Caleb had put the advertisement in the paper in December, after a long evening when he had sat at that table and said, more to the stove than to anybody, that he was thirty-four years old and he had never once in his life had anybody to talk to in the evenings who wasn't a horse or his brother or a child, no offense, Kez. He had said it like a joke. Keziah had not thought it was a joke. She had found the matrimonial paper in a stack of old newspapers Mr. Dimmock had left, and shown it to him, and he had laughed and then stopped laughing and asked her to write something down.
"He said every word of the advertisement," Keziah said. "I only spelled it. He made me cross out a part about the piano. We haven't got a piano. He said if he was going to start lying he might as well start with the Lord and work down."
When the letters came, eleven of them, she had read them all aloud to him at the table. Most of them were from women who wanted to know how many acres and whether the house was frame. One was from a man in Kansas who had misunderstood the advertisement. And one was from Linnet, and it was about the eight-point Bourgeois and the recipe, and Caleb had laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and said that one, Kez. That one. Write her back.
"How did he write?" Linnet asked. "How did it go, when he wrote? I want to know exactly."
Keziah looked at her. "He'd sit there," she said, pointing to the chair at the head of the table, which nobody had sat in at supper. "With his bad hand on the table and his good hand around a cup. And he'd think a long time. And then he'd say something like, tell her the creek's cold. And I'd say, Caleb, I can't just put the creek's cold, she'll think you're simple. And he'd say, well, put it how you'd put it, then, you're the scholar. And I would." She stopped. "That's how it was. Almost all of it. He'd say a thing in four words and I'd make it into four lines. And then I'd read it back to him and he'd say yes, that's what I meant, or no, Kez, that's too fancy, take that out. He took out a lot. He said you'd see through anything fancy."
"And Ivanhoe?"
Keziah's face went red to the hair.
"That was me," she said. "He asked me what I'd say about Rebecca, and I told him, and he said, well, put that, that's better than anything I'd say. So I put it." Her voice wavered and steadied. "And then you wrote back four pages about Rebecca, and I read it to him, and he said, Kez, she's arguing with you, not me. You'd better answer it. So I did. And he said that was fair, and he'd put his name to it, because he agreed with both of us."
Linnet sat very still. She thought of the four pages she had written about Rebecca, sitting up past midnight in the attic over the shop with a candle stub, and how she had felt when she mailed them, that she had at last found someone in the world who wanted to hear what she thought about a book. She had imagined a grown man reading them. A man with a burned hand and a careful way of writing. She had not imagined a girl of twelve, as Keziah would have been then, reading them aloud at a kitchen table, and arguing back.