“I was never going to be a good grocer,” he interrupted mildly. “Even my mother admits it. I have always wanted something else, something bigger. Another world would do.”
I gave an exasperated half laugh. “I don’t even know where we’re going, or for how long! My future is all tangled and messy, and you can’t sign up for all that out of, of goodness or pity or—”
“January.” His voice had gone lower and more urgent, which made my heart do a funny duh-dump against my ribs. “I do not offer out of pity. I think you know this.”
I looked away, out the cabin window at the blueing evening, but it didn’t matter: I could still feel the heat of his gaze against my cheek. The banked coals had sparked and caught flame.
“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe I did not make myself clear before, when I said I was on your side. I meant also that I would like to be at your side, to go with you into every door and danger, to run with you into your tangled-up future. For”—and a distant part of me was gratified to note that his voice had gone wobbly and strained—“for always. If you like.”
Time—an unreliable, fractious creature since the asylum—now absented itself entirely from the proceedings. It left the two of us floating, weightless, like a pair of dust motes suspended in afternoon sunlight.
I found myself thinking, for no particular reason, of my father. Of the way he’d looked as he walked away from me all those times, shoulders bent and head bowed, dusty coat hanging loose on his frame. Then I thought of Mr. Locke: the warmth of his hand on my shoulder, the jovial boom of his laugh. The pity in his eyes as he’d watched me drugged and dragged from his house.
In my life I’d learned that the people you love will leave you. They will abandon you, disappoint you, betray you, lock you away, and in the end you will be alone, again and always.
But Samuel hadn’t, had he? When I was a child trapped in Locke House with no one but Wilda for company, he’d slipped me story papers and brought me my dearest friend. When I was a madwoman locked in an asylum without hope or help, he’d brought me a key. And now, when I was a runaway pursued by monsters and mysteries, he was offering me himself. For always.
I felt the lure of that offer like a hook behind my heart. To be not-alone, to be loved, to have that warm presence always at my shoulder… I stared hungrily into Samuel’s face, wondering if it was a particularly handsome one and realizing I could no longer tell. It was only his eyes I saw, ember-bright, unwavering.
It would be so easy to say yes.
But I hesitated. My father had written about True Love like it was gravity—something that simply existed, invisible and inescapable. Was it True Love that made my breath catch and my heart seize? Or was I merely scared and lonely, reeling from exhaustion, clinging to Samuel like a drowning woman offered a buoy?
Samuel was watching my face, and whatever he saw made him swallow. “I’ve offended you. Forgive me.” His smile curdled with embarrassment. “It is only an offer. To consider.”
“No, it’s not—I just—” I started the sentence without knowing where it was going, half-terrified of where it might end, but then—with a sense of timing that bordered on the divine—Jane returned.
She had an armload of mossy firewood and a closed expression, like a sutured wound. She saw us and paused, her eyebrows lifting in a my-my-what-have-I-interrupted sort of expression, but proceeded to the stove without comment. Bless her.
After a minute or two (during which Samuel and I both exhaled and shifted our hands farther apart), Jane said mildly, “We should sleep early tonight. We leave in the morning.”
“Of course.” Samuel’s voice was perfectly even. He levered himself off the bed, face paling with the effort, and ducked his head graciously toward me.
“Oh no, you don’t have to—I can sleep on the floor—”
He feigned deafness, spreading a few mousy-smelling blankets in the corner and crawling into them. He rolled his face to the cabin wall, shoulders curving inward.
“Good night, Jane. January.” He said my name carefully, as if it were barbed.
I climbed into bed beside Bad and lay stiff and aching, too tired to sleep. My eyelids felt hinged and hot; my arm throbbed. Jane propped herself in the rocking chair in front of the stove with Mr. Locke’s revolver in her lap. Faint coal light glowed from the grate, drawing the planes of her face in soft orange.
She wore her grief more openly now that she was unobserved. It was the same expression I’d seen so many times on my father’s face, when he paused in his writing and stared out the gray windows as if wishing he could sprout wings and dive through them.
Was theirs the only future I could look forward to? Was I doomed to grim survival in a world that wasn’t my own? Grieving, unmoored, terribly alone?
Bad gave one of those soft dog yawns and stretched beside me.
Well, not entirely alone, at least. I fell asleep with my face pressed into the sunshine smell of his fur.
Traveling with Jane across New England was nothing at all like traveling with Mr. Locke, except that both of them had similarly clear ideas about who was in charge. Jane issued orders and instructions with the calm confidence of someone used to seeing them followed, and I wondered if she’d led her own bands of hunters back in her adopted world, and how hard it had been for her to impersonate a maid in this one.
She woke Samuel and me in the predawn gloom, and we were halfway across the lake before the first honeyed line of sunlight crept above the horizon. The four of us crammed into the Zappias’ rowboat rather than risk the ferry and its curious eyes, and took turns rowing toward the dull gaslight glow of the shore.
Rowing, I discovered, is quite as difficult as shoveling dirt. By the time the hull scuffed against coarse sand, my palms had progressed past blistered and were approaching bloodied, and Samuel was moving like someone several decades older than his actual age. Jane looked perfectly fine, except for the grave dirt and blood still staining her skirt.
I should’ve predicted the way people would scurry away from us as we straggled into town, clutching their hats and muttering. We made an unsettling gang: an armed black woman, a sickly young man, a glaring dog, and an odd-colored girl with ill-fitting clothes and no shoes. I tried to ask one of the scurrying women for directions to the nearest train station, but Jane stamped on my bare foot.
“Well, excuse me, but I thought you said we’d take the train?”
Jane sighed at me. “Yes, but as we will not be purchasing tickets, it’s best not to draw attention to ourselves.” She jerked her head at the railway snaking east out of town. “Follow me.” She walked on without waiting for assent.
Samuel and I looked at one another for almost the first time since our conversation the night before. He raised his brows, eyes sparking with humor, and made a grand after-you bow.
Jane led us to a small, mostly empty train yard, where we slunk aboard a flat railcar labeled MONTPELIER LUMBER CO. and waited. Within the hour we were hurtling east, deafened by the roar and rattle of the rails, coated in coal smoke and dust, grinning like children or madmen. Bad’s tongue lolled in the wind.
The next two days are blurred in my memory, lost in a haze of heat and aching feet and the ever-present fear that there were eyes on the back of my neck, hunting me. I remember Jane’s voice, cool and certain; a night spent curled in an overgrown field with the sky hanging like a spangled quilt above me; greasy fish sandwiches bought from a roadside store; a ride from a farmer hauling blueberries to Concord in a mule-drawn cart, and another from a chatty postal carrier at the end of his route.