Aunt Cornelia had been right in the first two of those beliefs, Sheridan belatedly realized. Sherry had tried to heed her aunt's warnings, but there was one major dissimilarity between her aunt and herself that made those warnings about going to England terribly difficult for Sherry to accept: Aunt Cornelia loved predictability. She thrived on rituals, treasured the identical day-to-day routines that sometimes made Sherry feel like weeping with despair.
4
As she stared blindly across the tiny cabin at poor Meg, Sherry wished very devoutly that she were back in Richmond, sitting across from her aunt in the tiny little three-room house they shared, enjoying a nice, routine pot of tepid tea, and looking forward to an entire lifetime of tepid tea and tedium.
But if Meg was right about British laws… then Sheridan wouldn't be going home ever, wouldn't set eyes on her aunt again, and that thought was almost her undoing.
Six years ago, when she first went to live with her mother's elder sister, the prospect of never seeing Cornelia Faraday again would have made Sheridan positively gleeful, but Sheridan's father hadn't given her a choice. Until then, he had let her travel with him in a wagon loaded with all manner of goods, from fur pelts and perfume to iron pots and pitchforks, luxuries and necessaries that he sold or bartered at farmhouses and cabins along their "route."
Their "route" was whichever fork in the road took their fancy when they came upon it-usually heading south, along the eastern seaboard, in winter and north in summer. Sometimes they turned west when a particularly glorious sunset beckoned, or they angled southwest because a gurgling stream angled in that direction. In winter, when the snow sometimes made travelling difficult or impossible, there was always a farmer or a storekeeper who had need of an extra pair of willing hands, and her Irish father would trade his labor for a few nights' lodging.