The Springborn

SABELLA

FEbrUARY 28, 1886

EARLY AFTERNOON

S omehow, in a blur of time, we arrive back where we started. Calder parks the cart near the kitchen door, in the shadowy alley between the inn and one of the outbuildings. “Well. Here we are,” he says with a surprising hint of awkwardness. “Shall we go again tomorrow?”

“If Darlis needs more thread, then yes.” My voice sounds different to me, as if I am not the same girl I was this morning. But I think I like this girl I’m becoming.

“Good,” Calder replies.

We are alone, save for the horse. We remain on the driver’s bench, our fingers entwined, listening to melted snow dripping from the eaves. The pleasant scent of herb-roasted chicken mingles with the acrid stench of the nearby barn.

“Your wings,” I say in a hushed voice. “I feel as if I dreamed them.”

“They’re real all right. As real as your splendid antlers.”

“Bony gray branches are hardly ‘splendid.’”

“Nonsense. But let’s not argue. Arguing would be a waste of our time together. You’ll be knee-deep in laundry again soon.”

I nod, agreeing to a truce.

He shifts on the bench, turning slightly toward me, the reins lying loose over his thighs. Our eyes lock for half a minute, and then he leans close. His breath warms my cheek for a heartbeat before his lips meet my cheekbone. I close my eyes and forget the world. It seems such a small thing, the touch of his lips on my face, but I feel as if some of his inner light is seeping through my skin, filling me with sweet happiness.

“Darnation!” Robbie exclaims. We spring apart. “Can’t a person walk through an alley anymore without seeing things he’ll want to unsee?”

Calder laughs, but I shrink away from him in embarrassment.

“Since you’re here, you can help unload,” Calder says to Robbie. His grin contains not a hint of shame. He hops from the seat to the ground.

Robbie rolls his eyes and plods to the rear of the cart. “Just when I thought my luck couldn’t get any worse.”

Deep in the night, when I ought to be asleep, I lie awake clutching my pillow. For once, Sparrow sleeps soundly in the borrowed cradle, an arm’s length from the edge of my bed. The twins sleep forehead to forehead, dog and girl, in their bed across the room, while I question every choice I’ve made in the last few weeks.

And I worry.

I worry about my ceaselessly growing Sparrow and her future. I fret over the idea of returning to the icy roads soon. The safety of our next home. Most of all, I agonize over Calder.

Are his feelings for me authentic or a fleeting fancy? And what of my feelings for him? We have known each other for such a short time, and fires that catch fast burn quickly and leave behind nothing but ashes.

I roll over. My nightgown twists and entangles my legs.

If Mother were here, she would scold me for being easy prey for a charmer. I hear her voice in my head, her words slurred by medicine: He does not truly care for you. Boys will take whatever they can from a girl, and it’s the girl who ends up maligned and ruined.

If you think a man would ever really love the likes of you, you’re a fool. You were a bad daughter; you’d be a worse wife.

You should be ashamed of yourself for allowing his advances, Sabella Jenkins.

Perhaps this apparition of Mother is right. Perhaps years of loneliness and isolation have left me all too vulnerable to kind words and adoring glances. But maybe, just maybe, she was wrong. Maybe her views of the world and of me were tainted by her own bitterness and broken dreams. Her own failures.

Am I brave enough to dismiss her apparition and to choose to follow my own heart?

I stare at the shadowed ceiling until I hear the squeak of the stairs that daily announces the housemaid is on her way down to stoke the kitchen fire. It is time to rise and dress for a new day—ready or not.