The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

by Rowenna Miller

Genres: Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Historical Fantasy; Feminist

Synopsis

In this enchanting historical fantasy about sisterhood and self-discovery, a woman does everything she can to help her sister escape her husband— perfect for fans of C. L. Polk, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Marie Brennan.

There is no magic on Prospect Hill—or anywhere else, for that matter. But just on the other side of the veil is the world of the Fae. Generations ago, the first farmers on Prospect Hill learned to bargain small trades to make their lives a little easier—a bit of glass to find something lost, a cup of milk for better layers in the chicken coop.

Much of that old wisdom was lost as the riverboats gave way to the rail lines and the farmers took work at mills and factories. Alaine Fairborn’s family, however, was always superstitious, and she still hums the rhymes to find a lost shoe and to ensure dry weather on her sister’s wedding day.

When Delphine confides her new husband is not the man she thought he was, Alaine will stop at nothing to help her sister escape him. Small bargains buy them time, but a major one is needed. Yet, the price for true freedom may be more than they’re willing to pay.

Praise for The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill:

"A warm-hearted yet fierce fairy tale around the bonds of sisterhood."―H. G. Parry

"Brimming with folk magic and delightfully sinister hidden worlds. Truly enchanting.”―Leslye Penelope

"A beautifully written tale of feminine power, sisterly devotion, and magic as old as the hills themselves.”―Louisa Morgan

For more from Rowenna Miller, check out:

The Unraveled Kingdom
Torn
Fray
Rule

Release date: March 28, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Where flowers bloom unfading

And leaves are ever green

Fortune’s winds are shifting

By fairy touch unseen

—Folk song

WHEN THE MADISON Railroad laid the tracks at the base of Prospect Hill, there were no roads cleaving the thickly forested slopes and no houses overlooking the distant river. A few farmsteads were nestled into the beech woods on the other side of the crest, out of view of the rail workers driving spikes through oak ties into untouched clay. Horatio Canner was one of those rail workers, and when he looked up into the tapestry of boughs, he thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen.

He took his lunch breaks at the edge of the clearing for the railway, shorn saplings and ragged trunks of great oaks and walnuts crowding the space where sunlight ended and the shade of the forest began. Horatio sat on a walnut stump, feeling a bit like a trespasser. And then he heard a soft rustle and saw a shimmer of light in the shadows of the branches.

A girl. Not a girl, exactly, he amended, as he stood hastily and swept his hat off his close-cropped hair. A young woman, hovering on the edge of adolescence, eyes wide and thin lips parted to speak. Instead she turned and slipped between the trunks. After a moment’s hesitation, he followed. It seemed almost as though she led him on purpose, slowing when he lost the pale form of her white dress through the trees, hastening again when he came too close, until she stopped beneath a linden tree in full blossom.

Horatio Canner was not a country boy, or he might have paused to wonder why a linden tree was blooming in the first fits of spring warmth. He had been born out east, and had never pressed into the thick forests and still-wild places beyond the mountain ranges until he took work with the railroads. He could be forgiven, then, too, for assuming that the plain white dress the girl had on was what country folk wore, so unlike any fashion he’d seen back home or in the outlying towns along the river as the steamboat chugged past. Horatio Canner didn’t consider any of these things as the girl met his eyes, held out her hand, and finally spoke.

“What do you offer, and what do you ask?”

Horatio blinked. “I reckon I—that is, I don’t quite know what you mean,” he said.

She cocked her head. Her neck was as slender as a swan’s, Horatio thought, and the plain dress skimmed a figure that could have been one of the saplings circling the tree. “You followed me to the gate, but you don’t mean to ask for anything? Well.” Her smile was sharp and tight. “Perhaps, still, you’ve something to offer, and I could tell you what it’s worth.”

Horatio still didn’t understand, but he dug into his pockets anyway. “I’ve got a bag of tobacco, and the pipe for it,” he began, and she winced and pulled away. It stood to figure a young lady wouldn’t be interested in smoking, he chided himself. “And this kerchief.” He dug out the red printed cotton and held it out.

Her eyes shone. “You’d part with it, then?”

“I suppose.” He took a step closer, but she held up a hand.

“It’s dear enough,” she murmured, eyes still on it. “A true red.” She scanned him up and down, and he felt read for the simple man he was. “If you could ask for anything, what would you want?”

“A parcel of Prospect Hill, I suppose,” he said with a laugh. “Fifty acres. I’ve the will to tend it.”

