The Giver of Stars

6

My mother didn’t hold with twenty-four-hour-old pies, except mince. She would get up an hour earlier in order to bake a pie before breakfast but she would not bake any kind of custard or fruit pie, even pumpkin, the day before it was to be used, and if she had my father wouldn’t have eaten it.

Della T. Lutes, Farm Journal

In the first months after she had moved to Baileyville, Alice had almost enjoyed the weekly church dinners. Having a fourth or fifth person at their table seemed to lift the atmosphere in the sombre house, and the food was mostly a cut above Annie’s usual greasy fare. Mr Van Cleve tended to be on his best behaviour, and Pastor McIntosh, their most frequent visitor, was essentially a kind man, if a little repetitive. The most enjoyable element of Kentucky society, she observed, was the endless stories: the misfortunes of families, gossip about neighbours – every anecdote served up beautifully formed and with a punch-line that would leave the table rocking with laughter. If there was more than one raconteur at the table it would swiftly become a competitive sport. But, more importantly, those animated tall tales left Alice to eat her food largely unobserved and unbothered.

Or, at least, they had.

‘So when are you two young ’uns going to bless my old friend here with a grandchild or two then, huh?’

‘That’s what I keep asking them.’ Mr Van Cleve pointed his knife at Bennett and then Alice. ‘A house isn’t a home without a babby running through it.’

Maybe when our bedroom isn’t so close to yours that I can hear you break wind, Alice responded silently, scooping mashed potato onto her plate. Maybe when I’m free to walk to the bathroom without covering myself to the ankles. Maybe when I don’t have to listen to this conversation at least twice a week.

Pastor McIntosh’s sister Pamela, visiting from Knoxville, observed, as someone invariably did, that her son had gotten his new wife with child on the very day of their wedding. ‘Nine months to the day the twins came. Can you believe that? Mind you, she has that house running like clockwork. You watch, she’ll wean those two and the day after she’ll be carrying again.’

‘Aren’t you one of those packhorse librarians, Alice?’ Pamela’s husband eyed the world suspiciously from under two bushy brows.

‘I am indeed.’

‘The girl’s gone from the house all day!’ Mr Van Cleve exclaimed. ‘Some evenings she gets back so tired she can barely keep her eyes open.’

‘Strapping lad like you, Bennett. Young Alice there should be too tired to get on a horse in the first place!’

‘She should be bow-legged like a cowboy, though!’

The two men roared with laughter. Alice forced a wan smile. She glanced at Bennett, who was steering black beans around his plate with intent focus. Then she looked at Annie, who was holding the sweet-potato dish and gazing at her with something that looked uncomfortably like satisfaction. Alice hardened her look until the other woman turned away.

‘You got monthlies stains on your breeches,’ Annie had observed, as she brought Alice a pile of folded laundry the previous evening. ‘I couldn’t get it all out so there’s still a small mark.’ She had paused, and added, ‘Just like last month.’

Alice had bristled at the idea of the woman monitoring her ‘monthlies’. She had the sudden sensation of half the town discussing her apparent failure to fall pregnant. It couldn’t be Bennett’s fault, of course. Not their baseball champ. Not their golden boy.

‘You know, my cousin – the one over at Berea – she couldn’t fall pregnant for love nor money. I swear her husband was at her like a dog. She went to one of the snake-handling churches – Pastor, I know you disapprove but hear me out. They put a Green Garter around her neck and she was with child the very next week. My cousin said the baby has eyes as gold as a copperhead’s. But then she always was the imaginative type.’

‘My aunt Lola was the same. Her pastor had the whole congregation praying for God to fill her womb. Took them a year, but they got five children now.’

‘Please don’t feel obliged to do the same,’ said Alice.

‘I think it’s all this riding the girl is doing. It’s no good for a woman to sit astride all day. Dr Freeman says it jiggles up a lady’s insides.’

‘Well, yes, I do believe I’ve read as much.’

Mr Van Cleve picked up his salt-shaker and waggled it between his fingers. ‘It’s like if you shake a jar of milk up too much, it turns sour. Curdles, if you like.’

‘My insides are not curdled, thank you,’ Alice said stiffly, then added, after a moment, ‘But I would be very interested to see the article.’

