Margaret had recovered from her illness now, but she was exhausted and roughened by the journey and by the trauma of losing both Franklin and her family. Was she thinking only of herself and disregarding others, as Melody had claimed? What the Boses had said about taking passage on the first available boat might seem callous, she thought, but they were probably right. Franklin might have been taken in any of a thousand directions. He might already have met any of a thousand fates. If she had a duty now, it was only to herself and possibly, in the short term, to little Bella. Obtaining goat’s milk for the child that day had been immensely pleasing, especially when the girl had settled afterward and slept so contentedly. Carrying her had been easy.

Tomorrow Margaret would do the same — identify the safest house that had a cow or goat and use her wiles to procure more milk for her charge. She could not imagine parting from the child. She had nothing else, and there was no one to value. Bella was her only friendly flesh. So maybe she was now obliged to bite her tongue and stay on with the Boses, whatever they might decide to do, just to make sure that their granddaughter was given the attention — and the future — she deserved. It was strange, was it not, that a man whom she had scarcely known for seven days and a child whom she had known for only three should hold her thoughts, and perhaps her prospects, in their grip?

The rain outside the sheepfold was thickening and sleety. Margaret set her back against the corner of two walls and twisted her body so that Bella could lie across her lap and they could share the scarf, the blanket, and the tarp. It would be the coldest night so far. She offered her little finger to the girl’s hard gums. But Bella pushed the hand away. Her lips were chapped and sore from the salty food she’d had and from the cold, so Margaret dug for wax in her own ears and applied the honey-colored secretion as a lubricant. The child licked her lips, stopped crying for some moments when she tasted sweetness, and then cried out for more wax, tugging at Margaret’s fingers with her tough and tiny hands.

Eleven

Margaret needed to bully for milk three more times before her fortunes changed. For the better and for the worse. She valued these trips away from Andrew and Melody, and she knew they were glad to be free of her for a while. It was their chance to rest and recover their strength, as well as an opportunity to talk and complain freely behind her back. Having Bella entirely to herself, helping the baby to stand for a moment, rolling stones for her to crawl after, allowing her to explore her mouth, ears, and nose, tickling her — all that mothering was a joy.

Margaret had promised to reward the girl with milk, so over those few days, by trial and error, her begging and beseeching skills improved. She’d tie her scarf, put Bella on her hip, and head for anyone with goats or cows. She was ready to exploit the twin forces of a hungry and appealing child and what could be taken by the fainthearted as a diseased skull to get her way and get her milk and any other food that might be going spare.

The least neglected habitations were the best for begging. Untidy homes, she found, and homes with little to boast of were unlikely to part with anything as prized as milk unless someone was holding a blade at the owners’ throats. But tidiness suggested composure and respectability. Tidy people were more easily coerced. They had more to lose. They evidently had more to prove. Why else the public display of houseplants or painted fences or trimmed hedges on their land?

Men were easier to browbeat than women, Margaret soon discovered. For men, a child was a mystery. She had only to tell a man, “Look at my poor girl’s dry lips — that’s thirst. And look at her skin. Those blotches on her nose, you see? That’s hunger rash. My darling’s only got a day or two to live, just feel her bones,” and he would rather part with his big toe than stand accused of heartlessness. How Margaret loved her newly invented, inventive self, and how powerful she could be with certain, tidy men. But a woman, and especially one who’d been a mother, would know that just a little redness around the nose was common to all children of that age. Some kids are red around the nose for fifteen years and never hungry once.

So Margaret chose her victims carefully. Once she’d seen a man on the land, preferably near a well-kept house with livestock, she would approach, first greeting him in the old American way, then showing him the child (her beauty first, her hunger next, and then the red nose and the dry, chapped lips), and finally, if all of that had failed, dragging off her blue scarf to show the evidence of flux. This last act always had the greatest effect. Men everywhere fear illness more than women do, she supposed. But it was more complicated than that. She could not know — especially now that Franklin was not around to tell her — that as the days passed and her hair grew a little longer, she became more strikingly unusual. In the first days after the shaving, she would have seemed ugly to most men. Her color was not good. The illness bleached her. Her lids and brows, though, were red from where each pinch of hair had been plucked out by the women in her family — her mother, her two sisters. But except for the scabs where her grandpa’s shell razor had nicked her skin, her scalp had been oddly white and ailing from never having been exposed to light before.

But now her color was a healthy one. Since Ferrytown she’d had good exercise in open air, if not good food, and she had what country people call “ripe cheeks, sweet enough to pick.” Even if she did not remove her scarf, anyone could see she was a handsome woman. Her eyebrows were light and thin as yet, but that need not declare her as a recovering invalid and possibly contagious. The black-haired people of America did not expect those rare, unlucky redheads among them to have the forceful facial hair of normal folk. But with her scarf off and her history of contagion clearly on display, her attractiveness was enhanced instead of betrayed. By the fourth day of her begging her regrown head hair had become tufty enough to hide her scalp entirely under a soft, springy carpeting, but not long enough to hide the good shape of her face, the candor of her forehead, the set of her mouth. Her great green eyes, which might not see too well over long distances, looked to any observers — and there would be many — as if they were the largest eyes they’d ever seen. They’d wonder whether they would dare to sleep with her. Was such rare beauty worth the risk? It was.

So on her last trip into the final farmlands of America in search of milk, on the morning before she and the Boses expected to reach the salty, giant-pumped river, the man she found mending his harnesses outside his neat wood cottage, with its pen of three fatly uddered cows, was easily — excessively — seduced. When Margaret arrived with Bella and called out her greetings from the boundary fence, the man, like all the others before him, took hold of something with which to defend himself (in this instance, a weighted leather strap) and ordered her to stay exactly where she was and state her business unless she wanted to be driven out of the county with blood on her back.

Margaret was used to these immoderations. The man — as old as Margaret’s father by the look of him, and not as tidy as his house — did not seem alarmed. Just aggressively cautious. She gave her name. She smiled. She was polite. She introduced “her” child. She said how hungry they both were. She asked if there were any chores, anything at all, that she could do in return for a little milk and some food, and then, before he could actually suggest any suitable work, she pulled down her scarf and let the blue material puddle on her shoulders.