She plucked the kerchief from his hand. In her pale fingers it looked somehow more real, more solid. “A most unorthodox transaction,” she said, amused. “But as you will.”

The girl stepped into the tree and disappeared, leaving Horatio Canner gaping at nothing.

“And that is how Orchard Crest came into our family,” Papa Horatio finished with a flourish, tipping back his coupe of sparkling wine made with the grapes from the north slope.

“I didn’t realize I was marrying into a fairy-favored family until we’d said the vows,” Jack Fairborn said with a wink at his wife.

“You ought to have guessed,” Alaine replied, playfully swatting his arm. “After all, how do you think you managed to end up on my dance card for the waltz every ball of the season the year we got engaged?”

Alaine Fairborn had heard the story of her grandfather’s encounter with the Fae a hundred times if she’d heard it once. He’d never seen the pale woman again, and no one else in the family had ever seen one of the Fae. Still, the fairy-woman kept her end of the bargain. Within two months, he bought a farmstead at the crest of Prospect Hill for a song, the seller shaving fifty acres off a sprawling tract of land to pay off a gambling debt. It was a stroke of luck of a magnitude Horatio had never had before and hadn’t had since.

The other story she’d heard a hundred times if once was how a disoriented Horatio, wandering away from the blooming linden tree between the Fae and human worlds, had stumbled upon the Riley family farmstead and met a plump, tanned, very human girl feeding a flock of ruddy chickens. Gran had always laughed at this when she told her side of the story, that she knew that her husband had perfection on his mind from that Fae woman and she could never live up to it. And then Papa Horatio would flush red and protest that Lilabeth was the loveliest woman in the world, in any world, and that he’d never been happier than their wedding day.

“That’s enough, Papa,” Alaine’s mother said with a sigh, swiping his glass before he could refill it. “You have to leave us a few bottles for the wedding. I’ve been wearing my fingers to the bone for two weeks, getting the garden ready. I won’t have a last-minute wine shortage to account for, too.”

“Having it in the garden—I never heard of such a thing. Me and Lilabeth got married in the church, proper,” Papa Horatio said with a sly twinkle in his eyes. “And so did you and my son, Iris. And now my granddaughter gets married in the garden?”

“It’s fashionable to be married at home!” Delphine protested. “Besides, is there anyplace in the world I love better than Orchard Crest?”

“Hardly,” Papa Horatio said. “But it doesn’t rain inside the church.”

“It won’t rain,” Del replied. “Alaine will see to that.”

“She paid the best attention to Lilabeth,” he agreed. “Still, no guarantee like a roof over your head.”

“When will the Graftons be here on Saturday?” Mother asked for the fifteenth time.

“At eight o’clock in the morning,” Delphine replied. “And the ladies in the wedding party can get ready in my room, and the fellows in the study.”

“Is Emily allowed in with you?” Alaine asked. “She’s talked of nothing but her flower girl dress since last week.”

“Of course!” Delphine said, a genuine smile breaking the tension in her jaw. “She’s my best niece.”

“Only niece,” Mother corrected.

“So she’s clearly the best.” Delphine grinned. “The judge will be here at ten so we can begin by eleven. And then luncheon at noon.”

“Judge!” Papa Horatio shook his head. “The Graftons have some pull, getting the damn judge to officiate.”

“You might forget that we have some pull now, too, Papa.” Mother stood, her silk taffeta skirt rustling as though punctuating her point.

“Some pull,” he said. “Hardly Grafton pull. Oh, Alaine, I keep getting mail delivered up here for the farm—something came from the bank.” He rifled in his jacket pocket and produced a rumpled envelope.

“The bank!” Mother chided. “That’s hardly after-dinner talk.”

“Is this the Waldorf-Astoria? Are we at a formal dinner party? Have we had the sorbet course already? Here I thought I was in my own dining room, Iris.” Papa Horatio laughed. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry over, but—”

“But I’ll worry about it if it is,” Alaine said, taking the papers. She traced the sealed envelope fretfully. Probably another notice. “We should go soon.” Alaine laid a hand on Jack’s in a silent signal. No letting Papa Horatio draw them into one more story, no letting Mother finagle Jack into looking at a leaky pipe in the kitchen. His glance went from her hand to the envelope in her lap. He gave her a barely perceptible nod, understanding. “It’s almost past Em’s bedtime as it is.”

“Is she still out in the garden?” Delphine turned to look out the bay window, lithe neck encased in a high collar of lace. Alaine could have been jealous of her sister’s fashionable gown and the filmy white lace if it hadn’t looked so mercilessly scratchy at the seams. She smoothed her own practical wool skirt, the plum color hiding several jam stains.