‘Article?’ said Pastor McIntosh.

‘That you mentioned. Where it says a woman shouldn’t ride a horse. For fear of “jiggling”. It’s not a medical term I’m familiar with.’

The two men looked at each other.

Alice dragged her knife across a piece of chicken, not looking up from her plate. ‘Knowledge is so important, don’t you think? We all say at the library, without facts we really do have nothing. If I’m putting my health at risk by riding a horse, then I think it would be only responsible for me to read the article you’re talking about. Perhaps you could bring it with you next Sunday, Pastor.’ She looked up and smiled brightly across the table.

‘Well,’ said Pastor McIntosh, ‘I’m not sure I could lay my hands on it just like that.’

‘The pastor has a lot of papers,’ said Mr Van Cleve.

‘The funny thing is,’ Alice continued, waving a fork for emphasis, ‘in England, nearly all well-brought-up ladies ride. They go out hunting, jumping ditches, fences, all sorts. It’s almost compulsory. And yet they pop out babies with extraordinary efficiency. Even the Royal Family. Pop, pop, pop! Like shelling peas! Do you know how many children Queen Victoria had? And she was always on a horse. They couldn’t pull her off.’

The table had grown quiet.

‘Well …’ said Pastor McIntosh ‘… that is … most interesting.’

‘It can’t be good for you, though, dear,’ said the pastor’s sister, kindly. ‘I mean, strenuous physical activity is not good for young women at the best of times.’

‘Goodness. You’d better tell some of the mountain girls I see every day. Those women are chopping firewood, hoeing vegetable patches, cleaning house for men who are too sick – or too lazy – to get out of bed. And, strangely, they too seem to have all those babies, one after another.’

‘Alice,’ said Bennett, quietly.

‘I can’t imagine too many of them are just floating around, flower-arranging and putting their feet up. Or perhaps they have a different biological make-up. That must be it. Perhaps there’s a medical reason I haven’t heard of for that, too.’

‘Alice,’ said Bennett, again.

‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ she whispered angrily. She was furious to hear the tremor in her voice. It was what they had needed. The two older men exchanged kindly looks.

‘Oh, don’t you get yourself worked up now. We’re not criticizing you, Alice dear,’ said Mr Van Cleve, reaching across the table and placing his plump hand over hers.

‘We understand it can be a disappointment when the Lord doesn’t bless you straight off. But it’s best not to get too emotional about it,’ said the pastor. ‘I’ll say a little prayer for you both when you’re next in church.’

‘That’s most kind of you,’ said Mr Van Cleve. ‘Sometimes a young lady doesn’t always know what’s in her own interests. That’s what we’re here for, Alice, to mind your best interests. Now, Annie, where’s that sweet potato? My gravy’s getting cold here.’

‘What did you have to do that for?’ Bennett sat beside her on the swing seat as the older men repaired to the parlour, finishing off a bottle of Mr Van Cleve’s best bourbon. Their voices rose and fell, punctuated by bursts of laughter.

Alice sat with her arms crossed. The evenings were growing cooler but she positioned herself at the far end of the swing seat, a good nine inches from the warmth of Bennett’s body, a shawl around her shoulders. ‘Do what?’

‘You know very well what. Pa was just trying to look out for you.’

‘Bennett, you know that riding horses has nothing to do with why I’m not getting pregnant.’

He said nothing.

‘I love my job. I truly love my job. I will not give it up because your father is under the impression that my insides are jiggling. Does anyone say you play too much baseball? No. Of course they don’t. But your bits are jiggling all over the place three times a week.’

‘Keep your voice down!’

‘Oh, I forgot. We can’t say anything out loud, can we? Not about your jiggling bits. We can’t talk about what’s really going on. But I’m the one everyone’s talking about. I’m the one they think is barren.’

‘Why do you mind what people think? You act like you don’t care for half the people around here anyway.’

‘I mind because your family and your neighbours are harping on about it all the time! And they’re going to keep on unless you explain what’s going on! Or just … do something about it!’

She had gone too far. Bennett rose abruptly from the swing seat and strode off, slamming the screen door behind him. There was a sudden silence in the parlour. As the male voices slowly picked up again, Alice sat on the swing seat, listening to the crickets and wondering how she could be in a house full of people and also in the loneliest place on earth.

