The sudden screeching of the axles beneath Batya was accompanied by a yanking of the train car, followed by a slow, shuddering jerk. Batya sat up, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, and fixed her gaze outside as the train began to move out of the huge station, with its palatial glass domed roof as high as a mountain.

She placed her palm on the windowpane, as if to hold on to the receding station before being carried away, alone at the mercy of this horrible man.

She had become accustomed to the constant grumbling and swaying of the train, when it entered the belly of a mountain. The horn blared, the roar of the engine bounced off the walls, deafening, and instant darkness enveloped the car. Batya screamed. Her hands grabbed the seat; she was falling into the abyss, swallowed alive in the earth.

“It’s only a tunnel,” she heard Moskowitz say, and just then, yellow light flickered on in the cabin, turning the windowpane into a mirror in which her face reflected back. Her eyes seemed sunken, and twin hollows in her cheeks made her look ghostly.

It was only when they were speeding through open fields that a thought crossed Batya’s head. She was the feisty Zelda’s daughter, sister to two older girls who knew their minds and weren’t timid about following their hearts. She raised her head, took a deep breath, and steeled herself to speak.

“You said—uh—that this is a man’s way with his wife.” She forced herself to look at Moskowitz’s thin moustache so as not to see his watery blue eyes. “But I’m only your intended.”

He sighed. “Please forgive me. You are so beautiful that I lost my head.”

“We’re not even permitted to touch.”

He sighed again, leaned forward as if to take her hand, then pulled himself back. “It will be hard to wait two years.”

Mixed emotions washed over her. Moskowitz didn’t view her as spoiled goods; she still had the chance of helping her family one day. But it meant that she was destined for a lifelong nightmare of despicable acts. Tears came to Batya’s eyes. She must be brave for her family’s sake. For them, she would endure whatever she must.

The syncopated beats of the wheels pounded in Batya’s head. Outside, only the horizon remained steady while villages with onion-shaped church steeples or wooden huts crouching below a hilltop manor house flew by. She should say no more to this man who knew the ways of the world. He shouldn’t regard her as a shrew who badgered him.