“She would spend the night there if we let her,” Alaine said. “But not tonight.”

“Not any night!” Mother said, appalled until she realized that Alaine was joking—at least, mostly. Mother had always reined in Alaine’s penchant for the woods and wilds, trying to teach her flower arranging and piano and, one disastrous summer, watercolors. Alaine took the opposite tack with Em, indulging her preference for an open afternoon of exploring the forest, tattered hems and muddy shoes notwithstanding.

Alaine followed Delphine’s gaze out the window. Emily was hanging upside down from the low-hanging branches of a crab apple. Delphine fought back a grin. “I’ll call her in.”

Alaine watched her sister go with an odd tightness in her throat—even crossing the family dining room of Orchard Crest, where they’d eaten thousands of breakfasts and dinners, played thousands of games of checkers in the hollow of the bay window, spent thousands of afternoons reading in its long swaths of sunlight, Del was graceful. Alaine’s little sister wasn’t just grown up—she was an accomplished lady who had mastered all the genteel arts their mother had tried to impart on them. Flower arranging, piano, and especially watercolors. Alaine had long ago stopped begrudging her that.

Delphine brought Emily in by the hand, the six-year-old’s face beaming with admiration for her aunt. She had once told Alaine that Aunt Del must be a princess. Alaine had very little argument to the contrary.

“Time to go, love. Say good night to Grandmother and Papa Horatio.”

Jack and Alaine let Em skip in front of them on the dirt road that wound through the orchard on one side and the woods on the other, linking Orchard Crest to their cottage, tucked away near the back ridge of the hill. Papa Horatio and Grandma Lilabeth had built a small cabin on their fifty acres when they were first married, a rustic square of hewn logs and mortar. It still stood where the trees thinned near the ridge, but even Alaine, with her staunch loyalty to every piece of the family farm’s history and especially anything Papa Horatio had made, had to admit it was cramped and dark. When the orchard had made its first profits, Papa Horatio built the house facing Prospect Hill and named it Orchard Crest. He raised a family there, and Alaine and Del had grown up there, too.

When Papa Horatio had offered the strip of land along the ridge to her and Jack, she knew she could never tear down the cabin, but they had built nearby, a lavender Queen Anne with white gingerbread trim and windows tucked into sloping eaves that, as they approached from the lane, even now gleamed with the lamps inside.

If she was honest with herself, Alaine had always assumed that Delphine would do the same when she was married—take the offer of a parcel of land, build a cottage as fashionable and pretty as she was, and keep the little world that was Orchard Crest spinning along as it always had. Then Pierce Grafton had come along and knocked the perfect balance off-kilter. Alaine wasn’t sure how to right it again, how to imagine the family farm without part of her family.

“You’re thinking deep thoughts,” Jack teased softly as they rounded the curve in the road and Emily ran ahead to catch up with the chickens foraging in a tangle of blooming multiflora rose.

She snorted. “Hardly.” She held back a sigh, and it stuck in her throat, tight and painful. “No, the opposite. I was thinking about the wedding and—well, I suppose anything I could say sounds petty or childish.”

“What? Don’t you like Pierce Grafton?” Jack’s blue eyes pinched at the corners, half laughing but not entirely.

“Oh, it’s not that.” Alaine caught herself. “Not that I don’t like him, of course.” It was an open secret between her and Jack that she didn’t care for the Perrysburg glass magnate, with his impeccable manners and his thin moustache and his bellowing laugh, but she still never said it out loud. “It’s that she’s going away. Doesn’t that sound silly? Like something Em would say.”

She pushed back a sudden urge to cry, the feeling gumming up the back of her throat.

“I don’t think it’s silly at all.” Jack caught Alaine’s hand and slowed their pace, turning to face her as they stopped. “You’ve both lived at Orchard Crest your whole lives. I thought you must have some sort of secret sisterhood blood pact to never leave,” he teased lightly, but the furrow between his eyes deepened. He sensed her fears, her griefs, even if she hadn’t articulated them.

“Maybe we should have.” Not, Alaine thought with a flash of anger, that Delphine wouldn’t have broken it anyway. For Pierce Grafton, for the new house in Perrysburg’s best neighborhood, for the chance to be the wife of the sort of person who had season tickets to the opera and invited the mayor for dinner parties. Alaine felt her ears getting hot, and she clamped down on her runaway thoughts, shamed by her selfishness. There was nothing wrong with Delphine wanting any of that, she reminded herself, even if Alaine couldn’t see why. But she couldn’t shake a feeling that, somehow, Delphine was turning her back on something more important than both of them. Especially now, with the bank sending notices every other week.