It had not been a good week at the library. The mountains turned from lush green to a fiery orange, the leaves forming a coppery carpet on the ground that muffled the horses’ hoofs, the hollers filling with thick morning mists, and Margery observed that half her librarians were out of sorts. She watched Alice’s uncharacteristically set jaw and shadowed eyes, and might perhaps have made an effort to sway her out of her mood, but she herself was antsy, still not having heard back from Sophia. Every evening she attempted to repair the more damaged books among their haul, but that pile had grown to a teetering height, and the thought of all the work, or all those wasted books, dismayed her even more. There was no time for her to do anything but get back on the mule and take another load out.

The appetite for books had become relentless. Children followed them down the street, begging for something to read. Families they saw fortnightly would beg for the same weekly allowance as those on the shorter routes, and the librarians would have to explain that there were only four of them and they were out all the hours of the day as it was. The horses were periodically lame from the long hours up hard, flinty tracks (‘If I have to take Billy sideways up Fern Gully again I swear he’s going to end up with two legs longer than the others’), and Patch developed girth sores so that he was off work for days.

It was never enough. And the strain was starting to show. As they returned on Friday evening, mud and fallen leaves treading in on their boots to add to the mess, Izzy snapped at Alice after she had tripped on Izzy’s saddlebag and broken the strap. ‘Mind yourself!’

Alice stooped to pick it up as Beth peered at it. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have left it on the floor, should you?’

‘It was only there a minute. I was trying to put my books down and I needed my stick. What am I supposed to do now?’

‘I don’t know. Get your ma to buy you another?’

Izzy reeled as if she had been slapped and glared at Beth. ‘You take that back.’

‘Take what back? It’s the damn truth.’

‘Izzy, I’m sorry,’ said Alice, after a moment. ‘It – it really was an accident. Look, I’ll see if I can find someone to fix it over the weekend.’

‘You didn’t need to be mean, Beth Pinker.’

‘Shoot. Your skin’s thinner than a dragonfly’s wing.’

‘Can you two stop bickering and enter your books? I’d like to be out of here by midnight.’

‘I can’t enter mine because you haven’t done yours, and if I bring my books over we’re just going to get those mixed up with the ones by your feet.’

‘The books by my feet, Izzy Brady, are the ones you left yesterday because you couldn’t be bothered to shelve them.’

‘I told you Mother had to pick me up early so she could get to her quilting circle!’

‘Oh, well. We can’t get in the way of a damn quilting circle, can we?’

Their voices had reached a pitch. Beth eyed Izzy from the corner of the room, where she had just emptied her own saddlebags, along with a lunch pail and an empty lemonade bottle.

‘Ah, shucks. You know what we need?’

‘What?’ said Izzy, suspiciously.

‘We need to let our hair down a little. We’re all work and no play.’ She grinned. ‘I think we need to have us a meeting.’

‘We’re having a meeting,’ said Margery.

‘Not this kind of meeting.’ Beth strode past them, stepping neatly over the books. She opened the door and stepped outside, where her little brother was sitting on the steps, waiting. The women occasionally bought Bryn a poke of candies in return for running errands, and he looked up hopefully. ‘Bryn, go tell Mr Van Cleve that Alice here has to stay late for a meeting on library policy and that we’ll walk her home when we’re done. Then head over to Mrs Brady’s and tell her the same – actually, don’t tell her it’s library policy. She’ll be down here faster than you can say Mrs Lena B. Nofcier. Tell her … tell her we’re cleaning our saddles. Then you tell Mama the same thing, and I’ll buy you a twist of Tootsie Rolls.’

Margery narrowed her eyes. ‘This had better not be –’

‘I’ll be right back. And, hey – Bryn? Bryn! You tell Daddy I was smoking and I’ll rip your damn ears off, one after the other. You hear me?’

‘What is going on?’ said Alice, as they heard Beth’s footsteps disappear down the road.

‘I could ask the same thing,’ said a voice.

Margery looked up to see Sophia standing in the doorway, her hands clasped together and her bag tucked under her arm. One eyebrow rose at the sight of the chaos. ‘Oh, my days. You said it was bad. You didn’t tell me I was going to want to run screaming back to Louisville.’

