I smiled. “I don’t think I’m much of a threat,” I said.
“Take your prayer book with you,” she said. “I’d like to feel we taught you something.”
CHAPTER 3
I rode to Hole in the Wall with two hundred copies of A Young Bride’s Tale by Mrs. Eglantine Cooper (a woman’s new husband turns out to have five brothers, each more strapping and depraved than the last; many acts depicted were anatomically improbable or even impossible but I read it very quickly), one hundred copies of A Season in the Rocky Mountains by Geoffrey Cragg (boring, except for the chapter about killing and eating a marmot), assorted less prominent works of fiction and nonfiction, and fifty-nine copies of On the Regulation of the Monthlies, all of which I’d copied myself. In my satchel I had a copy of Mrs. Schaeffer’s Handbook of Feminine Complaints, which Sister Tom had let me take and which I held close to me, the way Bee used to hold a doll that Mama had stuffed with dried lavender and pine needles to give it a calming smell.
Three nights I slept hidden among the books while the bookseller drank beer and ate potpie at roadhouses. On the morning of the fourth day he woke me from a dream in which I still lived with my husband, who had locked me in the henhouse until I gave him a child. All around me the hens were clucking and fighting, pecking each other to pieces. One hen was pecked almost clean.
“You know a Sheriff Branch?” the bookseller was asking me.
The name frightened me fully awake.
“Why?” I asked.
“Somebody in there at Albertine’s said there’s a Sheriff Branch from Fairchild offering three hundred golden eagles for the capture of a witch. Said she goes by Ada. Isn’t your name Ada?”
I tried to think quickly.
“I’m from Spearfish,” I said. “And Ada’s not my birth name, it’s my convent name. For Saint Ada, the patron saint of midwives.”
I had no idea if Saint Ada existed, and hoped the bookseller didn’t either. He had a slender, nervous face, and he was looking at me with a new scrutiny, his eyes narrowed.
“If I was running from a sheriff, I might go to a convent,” he said. “Or I might go to Hole in the Wall.”
I had no money to offer the bookseller, certainly not three hundred eagles.
“I told you, I don’t know any Sheriff Branch,” I said, buying time.
All I knew about the bookseller was that he bought Sister Tom’s books, and that not very many people owned books like On the Regulation of the Monthlies, much less were willing to copy them. Such books, I realized, might be valuable—perhaps worth far more than what Sister Tom was getting for them.
“Listen,” I said, “say I am the witch he’s looking for. Say you manage to find Sheriff Branch, and you turn me over to him. That’s ten gold pieces you just made. But do you think Sister Tom’s going to be happy when she finds out she paid you to take me someplace, and you sold me instead? There are other booksellers, you know. She can find another buyer for what she’s selling, maybe at a better rate. Can you find someone else to make what you need?”
I tried not to show my fear as he considered. I thought about whether I could hurt him if he tried to grab me, gouge out his eyes or knee him between the legs and make an escape. But then where would I go?
“Get back behind the Bride’s Tales,” he said finally. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.”
All that day I crouched in the wagon worrying. On the one hand, if Sheriff Branch was looking for me, maybe that meant I still had the town’s attention, and my neighbors had not yet transferred their anger over to my mother and sisters. But on the other, if the sheriff was searching this far afield—farther from home than I or my sisters or any of my friends had ever been—then he might not stop until he found me. Even Hole in the Wall might not be far enough away.
Toward nightfall, I heard wooden slats beneath the horse’s hooves, and peeked out the back of the wagon to see that we were crossing a wide, calm river. Past the far bank—powdery gravel that crunched as we passed—the land began to climb. Red rocks jumped out of the prairie at strange angles, and large birds wheeled between the hills, dark above, light below, and songless. The road grew narrow and poorly kept, and for hours the wagon shuddered over rock and scrub in land so wild I saw not even a fence post to mark a man’s claim to it. Finally we stopped, and the bookseller turned in his seat and said, “This is where we part company.”
I looked out. Behind the wagon was all darkness, the only light coming from a cat’s claw moon.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
“They don’t allow me to approach their camp,” the bookseller said. “Usually they send a scout up to the road to meet me. Tonight they didn’t. You’ll have to find your way down there on your own.”
“How do I even know which way to go?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not that way,” he said, pointing back to the road behind us. “So it’s probably that way.”
He let me take two strips of pronghorn jerky and a handful of dried buffalo berries.
“Baby Jesus keep you,” he said, not unkindly, and then I was walking in the blackness.
After a while my eyes adjusted, and I saw that to my left the roadside fell away into a silkier, deeper black, a valley whose depth I couldn’t measure. I kept close to the right, on the rocky margin where the road met the hill. I heard the hoofbeats of the bookseller’s horse in the distance, then nothing but the sawing of summer locusts and the pounding of my own blood in my ears.
The road seemed to wind down toward the valley floor, and after a while the hillside gave way to flatter land. I felt a chill in the air and a change in the shape of the darkness; I saw the stars reflected in the still surface of a pond. I had not had a drink of water since the bookseller had come back from the roadhouse that morning. I knelt with cupped hands. The pond tasted like dirt but I drank deep. I sat on the soft ground by the water’s edge and ate the berries and one of the strips of jerky. A frog hopped away from me, its croak like a plucked string. Then I heard the rustling of something much larger in the tall grass, something that scared more frogs into the water and sent a duck flapping and quacking into the air.
Mama always said wild animals were afraid of human voices, so I shouted and waved my arms. But in town the only wild animals were black bears and the occasional coyote—out here could be grizzlies and wolves and mountain lions. I had been walking for what felt like hours and I had seen no sign so far of any human life. I began to wonder if the bookseller had lied to me, if it had always been his plan to collect my books, drop me off in the middle of nowhere, and move on.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing but a scuffling in the scrub near the road, more night animals fleeing or approaching. I began to run. I called and ran and ran and called until my throat was hoarse and my legs were spent. Then I knelt on the road—by now a horse track just wide enough for my two knees together—and gasped and ate the second piece of dry jerky, and ran and called some more.
My throat was scraped raw and my whole body aching when, out in the black to the left of the road, I heard someone playing a fiddle. The music was lively and dreamy at the same time, a tune I’d never heard but that reminded me of stories Mama told us when we were very little, about pirate ships in the time before America, about elves and goblins meeting at midnight in the woods. I was afraid my senses might have left me and I might be dreaming or imagining the sound, but with nothing else to guide me I had no choice but to follow the song.