Jack squeezed her hand. “It’s only Perrysburg. Hardly anything on the train. Maybe we’ll get you one of those electric motorcars that so many ladies seem to favor.”

“I don’t want an electric motorcar, thank you very much.” Alaine sighed. “Del’s really leaving the farm,” she added in a whisper.

Alaine stopped herself, but she knew what she meant, at its core—that she had thought the farm was as important to Delphine as it was to her. That, just like her, Delphine felt the rhythm of the orchard pulsing in her blood, that she would do anything for the fifty acres on the slopes of Prospect Hill. And now Delphine was leaving, without a glance behind her. Alaine felt the sting of deep betrayal.

Jack settled an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. “It’s a hard change for us. We’re used to Delphine at dinner and Delphine helping in the orchard on harvest days and Delphine’s jam thumbprint cookies for teatime.”

“And now someone else gets to have Delphine at dinner, and Delphine’s tea cookies,” Alaine said, fully aware that she sounded petulant, but unable to tell even Jack what she really thought. “But one thing is sure—Delphine is still going to help at harvest.”

“Was that the blood pact?”

“No, but try keeping her away.” Alaine smiled, pretending for the moment that she believed Delphine would come back for the autumn harvest. “Listen,” she said, reining in the tremor in her voice, “I’ve got one more thing to do before we turn in. There’s the election tomorrow for the Agricultural Society to think of.”

Jack grinned. “First woman to run in the county.”

“In the lower half of the whole state,” Alaine retorted. “Howard Olson is running the organization into the ground, and Acton Willis right along with him. The two of them are businessmen, not farmers—preying on farmers, more like.”

Though Olson managed a granary and Willis owned a transport company that catered to farmers, they weren’t truly integrated into the community. And, after last year’s dismal harvests and Olson’s lukewarm response, it was clear that the Agricultural Society needed better leadership. When Alaine looked around the stuffy fellowship hall of the Free Methodist Church and didn’t see anyone else raising their hand, she couldn’t stop herself. Someone had to push the Society out of the slump Olson had driven it into, and if no one else would volunteer, she’d be damned if she’d sit idly by.

“It did have to come right at the same time as the wedding,” Jack joked. “I’m sure Olson is running the old campaign wagon around town, and you’re tied to the house, making macaroons for the reception.”

Alaine laughed, but she tasted bitterness in the joke. Her sister’s wedding was a trump card over her plans. The oncoming cherry harvest, the bank’s demands on the mortgage, the health of the Agricultural Society—these were more important than the cake or the flowers or the dress for the wedding, but Alaine found her attention dragged time and again back to this one day, this pretty picture Delphine was painting. She didn’t want to resent Delphine, but there were other things in her life to tend to.

“I think I still have a good shot at it. Olson sunk himself raising prices at the granary in the middle of the worst harvest we’ve had in a decade.” She raised a conspiratorial eyebrow. “Besides, I’ve got another plan.”

“A bargain.” Jack’s mouth pursed, the way it always did when he was thinking. Usually when it pinched shut, it was over a legal contract or a political editorial in the paper, and Alaine knew he had a thesis-length torrent of thoughts percolating on the subject. “I don’t recall one for local elections.”

“It’s not for elections, specifically. Lands, imagine if it worked that way, picking a side to win!” Terrifying, actually—thank goodness bargains didn’t work like that, or the political parties would have commandeered them long ago. “It’s just an extra pinch of good luck. It may or may not work—I haven’t tried it before.” Her hand hesitated over her pocket, grazing the black soutache trim along the opening. “I’ll only be a moment.”

Jack gave her a curious look, but didn’t press. Unlike most Prospect Hill newcomers, he didn’t tease her about bargains or question their efficacy—he’d seen enough for himself. But he considered them her domain, just as much as she considered the law firm where he was primed to make junior partner his territory. Respected, but foreign.

She fished out a length of scarlet ribbon and another of white weighty silk pooling like liquid in her palm. She threaded both through a pair of silver rings so that when she spun the rings the ribbon alternated white and red, red and white. A bargain for change, for switches, for reshuffling the cards. As Gran had said, it would take the first and make him last, and the last, first—and more efficiently than the preacher at their white clapboard church ever had.

