The Moonstone Heiress- Chapter One: Waiting for the Market

The farm ran entirely without technology.

No machines worked the fields. No automated pumps watered the crops, and no humming equipment harvested them when summer came to an end. Everything depended on the labor of Carlone's uncle, her mother, and the seasonal workers who arrived each spring and disappeared again after harvest.

Carlone was still a child then.

Years later, she would remember those busy summers with her mother as some of the happiest days of her life. There were other things she would try very hard not to remember.

Her aunt was one of them.

Aunty was a harsh, judgmental woman who could turn the smallest mistake into evidence of some terrible flaw in Carlone's character. Carlone's mother frequently had to intervene before a scolding became something worse. Most days, Aunty remained inside the main house with her daughters, Kuli and Faya, while everyone else worked.

Kuli was slightly older than Carlone and seemed determined to imitate her mother in every possible way. Faya was a few years younger and stoutly built, with a temperament much more like her father's.

Kuli never missed an opportunity to remind Carlone that she and her mother had been thrown out of the house.

Carlone remembered the night it happened.

Her mother and uncle had returned late from the farmers market. Aunty had been waiting for them, furious. She made accusations Carlone didn't understand about what her mother and uncle had been doing together and why they had taken so long.

Carlone had been too young to understand the argument.

Later, Faya whispered that perhaps she and Carlone could be "real sisters."

Kuli slapped her for saying it.

After that night, Carlone and her mother were no longer allowed to sleep in the damp basement beneath the house. They were sent to the loft above the barn instead. Their exile remained permanent even when winter came, and the cold crept through the wooden walls.

Her mother claimed she preferred it.

Carlone did too.

At least the barn was quiet.

They kept their trips to the main house brief and, whenever possible, waited until Aunty and the girls had gone to church. Once, Carlone asked her mother why they didn't simply leave the farm altogether.

"Because she's my sister," her mother told her.

Carlone waited for the rest of the explanation.

None came.

Her last summer on the farm became her favorite.

Every blueberry bush seemed determined to burst beneath the weight of its fruit. The pumpkins were already swelling to enormous sizes, and the peach trees produced the sweetest peaches Carlone had ever tasted. In the evenings, she and her mother ate bacon-

and-celery soup with the workers beneath the gazebo while the light faded over the fields.

Aunty and the rest of the family ate inside the main house.

Carlone preferred it that way.

Dinner outside meant she didn't have to endure Aunty correcting the way she sat, the way she ate, the state of her hair, or whatever fault the woman happened to discover in Carlone's mother that evening.

The seasonal workers were mostly young adults living away from home for the first time and older men who seemed grateful to have somewhere useful to be. They treated Carlone kindly enough. While they handled the difficult work in the fields, Carlone wandered between the rows picking insects from the plants and dropping them into a mason jar filled with soapy water.

The workers slept in tents near the stables at the far end of the property, where an outdoor kitchen had been built for them.

Aunty rarely went near it.

She considered the workers beneath her.

One afternoon, Faya saw Carlone struggling to carry a bucket of compost tea toward the field and hurried over to help.

"Faya!"

Her mother's voice stopped her.

Faya froze.

"If you do a man's work, you'll look like one soon enough!"

Faya's shoulders dropped. She released the bucket and trudged back toward the house, giving Carlone an apologetic shrug before disappearing inside.

Carlone watched her go.

Sometimes she thought Faya had to live like an old woman.

Her uncle tolerated his wife's moods with remarkable patience. Aunty was frail and frequently ill, and without her daughters beside her she seemed incapable of being alone.

Faya shared her father's steadiness.

Kuli did not.

Kuli and her mother always seemed to be waiting for something to upset them. Carlone sometimes wondered if anger was simply how they understood the world.

Her mother had developed another strategy.

She ignored them.

When Aunty insulted her sunburned skin, or Kuli made some remark about Carlone's tangled hair, Carlone's mother behaved as though neither woman had spoken.

