. Do not think I mean to blame you Dorrie. If ever a blameless soul walked the earth it is you.