Page 39 of Charlotte

Lottie looked down quickly, pretending to straighten the stack of primers. No one had ever called her proper anything before. Not in a way that meant capable. In Chicago, she had been useful, young, pleasant, and fortunate to have employment. Delly had made certain she was safe, fed, and sheltered. Mrs. Whitmore had called her my dear girl and blessed child.

Proper librarian landed differently.

It felt like being trusted with the shape of her own life.

Delly arrived half an hour later with a ledger tucked under one arm, pencils in her reticule, and the look of a married woman who had slept poorly, thought deeply, and found both experiences inefficient.

Lottie took one look at her sister and forgot the books.

“Oh,” she said.

Delly stopped just inside the door. “Oh what?”

“You look married.”

“I look no such thing.”

“You do.”

“I am wearing the same dress I wore yesterday.”

“Yes, but now you look as if you have argued with a stove and lost.”

Cornelia coughed into her hand.

Delly’s cheeks colored. “The stove in Mr. Simms’s cabin is contrary.”

“You rearranged his shelves, didn’t you?”

“That is entirely beside the point.”

“You did.”

Delly crossed the room and set the ledger on the table with unnecessary firmness. “His medical supplies were not arranged by any civilized principle. Catgut sutures near the washbasin, quinine behind lamp oil, laudanum without clear markings. A person could perish from the sheer disorder of it.”

Lottie smiled. “Did Mr. Simms appreciate being rescued from his own shelves?”

Delly opened the ledger. “He was not ungrateful.”

Cornelia’s brows lifted. “That is nearly a sonnet from Odelia.”

“It is a factual summary,” Delly said.

Lottie pressed her lips together, but the smile escaped anyway. There was something different in her sister. Not softer exactly. Delly would object to that word on principle. Some tightly fastened part of her had loosened just enough to let light show through.

Lottie thought of Jeb standing at the altar, his hands trembling when he took Delly’s. She hoped her sister had noticed. She suspected her sister had noticed and was pretending not to have done so.

Delly drew the ledger toward her. “Now. No book leaves this room without a name, title, date, and expected return. If the borrower cannot write, someone will write for him. If a page returns torn, stained, chewed, damp, burned, or smelling of tobacco, there will be consequences.”

“Chewed?” Cornelia asked.

“Children,” Delly said.

Cornelia nodded. “Fair.”

“And dogs,” Lottie added.

Delly looked pained. “I had not considered dogs.”