Papa grimaced. “Don’t be so vulgar.”
My anger came to a boil. I surged to my feet and clenched my hands. This angst, it had been simmering in me for quite a while, long before the occasion of these revelations, even before my humiliation on Sled Day. It needed only Matthew’s arrogance—his privileged maleness—to make my ire explode into words. “If you think I’ll marry anyone for your sake, you’re mistaken.”
“Why not?” He gave me a dismissive look. “You ought to feel grateful Daniel wants you. And you’re going to have to marry someone anyway. That’s what girls do. Even headstrong hoydens like you.”
In a furious hiss, I clarified, “It’s not my job to make your life easier. Haven’t you had it easy enough, playing your high-stakes games with the family’s meager resources, acting like a dandy instead of what you are, a poor farmer? What bacon-brained plan will you take into your cockloft next? Perhaps a new look to complete your posturing—some shiny boots, a quizzing glass, a starched cravat?” I barked a mirthless laugh. “Wouldn’t those make you a pretty picture at the card table? Well, Sir Matthew, you won’t be betting me.”
The others stared, astonished.
My face felt hot, and a sound akin to a rain-glutted waterfall filled my ears. I stomped toward the door. “You’ll likely gamble away the farm one day. It’s a shame you’re the oldest and so terribly stupid. I wish I’d been born a boy.” Furiously, and with words I hadn’t known I’d buried, with a sentiment kept secret even from my conscious self, I snatched my cape off the hook, glared at the confounded faces of my family, and finished, “This isn’t Matthew’s land. This isn’t even the Winters’ land. This is Knowles land.” I stamped my foot. “And it should have been mine!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I whipped around to escape and stormed straight into Daniel Long. For a second, in my disorienting rage, I mistook his hard stomach for the door and patted it nonsensically, as if to find the latch.
He took my trembling hand in his and murmured, “Harriet?”
I tore myself free. “Leave me alone.” Burning and shaking, I stumbled past Luke, who stood just outside, slack-mouthed and bug-eyed. “What are you looking at?” I muttered, and marched across the dead kitchen garden.
Behind me I heard Mr. Long say, “No, stay here, Gideon. I’ll talk to her.”
A scarce snow threaded the air. Without acknowledging the man who strode steadily, unhurriedly, in my wake—the man who was my neighbor and sometimes friend and supposed suitor—I forged past the barn, where the cows mooed and Mitten barked like an audience mourning my temper, then over a stubbly field, and around the pond, frozen and snow-dusted.
As I clumsily scaled the stone fence, my skirt caught in my boot heel so that I had to teeter at the top while awkwardly unraveling myself, rending the flounce’s hem in the process. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mr. Long get closer. My pulse quickened. I hurried over the rocky barrier, hem trailing, and continued my attempt at a dignified walk. Do not bolt like a naughty urchin; do not give Mr. Long or anyone else the satisfaction of seeing you turn fugitive and run away; do not admit to being wrong. In this situation, I wanted very much—indeed, desperately—to feel that my outburst was justifiable, if not particularly laudable.
Mr. Long was probably circling the pond by now. The pond, white and round, like Mama’s cheeks. She’d stood so pale and still while I’d ripped apart Matthew, spat my vicious resentment toward her family (no, no, my family, my family, too), then hurled the Winters against my rancor for good measure. Dear Lord, where had the bitterness been hiding itself all these years?
A sob escaped me. I kept walking but glanced over my shoulder. Mr. Long had paused to gaze across the frozen water.
Years ago, I’d recklessly tested the pond’s ice. My parents had forbidden me to walk on it that February. We’d experienced a mercurial stretch of weather, cold snaps and thaws taking turns for weeks on end. The ice had looked thick. I’d thought it would hold my weight. When the bottom fell out from under me, I plunged like a rock. Then, dazedly ignoring Gideon’s yells and the dead tree limb he extended in my direction, I made my situation worse by trying to heft my drenched self out, again and again breaking and widening the hole in gasping, sputtering foolishness. Not until Gideon swatted me in the head with the branch did I find the sense to seize it.
I felt like that now. My anger, a dangerous pool, had held me for weeks. I’d practically dived into its deadly waters. And I was still drowning in it, making matters worse and worse. Mama’s tragic face, my scorn, my meanness to anyone who dared to take what I wanted, who dared, even unwittingly, to show me my inferiorities: These thoughts teemed and crashed in my head. The tears welled in a rush, tears of remorse but, still, as always, of anger, too: this time mostly directed at myself.
Matthew wasn’t the biggest fool in the family.
Dignity forgotten, I raced across the snow, floundering and slipping, all the way to the burial ground, and once at the fence, I clung to a post and sobbed into the rough grain. I hated myself. I wanted to throw my body onto the other side and bury myself alive.
I knew Mr. Long was coming, but when he touched my shoulder, I gasped and jumped anyway.
“Oh, Harriet,” he said quietly.
It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to twist under his hand and shove my wet face against his chest, a hard surface but kinder than the wooden post and vibrantly beating against my ear. “Why, why didn’t you leave me alone?” I sobbed, even as I clutched his coat on either side of my face.
He grunted. “Can’t tell you how often I ask myself that.” His hands rubbed my back. “I never know if you hate me or want me.” After a moment he added, “It’s uncomfortable, never knowing.”
I shook my head and kept crying. I didn’t know, either.
“Would you like to talk about what happened?”
“No.”
His chest rumbled a short laugh. “As you wish.”
We stood that way for a while: me weeping, then just crying, then eventually sniffling and noisily breathing, a moist, shuddery inhaling and exhaling against Mr. Long’s shirt, and him easing his hands up and down my back, in a consoling but matter-of-fact manner. I’d always noticed Mr. Long’s strong hands, wondered how such a big man could fashion the smallest details into a piece of wood and whittle so finely. He had sensitive hands, and I felt a rare rush of warm gratefulness that he was letting me recover in his careful, caring hold.
Minutes passed before I finally detached myself from his shirt.
His gray eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them, more like a spring fog than a thundercloud.
“I didn’t mean to get so angry.”
“I know.” He shrugged. “You just have a hot temper.”
His casual evaluation of my nature raised my hackles, which was unfortunate, since it proved his assertion true. Straightening, I made a face, then turned and rubbed my eyes. When I cleared my vision, I took in the burial ground, as always searching out my birth mother’s marker first: MRS. SUBMIT FAITHFUL WINTER, WIFE TO MR. DAVID WINTER, DEC’D OCT’R 10 1792 IN YE 18 OF HER AGE.
“‘Mrs. Submit Faithful Winter,’” I read aloud. “Dead at eighteen.” I shot him a sideways glare. “That’s where submission lands you.”
He snorted. “Then I expect you’ll live a long, healthy life, Harriet, because you’re the least submissive girl I know.”
I folded my arms. “We can’t all be biddable Lydia Goodriches. Think how tedious the world would be.”
He folded his arms likewise. “Yet how calm and peaceful, too.”
“Ha.” I narrowed my eyes and, raising my chin in a dismissive way, returned my attention to my mother’s—my first mother’s—gravestone, with its winged skull and crossed bones. The thought of the mother waiting back home swamped me with guilt. I shook my head. “Did you hear”—I swallowed—“everything?”