Charlotte spent the morning stacking and rearranging, bringing order to the chaos.  Despite the obvious implications of her predicament, she smiled without meaning to at the objects she found.  There was coffee and she didn’t drink coffee, but could it be offered as a trade to those for whom it was a precious and scarce commodity?  A boot hook, but none of the boots requiring it.  Drawers, camisoles, shifts, petticoats, now she pitied him.  He was not the kind to be voluntarily rummaging through women’s undergarments.  All her dresses and skirts, every shawl she owned, her hand mirror and lilac soap.  She stopped, one hand over her mouth, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.  Here were her bone and tortoiseshell hair clips, obviously swept in a pile off the dresser in what had been the bedroom of her married life.  These for the thick tresses of auburn hair which now stuck out from her head in minute, grievously butchered lengths immune to the aid of any hair clip ever devised.

There were lotions, medicinal herbs, a saw, a shovel, an extra wheel and axle, lengths of rope and chain, wagon grease, flints, a hatchet and hunting knife, a mallet and wooden pins, dried apples, six tins of oysters, a single piece of sheet music out of the thousands that were the Family’s most prized and strictly guarded possessions, the translations of which only her father could undertake.  She sat down in the wagon bed and held the parchment to her heart, her eyes welling up with tears.  He could only have been thinking one thing when he’d included it, that he loved her beyond all reason, she was his only child, and here was the last protection left that he had to offer her.

How could she have done this to him?  In her mind, it was not even a question.  She could repeat that night, play it over and over again and it would still come out exactly the same.  Conner Mathis was a big man with a loud voice and the smallest, weakest, most pathetic and cowardly person inside that she had ever known.  He was a false front, a broad-shouldered square-jawed prop with nothing behind it.  That he had taken in all of the Elders, even the First Elder, who was supposed to be the wisest and most discerning of them all, made her want to be sick.