Outlawed(14)

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How could I go to Hole in the Wall?”

“Soon after we got back to Holy Child, a young man came to us, maybe twenty years old. He asked for sanctuary. We didn’t know what to call him—he refused to accept a Christian name or tell us his given one—so we hit upon the Kid.”

I remembered Sheriff Branch’s stories about the Kid, a man tall as a pine tree and as strong as a grizzly bear, who once shot a deputy’s hat off his head while riding backward on his horse.

“Did he rob you?” I asked.

The Mother looked annoyed.

“Why would he rob us? We had nothing of value except food and shelter, which we gave him freely. He stayed with us a few months, then he went on his way. But we haven’t forgotten him, or he us. Every now and again I send someone out to Hole in the Wall. You’re young and healthy and stubborn—they might take you.”

I was not sure what the Hole in the Wall Gang would want with a young girl, but none of my guesses were pleasant ones.

“I mean no disrespect, Mother, but I can’t be a proper wife to any man, even an outlaw.”

The Mother smiled a little then.

“You wouldn’t be a wife, Sister Ada. You’d be an outlaw too.”

She stood up then, so I stood up with her.

“It sounds like you’ve already been doing some business with the bookseller,” she said. “He can take you up there if that’s what you decide. I hear his rates are reasonable.”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I’m not doing you a favor. And remember, before you go: You may not like this place, but you’re safe here. If you go up to Hole in the Wall, you won’t be safe anymore. And other people won’t be safe from you.”

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.