“They wouldn’t—”
“Why can’t they mind their own fucking business?”
Patience’s words rang through the trees, and in the silence that followed the wind rose, made the branches of the black oak creak and the last clinging dead leaves rustle. Sorrow scarcely dared to breathe. There was a hot dense ache under her ribs, right where the favors in her pockets were pressing into her side. She shivered and wiped at her nose with her mitten. The wool smelled like woodsmoke; the scent made her nauseous.
“You know what?” Julie said after a long, horrible silence. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“You—”
“I don’t care.” Julie took a step back and spread her arms wide, and she said it again, loud enough to echo through the orchard. “I don’t care! I’ll mind my own business. It’s fine! I won’t bother you again. Exactly what you want. You ever get over yourself and change your mind, you know how to find me.”
She stomped into the orchard, slipping once on a lingering patch of snow. Patience watched until the bright purple of her coat disappeared into the trees.
She sniffled softly, scrubbed at her face, and said, “We’re going home.”
She held out her hand. Sorrow didn’t take it.
“Come on. It’s cold.”
Sorrow stared at her sister. “Are you friends with Julie?”
“No. She’s being—I’m not.”
“She said you were.”
“What do you care what she says?”
“Does Mom know?”
Patience stepped forward so quickly Sorrow stumbled backward, her boots skidding on the ice, but Patience caught the front of her coat before she fell.
“Don’t you dare say a word to her about this,” she said. Her voice was low and angry and unlike anything Sorrow had ever heard. She didn’t sound like Patience at all. She sounded like a stranger.
Sorrow’s heart was hammering. “But if you—”
“Don’t you dare,” Patience said, giving Sorrow a shake. “She’s upset enough as it is. You don’t say anything about the fire or the Abramses or anything, okay? Don’t make it worse.”
“I won’t,” Sorrow whispered.
“You have to promise. You’re not going to say anything to upset Mom.”
“I won’t!” Sorrow said again. “I promise, I won’t!”
Patience let her go and turned away. Her face was so pale and so hard it might have been carved from stone. She threw the white rock at the base of the oak. “We’re going home now.”
Sorrow followed without a word.
16
SILENCE LOVEGOOD
1782–1816
THE FROST HAD not broken. She knew before she opened her eyes.
Silence lay abed beside her husband. His breathing was slow and steady. The children snuffled softly in their blankets. Beyond the log walls of the cabin a single bird braved the cold to greet an unnatural dawn. Its voice rose and rose, spinning to shrill, impossible heights before falling quiet, and only when it was gone did Silence rise. She pushed the curtain aside, stoked a small fire in the woodstove, shed her nightdress for her day clothes. Her throat was tight, her mouth tinged with the metallic taste of fear. It was too cold. Spring was late in coming. The trees would not blossom. The wheat would not grow. It was too cold.
She moved without noise, stepping over her children. Seven small sleepers all in a row. Her mother had borne only one child that survived infancy, as had her grandmother before her, but what they had lacked in fertility Silence had made up and more. Her littlest, Grace, born five years ago in a flood of blood and pain, was curled like a kitten in a nest of blankets by the hearth.
It was May of 1816, but there were no leaves on the trees, no grass sprouting in fresh green shoots, no apple blossoms covering the hills with a delicate spring blush. There was only cold and frost and the eerie dry fog that sat upon the land like smoke, never washing away with the frequent rains. It was a wicked spring, a bitter spring. Yesterday her sons had come home with eyes blacked and lips bloodied by the fists of boys in town who blamed them—blamed her—for the ill-fortuned weather.
The townspeople remembered when this had happened before: during the summer of 1805, when her mother, Fearful, had died, and fifteen years before that, at the passing of her grandmother Rejoice. The apple trees had turned brown in mourning, the flowers withered, the grass dried: the entire Lovegood orchard cast into an unnatural autumn. It had not lasted—the wicked weather faded after the dead were buried and the living had shed their tears—but the memories endured.
This time, unlike before, the cold reached beyond the orchard and chilled the whole of the valley, the whole of Vermont, perhaps the whole of the world. Neighbors were packing their carts to move south. The Smith family had already gone to their cousins in Virginia. The Van Tassel brothers were looking even farther afield; they planned to board a ship in Portsmouth that would take them to Charleston, where, it was said, snow never fell, and certainly not at the end of May.
John had asked her, two days ago, if they might consider leaving as well. He had asked with hunched shoulders and lowered eyes, knowing before he spoke what the answer would be, but Silence had allowed herself to consider the question. She had never been anywhere beyond the Hollow—they were calling it Abrams Valley these days, giving Enoch Abrams and his wretched family all the more reason to puff their chests as they strutted through field and town—and she could not even imagine what they might find outside this valley. The world, when she allowed herself the luxury of contemplating it, stretched forever in every direction as an endless expanse of trees, shadows as dark as night and twice as cold, and it took her breath away, the hugeness of it, how far a person might walk and never see home again.
“We will stay,” John had said when Silence did not answer. “The weather will break soon.”