Caleb leaned back into his seat.
“To be quite honest, I’m not sure why Father has made such a strong stand. His loyalty to those two. They’re perfectly fine help, but I’m not sure it’s worth the grief. No other man in the county is willing to pay the wages he does, and some don’t pay at all. It’s becoming the talk of the town. Folks say cruel things behind his back.”
Her dress felt tight, the stitching coarse at her backside. She’d been gone no more than half an hour and already missed her rocking chair on the front porch and the solitude of the cabin, the distance from the world, that space all her own. In this, along with so much else, she and George were alike, even if they weren’t always willing to recognize it in each other.
“It’s rare for your father to find fellow travelers. Those two boys are outsiders. They understand him. And he them.”
“I’m not sure understanding means much,” Caleb said.
“I don’t follow you.”
“You understand Father like no one else might. Yet you two speak less than bickering schoolchildren. It’s vexing.”
“Yes. Well…”
She closed her eyes, ignored the whine of a caged hog, the ring of hammer meeting anvil. Sounds of excess, vice not of the religious order but of the human order, the noises of society fending off despair with routine.
“Consider that it’s not as simple as you might have it. Your father and I—we made sacrifices, not for each other, but for the kind of life we sought. In the face of the alternative. What’s all around us.”
The dappled shadows of the town blighted her eyelids until the noise ceased and they’d gone beyond it all. Time unspooled in lockstep with the patter of Ridley’s footsteps, and neither disturbed the spell cast by their silence. When at last they arrived at the Beddenfelds’， she let herself out of the carriage with only a brief goodbye.
*
The flowers around the home appeared to have been placed indiscriminately, their presence explained not by any sense of taste but by a general preference for extravagance. Gaudy carpet stamped with designs like illegible handwriting snaked through the entrance hall. The women, six in all, were seated in the parlor. At least Mildred was among them. They stood at her arrival, mothers every one, dragging the length of their dresses as they came to say hello, each of them other than Mildred fawning over her as if she were a puppy brought in from the cold.
“Oh, I thought you would never show!” Sarah Beddenfeld said.
“You look simply stunning,” Margaret Webler said, stroking Isabelle’s dress, the same model she’d most likely discarded years ago. The skin at her cheeks looked thinned by years of grinning, and her eyebrows, the same crimson hue of her hair, had been drawn on so recently that Isabelle suspected they would smear at the touch.
“My apologies if I’m late,” Isabelle said. “The ride took longer than I’d expected.”
This was a lie, the first of many to come. They sat at the dining table of polished wood, a lace runner spilling from either end, with a bowl at its center so overflowing with fruit that the table seemed to have been set for a Roman feast, or a still life. Isabelle lied about the beauty of the décor, and then about the salad in which flaccid lettuce had been drowned in a surplus of vinegar.
“You are the envy of the town,” Martha Bloom said to Sarah, seated at the head of the table. “Who with a daughter would not wish for such a betrothal? August Webler is destined for great things, just like his father. That I’m sure of. Quite sure.”
“Have you noticed,” Katrina said in a hush, “how sometimes even the gentlemen in town grow quiet when he appears?”
Natasha’s sister, Anne, who’d failed to touch her plate, nodded along vigorously. The nodding, Isabelle ventured, was a symptom of being the youngest present, the sign of a need for approval from her elders, but the frequency of the nods had increased to the point that she had developed a dew of sweat at the hollow of her neck, and it remained to be seen whether she would last the evening without her head lolling over at the strain and falling face-first into her plate.
“The poor girl needs to relax before she faints.”
It was Mildred speaking into Isabelle’s ear. Thank heavens her friend had been seated immediately to her right.
“Yes!” Isabelle said, at a lower register, grateful to have her darker observations shared. “They’ll need to bring the wine early just to ease her nerves.”
“Oh, did you not have some yourself before arriving? It’s etiquette to steady yourself with a glass—or two—before any appearance in such company.”