Page 55 of The Giver of Stars
‘I think Clem McCullough is coming after me.’
Sven walked up to her. There was something absent and watchful in the way she spoke, as if she barely registered him being there. Her teeth chattered.
‘Marge?’ He went to place his hand on her knee, but remembering her reaction of earlier, he touched the back of her hand lightly instead. She was frozen. ‘Marge? It’s too cold to sit out here. You got to come inside.’
‘I need to be ready for him.’
‘The dog will let us know if anyone’s coming. C’mon. What happened?’
She stood finally and allowed him to steer her in. The cabin was freezing, and he wondered if she’d been inside at all. He lit the stove and brought in some more logs as she stood by the window looking out. Then he fed Bluey and boiled some water. ‘You stayed up all last night like that?’
‘Didn’t sleep a wink.’
Finally he sat down beside her and handed her a bowl of soup. She looked at it as if she didn’t want it, but then drank it in short, greedy bursts. And when she’d finished, she told him the story of her ride to Red Lick, her voice uncharacteristically halting, her knuckles white and trembling, as if even now she could feel McCullough’s grip still on her, his hot breath on her skin. And Sven Gustavsson, a man renowned for his unusually level temperament in a town full of hotheads, a man who would break up a bar fight nineteen times out of twenty where another would be unable to resist the satisfaction of the hurled punch, found that he was possessed of an uncharacteristic rage, a red mist that descended and made him want to seek out McCullough and deliver some of his own brand of vengeance, a vengeance that involved blood and fists and busted teeth.
None of this showed in his face, or in the calm of his voice when he spoke again. ‘You’re exhausted. Go to bed.’
She looked up at him. ‘You not coming?’
‘Nope. I’ll be out here while you sleep.’
Margery O’Hare was not a woman who liked to depend on anyone. It was a measure of how shaken she was, he realized, that she thanked him quietly, and took herself to bed without a word of protest.
11
Fair Oaks was built about 1845 by Dr Guildford D. Runyon, a Shaker, who renounced his vow of celibacy and erected the house in anticipation of his marriage to Miss Kate Ferrel, who died before the house was completed. Dr Runyon remained a bachelor until his death in 1873.
WPA,Guide to Kentucky
There were fifteen dolls on the dresser. They sat shoulder to shoulder, like a mismatched family, their porcelain faces pale and rosy and their real hair (where had it come from? Alice shuddered) curled into immaculate glossy ringlets. They were the first thing Alice saw when she woke up in the morning on the little daybed, their blank faces watching her impassively, their cherry-coloured lips curled into faint, disdainful smiles, frothy white pantalettes peeking out from under full Victorian skirts. Mrs Van Cleve had loved her dolls. Like she had loved her little stuffed bears and her tiny china ornaments and her porcelain snuff boxes and her carefully embroidered psalms that hung around the house, each the result of hours of intricate needlecraft.
Every day Alice was reminded of a life that had been almost solely focused on the inside of these walls, on tiny, meaningless tasks, tasks Alice felt increasingly strongly that no adult woman should view as the sum total of her day’s activities: dolls, embroidery, the dusting and precise rearranging of totems that no man noticed anyway. Until shehad gone, after which they had become a shrine to a woman they now insisted they idolized.
She hated those dolls. Like she hated the heavy silence in the air, the endless stasis of a house in which nothing could move forward and nothing could change. She might as well be one of those dolls, she thought, as she walked through to the bedroom. Smiling, immobile, decorative and silent.
She glanced down at the picture of Dolores Van Cleve that sat in a large gilt frame on Bennett’s bedside table. The woman held a small wooden cross between two plump hands and an expression of pained disapproval, which to Alice seemed to settle on the two of them whenever they were alone together. ‘Perhaps we could move your mother a little further away? Just … at night?’ she had ventured when she had first been shown their room. But Bennett had frowned, as disbelieving as if she had cheerfully suggested digging up his mother’s grave.
She snapped out of her thoughts, gasping quietly as she splashed the icy water on her face and hurried into her many layers. The librarians were riding a half-day today, to allow them all some time for Christmas shopping, and a small part of her had to fight her disappointment at the prospect of time away from her routes.
She would see Jim Horner’s girls this morning. That helped. The way they would wait at the window for the sight of Spirit making her way up the track, then bolt through the wooden door, bouncing on tiptoe until she climbed off the horse, their voices bubbling over each other as they clamoured to find out what she had with her, where she had been, whether she would stay for a little while longer than the last time. The way they would hang casually around her neck while she read to them, little fingers stroking her hair or planting kisses on her cheeks as if, despite the slow recoveryof the little family, they were both desperate for feminine contact in some way they could barely understand. And Jim, his expression no longer hard and suspicious, would place a mug of coffee at her side, then use the time she was there to chop wood or sometimes, now, just sit and watch, as if he took pleasure in the sight of his girls’ happiness as they showed off what they had learned to read that week (and they were smart; their reading was way ahead of other children’s, thanks to lessons with Mrs Beidecker). No, the Horner girls were consolation indeed. It was just a shame that girls like them would have so little in the way of Christmas gifts.
Alice wrapped her scarf around her neck and pulled on her riding gloves, wondering briefly whether to put on an extra pair of socks for the ride up the mountain. All the librarians had chilblains now, their toes pink and swollen from the cold, their fingers frequently corpse-white from lack of blood. She looked out of the window at the chill grey sky. She no longer checked her reflection in the mirror.
She pulled the envelope from the side, where it had sat since the previous day, and tucked it into her bag. She would read it later, once she’d done her rounds. No point getting worked up when you had two silent hours on a horse facing you.
She looked at the dresser as she made to leave. The dolls were still staring at her.
‘What?’ she said.
But this time they seemed to be saying something quite different.
‘Forus?’ Millie’s mouth had dropped so far open Alice could almost hear Sophia warning that bugs would fly straight in.
She handed the other doll to Mae, its petticoats rustling as it was pulled swiftly into the child’s lap. ‘One each. We had a little chat this morning and they told me in confidence thatthey’d be much happier here with you than where they’ve been living.’
The two girls gawped at the angelic porcelain faces, and then, in unison, their heads turned towards their father. Jim Horner’s own expression was unreadable.
‘They’re not new, Mr Horner,’ Alice said carefully. ‘But where they come from has no real use for them. It’s … a house of men. It didn’t seem right to have them sitting there.’
