Sweet Sarah Ross. Julie Tetel

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      “You have experience with Sioux women,” she said, hugging her knees to her chin and arranging her skirts around her feet, “which gives you an idea how a white woman might behave outside the conventions.” She rested one cheek on a knee. “Does that mean you won’t tell me how to make a fire, so that I have to depend on you for food and warmth?”

      He shook his head slightly as if to dismiss this absurd, yet not so absurd, discussion. Then he slipped his hand inside his trouser pocket and tossed something over to her. The sparkle of the small objects in the firelight brought her head up. She sat back reflexively so that she was cross-legged Indian-style, and two stones fell in the trough created by her skirts spread across her knees. She picked up the chunks and looked at him in question.

      “Iron pyrites,” he explained. He withdrew several more pieces from his pocket and showed her how to strike them to achieve the desired result. “Starting fires from sticks is a tedious business, so I was happy to have found these rocks as we walked along the riverbed this past evening. Keep them. You never know when you’ll need them.”

      While she untied the strings of the reticule at her waist in order to slip the rocks inside, she considered the unpleasant possibility that they might be separated. She was about to ask which one of them should carry her valuable scissors, but before she had a chance to pose the question, he tossed another object over to her. The next thing to land in her lap was one of the strips from her petticoat, bundled into a ball, which, she discovered upon opening it, contained a bunch of berries.

      “Dinner,” he said.

      She was catching on to his ways. “So that’s what you were doing all the time we were walking next to those bushes. I thought you had chosen the route to offer us protection from attack.”

      “That was part of it.”

      “You were harvesting the berries as we walked,” she said, recalling that she had glimpsed in his hand an occasional flash of metal in the moonlight. The razor’s tilted blade would not have been exposed enough for the task, so he must have used the scissors. “I hardly noticed what you were doing, just as I hardly noticed you gathering the bits of iron pyrite as we walked along the riverbed. You were able to bend down and pick them up without breaking stride.”

      “Which is why I’m still alive.”

      She decided that he had more useful ideas for her scissors than she did. Instead of asking for them back, she inquired, “What kind of berries are these?”

      “The bitter kind,” he warned her. Then he opened the bundle he had prepared for himself and began eating.

      She did the same. Having been forewarned of the taste helped cut the effect of the bitterness. “Not so bad,” she said, munching slowly, fighting the ravenous impulse to gobble, savoring every sour flavor.

      “Tell me,” he said, “what else you have in your bag.”

      She sighed. “Pins and needles and thread. A few coins. How I regret not having equipped myself more completely! When I think of all that I left behind in the wagon—”

      “Better not to think of it.”

      “Yes, well, the needle and thread can still be useful. I was thinking that I should repair the rent in your shirt so that it doesn’t look as if it was robbed from a dead man—in the event anyone should notice the tear and care about it. I could embroider something over it, you see, to disguise it.”

      “You like to embroider?”

      “Not at all! It drives me to distraction, but I can do a respectable bird or two, and I even have the right colors for an oriole.”

      “An oriole?” She shrugged. “A Baltimore oriole. It’s the first embroidery pattern little girls learn where I’m from. After the alphabet, of course, and the usual flowers.”

      “That’s right,” he said, his voice low and lazy, “you’d rather be in Baltimore. Do I assume that’s where you’re from?”

      She heard his questions as conversational, a way to fill the spaces of time that were as empty as their stomachs. She hesitated over her usual impulse to pretty up her background, but the coziness of the campfire, which contrasted with the vast ocean of emptiness around them, prompted an honest response.

      “From a farm just east of Baltimore,” she said. “It’s at North Point on the Chesapeake. I have many friends in Baltimore, though, and often go into town for one reason or another.”

      “And now you’re on the road to Oregon,” he observed. “What did your family grow on the farm?”

      “Years ago—well before I was born, that is—it was tobacco. When the Maryland farmers were undersold in that market by the Virginians and Carolinians, the profit seemed to be in the staples, corn and kale and the like. More recently…”

      He finished her statement. “More recently there was no profit to be had in anything.”

      She stared into the flames and watched a succession of miniature jewel gardens grow and die. It was pointless to deny the obvious. No one left a home when it was comfortable or a business when it was profitable. The original colonists hadn’t been landed gentry or moneyed merchants when they had left England, and their descendants weren’t fat cats leaving the East, either. The word depression had been circulating in The Baltimore Register with ever more frequency, along with installments from Samuel Parker’s guidebook to the Oregon Territory.

      It had taken only a recent letter from Laurence’s wife, Cathy, reporting on the success of their apple tree farm out west, for Morgan and Barbara to decide that they had worked too hard for too long to have so little. Before Sarah knew it, the Harris family was packed up and ready to go. They were the first in their neighborhood to leave the old soil for greener pastures, but every farmer and shopkeeper in and around Baltimore had heard the enticing reports of the Oregon climate and the timber.

      Sarah was of a mind to tell Mr. Powell that she had not been obliged to undertake this journey because she was poor. Oh, no! Mr. Powell should know that she had a very fine trust fund on which she could live in the style she deserved and which had been provided her by the widow of her father, the illustrious General Robert Ross of the British army.

      Now, Mr. Powell didn’t need to know that she wouldn’t come into the money before she was twenty-five. Neither did he need to know that Mrs. Ross had threatened to close the account after those catty British “ladies” had tried to ruin Sarah’s reputation when she had visited Mrs. Ross two years before. And he certainly didn’t need to know that Morgan and Barbara had refused to borrow a penny against the future of that money and that their refusal hurt her in a peculiar sort of way. She knew, however, that to say any of this would leave her open to embarrassing questions.

      She looked up and repeated, “No, there was no profit to be had in anything.”

      If she thought she was going to avoid embarrassing questions, she was mistaken. Powell, who was thoughtfully chewing his berries, asked next, “You’re traveling with your sisters, no?”

      “That’s right. I have two.”

      “Older? Younger?”

      “Both younger. Helen is sixteen and Martha is fourteen.”

      “Which СКАЧАТЬ