“That girl look at me like I was speaking Latin. No idea what I’m trying to say except that it some business it ain’t polite to talk about. But in the end she want that baby more than she want to keep her pride. So I ask her, how often does your husband cover you at night? Once or twice a week, or more? Did she look scandalized? She say, why, I have a coverlet every night. He wouldn’t let me be cold. He a good man.

“Can you imagine?

“She been lying next to that man of hers for close to six months and he hadn’t ever done no more than touch her hand. She thought that’s all they was to it—a woman and a man and a bed. So I told her what she didn’t know already.

“Now, I don’t know what she said to her husband or how she explained what they were supposed to be doing, but nine months later she brought a little girl into the world. Just as pretty as the morning. She went on to have another five.”

They were laughing quietly, for fear that Birdie would come to demand to hear the story.

Lily said, “Well, I can tell you that whatever has gone wrong with me, it hasn’t been for lack of trying. I decided to come home in the fall because I know if you can help me, you will. Then sometime on the journey—”

“You caught,” Hannah said.

“I thought I was seasick,” Lily said. “But it’s been ten weeks since I last bled….” Her voice trailed off.

Hannah said, “You are frightened to the bone. You don’t know if you could stand another loss.”

Lily felt the blood draining from her face.

“Why are you surprised? We women too,” Curiosity said. “Hannah and me, we know what it is to lose a child. Your mama know, and just about every woman old enough to bear know well enough. I don’t doubt it the same way the world over. Ain’t you have nobody to talk to in Italy?”

Lily’s gaze dropped to her lap. “There was an English doctor. I saw him once.”

“An English doctor,” Hannah echoed.

Curiosity’s mouth twitched. “Tell us what the great man had to say.”

“It will make you mad.”

“No doubt,” Curiosity said.

“Do tell,” said Hannah.

“He said that as long as I persisted in pursuing male activities and denying my true nature, I wouldn’t be able to bring a child into the world.”

“Lord have mercy. Save us women from educated men. I’d like to have a word with that English doctor, I surely would.” Curiosity shook her head.

Lily was so relieved that tears sprang to her eyes.

“You didn’t start to believe that nonsense, did you?” Hannah looked at her as if she might have a fever.

“I tried not to,” Lily said. “But there was no one else to ask—”

“That’s when you decided to come home?” Hannah asked.

She nodded.

Curiosity said, “And high time too.”

“Do you think you can—” She paused, afraid to say the words. Her gaze shifted from Hannah to Curiosity and back again. “Is there a chance?”

“There is a chance,” Hannah said. “But you are going to have to follow orders very closely.”

“That wan’t never your strong suit,” said Curiosity. “You always had to do things your own way.”

Lily managed a smile. She said, “I look forward to surprising you.”

Chapter XIV

A full week after the flood pretty much everybody was still out of sorts: short-tempered, prone to crying fits, distracted. Plain old sad. Birdie understood why. It could hardly be otherwise, with so many families still without a roof. The repairs went on from first light to last, and still many houses and cabins were uninhabitable. It was a new word for Birdie, one she liked.

Since the flood she had learned a lot of new words, because when Ma was worried, she started to talk like a book. Other people might babble when they were scared, but Birdie’s ma would talk more slowly, and her sentences got longer, and her words got bigger. Birdie’s list was longer every day: chaotic, debris, indestructible (because the schoolhouse had mostly survived), turbulence, and the best of all: Mesopotamian and aqueduct. Those she got from a conversation at the table—the very crowded table—when Ma had told them all about how people farmed long ago, and what benefits were to be had from floods. Then Adam had asked if Mesopotamia was in Ohio territory, and Ma had got out the atlas to show them the world, with Da and Ben making comments now and then that had them all laughing.

There was a lot of talk at home, and even more in the village. People asked altogether too many questions and Birdie got more than her share. When a Bonner came into the village people wanted to know was it true that Gabriel had married the Mohawk girl Annie from Lake in the Clouds? And wasn’t that a surprise? And where were the happy couple living, and did they have one of the cabins at Lake in the Clouds for themselves or were they living with Blue-Jay and Susanna?

Blue-Jay and Susanna were another subject people never got tired asking about. Not the Quakers, of course, but everybody else. The Quakers had turned her out because she fell in love with a savage, or at least that’s the way people talked about it, though Birdie knew better. Her ma had explained how it all worked, but she never corrected people when they said stupid things. They wouldn’t have listened to her anyway.

The hardest thing was when they used words like savage. Which was being used even more now that Gabriel had gone and married Annie. One of the good things about that was clear right away. The talk about Susanna was put away for a while at least.