Alice and Izzy stared at the tall woman in the immaculate blue dress. Sophia looked back at them. ‘Well, I don’t know why you all are just sitting there catching flies. You should be working!’ Sophia put down her bag and untied her scarf. ‘I told William, and I’ll tell you. I’ll work the evenings, and I’ll do it with the door bolted, so nobody’s going to get aerated about me being here. Those are my terms. And I want the wage we discussed.’

‘Fine by me,’ said Margery.

The two younger women, bemused, turned and looked at Margery. Margery smiled. ‘Izzy, Alice, this is Miss Sophia. This is our fifth librarian.’

Sophia Kenworth, Margery advised them as they began to get to grips with the stacks of books, had spent eight years at the coloured library in Louisville, in a building so large that it had divided its books not just into sections but into whole floors. It served professors, lecturers from Kentucky State University, and had a system of professionally produced cards and stamps that would be used to leave date marks when anything came in and out. Sophia had undergone formal training, and an apprenticeship, and her job had only come to an end when her mother died and William had had his accident within three short months of each other, forcing her to leave Louisville to look after him.

‘That’s what we need here,’ Sophia said, as she sifted through the books, lifting each to examine its spine. ‘We need systems. You leave it with me.’

An hour later the library doors were bolted, most of the books were off the floor and Sophia was whisking through the pages of the ledger, making soft sounds of disapproval. Beth, meanwhile, had returned and was now holding a large Mason jar of coloured liquid under Alice’s nose.

‘I don’t know …’ Alice said.

‘Just sip it. Go on. It’s not going to kill you. It’s Apple Pie moonshine.’

Alice looked at Margery, who had already declined. Nobody seemed surprised that Margery didn’t drink moonshine.

Alice raised the jar to her lips, hesitated, and lost her nerve again. ‘What’s going to happen if I go home drunk?’

‘Well, I guess you’ll go home drunk,’ said Beth.

‘I don’t know … Can’t someone else try it first?’

‘Well, Izzy ain’t going to, is she?’

‘Says who?’ said Izzy.

‘Oh, boy. Here we go,’ said Beth, laughing. She took the jar from Alice’s hands and passed it to Izzy. With an impish grin, Izzy took the jar in two hands and raised it to her mouth. She took a swig, coughing and spluttering, her eyes widening as she tried to hand the jar back. ‘You’re not meant to be glugging it!’ said Beth, and took a small sip. ‘You drink like that and you’ll be blind by Tuesday.’

‘Give it here,’ said Alice. She looked down at the contents and took a breath.

You are too impulsive, Alice.

She took a sip, feeling the alcohol burn a mercury path down her throat. She clamped her eyes shut, waiting for them to stop watering. It was actually delicious.

‘Good?’ Beth’s mischievous eyes were on her when she opened them again.

She nodded mutely, and swallowed. ‘Surprisingly,’ she croaked. ‘Yes. Let me have another.’

Something shifted in Alice that evening. She was tired of the eyes of the town on her, sick of being monitored and talked about and judged. She was sick of being married to a man whom everyone else thought was the Good Lord Almighty and who could barely bring himself to look at her.

Alice had come halfway across the world to find that, yet again, she was considered wanting. Well, she thought, if that was what everyone thought, she might as well live up to it.

She took another sip, and then another, batting away Beth’s hands when she shouted, ‘Steady now, girl.’ She felt, she told them, when she finally handed it back, pleasantly squiffy.

‘Pleasantly squiffy!’ Beth mimicked, and the girls fell about laughing. Margery smiled, despite herself.

‘Well, I have no idea what kind of library this is,’ said Sophia, from the corner.

‘They just need to let off steam, is all,’ said Margery. ‘They’ve been working hard.’

‘We have been working hard! And now we need music!’ said Beth, holding up a hand. ‘Let’s fetch Mr Guisler’s gramophone. He’ll lend it to us.’

Margery shook her head. ‘Leave Fred out of it. He doesn’t need to see this.’

‘You mean he doesn’t need to see Alice all inebriated,’ said Beth, slyly.

‘What?’ Alice looked up.

