"I just fill in where they need me. Besides, soon as I can find another job I'm leaving here."

"Why do you want to leave?" Rachel asked.

Joel met her eyes.

"Because I don't like them," he said, and turned back to his food.

Rachel looked at the clock by the doorway and saw it was time for her to get back to work. She could already hear the clatter of crockery and metal being washed and rinsed in the fifty-gallon hoop barrels, but she didn't want to get up. It had been so long since she'd talked to someone her own age. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be.

"We had some good times at that school," she said as Joel finished the last bit on his plate. "I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it."

"We did have some fun," Joel said, "even if Miss Stephens was a grumpy old sow."

"I remember the time she asked where in the United States we'd want to go, and you said far as you could get from her and the schoolhouse. That really got her out of sorts."

The dining hall suddenly grew quiet as Galloway opened the side door and took a step inside, his head cocked slightly to the right as he scanned the room. He found Joel and jerked his head toward the office.

"I better go and see what old flop arm wants," Joel said, and got up.

Rachel got up as well, speaking softly across the table as she did so.

"Have you ever heard Mr. or Mrs. Pemberton say anything about me?"

"No," Joel said, his face clouding.

Joel looked like he wanted to say something more, and whatever that something more was it wouldn't be said in a playful tone or with a smile on his face. But he didn't. He put on his cap and mackinaw.

"Thanks for sitting with me," Rachel said.

Joel nodded.

As Joel went out the door, Rachel saw Mrs. Pemberton through the dining hall's wide window. Horse and rider moved briskly through the last crews walking toward the woods. Rachel watched until Mrs. Pemberton and the horse began their ascent onto the ridge. She raised herself from the chair, her eyes about to turn away from the window when Rachel saw her own reflection. She did not bend to pick up her plate but let her gaze linger. Despite the apron and her hair tied back in a bun, Rachel saw that she was still pretty. Her hands were chapped and wrinkled by the kitchen work, but her face was unlined and smooth. Her body hadn't yet acquired the sagging shapelessness of the other women in the kitchen. Even the soiled apron could not conceal that.

You're too pretty to stay covered up, Mr. Pemberton had told her more than once when Rachel waited until she was in bed to take off her dress and step-ins. She remembered how after the first few times there'd been pleasure in the loving for her as well as him, and she'd had to bite her lip to not be embarrassed. She remembered the day she'd walked through the house while he slept, touching the ice box and the chairs and the gilded mirror, Rachel also recalling what hadn't been there-no picture of a sweetheart hung on the wall or set on a bureau, just as there'd been no woman come down from Boston like Mrs. Buchanan had once. At least not one until Serena.

Someone called Rachel's name from the kitchen, but she did not move from the window. She remembered again the afternoon at the train station when Serena Pemberton held the bowie knife by its blade, offering the pearl handle to her. Rachel thought how easily she might have grasped the bowie knife's handle, the blade that had just killed her father pointed at the other woman's heart. As Rachel continued to stare at her reflection, she suddenly wondered if she'd been wrong about having had only one real choice in her life, that in that moment at the depot Serena Pemberton had offered her a second choice, one that could have made laying down in bed with Mr. Pemberton the right choice after all, even at the cost of her father. Don't think a thing that terrible, Rachel told herself.

Rachel turned and walked into the kitchen, setting her plate and fork on the oak stacking table before settling herself beside the hoop barrel closest to the back door. She picked up the scrub brush in her right hand and the slab of Octagon soap in the left, dipped her hands in the gray water and scuffed the wood bristles against the tan-colored soap to make her lather. As Rachel took up her first plate to clean, one of the other kitchen workers shouldered open the back door. In her hands was a tin tub filled with breakfast dishes and silverware from the office.

"Mr. Pemberton wants more coffee brought to his office," the woman said to Beason, the head cook.

Beason looked around the kitchen, his eyes passing over Rachel before settling on Cora Pinson.

"Take a pot of coffee over there," Beason said to her.

As Cora Pinson went out the back door, Rachel thought of Mrs. Pemberton astride the great horse, erect and square-shouldered, not looking anywhere but straight ahead. Not needing to, because she didn't have to care if someone stepped in front of her and the horse. She and that gelding would go right over whoever got in their way and not give the least notice they'd trampled someone into the dirt.

Smart of her, Rachel thought, not to allow me near her food.

THE MEETING WITH THE PARK DELEGATION WAS set for eleven on Monday morning, but by ten o'clock Pemberton, Buchanan and Wilkie had already gathered in the office's back room, smoking cigars and discussing the payroll. Harris also sat at the table, reading the morning's Asheville Citizen with visible ire. Campbell stood in the corner until Pemberton checked his watch and nodded it was time to get Serena.

"They're early," Buchanan said minutes later when the office door opened, but it was Doctor Cheney and Reverend Bolick instead. They came into the back room, and Cheney settled into the closest chair. Bolick held his black preacher's hat in his hand, but he sat down without being asked and placed his hat on the table. Pemberton couldn't help but admire the man's brazenness.

"Reverend Bolick wishes to have a word with you," Doctor Cheney said. "I told him we were busy but he was insistent."

The morning was warm and the preacher dabbed his forehead and right temple with a cotton handkerchief, not touching the left side of his face where the skin was withered and grainy, thinner seeming, as if once shaved with a planer. Caused by a house fire during his childhood, Pemberton had heard. Bolick placed the handkerchief in his coat pocket and set his clasped hands before him.

"As you have guests arriving soon, I'll be brief," Reverend Bolick said, addressing them all but looking specifically at Wilkie. "It's about the pay raise we've discussed. Even half a dollar more a week would make a huge difference, especially for the workers with families."

"Have you not seen all those men on the commissary steps?" Wilkie said, his voice quickly shifting from annoyance to anger. "Be grateful your congregation has work when so many don't. Save your proselytizing for your congregation, Reverend, and remember you serve here at our indulgence."

Bolick glared at Wilkie. The fire-scarred side of the preacher's face appeared to glow with some lingering of that long-ago violence.

"I serve only at God's indulgence," he said, reaching for his hat.

Pemberton had been looking out the window and now he spoke.

"Here comes my wife," he said, and the others turned and looked out the window as well.

Serena paused at the ridge crest before her descent. Lingering fog laid a thick mist on the ground and the ridge, but the morning's brightness broke full on the summit. Threads of sunlight appeared to have woven themselves into Serena's cropped hair, giving it the appearance of shone brass. She sat upright on the gelding, the eagle perched on the leather gauntlet as if grafted to her arm. As Bolick pushed back his chair to rise, Wilkie turned his gaze from the window and met Bolick's eyes.