The Hunger(93)

Sarah broke away from her husband and came to sit beside Mary. For a long time she was silent.

“Papa’s dead,” she said at last.

Mary tried to reach down, to pull up some thread of sadness or regret. It was as if the mountain cold had reached into her center and frozen her through the core. “We have to bury him,” she said.

Sarah shook her head. “We must keep moving.”

But it was as if something had snapped in Mary. She held her ground. “I’m done,” she said. “I want to go back to the rest. There are too few of us now. They’ll pick us off, all of us. We have no chance.”

Sarah gripped her sister’s shoulders between icy fingers. “There’s no way back now, Mary. We’ve come too far.”

“We put the others at risk,” she said, realizing now that it was true. “We wanted to march ahead to seek help, but we’ve cut the party down in size. The shadows will come for them as they’ve come for us. Don’t you see? We separated ourselves into smaller groups, made ourselves easier targets. We doomed ourselves, and by doing so, we’ve doomed the others, too.”

“Mary,” her sister was saying, and she was shaking her, hard.

Or was it the cold causing her to shake?

She could easily picture lying down, letting the snow swallow her up. Surrendering to the cold. Numbness spreading to her fingers and toes, ears and nose, throat, and finally her chest.

But she hadn’t imagined it. She was lying down.

Sarah had gone somewhere. Maybe she had never been there—maybe none of them had.

Snow fell on Mary’s eyelashes, stiffening them, tiny icicles fracturing the firelight. Or was it sunlight? Somehow morning had come. There was no hunger left in her—no feeling at all.

The snow was dazzling, endless.

Sarah appeared before her, lifted her, forced her to her feet, and took her hand.

They trudged on, into the blinding light.





CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR




Springfield, Illinois

September 1840


It was sudden and overpowering: the smell of burning hair. Acrid, unearthly.

Tamsen screamed . . . and dropped her curler on the floor.

Quickly, she doused it in water and breathed a sigh of relief as steam rose and the iron tong cooled.

She was nervous, distracted. Luckily, she hadn’t lost much hair, only singed a few strands.

She had risen early to get ready for the ceremony, but in truth, she hadn’t been sleeping anyway. It was as though she could feel the weight of the rest of the house sleeping around her. She’d grown up here, and now it was her brother’s home. Every night, he lay in the big four-poster bed just through the far wall. If she listened hard enough, she imagined she could hear him breathing, hear him thinking. Was he having the same thoughts that she was?

For as long as she’d been back, sleeping in this old room, she’d been haunted by memories that seemed to have been burned into her skin since she first left.

Beauty, at least, was her solace. She tried again with the tongs. Back in North Carolina, she could always find someone to help fuss with pomade and tongs, someone who enjoyed fawning over her and receiving her attentions, but here in Illinois she had no women friends, no female admirers who looked up to her, as if hoping her beauty and intelligence would somehow rub off on them. Here, in her brother’s home, she was on her own.

Tamsen chose her second-best dress to be married in, a blue wool challis with a pleated bodice and full sleeves. Her best was a sage-colored broadcloth, but green was unlucky for weddings. Ever since she had read of the English queen’s wedding in Godey’s Lady’s Book a few years back, she had dreamed of a white dress if she were to remarry. It wasn’t the expense that had stopped her—George Donner had offered to send to Chicago for any dress she wanted. But marrying George Donner meant she would be living on a farm and would not have many occasions for a white dress. It would be a highly impractical purchase.

Still, that wasn’t the reason, either. She knew that one extraordinary thing was bound to make the ordinariness of her life all the more painful.

Besides, she didn’t feel clean enough on the inside for white.

Through the window, the wheat fields of her brother’s farm were bowing and rising like the tide of a golden ocean. The sky was a perfectly clear cerulean. Her heart swelled. It was so beautiful, the gold gently reaching up to kiss the blue. It made her want to cry. When she next came to Jory’s farm, it would be as a visitor, a stranger. Another man’s wife—again.

When Tully died, her brother had begged her to come to Illinois, pretending it was to help him, though really she knew it was his way of helping her. He didn’t want her to be alone.

But she was. Marrying George wouldn’t change that. She would always be alone, in her heart. Her first marriage had proven that.

Being back here, with the brother whom she’d tried to forget, proved it, too. How she ached with everything she could never say.

Jory was suddenly in the doorway, as if conjured by the heat of her thoughts. His broad shoulders looked a bit squeezed-tight in his best suit of brown wool, the one he saved for Sundays. “You’re a vision, Tamsen.” She noticed a slight strain in his voice, and her breath leapt in her chest.

Of course, it was natural for him to be emotional on a day like today, wasn’t it?