Judah put on a face of hound-dog sorrow and sighed deeply. “It were just too much care for poor Clarissa, delicate as she be.”

“Why didn’t you ask me? I been responsible for her before. I can do it.”

He cocked his head. “You waren’t there, ey?”

“Where’s Rachel? What have you done with the baby?”

“Why,” he said, relieved to have gotten off the subject of her mother, “why she’s just fine. Right out front in the wagon. I brung her to you.”

Lyddie brushed past him out the door. The farm wagon stood outside; the patient oxen, oblivious to how comically out of place they looked on a city street, chewed their cuds contentedly. For all the stuffiness upstairs, it was damp and chilly down on the street, and Rachel sat shivering on the bench of the wagon, wrapped in a worn shawl that Lyddie recognized as her mother’s.

She climbed up on the wagon step and lifted the child down. Rachel was too light. Boneless as a rag doll. As Lyddie went up the steps of the boardinghouse, she could feel her tiny burden trembling through the shawl. “It’s all right, Rachie. It’s me, Lyddie,” she said, hoping the child could remember her.

She carried Rachel inside to where Judah still stood, nervously pinching the rim of his sweat-stained hat. “It’s your sister, Rachie,” Judah boomed out, his voice fake with hearty cheer. A gasp went up from the girls in the parlor. “Like Aunt Clarissie told you, ey? We brung you to Lyddie.”

“Have you got her things?”

In answer he went out to the wagon and brought back a sack with a small lump at the bottom.

“What about my mother’s things?” she asked coldly, no longer caring about the audience and what they heard.

“There waren’t hardly nothing,” he said. She let it go. He was nearly right. “Well,” he said, looking from one sister to the other, “I’ll be off, then, ey?”

“I’m coming to fetch our mother, soon as I can. As soon as I pay off the debt. I’ll take her back home and care for her myself.”

He turned at the door, the hat brim rolled tight and squeezed in his big hands. “Back where?”

“Home,” she repeated. “To the farm.”

“We be selling it,” he said, “We got to have the money—for—for Brattleboro.”

“No!” Her voice was so sharp that the roomful of girls stopped everything they were doing to stare. Even little Rachel twisted in her arms to look at her with alarm. She went close to Judah and lowered her voice again to a fierce whisper. “No one can sell that land except my father.”

“He give permission.”

“How?” She was seized with a wild hope. Her father! They had heard from him. “When?”

“Before he left. He had it wrote out and put his mark to it. In case—ey?”