Page 22 of Charlotte

That did not reassure Lottie.

They reached the hotel parlor to find Delly seated in a chair with three women around her, looking less like a bride but more like a woman enduring medical treatment without complaint. Mrs. Hanford stood behind her, repairing her wind-tumbled hair with grim purpose. Mrs. Schulte held a small spray of flowers cut from Mrs. Beck’s garden. Ella from the dress shop kneeled at Delly’s side, pinning a length of borrowed lace at her collar.

Delly’s eyes met Lottie’s in the mirror.

“I am not being dragged,” she said at once.

Lottie stopped in the doorway.

“I know,” Lottie said. “That is what frightens me.”

The parlor quieted around them.

Delly’s face was a carefully managed country with strict border laws. Lottie had lived there long enough to notice when one guard stepped away from the gate.

“I am certain,” Delly said.

“Are you happy?”

Mrs. Hanford made a soft sound as if the question were both intimate and badly timed.

Delly looked down at her hands. “I am not sure happiness is the word I would choose.”

“That is not comforting.”

“I find him suitable.”

“Delly.”

Her sister sighed, and for one moment, she looked very young. Not younger than Lottie, perhaps, but younger than the woman who had held their whole life together by force of will since their parents died.

“He is good,” Delly said quietly. “I think I trust that more than happiness.”

Lottie had many things she wanted to say. Marriage should be more than suitability. Delly deserved tenderness, not merely safety. Marrying a man to study marriage was possibly the most Delly-like thing ever done and still entirely absurd.

Lottie had seen Mr. Simms yesterday at the dock. She had seen him bend over a bleeding boy, steady as stone and gentle as prayer.

Earlier that afternoon, Delly had told her the rest.

Her sister had walked into the lumber camp carrying an apple pie as if baked goods were a perfectly reasonable form of negotiation. There had been rough talk, of course. A whistle. Some laughter. One or two remarks Delly had repeated with great precision and no apparent understanding of how shocking they sounded coming from her mouth.

Mr. Simms had not laughed.

According to Delly, he had risen from his place, broad and quiet and impossible to ignore, and the whole cookhouse had remembered its manners. He had not shoved Delly behind him or spoken over her. He had simply stood beside her, near enough that every man there understood she would be treated with respect.

And when one man pushed the joke too far, Mr. Simms had looked around the cookhouse and said, calm as Sabbath bells, that the woman was going to be his wife.

Lottie crossed the room and took her sister’s hand.

“If he hurts you, I shall strike him with the largest book I brought.”

Delly’s mouth twitched. “That would be the botany volume.”

“It has excellent weight.”

“I shall warn him.”

“You do that.”