The Prophet's Wife by Libbie Grant

Author:Libbie Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

June 28, 1844

Nauvoo, Illinois

Emma has dressed herself by the time Eliza comes, though her fingers are numb. Strange. Why should it strike her this way, take her like an illness? It’s only a fact of the world, a thing she has known since Joseph first agreed to surrender. He is dead. But the world goes on turning.

Strange, that a body should go on living, hands go on working the buttons of a dress, and strange the way your feet slide into your boots and the petticoats fall down around your ankles, the way you can look into the glass and smooth your hair and see the old redness of your eyes, the hardness of your mouth and know what you’ve known all along is true. And your heart is still beating, and you refuse to stop breathing. You don’t even need to think about it. Your body is hungry for breath, but it shouldn’t be. The grief and guilt ought to be enough to kill you.

Eliza slides in sideways through the door. She almost doesn’t open the door at all, as if she can pass like a ghost through a solid world. Once Emma had imagined Eliza could see into another reality, a realm misty as a dream and fitted for her remarkable, far-seeing eyes. Perhaps she’d been right, and Eliza was always a being from another world—this shell of a woman, this lost spirit, drifting silently in.

“You know Porter has returned from Carthage,” Emma says. No break to her voice. There is work to be done.

Eliza nods. She can’t look up, can’t meet her eye.

“You must be strong,” Emma says.

Eliza shakes her head. Her mouth buckles; her eyes close. She shakes her head, and then she nods—denial, acceptance. An angel told her, after all. She has known, even before Emma knew it.

For a long time, there is only silence, except for one little closed-lipped mew of pain from Eliza. Crows call from somewhere outside, out across the orchard. The Mansion is shuddering around them, the girls in their rooms, in their private spheres of grief, feeling what Eliza feels.

Emma says, “God’s will be done. We can’t know His meaning. We can’t understand His designs. It isn’t for us to know. It’s only for us to obey with perfect faith.”

“My faith.” She can barely make out Eliza’s words, they’re so strangled and thin. “My faith is nothing to me now.”

“Your faith is everything. To you, and to God.”

Faith will hold you up, Eliza. Faith will turn your back to iron, stop your ears, shut your eyes if you let it. Faith will drown every true thing with its inescapable tide. Her mother and father are dead by now. They must be. Dead like Joseph, and she never saw them again after she left Harmony. She never read a word from her mother in a letter, never told her father he’d been right all along. It was faith that made all this.

Emma says, “I told you first.”

“Why? Why did you bring me here, why did you give me this terrible news, I cannot bear it, Emma.

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