“Ellie,” Old Nathan said quietly, “thar’s no call fer thet. Sarah, what is it brings ye here?”
“Yer Cull ain’t good enough fer me now, Miz Ransden!” Ellie cried. Her right cheek was bone white, but the swollen print on the left flared like an August rose. “Ifen he don’t hang afore he comes back, I’ll leave.”
The anger that had kept Ellie ramrod straight poured out through a memory, leaving her suddenly vulnerable. She touched her left cheek, then lowered her hand and stared at the fingertips.
“He niver hit me,” she whispered. “He niver hit me afore naow.”
“Oh, child,” Sarah Ransden said. “I felt the storm comin’ in my bones, an’ the good Lord knows hit was true.”
Sarah hesitated, from fear of being rejected rather than calculation, then put her arms around the younger woman’s shoulders anyway. They hugged one another, both with their eyes closed and on the verge of tears.
Old Nathan looked away uncomfortably. His fingers began to probe the box again. A thin panel slid aside; the cunning man shook a wooden key out into his palm.
“Whar did ye git thet box, Nathan Ridgeway?” Sarah asked from behind his shoulder. Her tone was controlled and distant, the sort of voice one used to inquire of a stranger found staring over one’s garden fence.
“Happen I found hit here on the fireboard, Sarah,” the cunning man replied calmly. “What is it ye know about this thing, thin?”
The women stood side by side; both of them tall and striking, though Sarah forty years younger had never been the beauty Ellie Ransden was now. Their clothing, Ellie’s check dress and the blue shawl Sarah wore over homespun, was worn and had been inexpensive when new, but there was an unmistakable pride in the women—at what they were, and in the fact that they were surviving.
“Chance had a thing like thet,” Sarah said. “Hit opens up, though I niver knew how.”
Old Nathan’s paired thumbs slid the base of the box rearward. His eyes were on Sarah. In his mind trembled like a tent of shadows the joints and planes of the object with which he had almost merged.
“Like thet, I reckon,” the older woman continued. She licked her dry lips. “The one time I asked, he told me his Pappy hed give it to him whin he come of age . . . en he hit me, which warn’t new by thin.”
Ellie put her arm around Sarah’s shoulders.
“I burnt it,” Sarah said softly. “I burnt hit whin Cullen run him off, but I swear t’ God thet hit war the same box ez ye’ve got in yer hands.”
Old Nathan uncovered the keyhole. As the women silently watched him, he inserted the key and opened the box.
The box was empty. He upended it. Ellie and Sarah relaxed palpably.
“We ain’t out uv the woods,” the cunning man murmured. “Not jest yet. . . .”
He set the box on the table and reached into the air above him. It was like fumbling on a shelf in the dark. If he looked up there would be nothing to see, only his knobby old fingers closing on—
The familiar, solid angles of a jackknife. The German silver bolsters were cool to his touch, and the shield of true silver set into one jigged-bone scale was cold.
He lifted the knife down without meeting the eyes of the women. There were things the cunning man did for show, when impulse or perceived need drove him, but he felt uncomfortable at the notion of showing off before this particular pair. The only reasons he could imagine for doing that were so childish—and so foolish in a not-man like him—that his mind danced around their edges like a pit.
Old Nathan held the knife between his thumb and forefinger so that the polished silver plate reflected down into the box. It showed—
Nothing. No hidden object, but not the coarse grain of the wood, either. It was as if the silver were mirroring a gray void . . . except that when the cunning man stared at the plate without blinking, he seemed to see flames flicker at the corners of his eyes.