‘Don’t tease her,’ said Margery. ‘She’s married, anyway.’

‘In theory,’ muttered Alice, who was having trouble focusing.

‘Yeah. Just be like Margery and do what you want when you want.’ Beth looked sideways at her. ‘With who you want.’

‘You want me to be ashamed of how I live my life, Beth Pinker? Because you’ll be waiting halfway to the heavens falling down.’

‘Hey,’ said Beth. ‘If I had a man as handsome as Sven Gustavsson come a-courting me, I’d have a ring on my finger so fast he wouldn’t even know how he’d found himself at church. You want to take a bite out of the apple before you put it in the basket, that’s up to you. Just make sure you keep hold of the basket.’

‘What if I don’t want a basket?’

‘Everyone wants a basket.’

‘Not me. Never have, never will. No basket.’

‘What are you all talking about?’ said Alice, and started to giggle.

‘They lost me at Mr Guisler,’ said Izzy, and belched quietly. ‘Good Lord, I feel amazing. I don’t think I’ve felt like this since I went on the Ferris wheel three times at Lexington County Fair. Except … No. That didn’t end well.’

Alice leaned in towards Izzy, and put a hand on her arm. ‘I really am sorry about your strap, Izzy. I didn’t mean to break it.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll just ask Mother to go get me another.’ For some reason they both found this hysterically funny.

Sophia looked at Margery and raised an eyebrow.

Margery lit the oil lamps that dotted the end of each shelf, trying not to smile. She wasn’t really one for big groups, but she quite liked this, the jokes and the merriment, and the way that you could see actual friendships springing up around the room, like green shoots.

‘Hey, girls?’ said Alice, when she had got her giggles under control. ‘What would you do, if you could do anything you wanted?’

‘Sort out this library,’ muttered Sophia.

‘I’m serious. If you could do anything, be anything, what would you do?’

‘I’d travel the world,’ said Beth, who had made herself a backrest of books, and was now making armrests to go with it. ‘I’d go to India and Africa and Europe and maybe Egypt and have me a little look around. I got no plans to stay around here my whole life. My brothers’ll have me minding my pa till he’s dribblin’. I want to see the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China and that place where they build little round huts out of ice blocks and a whole bunch of other places in the encyclopaedias. I was going to say I’d go to England and meet the king and queen but we got Alice so we don’t need to.’ The other women started to laugh.

‘Izzy?’

‘Oh, it’s crazy.’

‘Crazier than Beth and her Taj Mahals?’

‘Go on,’ said Alice, nudging her.

‘I’d … well, I’d be a singer,’ said Izzy. ‘I’d sing on the wireless, or on a gramophone record. Like Dorothy Lamour or …’ she glanced towards Sophia, who made a decent fist of not raising her eyebrows too far ‘… Billie Holiday.’

‘Surely your daddy could fix that for you. He knows everyone, don’t he?’ said Beth.

Izzy looked suddenly uncomfortable. ‘People like me don’t become singers.’

‘Why?’ said Margery. ‘You can’t sing?’

‘That’ll do it,’ said Beth.

‘You know what I mean.’

Margery shrugged. ‘Last time I looked you didn’t need your leg to sing.’

‘But people wouldn’t listen. They’d be too busy staring at my brace.’

‘Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Izzy girl. Enough people got leg braces and whatnot around here. Or just …’ she paused ‘… wear a long dress.’

‘What do you sing, Miss Izzy?’ said Sophia, who was arranging spines into alphabetical order.

Izzy had sobered. Her skin was a little flushed. ‘Oh, I like hymns, bluegrass, blues, anything, really. I even tried a little opera once.’

‘Well, you got to sing now,’ said Beth, lighting a cigarette and blowing on her fingers when the match burned too low. ‘Come on, girl, show us what you got.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Izzy. ‘I only really sing for myself.’

‘That’s going to be some pretty empty concert hall, then,’ said Beth.

Izzy looked at them. Then she pushed herself up onto her feet. She took a shaky breath, and then she began:

‘My sweetheart’s murmurs turned to dust

All tender kisses turned to rust

I’ll hold him in my heart though he be far

And turn my love to a midnight star.’

