by Rosalyn Eves
ALSO BY ROSALYN EVES
The Blood Rose Rebellion Trilogy
Blood Rose Rebellion
Lost Crow Conspiracy
Winter War Awakening
this is a borzoi book published by alfred a. knopf
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Rosalyn Eves
Cover photographs copyright © 2021 by Trevillion Images
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Cast of characters page art by Shutterstock.com/suns07butterfly
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ISBN 9781984849557 (trade) — ISBN 9781984849564 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781984849571
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Contents
Cover
Also by Rosalyn Eves
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Dan, for believing in me even when I doubt
* * *
And to the skeptical believers and believing skeptics: there is room for us too
* * *
Per aspera ad astra
CAST OF CHARACTERS
* denotes real historical figure
MONROE, UTAH
Bertelsen family
Anders: grist mill owner
m. Elisa (1853, died 1865)
Rebekka
Four babies who died
m. Hannah (1856)
Hyrum
Elizabeth
Emily
Mary
David Charles
John
Henry
Rachel
Albert
m. Olena Nilsson (1876)
Willard family
Richard: farmer/carpenter
m. Emma
Older children living in Salt Lake City
Samuel
Christopher
Lyman
Vilate Ann
Ellen
* Phoebe Wheeler: teacher at Presbyterian school
RAWLINS, WYOMING
* Thomas Alva Edison: inventor
* John “Texas Jack” Omohundro: performer
* Henry Morton: president of Stevens Institute of Technology
* Henry Draper: medical doctor and amateur astronomer, financed Edison’s visit to Rawlins
* Anna Draper: Dr. Draper’s wife and assistant
* Lillian Heath: would become Wyoming’s first female doctor in 1893
DENVER, COLORADO
Lancelot Davis (owner of Trans-Oceana hotel)
Stevens family
Ambrose: businessman
m. Louisa Davis: manager of Trans-Oceana
William Lancelot
Alice
* Henry Wagoner: abolitionist, civil rights activist, clerk of the first Colorado State Legislature
Mrs. Segura: housekeeper at Trans-Oceana
Frances: maid at Trans-Oceana
* Alida Avery: medical doctor, former colleague of Maria Mitchell at Vassar College
* Maria Mitchell: astronomer, first professor of astronomy at Vassar College
* Emma Culbertson: former student of Miss Mitchell, aspiring physician
* Cora Harrison: former student of Miss Mitchell, graduate student in astronomy at Vassar College
* Elizabeth Owen Abbot: former student of Miss Mitchell, schoolteacher
COLORADO SPRINGS/PIKES PEAK, COLORADO
* Helen Hunt Jackson: writer, reformer
* Samuel Pierpont Langley: astronomer, first director of Allegheny Observatory, early aviation pioneer
* John Langley: medical doctor, professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan
* General Albert Myer: father of US Signal Corps
Daniela Navarro: guide
The world of learning is so broad and the human soul so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that holds the infinite from us.
—Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals, p. 33
chapter one
Friday, June 28, 1878
Monroe, Utah
Thirty-one days until eclipse
“Elizabeth!” Mama’s voice floats up the valley toward my seat near the mouth of our narrow canyon, light as the cottonwood seeds drifting in piles beside the creek.
Her call jars me from my book, and I blink at the long gold light of the summer evening lingering in the valley like a cup of honeyed tea. As the sound of my name settles, I close my eyes, blotting out the ink on the open pages before me, the faint stars beginning to emerge in the s
ky above. I wish it were so easy to block out my mother’s voice.
I’m not supposed to be here, perched on a rocky outcropping overlooking the Little Green Valley like some fledgling about to launch from its nest.
I should be home, helping prepare the little ones for bed, bathing four-year-old Rachel and seven-year-old Henry, who gave themselves mud baths near the creek earlier.
But I’m not ready to leave. Not ready to abandon my perch or my view of the emerging stars. Not ready to face home, where I am surrounded by people I love but who are sometimes too much, their voices and bodies too big for the frame house Far built. Not ready to abandon my book, a gloriously ridiculous dime novel about a man named Texas Jack, army scout turned frontier hero.
