Page 36 of The Invisible Hour

“There are no promises in my time. It’s not everything you think it is.”

“I don’t need everything,” Elizabeth said. “Only something.”

WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT the station, Elizabeth bought Mia a ticket, for she had no money of her own. One way, Mia noticed.

“We both know you won’t be back,” Elizabeth explained.

“Do we?”

Elizabeth gave Mia an onyx-and-silver hairpin, so she could put her long hair up and not stand out. “I don’t expect you to return it,” she said. She wanted to know about New York and the library; she wanted to imagine what it was like to walk down the street at night and feel that you had every right to do so. She wanted to leave home, even if it meant never seeing the people she loved again. She could have cried right then and there if she’d been another person, if she hadn’t been trained to hide her emotions and do the right thing no matter what.

Mia unclasped the pearl necklace she had inherited from Constance. “For you,” she told Elizabeth. “To remember me by.”

“What makes you think I wish to remember you?” Elizabeth asked, her voice wary, but the truth was, she was pleased with the gift. The pearls were delicate, with a faint blue tint. She wanted to wear them in the moonlight, as she walked through the grass, as she boarded a boat that would take her far out to sea. She would do none of those things; all the same, the pearls were meant for her. Mia leaned forward unexpectedly and clasped the strand around Elizabeth’s throat. She knew from her readings that Elizabeth would not attend Nathaniel’s wedding to Sophia, and she smiled to think that perhaps it was because Elizabeth preferred Mia to the wife her brother would later choose.

Elizabeth touched her hand to the pearls and blushed with vanity despite her vow never to have self-indulgent thoughts. When Mia walked along the platform, Elizabeth followed reluctantly, still unsure if she had made the right decision in telling Mia where Nathaniel was. “I’m not certain why I’m helping you,” she wondered aloud.

“Because we care about his writing,” Mia said.

“What do you know of his writing?” Elizabeth scowled.

“I know it saved me. Do I need to know more?”

“You need to know that it saved him as well.”

The train had arrived, and the time had come for Mia to leave. The two women were connected by their love for Nathaniel, and so Elizabeth decided to say more.

“You would never have been happy here. I think you know that. There are no witches anymore, to be sure, but women are judged as if there were. Everything you wear and say and eat is meted out by a rule book. As you plainly see, I am not the one in Blackwell fishing. I am not the one with novels published. You know that’s not the world you want.”

Women wrote under men’s names, or used only initials, hiding their gender, for all they did was considered less important. There were some female academies with high tuition costs for women students, but they were not accepted at colleges or universities, except for Oberlin, which had just begun to admit female students.

“The world will change,” Mia said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Not in time for me or for your daughter if you stay.”

Mia looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth laughed to see her confusion.

“Girls run in our family. My brother is the one and only treasured boy.”

Mia felt the quickening inside her as they stood on the platform in the heat of the day and then she knew. She was not about to hide in the woods invisible and she understood why her mother had done whatever she had not to lose her.

You were mine and mine alone. You were the best thing that ever happened to me.

The train was boarding. Mia threw her arms around Nathaniel’s sister, and as she did Elizabeth felt a sob rise in her throat. Her life was set, and could not be altered, but oh, she wished that it might be. She wished she’d been born a boy, or that she could slip into another time, or that Nathaniel could have all he wanted and still be the writer he was meant to be.

“So now you know,” Elizabeth said, taking a step away and blinking back her tears. “A fish may live in the same world as a sparrow, but they cannot marry their lives together, and a hawk cannot marry at all.”

Mia understood that Elizabeth considered herself to be the hawk. “You’ll do more than most men in your lifetime,” Mia told her.

“And will it matter? Or will they only remember what he did?”

Mia could not bring herself to tell Elizabeth that she was right.

“I don’t need to see into the future to know that is what will happen,” Elizabeth said. “He is my brother and a genius. But in another place and time, I might have been one, too.”

Elizabeth surprised herself then. She did not back away when Mia embraced her. “I’ll name her after you,” Mia said. “To make certain that she’s brave.”

A conductor guided Mia along, and once on board she was grateful to sink into her seat. She gazed out the window to see that Elizabeth was still on the platform. She waved and Elizabeth waved back, then Mia closed her eyes and leaned her head against the seat as they began to slowly move away from the station. She had come so far and now here she was, headed for the one place in the world she had vowed never to return to. She had to change trains, and she was exhausted, and she felt as if she was going back on her word by heading for Western Massachusetts. All the same, by the end of her journey, when the hills of Berkshire County were in sight, there was nowhere she would rather be.