Laura Keene, all too familiar with such behavior, fleeing a drunken husband of her own, never forgives him. Eliding the cause, Edwin’s letters admit to the rift. He writes that he’s “suffering Keenely” as a result. He parts from her and sails on to Hawaii, where he performs Richard III for King Kamehameha, who had once seen his father in the same role.

John can hardly bear to read these letters, so great is his envy. He’s desperate to protect his captain from a mutiny—he’s better with a sword than Edwin is by miles. Meanwhile, the situation on the farm is desperate. No one since the Hagan debacle has leased the fields. No one has ever teased a good crop of grain from them. In the winter of 1855, the Booths begin to slowly starve.

—

Asia is always tired and always cold. She feels brittle and breakable. Her hair loses its gloss, she suffers from constipation, and she understands that nourishing food would cure all of this, but the larder has little of that. Then the cows go dry. Only one continues to yield, but her milk is pink in color, which makes Asia remember how Herne the Hunter comes in his hoofs and horns, shaking his chain, and making the milch-kine yield blood. “There is nothing,” John says, “that Shakespeare didn’t anticipate.”

Snow blankets the woods and fields in higher and higher drifts. The world is hushed. The water doesn’t flow, the birds don’t sing. Only the sound of the thawing and the freezing again. Only the sound of icicles dripping from the tree branches and eaves and windows. Only the wind.

The pump freezes and it takes an axe to fill a bucket at the spring.

Some of the horses have to be sold. This includes Fanny’s foal. They can no longer afford to pay Ann Hall and the snow is so deep, she would struggle to reach Tudor Hall anyway. No one is braving the roads; they haven’t had a guest in more than a month. Still, Rosalie wants to bring Joe home. Mother says no. She’s behind in his school fees, but he’s being fed where he is. A growing boy needs food.

Asia has a cage of pet partridges. There is no eating them as they all have names, but there is no feeding them either. Asia lets them go, watches them pick and scatter across the white ground. “They were too pretty to eat,” Rosalie says and Mother says, “This is what comes of giving a name to every creature that wanders onto our land.”

Asia decides to go with John into the woods to check on some traps that he set the day before, traps for animals without names. More snow in the night, so she opens the front door to a world of blinding white. The porch steps have disappeared.