Chapter 2

Once Walt was a little stronger, I brought him along to the market.

He couldn't do heavy work, but that face of his had to be worth something. A little extra draw for the stall never hurt.

I was wrong.

The moment he stepped up to the stall, he drew a crowd all right. A mob of older women packed in so tight one couldn't squeeze through, and not a single one of them was there to buy meat.

They just wanted to get close. Some of them even reached over and grabbed his hands.

"Young man, how much is the pork?"

"Young man, are you for sale too?"

Walt stood there red-faced and completely lost, shooting me helpless looks over the crowd.

It was chaos. We barely sold anything, and Walt had been taken advantage of the whole time.

Then a carriage pulled up in front of the stall. The curtain lifted, and out looked the daughter of Simon Langley, the richest man in town. She immediately set her sights on Walt.

"A face like that, wasted in a meat stall reeking of blood and fat. What a shame."

Vivian Langley stepped out of the carriage and walked straight up to him, then she reached out and tilted his chin up with one finger.

"Come home with me. Be my companion. I'll give you everything you could want. You won't have to spend another day suffering beside this butcher woman."

Then she pulled out a bag of coins and tossed it at him like she was throwing scraps. It hit him square in the face.

Walt pressed a hand to his cheek where the bag had struck. He stood there for a moment, stunned.

He didn't get angry. Instead, he slowly bent down to pick it up.

The bag contained ten silver coins. That was enough to keep the stall running for half a month.

The fool. Was he trying to help me with the money?

Something hot and furious shot straight through me.

I stepped forward and planted my foot on top of the bag of coins, then knocked Vivian's hand away from Walt before she could touch him again.

"Who do you think you are, coming onto my turf and pulling this nonsense!"

I pulled Walt behind me and got right in her face.

"This is my man. He's not for sale at any price. Take your filthy money and get out!"

Vivian had clearly never been spoken to like that in her life. She let out a shriek and snapped her fingers at her servants. They overturned my entire stall in one go.

Cuts of meat scattered across the ground, rolling through the mud and the rotting vegetable scraps.

I stared at the meat scattered across the ground and felt my eyes sting.

That was days' worth of income, just lying in the mud.

Vivian and her people left without a backward glance, taking their smug satisfaction with them.

Walt didn't say a word the whole way home. He just walked with his head down, silent.

I wanted to say something to comfort him, but I couldn't find the words.

Then he stopped. He turned around and looked at me.

"Yvonne. Sell me. The money the Langley family offered would be enough to keep you comfortable. Enough to fix up the house. Enough so you wouldn't have to work this hard anymore."

I jerked the wheelbarrow to a stop, tears streaming down my face.

I grabbed his collar and hauled him close.

"Even you think I can't provide for you? I'm a butcher. I'm not some woman who sells men for money! Say something like that again and I'll chop you up and feed you to the pigs!"

Walt looked at me, a little stunned. Then he slowly reached up and wiped the tears off my face with his thumb, clumsy and gentle all at once.

"Alright. No selling me. Don't cry, Yvonne."

That night, we got back to our broken-down house, washed the dirt off the scattered meat, and boiled it plain in a pot of water.

There was no salt or seasoning, and it tasted bitter.

After we ate, Walt glanced at my account book sitting open on the table. It was a mess, numbers scrawled everywhere with no real order.

He frowned slightly.

Without really thinking about it, he picked up the pencil and started marking things up.

"This total is off by three coins. This entry was missed entirely. And here, if you bundle the offcuts with the prime cuts instead of selling them separately, you'd double the profit."

He kept talking quietly, the pencil moving across the page without hesitation.

I leaned over to look, and my jaw dropped.

His handwriting was a hundred times better than the most educated man in town. And he ran those numbers faster than I could ever tally.

I watched him in the lamplight, his face calm and focused. Suddenly, I felt that maybe having a kept man wasn't so terrible after all.