Laura Keene, all too familiar with such behavior, fleeing a drunken husband of her own, never forgives him. Eliding the cause, Edwin’s letters admit to the rift. He writes that he’s “suffering Keenely” as a result. He parts from her and sails on to Hawaii, where he performs Richard III for King Kamehameha, who had once seen his father in the same role.
John can hardly bear to read these letters, so great is his envy. He’s desperate to protect his captain from a mutiny—he’s better with a sword than Edwin is by miles. Meanwhile, the situation on the farm is desperate. No one since the Hagan debacle has leased the fields. No one has ever teased a good crop of grain from them. In the winter of 1855, the Booths begin to slowly starve.
* * *
—
Asia is always tired and always cold. She feels brittle and breakable. Her hair loses its gloss, she suffers from constipation, and she understands that nourishing food would cure all of this, but the larder has little of that. Then the cows go dry. Only one continues to yield, but her milk is pink in color, which makes Asia remember how Herne the Hunter comes in his hoofs and horns, shaking his chain, and making the milch-kine yield blood. “There is nothing,” John says, “that Shakespeare didn’t anticipate.”
Snow blankets the woods and fields in higher and higher drifts. The world is hushed. The water doesn’t flow, the birds don’t sing. Only the sound of the thawing and the freezing again. Only the sound of icicles dripping from the tree branches and eaves and windows. Only the wind.
The pump freezes and it takes an axe to fill a bucket at the spring.
Some of the horses have to be sold. This includes Fanny’s foal. They can no longer afford to pay Ann Hall and the snow is so deep, she would struggle to reach Tudor Hall anyway. No one is braving the roads; they haven’t had a guest in more than a month. Still, Rosalie wants to bring Joe home. Mother says no. She’s behind in his school fees, but he’s being fed where he is. A growing boy needs food.
Asia has a cage of pet partridges. There is no eating them as they all have names, but there is no feeding them either. Asia lets them go, watches them pick and scatter across the white ground. “They were too pretty to eat,” Rosalie says and Mother says, “This is what comes of giving a name to every creature that wanders onto our land.”
Asia decides to go with John into the woods to check on some traps that he set the day before, traps for animals without names. More snow in the night, so she opens the front door to a world of blinding white. The porch steps have disappeared.
John must take a stick when he walks, stabbing it into the drifts to be sure of the solid ground beneath. In this way, he finds the snake fence at the perimeter of the property, vaults over it. “Come on,” he says to Asia. “One leap will do it.”
Surely she would have made that leap on another day when her belly was full. Instead, she lands short, sinks into a drift up to her neck. She can’t move her arms or pedal her feet and by the time John has managed to pull her out, adrenaline has her heart hammering. Snow sticks like burrs to her skirts and she can’t shake it all off. “I was drowning,” she says. “I nearly drowned.” We thought he’d never open those big eyes for us again, she hears Jesse Wharton say.
“I doubt a person drowning would have managed the squawking you did.” John is laughing at her panic. He adds, more gently, “I never lost you. I had you safe.” She’s shivering uncontrollably so he suggests that she go back to the house; he can find the traps himself, but she’s too frightened to go alone. The way home now seems to her one continuous and all-too-likely grave.
In the woods, under the trees, the snow thins and they can more easily make their way forward. They’ve caught two animals, a possum and a squirrel. Whatever horror these animals felt when the traps first sprang has been spent. Both are limp, eyeing Asia with resignation. Both are more starved than the Booths.
John lets them go. “They wouldn’t have been a mouthful anyway,” he says. “Poor miserable creatures.” And then, changing his mind when it’s too late, “But they were quite prepared to die. How stupid of me!”
Asia is numb by the time they make it home. The return of sensation in her arms and legs is fiery and painful. She trembles so hard it seems she might break a tooth.
Eventually, she is warm again. But still hungry.
* * *
—
John sells some livestock and finds a distant neighbor, Mr. Parker, who lets him purchase a lactating cow. John sets off on foot to fetch her. The snow is falling at a slant when he leaves, there is an icy wind, and Asia has a terrible premonition as she watches his figure blur and disappear. She runs after him, but only makes it as far as the family graveyard, where the crosses barely clear the snow, the dead lying deeper and colder than ever.
They expect him back that afternoon, but night comes and he hasn’t returned. The wind has stopped, but not the snow, which now falls straight and white from the black heaven. Asia lights the lamps, sets one against each of the chilled windows so that John can find his way home. Branches of frost blossom on the glass.
She retires to the settee and, in the lamplight, tries to pick up the story she was reading . . .
The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides moral man to evil . . .
But the words are meaningless on the page. Mother has set down her sewing and rocks in her chair, her arms tight around her own body. “My boy, my boy, my boy,” she says. “My own, my darling boy.”
The long night is unendurable. The women grow quiet. No one goes to bed. Asia wraps herself in a quilt and thinks again of the cocoon of snow, how it pinned her arms. She might have died if John hadn’t been there to pull her out. She would probably have died. People do die in the dangerous cold, only steps from their own front doors. She hates the cow he’s gone to buy. She hates the Parkers for offering her. She thinks that if something has happened to John, she will never get over it.
“I remember,” Rosalie says suddenly. “I remember when Henry died.”
“Stop that,” Mother tells her.
“I remember it perfectly.”
“Not another word. I warn you.”
It’s been years since anyone mentioned Henry’s name in Asia’s presence. She knows about these dead brothers and sisters, but the world they lived in is an imaginary one, the world before her. They don’t feel dead to her; they feel like something in a book or a dream.
“You can’t have him,” Rosalie says.
“What?” Asia asks, but Rosalie isn’t talking to her.