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with loose stitches, and only needed sewing; it was a simple enough design, with a long, wide bavolet of cloth to cover the neck from the sun. The fabric was a light blue plaid crisscrossed with thin yellow and white stripes. It was not a style Honor was familiar with—no English woman would be willing to let so much fabric flap around her neck—but the sun was stronger here, so perhaps such covering was needed. At any rate, it would be easy to sew.
    Honor reached for a spool and her needle threader and quickly threaded six needles, poking them into the pincushion in readiness. Though Belle’s scrutiny made her self-conscious, in the sewing realm at least she was confident of what she was doing. She began to sew the crown onto the brim using a back stitch for strength, and gathering the crown cloth into little pleats as she made her way around. Honor was a fast, accurate seamstress, though she went more slowly on this bonnet, to make sure she was doing what Belle wanted.
    Belle sat in the rocker next to her and sewed cream silk over the top of the straw, oval-shaped brim of a bonnet. Every so often she glanced over at Honor’s work. “I can see I don’t have to look after you,” she remarked when Honor had finished the sun bonnet. “Now, watch the pleats I’m makin’ to get this cloth to lay flat around the brim. See, like this. Think you can do that? Here, try it. Use this—it’s a milliner’s needle—better for straw.”
    When Honor had sewn enough to Belle’s satisfaction, the milliner stood and stretched. “Guess I got lucky with you comin’. When you finish that, you can work on these.” She patted a pile of bonnets in various stages of construction that she had placed on a table between them. “I’ll trim ’em later. You got any questions I’ll be in the shop. Got to open for the afternoon.”
    It had grown warm, with the sun high in the sky and the porch less shaded. Honor had not been alone much since landing in America, and was glad to sit still on a bright spring afternoon with familiar work to do but nothing more expected of her. She would have liked a cottage garden to look at, with drifting borders of flowers such as her mother grew—lupins and delphiniums and columbine and love-in-a-mist and forget-me-nots. She didn’t know if any of these flowers even grew in America, or if Americans cultivated that sort of garden. She suspected not—it was not practical, especially here, where society was still being hewn from the wilderness and energy was directed toward survival rather than decoration. Mind you—she surveyed the pile of bonnets Belle had left her—Ohio women did allow themselves some frivolity in their headwear: the bonnets were in brightly colored ginghams and chintz.
    She finished the cream bonnet and picked up another, of pale green fabric dotted with tiny daisies, and a brim that could be folded back to reveal another color—tan in this case. Honor would have expected pink, but she was not about to suggest so. As she worked on the second bonnet, the steady, familiar rhythm of sewing took over, its repetition meditative, freeing her to her thoughts rather as Meeting for Worship did. She felt her shoulders begin to sink, the tension she had been carrying with her since leaving England easing a little. Reaching the end of the thread, she let her hands rest on the bonnet in her lap and closed her eyes. That calm, and her solitude, gave her the space in which to think: of Samuel telling her he loved someone else, and her decision to unmoor herself from Dorset; of her sister’s death leaving her so alone in a strange place. Honor at last began to cry, painful sobs reminiscent of the heaves she had suffered on board the Adventurer .
    The relief of her tears did not last, however. In between her muffled gasps, a sense came over her, just as it had on the road from Hudson to Wellington, that she was not alone. Honor glanced behind her, but Belle was not in the doorway or the kitchen;