“What is there to be nervous of?” A question, not a challenge.

“It’s just too bare. I don’t know what it is, but…it’s open ground. You know, exposed. There’s not a tree on there to hide behind. I feel we shouldn’t even step on it. Not one single toe. We have to find another way. We have to hide ourselves.”

Franklin was impatient to move on swiftly, as the mules and the little carriage had done, and thereby reach the ocean soon. “Why hide ourselves? You only have to hide your head. That blue scarf of yours should do it. No one need know that you’ve been ill. Your color is healthy today. Just cover up.”

“My scarf won’t make us safe. The roads on this side of the river are dangerous, all of them.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone in Ferrytown.”

What “everyone in Ferrytown” had known, according to Margaret, was that the journey to the coast, rather than becoming more straightforward once the river had been crossed, became more hazardous and deadly. “Why do you think we kept that wooden bridge a secret?” she asked. “Not just for the ferry fees. But to stop anybody from fleeing back to our town on the safe side of the river.” She’d heard her father talk about it many times when he was working on the ferry. Once in a while — too often for comfort, actually — bodies would be pushed onto the shingle landing beach or caught in the weed beds, the bloated corpses of people who had tried to swim back across to Ferrytown and drowned. And every few days a little group would be waiting on the eastern side, terror on their tails, begging to be taken back to the settlement by ferry.

She said, “I’ve heard of people there with gaping wounds, and widows with the pieces of their murdered men and sons in sacks, and tales of little boys and girls, hardly big enough to climb down off their mothers’ laps, who’ve been taken by gangs and sold or put to work. We had to turn them back, of course.”

“You turned them back?”

“Well, yes. Don’t frown at me. There wasn’t any choice. That’s what our consuls said.”

Ferrytown’s failure of charity to these westward refugees, according to Margaret’s uncomfortable explanation, was simply a business decision. The town was geared to take in paying emigrants from the west, help them part with some of their wealth, then ferry them out eastward as speedily as possible. Any westward refugees who made it back to Ferrytown would be not paying guests but “beggars and schnorrers.” All they’d do, apart from eat and use up moneymaking beds, was spread alarm. With their stories. And the expressions on their faces. And their wounds. The far side of the river would become a place to fear.

“Pigeon, think of it,” she instructed him. “What would happen if the migrants learned that Ferrytown might be their last safe place? They’d never leave us, would they? Would you? Imagine, then, how huge our town would be. Big and poor and as crowded as a beehive. And think, if people found the wooden bridge, we’d wake up to an even larger herd of strangers, with not a scrap between them to pay for their beds and suppers. We couldn’t let them cross. It’s unkind, yes, I know it’s unkind, but that’s the truth of it.”

“Why have the wooden bridge at all?”

“For us. Not them. Who can say when we might need to run away ourselves? Or on what side of the river safety will prefer to live next season? The bridge is our security.”

Franklin laughed uneasily and pulled a face. Is, not was? She hadn’t even guessed, then, what he had inflicted on her bridge. He wouldn’t tell her, either. What difference could it make, except to have him seem a fool? He wouldn’t be her Pigeon anymore. He’d be her turkey, big, stupid, and clumsy. Instead he steered their discussion back to the long straight track where some time ago, he supposed, great vehicles and crowds had hastened between the grand old towns—cities was the word he’d heard — and the people of America had been as numerous and healthy as fleas.

He found, in his eagerness to change the subject from the bridge, an uncharacteristic bullying and determined tone to his voice. “This will speed us to the boats,” he said. “We have to take a chance. The winter’s closing in on us. You’ve seen the frosts. The snow is never far behind. And anyway, this barrow is exhausting me. You think that because I’m big, I can’t ache?” He began to blush, embarrassed to sound so much like his brother — except that Jackson would not have admitted to aches or exhaustion.

Margaret held up her hands in comic submission, but conscious, too, that for the first day, at least, she’d not made the barrow any easier to push. “Let’s not make the big man ache,” she said.

“We’ll either have to throw out half of our possessions, ditch the barrow, and carry what we can, and that is not a good idea. We’ve not got much, but what we’ve got we need,” he continued. “Or else we’ll have to find a path where wheels are helpful rather than a hindrance. In other words”—he pointed toward the disappearing train of mules—“that road. Our wheelbarrow will fly along that road.” That dreaming road.

It did not take them long to reach and climb the first of the two parallel mounds that protected the road from the wind and then to descend the sloping, grassy berm, varicosed with gopher trails, to the flat corridor itself. It was almost as wide as the river at the ferry point in Ferrytown, and that made no sense at all. The widest transport that had ever passed through Ferrytown was only three horses wide, while this great swath of track would easily take two teams of horses, each fifty wide or more. It had to be the pathway of a giant or else to have been designed to carry something huge and heavy — those wooden war machines, perhaps, that Margaret had heard talk about, the ones that broke through walls, or shot boulders in the air, or hurled fire.

The road, indeed, seemed built — by how many laborers and over how many years? at what immense cost? — to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, comprised mostly chips of stone, loose grit, and sticky black rubble, which only the toughest of plants — knotweed, sagebrush, and thistle — had succeeded in penetrating. Along the verge, behind thick curbs of fashioned rectangular rock and what seemed like rusted metal fences thinned to a finger’s breadth by corrosion, were clumps of jimson, not yet cut back by the frost, their summer trumpets rotting at their bases. There was nothing edible for travelers, unless they craved hallucinations and stomach cramp or could, like beetles, dine on rust. The going, though, despite the often uneven rubble, was almost as easy as Franklin had hoped. Margaret could climb on board again, to rest herself. (“Don’t let me make you ache,” she said.) The barrow, aided by a slight decline in the easterly direction, was quick and easy to maneuver. Franklin only had to lift it a little by its handles and it almost rolled forward on its own, anxious to make progress.

To tell the truth, Franklin’s chosen route, though fast, was tedious. Protected by the mounds of earth, it was impossible to tell if any breeze or stormclouds were building up on a far horizon or even if there was any danger in the wider world. Margaret had resigned herself to feeling a bit uneasy on the highway, but she had allowed her Pigeon to win their dispute about her fears and so would have to make the best of it. She had not minded Franklin’s unexpected tone of voice. Her brothers, though they were both much smaller men than Franklin, had been greater bullies in their time and much louder in their arguments, so she was used to bombast. She would have been more surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, to have gotten her own way easily. It was better, all in all, to be in the care of a man who was strong and determined to have his way than to place her trust in what was known by the women in Ferrytown as a lily liver, whatever that might be exactly. Franklin had expressed himself. She had allowed him to. Now the responsibility was his. She could hold him to account if anything went wrong.