She swept back to her carriage and Eleanor stood in the doorway with her hand on Clara's shoulder and watched her go and did not let the girl see how hard her heart was pounding. But when the carriage had disappeared down the road, Clara looked up at her and her fierceness had melted back into a child's uncertainty. "Is it true?" She asked softly. "What she said?
That your other family sent you away? That they said you were that word?" Eleanor knelt down. She had promised herself never again to make herself small. But she had also learned this past month that there were harder and braver things than pride.
And one of them was letting a child see you honest. "Yes," she said. "It's true." My husband died and his family decided I wasn't worth keeping. And they said cruel things and they put me on a train and they sent me away.
That part's all true, Clara. I won't lie to you about it. Clara's eyes filled. That's the meanest thing I ever heard. It felt that way, too.
Eleanor tucked a strand of hair behind the girl's ear. But here's the part they got wrong, sweetheart. They thought getting rid of me was them winning something. And instead, it put me on a stagecoach to Cedar Hollow, where a man found me in the snow and asked me to stay, and where a girl I'd never met turned out to have more courage in her whole small self than anyone in Boston ever had. So they can say whatever ugly thing they like at that hearing.
It doesn't change one thing about what I have now. "What do you have now?" Clara asked. And it wasn't a challenge. It was a real question from a child who needed to hear the answer said plain.
You Eleanor said simply and Henry and your father. I have a family Clara the one they said I'd never be worth having. And no letter from Boston is going to convince me I don't deserve it. Not anymore and not ever again. Clara threw her arms around Eleanor's neck and held on.
And Eleanor held her right back, kneeling on the cold porch in the last of the winter light, and neither of them heard Nathaniel come up the path until he was standing right there beside them. He'd heard enough, though. Eleanor could tell by his face. "Prudence Whitaker," she said before he could ask. "Charles's sister came to tell me Boston sending a statement to the magistrate.