Most everything about the book is unfamiliar, the pages full of blood-curdling deeds and high adventure, of betrayal and true love, and people who don’t at all resemble the westerners I know. In Texas Jack’s world, desperate thieves stage daring robberies. Tyrannical trail bosses misuse their cowboy employees. Fragile women faint at an oath, and cunning Indians plot against whites while mangling English. Worst of all are the Mormons, who are invariably dastardly or foolish dupes. I’ve never met an outlaw or known a woman to faint so easily. The Paiutes who live in our valley are mostly peaceful; Brother Timican, who attends our church meetings in a suit and collared shirt, speaks better English than many of the Danish and Swedish immigrants. And the Mormons…my sister Emily and I save the best passages to share, to laugh at how wrong these eastern writers get us.
“Elizabeth!” Mama’s voice comes again.
Texas Jack never stands down from a challenge. I seldom stand up to my mother.
With a sigh, I snap my book shut, wiping fruitlessly at a smudge on the yellow cover. I relace my shoes and, tucking the book beneath the waist of my skirt, scramble down the incline of the hill toward an ill-defined trail beside the creek. As I walk, I watch for any sign of predators brought out by the dusk. We don’t get many mountain lions in high summer, and any rattlers will be sluggish in the cooler air, but it’s best to be wary. Flickering lights burn like stars in the grist mill below. Far must be working late again.
There’s no moon tonight: this close to the new moon, I’ll only catch a glimpse of the silver crescent at sunrise. I make my way by starlight instead. The North Star glitters down, and the stars of the Big Dipper. It’s too early yet to see anything of the constellation Cygnus, though I can just make out Vega of the Lyre nearby.
I take mental notes of their positions, to record them in the notebook I use to track moon phases and planetary movements—a notebook I keep hidden beneath my bed with my dime novels. In less than a month, both the sun and moon will sit in the sky at the same time and place, a total solar eclipse that, for the first time in nearly a century, will cross the western territories of the United States.
And for all the celestial wonders I have seen, I won’t get to see this. According to the newspaper reports, the path of totality will cross through Montana and Wyoming and Colorado and Texas—but not Utah.
Mama flaps her apron when she sees me, a white flag in the night. But the surrender she signals is all mine.
As soon as I come close, she begins. “Elizabeth Bertelsen, where have ye been? Moonin’ after the stars again?” Mama’s North British accent, worn soft by her years in Utah Territory, grows more pronounced when she’s upset. “Ye should set your mind on higher things. God did not call us here to waste our lives dreaming.”
What could be higher than the stars? I do not speak my thoughts. Mama is grumpy enough already.
She beckons me into the house. Baby Albert, red-faced, cries halfheartedly in fifteen-year-old Emily’s arms as she rocks back and forth, back and forth, in the rocking chair. Her face is pinched with worry. Nearby, Mary, just a year younger than Emily, pushes a brush sullenly across the floorboards. From the attic, I hear one of the little boys calling after Mama.
Mama waves her apron at me again. “Take the baby from Emily so she can bring your da his supper.”
Obediently, I start across the room, but Mama takes my arm and turns me to face her. “I can’t have ye harin’ off like this of nights. It’s dangerous. And unseemly in a big lass of seventeen. I’d thought to take you with me to Richfield tomorrow, but perhaps it’s best if ye stay here and mind the children. Your sisters can come in your place.”
Mary perks up and drops the brush to tug on her strawberry-blond braid, now half undone. “You mean it, Mama?”
I take the baby from Emily and settle into her spot on the rocker. I should have liked the visit, though Richfield is no great city. Baby Albert looks up at me, his hazel eyes wide and wet, his chin still wobbling from his cries. He is warm and heavy in my lap, and though he smells sweet, like milk, his weight anchors me to this room, this house.
