"She would hand it to someone who had always picked it up," Linnet said. "Wouldn't she? Someone she was used to seeing take it."
He was quiet for a while. The dog under the feed store awning rolled over on its back and let the sun have its belly.
"Tell me about the letters," he said finally. "From the start. If you don't mind. I'd like to know what my brother said, when he was saying it, before I go hunting for who said it after."
So she told him, sitting on the depot bench with her gloved hands folded on top of the leather case, and she told it the way she would have set a page, line after line, nothing left out because it was inconvenient.
She was twenty-six years old. She had been born in Lancaster County and raised in Reading, where her father had been a compositor at the Eagle until his lungs gave out, and he had taught her the case before she was ten because she was quick and he was tired and there was no son. When he died, and then her mother two winters after, Linnet had gone to live with her older sister Adah, who had married a man named Prosper Weems who kept a jobbing print shop on Penn Street: handbills, sale notices, funeral cards, the occasional pamphlet on temperance or the tariff. Prosper had taken her in, he liked to tell people, out of Christian duty. What he had taken in was a compositor who could set a clean galley faster than either of his journeymen and who did not have to be paid, because she was family, and family was fed and housed and should be grateful.
She had been grateful for a while. Then she had been tired. Then, for about three years, she had been something she did not have a word for, a kind of patient, quiet fury that she set into every line of type she touched, so that the work came out cleaner and straighter than ever and nobody in the shop could understand why Miss Rudd never smiled.
"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me," she said. "I'm telling you so you understand why I answered an advertisement in the back of a matrimonial paper from a man in a place I couldn't find on a map. It wasn't romance. I want to be honest with you, because I don't think anybody has been honest with either of us. I answered because Prosper had found a man for me to marry, and I didn't care for his choice."
"Who was it?"
"A paper merchant named Absolon Lusch, who held Prosper's notes. He was fifty-one and had buried two wives. Prosper owed him four hundred dollars and could not pay, and it was suggested, very delicately, at Sunday dinner, that if Mr. Lusch were family the notes might be forgiven. My sister cried in the kitchen afterward and told me I didn't have to. She also told me she didn't know what would become of the children if the shop went under." Linnet smoothed the letter on her knee. "I set the type for my own advertisement reply that week. I paid for the stamp out of money I'd hidden in a cocoa tin. Thirty-one dollars. It took me four years to put by."