With a sigh, I picked up a large flat paddle brush and started in with Luna first. “How…how do you know it’s not yours?” I tried keeping my voice smooth even as I wanted to cringe.
After a pause, Sam took up a comb and began brushing off Zenith. “You really want all the sordid details of my love life, Ellerie?”
“Of course not, but Rebecca is certain you’re the father, and I can’t imagine her straying from you.” I picked at a particularly nasty tangle in Luna’s mane, focusing my attention on a problem I could solve.
“Well, she did. Just like the trapper said. And Winthrop. I don’t doubt there are others too. She’s probably familiar with half the boys in the Falls.”
I peered into the neighboring stall with a withering stare. “Sam, you can’t believe that. This is Rebecca. I’ve seen how she looks at—”
He pointed the comb at me. “Don’t tell me what I ought to believe. Stop sticking your nose into things that don’t concern you.”
We glared at each other for a long moment before I turned back to Luna. She swayed back and forth as though listening in and unable to pick a side.
“Everything all right in here?” Papa asked, suddenly appearing in the doorway. “I heard your yelling all the way from the creek.”
“It’s nothing,” Samuel said, working the brush over Zenith with sudden diligence.
“Actually—”
Sam was up and over the half wall before I could continue, his hand raised as if to slap my words away. I cried out in surprise and ducked around the mare to avoid him.
“I swear to God, if you breathe a word of this to anybody—” he began, but was yanked back as Papa rushed into the stall, stopping him before his hand could fall. “Let go of me!” Samuel shouted, enraged. He cast aside Papa’s arm. The momentum threw Samuel off balance, and he crashed hard against a post.
“Sam!” I cried out in concern, even as I hid away.
Papa stepped forward with an outstretched hand, ready to help.
“Get away from me,” my brother growled, scrambling to his feet. “I’m so sick of everyone in this family always reaching for me. Everyone always in my face, wanting more and more. Just leave me alone!”
Before Papa could stop him, Samuel raced from the barn.
“What in the world happened?” Papa asked, whirling back to me.
His face softened as he spotted my building tears. Growing up, Sam and I had squabbled often—as twins, we were often seen as one person even when our thoughts were wildly divergent—but we’d never come to physical blows before. He was changing, growing angry and hard. I didn’t understand why. Was this simply part of growing up—growing separate and apart?
“Sam—” I stopped short. This was a problem, a big problem, but it was Sam’s, and Sam’s alone to fix. I wouldn’t run tattling to Papa like a little girl, out of breath and braids flying. “It’s nothing.”
Papa looked me over. “Are you all right?”
I stepped from the stall.
A long sigh fell from his mouth. “I don’t know what to do about that boy. It’s like pulling teeth to get him to do an ounce of work this summer. He needs bigger opportunities, bigger responsibilities. When I was his age, I was already wed with the two of you on the way. He needs to grow up, become a man.”
I swallowed uncomfortably.
Sam and I were twins. We were supposed to be at the same stage of life. What bigger opportunities did Papa think I was meant to take on? Why wasn’t he concerned that I wasn’t married, wasn’t grown-up?
I wasn’t a man.
My place in the world was nebulous, a malleable concept only given definition by the space I occupied. When I was in the classroom, I was a schoolgirl. At home, I was a daughter. When someone eventually courted me, I’d be a wife, a mother.
But until then, what was I?
Who was I?
I had no answers and once again felt the sharp loneliness of being left behind.
By my own twin, the one person I was meant to go through the world with.
I opened my mouth, but Papa chuckled to himself, unaware of the torment he’d summoned within me. “If he’s not proposed to that Danforth girl by the end of the summer, I might just do it for him.”
* * *
Sam didn’t come home for dinner that night, and in the morning, his bed remained crisp and completely untouched. We didn’t see him that day, or the next.
We didn’t see him for a whole week.
Though they didn’t comment on his absence, I caught Mama fretting in moments of solitude, chewing on the side of her cheek as she peered out the window. Papa couldn’t seem to muster the energy to worry.
Crops needed tending.
Animals needed care.
And finally, the honey was ready to be harvested.
The morning of the harvest, he tapped me on the shoulder, letting me know I was needed. My excitement loomed so large, I could barely eat my breakfast.
Papa and I donned hats, veils, and gloves and worked from sunup to sundown, putting hive boxes to sleep and extracting out the honey-laden frames. We carried them back and forth across the field with trembling arms. Each section of a hive box could weigh up to eighty pounds when full of capped honey, and I think it surprised but pleased Papa to see I could keep up with him and never once slowed down the process.
It felt good to put in a hard day’s work. My muscles ached each night, but I went to bed so content, I almost never noticed Samuel’s empty corner of the loft.
* * *
“Mama, please!” Sadie exclaimed. “I’ll do anything, I promise!”
Days before Sadie’s eighth birthday, Trinity Brewster had loaned her a tattered book of fairy tales. Every night, I’d read the stories out loud while Sadie hopped about the loft reenacting them for us and making Merry join in whenever a handsome prince or evil queen was required. “Hansel and Gretel” was her favorite, and she studied the illustrations with rapt attention while pondering what the three-tiered cake at the center of the witch’s table must taste like.
At first, she thought it must be a strawberry cake, so thick and moist that it would take a circus strong man to slice through it. Then she decided it was a pecan cake, with toasted nuts and caramel drizzle. Finally she declared that Abigail had told her it was chocolate, with a generous scoop of cocoa powder dusted across the frosted tiers.
Once Abigail had conjured such a cake, Sadie could think of nothing else.