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neck as she pushed forward. The ground beneath her hands was dry and littered with chicken feathers and old chicken shit and the hard dead leaves of thebush. Inside, there was a hollow place. The thick outer growth of leaves was just a husk enclosing a space like a tiny room.
    Ada sat up in it and looked about on the ground and in the branches for eggs but found only a broken shell, dried yolk the color of rust in one jag-edged cup. She fitted herself between two limbs and rested with her back against the trunk. The boxwood bower smelled of dust and of the sharpness and bitterness of chickens. Its light was dim, and it reminded her of childhood play in caves made by draping sheets over tables or by tenting carpets over clotheslines. Best of all were the tunnels she and her cousin Lucy dug deep into haystacks on her uncle’s farm. They had spent entire rainy afternoons snug and dry as denned foxes, whispering secrets to each other.
    It was with a familiar delicious tingle of pleasure, a tightening in her breathing, that she realized she was now similarly hidden away, that anyone walking from the gate to the porch would never know she was there. If one of the ladies from the church made an obligatory visit to see about her welfare, she could sit motionless as they called her name and knocked at the door. She would not come out until long after she had heard the gate latch clack shut. But she expected no one to call. The visits had tapered off in the face of her indifference to them.
    Ada looked up with some disappointment to the faint lacework of pale blue sky visible through the leaves. She wished rain were falling so she would feel even more protected as it rustled the leaves overhead. The occasional drop that might find its way through, plopping a tiny crater into the dust, would only emphasize that though inside she remained dry, outside rain fell wholesale. Ada wished never to leave this fine shelter, for when she considered the pass she had lately reached, she wondered how a human being could be raised more impractically for the demands of an exposed life.
    She had grown up in Charleston and at Monroe’s insistence had been educated beyond the point considered wise for females. She had become a knowledgeable companion for him, a lively and attentive daughter. She was filled with opinions on art and politics and literature, and ready to argue the merits of her positions. But what actual talents could she claim? What gifts? A fair command of French and Latin. A hint of Greek. A passable hand at fine needlework. A competency at the piano, though no brilliance. The ability to render landscape and still life with accuracy in either pencil or watercolor. And she was well read.
    Those were the abilities to be marked down in her favor. None of them seemed exactly to the point when faced with the hard fact that she now found herself in possession of close to three hundred acres of steep and bottom, a house, a barn, outbuildings, but no idea what to do with them. It gave her pleasure to play on the piano, but not enough to compensate for her recent realization that she could not weed a row of young bean plants without pulling half of them out along with the ragweed.
    A certain amount of resentment came upon her when she thought that a measure of applied knowledge in the area of food production and preparation would stand her in better stead at that particular time than any fine understanding of the principles of perspective in painting. All her life, though, her father had kept her back from the hardness of work. As long as she could remember he had hired adequate help, sometimes freed blacks, sometimes unlanded whites of good character, sometimes slaves, in which case the wages were paid directly to the owner. For most of the six years of their mission to the mountains, Monroe had employed a white man and his part-Cherokee wife to run the place, leaving Ada with little to do other than devise a weekly menu. She had therefore been