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that he’d gathered on his travels, leaving me to eavesdrop.
    Outside our great-room windows, tiny buds of crocus pushed their way up through the soil, and already robins sat on the porch rails, watching for early worms. The dog slept at my feet. Then at last I had him to myself, after a fashion.
    “What did I see in you to make me want you for my wife?” Christian repeated my question. “Your kind spirit, indeed. And your willingness to question even when there might be … consequences. These are good qualities. Necessary for learning, my friend Karl says, necessary for change.”
    I hadn’t thought of myself as unusually kind and said so.
    “Remember New Year’s Day?” Christian told me.
    How could I forget?
“It was the day you asked me to be your wife.”
    “Yes, yes. But more,” Christian said. “In the corner of Elim wherewe gathered sat a woman with three children huddled around her. She was not of us.”
    I thought back. Yes, there’d been a woman who piled her hair on top of her head in an Apollo knot, the false hairpiece standing up behind the center part instead of in a chignon at the back as we colony woman wore ours. She wore fancy clothes, cloth with new dye, something else that made her different. The rest of us dressed in flannels or woolen dresses, clean but well-faded. New cloth was seen as a luxury we made and sold, unless one had worn out a dress and had already turned it into strips for rugs or repatterned it for a child’s gown.
    Louisa Keil, our leader’s wife, pulled her dark woolen shawl tighter around her as she knelt at that woman’s feet. She patted the woman’s knee, talking quietly to her. The woman nodded, wiping at her eyes with a handkerchief. Louisa looked up, and spying Christian and me—had I detected a frown?—she motioned us over.
    “You’re good with
Kinder
,” she said to me, nodding to the children. “Help them join in with the others, give their mother a bit of rest.”
    I remembered that the children’s mother wore bruises on her cheek and lip, and I assumed she was one of many women whom the colonists took in to help as they made their escapes from harsh men. Some remained and joined us; others recovered and moved on, often returning to the men who’d harmed them, a choice I never could fathom. I’d taken her children and we’d played Ring-around-the-Rosy, with all of us falling down in heaps, serenaded by their peals of cautious laughter.
    “I remember the woman’s bruises,” I said. Sheppie’s tail thumped the floor at the sound of my voice. “I wonder at times if our offering help to such people makes us suspect to other Missourians. We colonists step into the middle of a fray, act as servants to those in need, but such work can cause resentments.”
    Christian nodded. Missouri was a slave state, but on the border with freer territories, and many people didn’t own slaves here. There’d been talk of repealing that compromise that allowed Maine to enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave. Perhaps Missourians feared our colony would harbor escaped slaves, since we rescued broken women. I wasn’t sure that we wouldn’t. Maybe that was why there’d been discussion about the colony moving again. We danced around issues, and sometimes we stepped on someone else’s toes.
    “The children, they were so frightened; so many changes.”
    “You answered Louisa’s call without hesitation. You were selfless. This is good. It tells me you can see beyond your own needs to those of others. I had seen this before in you.”
    His praise warmed me to my toes, and I vowed to give him more reason for such words, though vows among the young are often soon forgotten. “And what else?”
    “Those questions,” he said. “You ask … pointed questions, a sign your mind keeps working. Just as now, about slave and free. And you’re persistent when you want a thing.”
    “Stubborn, my father says.” I felt my cheeks grow warm.
    “Indeed.” Christian