My Gown Had No Gems, So I Walked Out of My Own Bonding Ceremony novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Twenty-Two Letters

In Ironwood Hall Clara reads letters in a hand almost like hers, Jasper sets his terms for her week as a guest, and he shows her the empty silver box that carried every gem he sent.

The drive around the lake took forty minutes, and neither of us said anything for the first thirty.

Jasper drove with both hands on the wheel and the heater turned all the way up.

Margot's coat was still around my shoulders, and the string-tied bundle sat in my lap.

I did not open it until the road crossed the Ironwood line and the first porch lights came up out of the dark.

The top letter was on cream paper, folded in thirds.

Dear Jasper,

The snowflake is the most beautiful thing I have ever owned. I keep it under my pillow and take it out when the house is quiet.

Thank you for thinking of me. I hope we can meet soon.

Yours, Clara

The date was the spring I turned six.

I read it twice.

"I don't own a snowflake," I said. "I have never owned one."

"I know that now," said Jasper.

"You only have my word for that."

"I have more than your word. I watched you look at your own gown and not understand why it was bare."

I turned the paper over and held it under the dome light.

The handwriting was round and neat, and it was almost mine.

The capital C closed on itself the way I make it.

The tail on the final "a" looped back, which I have never done in my life.

Whoever wrote this had seen my handwriting and copied it with care.

I pulled out the next letter, and the next.

Each one said I wore the gem to Council, to the lake, to the long winter dinners, and that I thought of him when I did.

Not one of them said anything about me.

Whoever wrote them had never once asked what I was really like.

"I was nine when my father sent the first gem," Jasper said, watching the road. "He told me to put a letter in with it, in my own words, so you'd know a person had cut it."

"What did you write?"

"That it was a stone for a girl who couldn't read yet. That I hoped she liked the shine."

He said it flatly and kept his eyes on the road.

"Then the next spring a letter came back, and it said thank you."

The Ironwood Hall was a long stone building with a slate roof and every window lit.

A woman in a flannel shirt met us at the door with her arms folded, and she looked me over from head to boots.

"This is Clara Winslow," Jasper said. "She's a guest."

"I'm the beta," the woman said. "I'm told I'm to call you Miss Winslow."

"And I'm told you've been struck, which makes you nobody's Miss anything. I'll call you Clara."

"That's fine."

"You hungry?"

"Yes," I said, and my stomach answered before I did.

"Good. The cook made enough for forty people because he doesn't believe in small pots."

I ate three bowls of stew standing in the kitchen with Margot's coat still on.

Nobody asked me a single question about the ceremony.

The beta watched me eat, nodded once, and went to bed.

Afterward Jasper took me up a back staircase to a room with a fire already going.

There was a bed with a quilt, a basin, a window onto the frozen lake and a key in the door.

"Terms," said Jasper.

He stood in the doorway, not inside.

"You stay a week as my guest. You have a room, and the key stays with you. I sleep at the other end of the hall."

"Fine."

"Nobody here says the word bond to you. I won't either."

"Fine."

"You can leave any hour, by the front door, and I'll drive you wherever you want to go."

"What do you want in return?"

His jaw moved.

"I want to know who wrote those letters," he said. "That's all."

I looked at the scarred knuckles on his left hand, resting on the doorframe.

They were big hands, rough from the mine and the cold, and I did not know why I had noticed them twice.

"Why?" I said. "You could have said nothing. You could have let my father have his version."

"Because I'd sent twenty-two gems," Jasper said.

"And I was standing in a circle of four hundred people, looking at the one gown I never saw them on."

He went to his desk in the hall and came back with a flat silver box about the size of my palm.

He opened it and turned it toward the firelight.

Inside, the velvet was empty.

Pressed into the lid was a little six-pointed mark, the same mark the Ironwood miners cut into the arm of every snowflake they sold.

"That is what I sent you," Jasper said. "Twenty-two of them, in twenty-two boxes just like this one."

I held the box in both hands.

It was lighter than anything I had ever been given.

"I've never seen one," I said.

"Then someone has," he said. "Someone's been seeing them every day."

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