She undid her hair, the dark curls that ringed her face. She pulled it back until her eyes hurt, and wound it in a small neat bun at her neck.

She recounted her memories as they reeled into her past. A soldier beside her on a carriage seat. Her mother dying as her sister slipped from her body. The rainbow. She cataloged these memories and sewed them away as neatly as she had sewn her jewels in the hem of her skirt, needing to erase the intricacies of where she had been so that she might become the simplicity of where she was going.

She was a simple, honest woman, sitting in the unexpected splendor of a private railroad car. A child in white linen, sitting between her mother and a man she did not know.

Catherine Land sat until the last possible moment, poised between the beginning and the end. The train slowed and then stopped. The porter came in and took her suitcase from the rack. She tipped him, too much, and he smiled.

Still she stared at her face. She could not, would not live without money or love. Ralph Truitt had shyly promised in his last letter to share his life, and she would take what he had to give. She knew a good deal more about what was to happen than he did.

She got up, wrapped a heavy black missionary cape around her shoulders, and left the compartment, closing the door softly behind her. She wasn’t nervous. She made her way along the corridor. She stepped down the metal stairs, taking the porter’s hand in the billowing steam, and moved shyly and gracefully onto the platform to meet Ralph Truitt.

CHAPTER THREE

She stepped into snow, a swirling, blowing blizzard that blinded her, yet dazzled her at the same time. It both darkened and illuminated the air of the platform, surrounding her with an aura of moving light. Strangers darted back and forth, greeting, kissing, hurling trunks and suitcases onto shoulders, sheltering babies from the storm. The snow moved horizontally, spiking in giddying whirls around the hastening figures, flying swiftly upward into dark nothingness. There seemed to be no end to it.