Carlone hadn't always been capable of doing the same.

One winter, years before, she had cried when Aunty and the girls left them behind while they went to the church dinner. Carlone had been desperate to attend because it was one of the few occasions when she could wear the dress her mother had made for her.

She had put it on that evening with enormous pride. Her mother had embroidered tiny holly leaves along the fabric and crocheted lace for the sleeves.

Carlone wept against her mother's chest when she realized they weren't going.

Her mother wiped her face.

"We're better off," she said. "Now we can go into town."

"For what?"

"To dance."

They walked to the winter festival instead.

There were lanterns strung over the street, music in the square, and people dancing who didn't seem to care who Carlone's mother was or where Carlone slept.

That was the night Carlone first understood something important.

Perhaps being accepted by Aunty and her church wasn't something worth wanting.

The following summer was warm without becoming unbearable. Rain seemed courteous enough to fall mostly at night, and the workers knew their jobs so well that the farm moved with the rhythm of a practiced dance.

Every weekend, Carlone traveled to market with her mother and uncle.

The journey took only half an hour, but that was far enough from the farm that Aunty never came with them.

Those were happy days.

Her mother chatted with neighboring vendors before wandering through the shops to admire all the things Aunty insisted she had no business owning. During those excursions, Carlone stayed behind with her uncle.

Just the two of them.

Carlone liked his smile. When he grinned, the wrinkles across his forehead reminded her of the squashed face of a farmhand's dog from several summers before. She never told him this.

Her job at the stall was selling Aunty's moonstone jewelry.

She wasn't very good at it.

Then again, neither was anyone else.

The jewelry was pretty enough, and the stones had value, but the country had been trapped in an economic downturn for Carlone's entire life. Her uncle said the market had once been so crowded with buyers that a person could barely walk between the stalls.

Whenever Carlone asked what had happened, his answer changed.

Sometimes it was bad leadership.

Sometimes it was the wars in the northern countries.

Once he blamed venomous wolves.

Carlone knew perfectly well that venomous wolves belonged to the sort of stories old widows told children to frighten them into coming home before dark.

At least she was fairly certain they did.

Whatever had happened to the country, Carlone treasured those afternoons beside her uncle. At the market she wasn't the bastard child her respectable aunt whispered about.

She was simply Carlone.

Then came the final market day of the year.

It was also the worst.

Word had spread that blood fever was moving toward their province.

Several shops were already closed when they arrived. Others were being boarded up.

Instead of browsing as she usually did, Carlone's mother went from stall to stall asking what people had heard.

Her uncle refused to leave immediately.

If the rumors were true, he said, this might be their last chance to make money for a long while.

Everyone knew about blood fever.

Children learned about it almost as soon as they learned about war.

The illness could kill within forty-eight hours. It began with fever and pain and ended with the body failing from within. Those few who survived were often left permanently weakened, and many did not live long afterward.

Carlone tried not to think about it.

Summer wasn't even over.

The farm was producing its best harvest in years. Pumpkins still swelled beneath their leaves. Blueberries still waited to be picked. Peaches still ripened beneath the sun.

Yet with the faintest chill beginning to creep into the evening air, it felt as though the year had suddenly ended.

Not one moonstone necklace sold.

As the market emptied around them, Carlone rearranged the jewelry again and again, pretending she might discover some better way to display it.

Her uncle finally reached over and patted her head.

"Chin up."

Carlone looked around.

Most of the other stalls had already disappeared behind shutters. Wagons rattled away along the road. Somewhere nearby, a shopkeeper hammered boards across his windows.

They were among the last people to leave.

On the journey home, no one talked very much.

Carlone knew her mother and uncle were worried about the fever.

But she thought they were sad about something else too.

The market was the only place where the three of them could be together without Aunty watching.

Now there would be no more market days.

Not until next year.

At least, Carlone thought, there would be next year.