Excerpt from The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I bought a ticket on what is called a line boat, departing in an hour. It is sixty feet long and ten feet wide, and used mainly for freight which, the clerk warned me, meant not as select a company as I would find on a packet boat. As it is drawn by mules rather than horses, it is slower, but it is also cheaper. I am paying one cent a mile, which comes to three dollars and ninety cents. It will take five days to reach Buffalo.

I bought some peanuts and a ham sandwich and cider with Mr. Lombardi's half–dollar, reckoning it an unexpected treat, and ate the peanuts while I waited on the landing. Alongside me was an elderly woman holding a small gilded cage with a rabbit in it. Also a minister who asked if he might preach to us from the Bible. I didn't know how I could refuse and said nothing, but the woman with the rabbit said, "I'd prefer not. I'm given to seizures."

* * *

It is my third day on the line boat. I sit on a three–legged stool on the roof of the main cabin, although there are two spindly chairs in the bow, occupied by the old lady and her rabbit. A row of barrels and narrow crates line the sides of the boat, beginning at the bow. I sleep below deck in a wooden frame with a sacking bottom. The others sleep in cots packed into the main cabin, the men separated from the women by a serge curtain, strung each night on a sagging wire.

I feel unaccountably pleased with myself. I haven't felt this way in a long time, maybe never. I am on my way to Buffalo. No one has clapped his hands around my neck or burned me. Except for Mr. Lombardi, I haven't told a lie in five days. Now and then, I am frightened by my freedom, wondering what I am meant to do with it. In the past, that is a week ago, it was a relief when things remained merely themselves.

One of the boatmen, a slight Irish boy, high-shouldered and bony with a chipped front tooth, saw that I had no dinner last night and told me that I could eat each evening in the main cabin provided I pay for it. "It will cost you twenty cents," he said, taking a certain pride in what seemed to him an exorbitance. Tonight I sat at a long communal table with the boatmen and one other woman and ate baked beans and pork and green tomatoes. No one spoke, which was fine with me.

My penknife was stolen from my suitcase last night.

* * *

The boy's name is Dennis. He told me was an orphan with a sister in a convent in Ottawa, which did not surprise me as I learned at Dexter Asylum to spot an orphan a mile away. He has a tin whistle, a Doolin whistle, he says, and when the teasing by his fellow hands goes too far (the outline of a large crucifix is clearly visible beneath his shirt), he plays his whistle until they settle down. When he saw a book in my lap, he said he was teaching himself to read and asked if he could borrow it from me. I gave him Ivanhoe as I had finished it that morning and did not want to carry it. He returned half an hour later, having noticed it was a library book, to ask if he was breaking the law as the book was long overdue, but I assured him it would be all right. When my hat blew away, he gave me his neckerchief to wear around my head. I have no mirror, but I could see myself in the canal. I look like my mother.

Last night, I dreamed that Florence and I lived in Nova Scotia, and this morning, I almost jumped from the boat to find my way home even though I know Ank would kill me.

* * *

I neglected to bring certain necessities in my haste, not only food, but the means to wash myself. When I began to bleed, I had nothing to put between my legs. Dennis must have seen the blood on my skirt, but he said nothing, handing me a few dirty dishcloths with the tips of his fingers, as if I had already soiled them. He sits on the deck beside my chair when the packet stops for the night to practice his letters on the endpapers of Ivanhoe. I suspect that he would like to visit me later, but I do not fancy him. Besides, although I am not what you would call fat, I would flatten him.

Excerpted from The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore. Copyright © 2023 by Susanna Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.