The rest of the afternoon was the bazaar and the feast—long tables brought out and set with cake. Plates of oysters, too, which Experience and Louisa had never seen before.

“You tip them back, like this.” I showed them, and when I held one up to Louisa’s lips, she began to giggle. “That smell!” she cried. Experience pinched her elbow and then blushed hard, and they would not tell me anymore what it was about, so I drifted away from them, alone again.

Emmanuel Chase kept his distance from me, walking among the crowd, talking to the prettiest women and girls, laughing with the men. I thought, Had we really stood under those trees and talked of marriage? I could not believe, would not have believed it, to look at him.

“You are in-fat-u-a-ted.” It was Lucien who sang this. There was a slight weave in his step as he moved toward me, slapping the rhythm on his thigh. When he reached me, he smelled the same as Madeline Grady’s barrels of beer.

“You know this place is temperate,” I said.

“Not over there it’s not.” He pointed behind the trees, where a man was making his way gingerly out of the underbrush, passing another who was stepping in. “They have one barrel there, not too much, just enough to keep us all toasty.”

“You disrespect our mothers.”

“You keep acting so sour, Dr. Chase will never look your way,” he said, and then began to laugh.

“You should leave, Lucien, before your mother discovers you.”

“You never leave their skirts.”

“You do not seem too interested in that either.”

“You shouldn’t run after the first man who makes your blood roll like a river, Libertie.”

“I will see you this evening, when you’ve sobered up a bit,” I said.

I did not like to admit it, but Lucien had troubled me. I walked through the rest of the bazaar, stopping to look at the tables with things for sale. Some of the younger girls had knitted a set of fingerless gloves, and I spent time pulling them on and off my hands, becoming angrier and angrier at Lucien’s presumption. My feelings toward Emmanuel could not be so obvious as he wished to imply. I was not anything that a person like that could easily know—a man who looked to make his mother laugh first, a man who couldn’t hold his own after one mug of beer drunk under the trees.

I opened my purse and took the piece of paper out of it again. There was my own hand, writing out the events of this day. And on the back, the other script, the one I’d seen that morning.

To My Libertie

This is a note to declare my undying affection for you. I wish, above all, for you to become my wife. I think, if you are being honest with yourself, you would wish it, too.

Yours,

Emmanuel Chase