* * *
* * *
The next morning, the birds are wild outside the three-walled shelter where we keep a cow and two horses. Both horses are missing and my heart sinks. Far didn’t come home last night. I hope Far is back before Mama wants to leave for Richfield, or there’ll be the devil to pay. I milk the cow and try not to think too much about what it means, that Far spent the night in town. I rest my head against the cow’s warm flank and whisper a prayer. The familiar ritual calms me, lifting a burden from my heart.
Standing, my grip tight on the pail of warm milk I’ve just collected, I peer above the rim of the mountain, limned with gold. Venus, the morning star, glimmers down at me. I take another moment to find Jupiter, now in retrograde, so it appears to be moving backward in the sky.
Some people find the stars distant and cold. But I love them. According to the books I’ve read, the stars that look so tiny in the sky above are really enormous balls that radiate heat, like our sun. Some are even bigger than the sun. They’re different colors too, if you look closely—some pinkish, some tinged blue, some yellow-hot. Some are red, like Antares in Scorpio. The lights I see have stretched across millions of miles and thousands of years to reach me, as though they have nothing to do but shine endlessly. We talk at church about eternity, how existence extends forever in both directions—our spirits lived with God before we came to earth and will again after we die. Sometimes the idea of eternity is hard to hold in my head, but when I look at the stars, I can almost grasp it.
I shake myself. I have much more to do, and I cannot dawdle.
There is always a chance, however slight, that Mama will change her mind and let me come to Richfield. Even if she does not, someone needs to be inside when Far gets home, to keep peace. That task used to be Rebekka’s, but she is far away in Wyoming now, expecting her first baby.
I take a deep breath, glance up at the morning star once more, for courage, before going back to the house. I’ve learned a trick to watching the stars: if you look at the stars aslant, a little to one side instead of direct, they stand out more clearly. It’s a trick I use at home too: things are brighter if I don’t look at them directly.
Our house is big by local standards: a sitting room and a proper kitchen with a stove, two bedrooms on the main floor, and an attic for the boys. Mama reminds us to be grateful, as our first house here in Monroe was a dugout of sod and willow branches that always turned to mud in the midsummer rains.
But the house feels crowded when all of us are home: Far, Mama, and nine children. Only Rebekka no longer lives here.
Our ghosts crowd us too—Far’s first wife, Aunt Elisa, who died when I was five, and the four of her five babies who did not live past their first year, all of us sealed together for time and eternity. Far married Aunt Elisa in Denmark, where they met the Mormon missionaries, and they crossed the Atlantic and the plains together. He made Mama his second wife in Salt Lake City, after she’d worked her own way to Utah from England. I miss Aunt Elisa: she was sweet and soft, romantic where Mama is practical, and she told me fairy stories at bedt
ime to help me sleep. Sometimes I still sense her in tricks of light, in the smell of sugar caramelizing on the stove.
There is no sugar smell in the air now, as I wander into the main room. In fact, there are no smells at all. The stove is empty, the younger children crying for breakfast, their clamor drowning out the birdcalls outside the kitchen window.
I freeze. A weight separate from that of the bucket I carry settles over me. Mama must have had a bad night, to not have started breakfast already. My sisters Emily and Mary are at the table, slicing bread for Henry and Rachel, who are the youngest, save baby Albert. I stifle a sigh: Mama won’t like it if all the bread goes to breakfast. She’ll be wanting it for sandwiches on the road.
“Here, wait,” I say. “I’ll make some oats.” I set the pail down on the table and find a battered pan, filling it with water to heat. It’s not long before the oats are ready, and I dish them into bowls that Emily sets out for me—having the wit to be helpful, if not the wit to start breakfast on her own. I spoon fresh milk over the oats and drizzle a bit of sorghum on them before Mary hands the bowls around.
The boys tear through theirs as though they fear someone might steal the food from them before they’ve eaten their fill. I smile a little: I don’t think they remember being truly hungry. I do—there were lean years when we first came to the valley, both before and after the Black Hawk War. We have plenty now: it shows in the children’s round cheeks, in Albert’s baby rolls, even in me. Mama had to let out my seams again this spring, though I’ve not grown taller in three years.