Her eyes closed, her voice filled the little room, soft and mellifluous, as if it had been dipped in honey. Izzy, right in front of them, began to change into someone quite new, her torso extending, her mouth opening wider to reach the notes. She was somewhere quite distant now, somewhere beloved to her. Beth rocked gently and began to smile. It stretched across her face – pure, unclouded delight at this unexpected turn of events. She let out a ‘Hell, yes!’ as if she couldn’t contain it. And then, after a moment, Sophia, as if compelled by an impulse she could barely control, began to join in, her own voice deeper, tracing the path of Izzy’s and complementing it. Izzy opened her eyes and the two women smiled at each other as they sang, their voices lifting, their bodies swaying in time with the beat, and the air in the little library lifted with them.

‘Its light is distant but it warms me still

I’m a million miles from heaven but I’ll wait here till

My sweetheart comes again and the glow I feel

Is brighter than the stars above Kentucky hills.’

Alice watched, the moonshine coursing through her blood, the warmth and music making her nerves sing, and felt something give inside her, something she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge to herself, something primal to do with love and loss and loneliness. She looked at Margery, whose expression had relaxed, lost in her own private reverie, and thought of Beth’s comments about a man Margery never discussed. Perhaps conscious she was being watched, Margery turned to her and smiled, and Alice realized, with horror, that tears were sliding, unchecked down her cheeks.

Margery’s raised eyebrows were a silent question.

Just a little homesick, Alice answered. It was the truth, she thought. She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.

Margery took her elbow and they stepped outside into the dusk, hopping down into the paddock where the horses grazed peacefully by the fence, oblivious to the noise inside.

Margery handed Alice her handkerchief. ‘You okay?’

Alice blew her nose. She had begun to sober immediately, out in the cool air. ‘Fine. Fine …’ She looked up at the skies. ‘Actually, no. Not really.’

‘Can I help?’

‘I don’t think it’s something anyone else can help with.’

Margery leaned back against the wall, so that she was looking up at the mountains behind them. ‘There’s not much I haven’t seen and heard these thirty-eight years. I’m pretty sure whatever you have to say isn’t going to knock me off my heels.’

Alice closed her eyes. If she put it out there, it became real, a living, breathing thing that she would have to do something about. Her gaze flickered to Margery and away again.

‘And if you think I’m the type to go talking, Alice Van Cleve, you really haven’t worked me out at all.’

‘Mr Van Cleve keeps going on about us not having any babies.’

‘Hell, that’s just standard round here. The moment you put a ring on that finger they’re all just counting down –’

‘But that’s just it. It’s Bennett.’ Alice wrung her hands together. ‘It’s been months and he just – he won’t –’

Margery let the words settle. She waited, as if to check that she had heard right. ‘He won’t …?’

Alice took a deep breath. ‘It all started well enough. We’d been waiting so long, what with the journey and everything, and actually it was lovely and then just as things … were about to – well … Mr Van Cleve shouted something through the wall – I think he thought he was being encouraging – and we were both a little startled, and then everything stopped and I opened my eyes and Bennett wasn’t even looking at me and he seemed so cross and distant and when I asked him if everything was okay he told me I was …’ she gulped ‘… unladylike for asking.’

Margery waited.

‘So I lay back down and waited. And he … well, I thought it was going to happen. But then we could hear Mr Van Cleve clomping around next door and … well … that was that. And I tried to whisper something but he got cross and acted like it was my fault. But I don’t really know. Because I’ve never … so I can’t be sure whether it’s something I’m doing wrong or he’s doing wrong but, either way, his father is always next door and the walls are so thin and, well, Bennett, he just acts like I’m something he doesn’t want to get too close to any more. And it’s not like it’s one of those things you can talk about.’ The words tumbled out, unchecked. She felt her face flood with colour. ‘I want to be a good wife. I really do. It just feels … impossible.’

‘So … let me get this straight. You haven’t …’

‘I don’t know! Because I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like!’ She shook her head, then covered her face with her hands, as if horrified that she was even saying the words out loud.

Margery frowned at her boots. ‘Stay there,’ she said.

