“I can promise you I’d let them know that someone back home is waiting to hear from them. That they should write promptly. With an address where they can be reached.”
“It would be the greatest gift,” Isabelle said.
How was it she was choking up at such a playful comment by her friend?
“Tell them I’m well. That I get on. And tell that boy he must not only write, but write with detail. Long letters. Just as he promised.”
When Clementine opened her mouth to speak, Elsy ran up beside her, screaming of the chickens, and the moment was gone. Mildred climbed the stairs to the porch and there was a world between these two pairs—Clementine and Elsy near the carriage, their clothes rattled by the wind as they huddled together, and Isabelle and Mildred by their chairs, mere feet from the door that would lead them inside to the hearth.
“Just be well,” Isabelle called out.
Mildred waved, and Clementine, obscured behind her scarf, waved back. Elsy was reaching for the horse. Clementine called her to attention, raised the child’s hand, and made her wave as well. When they climbed into the carriage Isabelle was still watching them, as though there would be more to the interaction—one last farewell. Yet the horse circled the roundabout, and it seemed that no sooner had Clementine arrived than she was gone.
CHAPTER 29
There was a well-dressed man of squat stature who, at daybreak, rang a bell as he walked through the quiet town of Convent. There were mornings in the winter when the sun had yet to clamber through the darkness of the previous night, and on those occasions, in his other hand, he carried a lantern that drew men toward him in the same manner that light lures passing insects. The doors of houses would open and shut without a sound, footsteps would patter, and soon the man with the bell and lantern had formed a silent flock about his person. The whole lot would venture forward as one, never stopping, growing ever larger as they carried on. They were a pack of ghosts floating toward the fog and the woods beyond.
“Prentiss,” Caleb called out in the dark of their room, watching the men go. He was accustomed to receiving no answer in return at this early hour, but he tried again. “Prentiss, they’re out front now.”
He did not know how long the two of them had been in Convent. Enough time to lose track of it. Four months? Five? The town was the first they came across after they’d stopped fleeing in earnest, the inn the first one that would house them. The woman in charge, with her peculiar hospitality, reminded him of his mother, and her domestic duties seemed one with her insistence on keeping a strictly harmonious home. If the door between the kitchen and the parlor was left ajar, Mrs. Benson would issue no qualms, but one would find it properly shut the next instant. At a loud noise from upstairs she would call up to ask if a guest was in need—a way of asking for quiet. To let the house rest.
She had stowed them in the cobwebbed attic, two beds alone across the room from each other, and although there were spiders so enormous as to seem more beast than bug, and a dampness that turned the floorboards the color of rotted teeth, Caleb felt blessed to have a space all their own.
Caleb said Prentiss’s name once more, and the body across the room began to stir. Prentiss had never once risen before Caleb since they’d arrived. Each morning, as though he were pinned to his bed by the cold, it appeared that Prentiss might give up altogether and sleep all the way through the dregs of winter like an animal. But then he would wake suddenly, spurred on not by Caleb （for Caleb recognized that he had little effect on the man, who was mostly silent, a world away）， but seemingly by some wellspring of diligence that demanded he put himself to the task and see it through to a completion so devastatingly assured that no employer could ever have even a whisper of grievance. For it was work they were waking to. Work that occupied their days.
“Let’s get gone, then,” Prentiss said, the sleep still clinging to his voice. Such was his way that he was dressed before Caleb’s eyes had adjusted to see the figure drawing near him in the shadows.
*
The morning was still cold and the men hugged their coats tight to their bodies. All of them carried burdens. One man spoke often of a wife to whom he sent his earnings, a woman who failed to return his letters and might no longer be his wife at all. But given that he was an escaped convict, the return home that would satisfy him on the status of his marriage would also end with his hanging, and so he’d learned to bear the mystery as it presently stood. The other men were quieter, although in their darting glances, their fear of a spooked horse or a squawking crow, it was clear that some darkness from their past loomed with the ominous power to arrive at any moment and deliver a fate worthy of flight.