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They chanted the sisters’ names as they approached. Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, Mary—as though to remind them that they were merely girls. Not dogs nor demons: undistinguished girls.
He had not done anything wrong, and yet here he was, ashamed. That was the cunning power of girls, he thought. They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.
She seemed to know about hardship, how it crept into one’s life like a cuckoo, casting out happiness forever. Happiness was frail and flimsy: a petal, a whisper. Hardship was constant.
His wife had left him with an impossible task: to protect the girls from the hazardous world, a ravenous world, a world with teeth.
The worst type of women were the ones who didn’t know their place in the order of things. There seemed to be a lot of them around nowadays, women who thought themselves superior, who’d forsaken nice, feminine qualities like meekness and humility.
Others believed they had the God-given right for their demands to be met, their greed satisfied, but Robin didn’t share this view. He made no claims on the world; it owed him nothing.
When he was among them, the hungry men, he had learned as best he could to disguise his gentleness.
He didn’t believe in the vicar’s nonsense, in hellfire or heaven, but he envied his certainty. What lay before Joseph was unknowable, a gape. It scared him. Yet lying here, on this summer afternoon, he soothed himself with a question: How bad could it be to be buried in the warm earth and listen to the world conduct itself around you? That didn’t seem so dreadful.
The sisters looked, he thought, as if something had been stolen from them.
Spending time with Agnes was not always a joy, but it had never occurred to Pete not to marry her.
“She wishes she was not a woman?” “Yes, she says she’d rather be a boy. Or at least a woman who’s allowed to live like a man, like Joan of Arc. Or failing that, a pebble.”
Perhaps it had been a mistake, he thought, to let them believe they could reach beyond what the world expected of them. The world expected so little.
