The Giver of Stars(51)
Margery would slide the little book back into its home in the wooden chest where they kept cleaning materials, blister liniment and spare stirrup leathers, and a day or two later the word would be passed to another remote cabin, and the query would be made, tentatively, to another librarian: ‘Um … before you go, my cousin over at Chalk Hollow says you have a book that covers matters of … a certain delicacy …’ and it would find itself on its way again.
‘What are you girls doing?’
Izzy and Beth sprang back from the corner as Margery walked in, kicking mud from the heels of her boots in a way that would infuriate Sophia later. Beth was quite helpless with laughter, and Izzy’s cheeks glowed pink. Alice was at the desk, entering her books into the ledger and pretending to ignore them.
‘Are you girls looking at what I think you’re looking at?’
Beth held up the book. ‘Is this true? That “female animals may actually die if denied sexual union”?’ Beth was open-mouthed. ‘Because I’m not hanging off no man and I don’t look like I’m fit to drop, do I?’
‘But what do you die of?’ said Izzy, aghast.
‘Maybe your hole closes up and then you can’t breathe properly. Like one of them dolphins.’
‘Beth!’ exclaimed Izzy.
‘If that’s where you’re breathing out of, Beth Pinker, then lack of sexual congress isn’t the thing we need to be worrying about,’ said Margery. ‘Anyway, you girls shouldn’t be reading about that. You’re not even married.’
‘Nor are you, and you’ve read it twice.’
Margery pulled a face. The girl had a point.
‘Jeez, what are the “natural completions of a woman’s sex-functions”?’ Beth started to giggle again. ‘Oh, my, look here, this says that women who don’t get satisfaction may suffer an actual nervous breakdown. Can you believe that? But if they do get satisfaction, “every organ in their bodies is influenced and stimulated to play its part, while their spirits, after soaring in the dizzy heights of rapture, are wafted to oblivion’.
‘My organs are meant to be wafting?’ said Izzy.
‘Beth Pinker, will you just shut up for five minutes?’ Alice slammed her book down on the desk. ‘Some of us are actually trying to work here.’
There was a brief silence. The women exchanged sideways looks.
‘I’m just joking with you.’
‘Well, some of us don’t want to hear your horrible jokes. Can you just cut it out? It’s not funny.’
Beth frowned at Alice. She picked casually at a piece of cotton on her breeches. ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Alice. I hate that I might have caused you distress,’ she said, solemnly. A sly smile spread across her face. ‘You’re not … you’re not having a nervous breakdown, are you?’
Margery, who had lightning-quick reaction times, managed to get between them just before Alice’s fist made contact. She raised her palms, pushing them apart, and gestured Beth towards the door. ‘Beth, why don’t you check those horses have fresh water? Izzy, put that book back in the trunk and come and sweep up this mess. Miss Sophia gets back from her aunt’s tomorrow and you know what she’ll have to say about it all.’
She looked at Alice, who had sat down again and was now staring with intense concentration at the ledger, her whole demeanour warning Margery not to say another thing. She would be there long after the rest of them had gone home, as she was every working night. And Margery knew she wasn’t reading a word.
Alice waited until Margery and the others had left, raising her head to mutter goodbye. She knew they would talk about her when they were gone but she didn’t care. Bennett wouldn’t miss her: he would be out with friends. Mr Van Cleve would be late at the mine, as he was most nights, and Annie would be tutting about three dinners gone dry and shrivelled in the bottom of the range.
Despite the companionship of the other women, she felt so lonely she could weep with the weight of it. She spent most of her time alone in the mountains and some days she talked more to her horse than any other living being. Where once it had offered her a welcome sense of freedom, now the vast expanses seemed only to emphasize her sense of isolation. She would turn up her collar against the cold, wedge her fingers into her gloves, with miles of flinted track in front of her and only the ache in her muscles to distract her. Sometimes she felt as if her face was set in stone, apart from when she finally stopped to deliver her books. When Jim Horner’s girls ran to her for hugs it was all she could do not to hold tight to them and let out an involuntary silent sob. She had never thought of herself as someone who needed physical contact, but night after night, yards away from Bennett’s sleeping body, she felt herself slowly turning to marble.
‘Still here, huh?’
She jumped.
Fred Guisler had put his head around the door. ‘Just came to bring a new coffee pot. Marge said the old one had sprung a leak.’
Alice wiped at her eyes and gave him a bright smile. ‘Oh, yes! Go right ahead.’
He hesitated on the threshold. ‘Am I … disturbing something?’
‘Not at all!’ Her voice was forced, too cheery.
‘I won’t be a minute.’ He walked over to the side, replacing the metal coffee pot and checking the tin for supplies. He kept the women in coffee every week without so much as mentioning it, and brought in logs to keep the fire burning so that they could get warm between rounds. ‘Frederick Guisler,’ Beth would announce every morning, smacking her lips at her first cup, ‘is a veritable saint.’