She disappeared into the cabin, where the singing had reached a new pitch. Alice listened anxiously, fearing the sudden cessation of voices that would suggest Margery had betrayed her. But instead the song lifted, and a little burst of applause met a musical flourish, and she heard Beth’s muffled whoop! Then the door opened, allowing the voices to swell briefly, and Margery tripped back down the steps holding a small blue book, which she handed to Alice. ‘Okay, so this doesn’t go in the ledger. This, we pass around to ladies who, perhaps, need a little help in some of the matters you’ve mentioned.’

Alice stared at the leather-bound book.

‘It’s just facts. I’ve promised it to a woman over at Miller’s Creek on my Monday route, but you can take a look over the weekend and see if there’s anything in there might help.’

Alice flicked through, startling at the words sex, naked, womb. She blushed. ‘This goes out with the library books?’

‘Let’s just say it’s an unofficial part of our service, given it has a bit of a chequered history through our courts. It doesn’t exist in the ledger, and it doesn’t sit out on the shelves. We just keep it between ourselves.’

‘Have you read it?’

‘Cover to cover and more than once. And I can tell you it has brought me a good deal of joy.’ She raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘And not just me either.’

Alice blinked. She couldn’t imagine prising joy out of her current situation, no matter how hard she tried.

‘Good evening, ladies.’

The two women turned to see Fred Guisler walking down the path towards them, an oil lamp in his hand. ‘Sounds like quite a party.’

Alice hesitated, and thrust the book abruptly back at Margery. ‘I – I don’t think so.’

‘It’s just facts, Alice. Nothing more than that.’

Alice walked briskly past her back to the library. ‘I can manage this by myself. Thank you.’ She half ran back up the steps, the door slamming as she entered.

Fred stopped when he reached Margery. She noted the faint disappointment in his expression. ‘Something I said?’

‘Not even halfway close, Fred,’ she said, and placed a hand on his arm. ‘But why don’t you come on in and join us? Aside from a few extra bristles on that chin of yours, you’re pretty much an honorary librarian yourself.’

She would have laid down money, said Beth afterwards, that that was the finest librarians’ meeting that had ever taken place in Lee County. Izzy and Sophia had sung their way through every song they could recall, teaching each other the ones they didn’t know and making up a few on the spot, their voices wild and raucous as they grew in confidence, stamping and hollering, the girls clapping in time. Fred Guisler, who had indeed been happy to fetch his gramophone, had been persuaded to dance with each of them, his tall frame stooped to accommodate Izzy, disguising her limp with some well-timed swings so that she lost her awkwardness and laughed until tears leaked from her eyes. Alice smiled and tapped along but wouldn’t meet Margery’s eye, as if she were already mortified at having revealed so much, and Margery understood that she would simply have to say nothing and wait for the girl’s feelings of exposure and humiliation, however unwarranted, to die down. And amid all this Sophia would sing out and sway her hips, as if even her rigour and reserve could not hold out against the music.

Fred, who had declined all offers of moonshine, had driven them home in the dark, all crammed into the back seat of his truck, taking Sophia first under cover of the rest, and they had heard her singing still as she tapped her way down the path to the neat little house at Monarch Creek. They had dropped Izzy next, the motor-car’s tyres spinning in the huge driveway, and had seen Mrs Brady’s amazement at her daughter’s sweaty hair and grinning face. ‘I never had friends like you all before,’ Izzy had exclaimed, as they flew along the dark road, and they knew that it was only half moonshine talking. ‘Honestly, I never even thought I liked other girls till I became a librarian.’ She had hugged each of them with a child’s giddy enthusiasm.

Alice had sobered completely by the time they dropped her off, and said little. The two Van Cleve men were seated on the porch, despite the chill in the air and the late hour, and Margery detected a distinct reluctance in her step as Alice made her way slowly up the path towards them. Neither rose from his seat. Nobody smiled under the flickering porch light, or leaned forward to greet her.

Margery and Fred drove the rest of the way to her cabin in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

‘Tell Sven I said hey,’ he said, as she opened the gate and Bluey came bounding down the slope to meet her.

‘I will.’

‘He’s a good man.’

‘As are you. You need to find yourself someone else, Fred. It’s been long enough.’

He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again.

‘You have a good rest of your evening,’ he said finally, and tipped his forehead, as if he were still wearing a hat, then turned the wheel and drove back down the road.