Callie’s arms were crossed against her waist, her head lowered as though she saw something crucially important in the mud in which she stood. “I can’t build yet,” she said. “It will be a good while before I can get enough money saved up. What little savings I had went with everything else.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Martha said.

As children they had often read each other’s thoughts, and Callie still had the knack. She said, “I couldn’t take money from you.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Martha said. “You supply the land, and I build a house big enough for the both of us.”

Callie went still, her whole body stiff and wary. Martha wanted to apologize for giving offense, but Callie cut her off with a movement of her hand.

“Tell me this,” she said. “When you want to get married and start a family of your own, what then?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Martha countered.

Callie looked up sharply. “I’m never going to get married.”

She was so vehement that Martha was taken aback.

“Don’t look at me like that. If you think it through you’ll know that it’s the only reasonable thing for me to do. Ma didn’t lose her mind until I was born. I don’t want children, not if it means turning into—that.”

Martha hesitated. “You won’t be lonely?”

Callie grimaced. “No,” she said sharply. “I’m far too busy to be lonely.”

When Martha had disappeared from sight, Callie walked slowly down to the farm where she had been born and worked for all of her life, past the cider house to the new nursery. A small plot of land with a new-woven fence of beech saplings eight feet high all around it, as close as was possible to deer-proof.

On the other side of the fence was the single Bleeding Heart Levi had found and brought back, along with five new grafts from that same tree. Whatever other chores he turned his hand to, Levi was always within sight of the nursery. Every day he wove new wood into the fence that surrounded it; he had closed the gate with a complicated twisting of wires that were not easily undone. Levi’s vigilance was the difference between success and failure. They bore the burden together, and told no one about the Bleeding Heart.

Chapter XXIII

Martha was on her way back to the Bonners for supper, lost in her thoughts, when a hand tugged at her mantle from behind and she let out a small cry in surprise.

“Birdie,” she said. “You startled me.”

The girl had been running, and she took a moment to catch her breath. She said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

Birdie had the same dark and unruly hair as her brothers and sisters, and some of it had escaped the plaits to dance around her face. She was flushed with running and her eyes—an odd mixture of green and brown—seemed almost to glow. Birdie wouldn’t be called pretty, but there was an energy about her that drew a person in. As tired as Martha was and as preoccupied by her conversation with Callie, she stopped to listen to what Birdie had to say.

“My da says it’s best to be straightforward when you’ve got a favor to ask. So I’m asking.” She hesitated anyway, as if waiting for permission.

“Go on,” Martha said. She couldn’t think what Birdie might want, unless it had to do with the trunk of books she had brought with her from Manhattan. The girl loved to read, and was always looking for new stories.

“I think you would make a very good teacher,” Birdie said. “And I’d like you to think about teaching at the Paradise school.”

This request was so unexpected that Martha stopped where she was. Birdie reached out and tugged Martha’s cuff.

“You don’t have to answer now,” she said. “Just think about it.”

Martha would have preferred to put such a nonsensical suggestion out of her mind completely, but it stayed with her until the adults were all gathered around the supper table. And of course Lily and Simon weren’t here, but Hannah and Ben had come over so all in all there were the three married couples, each sitting side by side. Daniel and Ethan sat at one end of the long table, and Martha and Birdie at the other.

It was Birdie’s first time at the adult supper table. She had been campaigning for a place for months, Elizabeth told Martha.

“She’s not even six months older than her eldest nephew,” Elizabeth said. “But she claims precedence because she’s of his father’s generation.”

“And how did that go over with Nathan?” Martha asked. The Bonner grandchildren were the source of many dramas every day, many of them oddly compelling.

Nathan was a sensible boy, she was told, and he knew better than to take on Birdie on such a matter as this. He had gone off to bed with the rest of the grandchildren without a fuss and now Birdie sat next to Martha, looking around herself as if she had landed in Aladdin’s cave.

Surely, Martha consoled herself, surely Birdie would not raise the topic of teaching at this supper table.

The LeBlanc girls came in with platters and bowls until the sideboard was filled, and then the long process of passing plates began. There was a lot of small talk around the table, Jennet and Hannah had their heads together about something, while Luke was telling Ben something complicated in a combination of French and English. A living French, nothing like the parlor language she had learned. She could discuss painting and music and the health of relatives, but the language she had been taught had been stripped down and, in the process, crippled. She found herself listening. Birdie was just as interested, her head swiveling back and forth between the two men, as if she needed to see the mouths making the words to understand their meaning.