So why not Sleeper? She can picture her life with him and it’s a good life, a comfortable life. He makes a good living. She believes he’ll be a good husband. She doesn’t love him the same way she’s sometimes been in love, but those passionate feelings led eventually to passionate heartbreak, sometimes hers, sometimes his. Bad feelings all around.

And shouldn’t twelve years of tireless devotion be rewarded? And shouldn’t Edwin be made happy in the bargain?

She thinks all these things. The sound of the engine and the wheels on the track are a sort of lullaby, singing her home. She’s drowsy and happy and she trusts Edwin completely. She trusts him with her heart.

It’s time, she thinks. Time to grow up.

“All right,” she says. “But tell him I still want to be asked.”

—

No one seems surprised by the engagement. Mother and Rosalie are pleased. Only John sounds a sour note. “He wants the connection to the Booth name,” he tells her. “You don’t know the extent of his ambition. I do.”

There is nothing wrong with ambition, Asia thinks.

“He doesn’t love you,” John says, but in her mind, Asia is far away, standing before a great stone arch and a thunderous wall of water, and she can’t hear a word.

Rosalie

viii

Rosalie is beginning to wonder if Edwin has feelings for Mary Devlin. No one in the family has met her yet and nothing Edwin says is truly suspicious. But her name comes up more often than Rosalie would expect. She thinks they might be writing to each other.

She’s not the only one wondering. One day at dinner, when they are all gathered around the table with only John missing, and even Joe home now that his schooling has finished, Edwin mentions that Miss Devlin says that Romeo and Juliet now makes her think about what a romance between a girl from the North and a boy from the South might look like in these fractured times. The play seems particularly pertinent. But there are always factions. Perhaps it’s always pertinent.

Asia waves past the politics. “Is she pretty?” Asia asks. “This Miss Devlin of yours?”

“More sweet than pretty,” Edwin says, “and hardly mine.”

“But you do like her?”

“Don’t tease your brother,” Mother says.

“I wasn’t.”

The factory whistle blows. A horse and cart go clattering by. Mrs. Murphy, the new cook, a well-worn woman with hands like spatulas, banks the fire and pretends she isn’t listening.

“She’s a good girl,” Edwin says. “And very talented. But I would never marry an actress, you know that. She’s like a sister to me.”

“You have a sister,” Asia says.

“Two,” Joe reminds her.