Alaine stopped at the garden gate, hanging the ribbon and rings in a loop over the latch. Then she slipped a paper copy of the ballot into the latch, too, the Agricultural Society seal partially hidden by the silk ribbons.

“Silk and silver,” she whispered, remembering the words Gran had taught her, though she’d never used them, “chance and curse, favored and spurned, now reverse.”

Alaine left the bargain wedged in the creaky latch of the garden gate. It was a less clear-cut bargain than she’d employed before—it didn’t ask specifically for no rain or an averted snowstorm or more eggs in the chicken coop, but something intangible, applying a bit of reversed luck to her particular circumstance. She hoped her meaning was clear enough. Gran had instilled in her a healthy distrust of Fae logic, warning her that they’d use a bargain to their own ends whenever they could. Still, this was one of Gran’s bargains, tested and safe. She let the gate swing closed behind her.

Coin in the door for a visitor welcome

Bit of old leather for a welcome farewell

—Traditional bargain

“HAND ME ANOTHER rose—no, not the white, the pink,” Mother said, the color rising in her cheeks and her voice clipped. Delphine stripped the thorns from another pink rose and handed it to her mother. She assessed the vase of flowers silently, eyeing the flush of color from deep pink to pale. It needed more white to balance the colors, but it wasn’t worth arguing. She probably, Delphine thought with a smile, wanted to highlight the fussy centifolias that were the pride of her garden.

“There we are. Another vase, and we’ll have the flowers quite settled.” Mother smiled, painting over the nerves Delphine knew she harbored about the wedding. Delphine didn’t demand perfection from her wedding day, but Mother did. She didn’t remember her being this fractious over Alaine’s wedding, but then again, Alaine hadn’t married into one of the richest families in the county.

The Perrysburg society pages didn’t write it up when Alaine Canner married Jack Fairborn, just another boy from another Prospect Hill family, and not even an old family at that. A respectable family, a well-liked family—but not the family that owned the largest glass factory in the state like the Graftons.

And, Delphine allowed, Alaine wasn’t her mother’s baby. It wasn’t that Mother didn’t love both of her daughters, but while Alaine had tagged after Father and Papa Horatio in the orchard and copied every one of Grandma Lilabeth’s charms, Delphine had taken to her mother’s tutelage, soaking up all the beautiful things she knew how to do. It was clear, early, that there would be no boy to take over the family farm, so Alaine willingly filled the role, one replete with torn skirt hems and muddy stockings. Delphine lingered closer to home—and closer to Mother.

“Now, I’m going to clean this up. You should freshen up before Pierce arrives.” Mother swept loose leaves and clipped stems into her hand. Delphine picked up the dustpan to help and promptly gouged her hand with a stripped thorn. “Oh, dear! Don’t go bleeding on your dress! You needn’t bother with this—I can do it.” Delphine let Mother shoo her out of the kitchen, dabbing the blood from her thumb with her apron.

She caught her reflection in the hall mirror and smoothed a few loose hairs. In only four more days, she would be Mrs. Pierce Grafton. The thought sent a shiver running though her limbs, right down to her bleeding thumb.

Marrying Pierce Grafton. She could never have imagined it when she’d first been introduced on a visit with her friend Mary Porter. He’d swept like the west wind into the parlor, upsetting everything she’d assumed about herself with his generous smile and his expansive presence. He was outside her sphere then, a wealthy man from a wealthy family in a city she visited only sparingly—and yet by luck contrived from fairy bargains and some inscrutable magic of the universe, here they were. Delphine still couldn’t quite believe her good fortune, that a man like Pierce Grafton could want to marry a farm girl like her.

And wrapped entirely with marrying Pierce, another desire, to move to Perrysburg, to stretch and reach and taste and see more than Moore’s Ferry could offer. She loved Prospect Hill and Orchard Crest nestled into its ridges, but she had memorized it like a piece of piano music, its details practiced until her fingers knew the positions on the keys by rote and she didn’t have to think. Perrysburg was like a stack of new sonatas and concertos ready to be studied. And perhaps she could find more purpose there than Moore’s Ferry and even her family home could offer. If Alaine was the queen of the orchard, Mother was chatelaine of the estate, and Delphine was left the bored spinster in a tower.

