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celebration of a daughter’s marriage. The fiddler that evening played variations all night long on the same three numbers—the Quadrille, the Virginia Reel, and something called Shooting the Buffalo, which, strangely, proved the most sedate and formal of the three. Albert quickly mastered the dances—Lucy already knew them—and even invented his own special shout when turning his partner during the Reel. Lucy said it sounded somewhere between a hog grunt and a yodel.
    Despite the occasional pleasures of the country, Albert no longer felt at home among ranchers and farmers—which he himself thought curious,since he’d lived on the frontier as a boy and had loved the outdoors. He supposed Waco had citified him more than he’d been aware; he’d come to prefer people to unpopulated space, however beautiful, and would rather debate the changing face of Reconstruction than the comparative merits of branding calves at birth versus later. He’d come to think that should he have to leave Waco for good, his preference would be to move to a still larger town, one that might offer the chance to work again as a reporter or typesetter, and to plunge into the daily maelstrom of events.
    And might offer, too, the chance to take Lucy with him. He wanted to marry her, to live with her, to set up a place of their own. He’d made that clear many months ago. Initially Señor Gonzalez had been opposed to what he called “too quick a hitchin’ ” (an opposition, Albert felt sure, based on disgruntlement over losing an efficient housekeeper). But then Gonzalez’s fortune took a decided turn for the better: the plague of rust and grasshoppers that had decimated wheat fields across north Texas for five years abruptly ended, with a resulting harvest so bountiful no one could remember its like. An elated, much more prosperous Gonzalez gave his blessing, and promptly hired a third Mexican woman.
    But Lucy herself held back, much to Albert’s bewilderment, since she’d already told him that she fully reciprocated his feelings. On the evening when he formally asked her to be his wife, her eyes shone with pleasure and she told him in a hushed voice that she’d been certain from the beginning that they were meant to spend their lives together. Albert held her close and kissed her, his heart pounding. But as she clung to him, her face became shadowed in sadness. Lucy knew they could never legally marry, not here in Texas, anyway. Mixed marriage was a crime (though white men forcing themselves on female slaves before the War hadn’t been); interracial couples could be imprisoned, deported to Liberia—or burned alive. Lucy had long ago made the decision never to reveal that her ancestry
was
, in truth, part African; she refused to let the world use the information to circumscribe her options or subject her to the scorn and indignities meted out as a matter of course to “inferior people.”
    Feeling her change in mood, Albert held her at arm’s length, the better to gauge it. Lucy did her best to feign a smile, but she’d never been good at concealing emotion. Albert sensed, suddenly and with certainty, that he knew exactly what was bothering her. The time had finally come to talk openly about “the rumors.”
    He broached the subject farcically, puffing out his chest like a stage buffoon as he announced how lucky Lucy should feel at gaining entrance to a family as accomplished and patriotic as his.
    “High-toned folks, no doubt,” Lucy sniffed. “Meaning boring and self-satisfied.”
    “None of them as sprightly as me, that’s for sure!”
    “Well, my ancestry’s just as illustrious as yours,” Lucy said tartly—fully realizing what topic they were about to embark on. She gratefully picked up on Albert’s farcical tone.
“More
illustrious, come to think of it. Several great civilizations course through my veins. All you got is that thin Yankee stuff.”
    “What?” Albert mocked. “I’ll have you know, young Texas miss,