Tansy nodded sagely, her eyes revealing utter skepticism. “Aye, love. That must be why I heard you moanin’ the man’s name when I came by the wagon earlier this mornin’ to find you.” She bent a little closer to Maggie as she propelled her between enormous pools of rainwater. “What in the name of’eaven was the bloke doin’ to you to make you carry on like that?”

Completely mortified, Maggie pulled her arm free and stood, still and stubborn, glaring down into Tansy’s upturned face. “Anything you thought you heard must have come from your own lewd imagination!” she accused her friend hotly. “Either that, or you were lurking behind the wrong wagon!”

Tansy held up both hands in a gesture of peace, but her eyes twinkled and her lips twitched just a little as she struggled to keep from giggling. “All right, love, if you want to pretend it didn’t ’appen, I guess that’s fine by me, but you shouldn’t be so free with the feelings of a friend like meself, ’cause in nine months or so, you might be needin’ one.”

All the color drained from Maggie’s livid face. Not once had she thought that she might be carrying Reeve McKenna’s child; now the prospect was horrifying.

Tansy took both Maggie’s hands in her own. “Don’t be frettin’ now, love. The time for that is when your curse should come and doesn’t.”

Maggie’s knees felt weak as she tried to calculate when her next flow was due. She had two weeks to wait! Two long, hellish weeks before she would know the fate that might be bearing down on her even now. “I feel sick,” she said.

Tansy again took hold of Maggie’s elbow, this time squiring her back toward the crackling bonfire. “Fiddlesticks, you’re only scared,” she argued, “and a mite ’ungry, too, probably. Come and ’ave some breakfast with me and we’ll watch the ’orse races.”

Maggie didn’t want to watch the horse races; it seemed to her that Reeve had mentioned coming to the camp meeting for the express purpose of doing just that, and she wasn’t ready to face him again, under any circumstances. “I couldn’t eat.”

Tansy didn’t listen; it occurred to Maggie that her friend never listened. She left Maggie to join a queue at the food table and came back minutes later with two plates.

Maggie followed helplessly after her as she led the way to an improvised racetrack, carved right out of the farmer’s pasture, and found a place to sit on one of the long, wet logs that had been provided for spectators. In the center of the track were any number of horses, some Maggie recognized as Thoroughbreds, some, Tansy explained, were brombies, wild Australian horses that had been captured and tamed.