That would change in Perrysburg. She would have a place there, and a role that she could excel at. There would be charitable societies to helm, art exhibitions and music series to sponsor, the game of local politics to play—and the not insubstantial job of managing her husband’s social calendar and home. Pierce had built a new house for them, the height of style in the most fashionable neighborhood, three stories of limestone with nods to the new “Prairie School” of architecture. Pierce had hesitated over that, unsure if it was too daring or too modish, as Delphine had showed him photographs and sketches, but the resulting symmetry of pillars and piazzas and windows was striking yet still classic. Now he beamed when he showed it to friends, complimenting his fiancée’s good taste and keen eye. They would host dinners in the expansive dining room, teas in the parlor, parties on the piazza. She could imagine carriages and automobiles lining up beneath the porte cochere and laughter wafting from the gardens.

A new life, her life, that she would build. But it meant leaving Orchard Crest behind.

It would have been easy to fall into dime novel dramatics over it, imagining that she hated farm life, that she was desperate to escape a horrible fate, but the truth was, she loved her family and her home. Still, as much as she would miss quiet winter evenings in the parlor and languid summer afternoons in the garden, she wanted more than Prospect Hill, craved it like cool water on a hot day. It was why she spent so much time on watercolors and sketching; she could explore something more, express something new. She had never been content with the rhythm of farm life, the repetitive tasks in an endless cycle, looping year after year.

Her sister loved it. She always had. She loved the feel of dirt on her hands, the confidence of knowing what chore came next and exactly how to execute it. Alaine could see the harvest in the spring bloom and calculate how many barrels of cider were ripening on the trees. Delphine’s interest in the orchard ran in contrary currents.

Watching the trees bloom in a riot of pink clouds in spring, the red-gold sunrise in the skin of an apple, the shadows mingling on the moss, the moments of novelty and beauty hidden in the repetition—this was the orchard that captured Delphine. She tried to catch its movement in sketches and coax its colors into painted landscapes. And she knew, intuited it from the quietest, deepest part of herself, that there was more of that novelty and beauty waiting to be discovered. Waiting for her.

In any case, even if she had wanted to stay on Prospect Hill, there wasn’t any room for her. Not really, despite Alaine’s hopeful nods to running the orchard together. There could be no equanimity, no real partnership with Alaine, through no fault of her sister’s or her own. Alaine not only breathed and bled the orchard, she covered it, enveloped it, her ambition and surefooted strategies overtaking even the need for Papa Horatio’s oversight. But while Papa Horatio could slide into an easy retirement, the country sage in the rocking chair, there was no room for Delphine except in her sister’s shadow.

A knock at the door startled her, and she quickly stripped her apron and balled it into the umbrella stand in the foyer as she swung the door wide.

“Delphine, you look lovely! My sister was a wreck the whole month before her wedding, but here you are, looking as fresh as a daisy.” Pierce planted a chaste kiss on her cheek. She closed her eyes, briefly, inhaling cologne water and relishing the fleeting touch of his fresh-shaven cheek. His gray eyes, set deep under studious brows, caught hers as he pulled away, and she tamped down the sudden heady nerves that still accompanied his every touch.

“Mother has things well in hand.” She ushered Pierce into the parlor, the afternoon sunlight spilling in from the bay window. Orchard Crest may not have been as fine a home as the Grafton mansion in Perrysburg, but the light—the light was incomparable.

“I’ve brought the last of my things for the wedding—those shoes needed a good polish. Now. Are we quite alone?” He dropped his voice and leaned toward her, brushing her lips with his. The sudden intimacy made Delphine flush warm. It strained against propriety, but she leaned into his neatly pressed suit and felt the steady rise and fall of his chest under her hand as he kissed her.

He brought out a bold desire in her, had ever since the first time she had met him on that trip with Mary. He was the center of every room, the dominant voice in every debate, a commanding presence that left Delphine speechless, but he made room for her. He softened his voice to ask her thoughts, he left the orbiting crowd and sought her out. He was important, and his mere attention made her feel important, too.

“I brought something for you, too.” He pulled a folded bit of newsprint from his jacket pocket. “There’s an art studio opening downtown that’s going to offer lessons. I thought you might enjoy that—you seem to like painting here at Orchard Crest.”

Delphine took the advertisement, torn from the Perrysburg Gazette, a grainy image of a spacious loft full of windows and bold type promising expert instruction to students of all ages. “I think I would,” she said slowly. “I’ve never done much but watercolors, but I’d love to try oils someday.”

“My mother says a young lady needs a hobby or two. Even after children come along, to give her something to talk about with the other ladies at parties.” He laughed, the expansive bellow filling the parlor. She loved how it took over a room, how his jovial mood could enliven even the dourest of parties. “I’ll look up the particulars after the move.”

“The move—is the furniture all in?”