"Abbey come take this bucket and go out to the well, I must have water for washing clothes, do not dawdle." The impatient voice called out and wait a moment for confirmation. "Abbey!"<br/>The shout infiltrated the layers of space between the woman sitting by the fireplace with her tea drinking companion and the girl sitting in the attic reading by the light of the window.<br/>But she didn’t hear the shout. She jumped from building to building avoiding the possibility of capture. By this stage she was reading aloud from the well worn book in her hand. “You will never get me!” she shouted back at them. Abbey jumped from couch to couch in the small space of the attic her free arm extending out like she was parrying a sword turning to face her enemies. “I never poisoned him at all!” Abbey shouted startling her mother’s guest.<br/><br/>Patricia Callahan sighed shaking her head, gesturing her guest to stay.<br/>“Never mind her nonsense Lydia, she likes to carry on—I rue the day I allowed her to go to that school. Ever since she knew her letters she always goes to the Parsons for a book to read, sometimes neglecting her duties. I tell her she won’t ever get a husband that way. But she can get so hoity toity sometimes.”<br/>Lydia shook her head, sorry for her friend’s delimma. “She is what, nine and ten?”<br/>Patricia flushed at the assumption, uncomfortable with the truth. “Nay, one and twenty”<br/>Practically on the shelf was the unsaid words between them.<br/><br/>“Ma, I’m going outside!” the girl they spoke about bounded into the kitchen with her hair once in a chignon now loose about her face.<br/>“Abbey, you haven’t finished your chores yet and yer pa and brother’s will be coming back starved!”<br/>Patricia complained, raising half out of her seat as if to try and physically hold the girl back.<br/><br/>“Ma, I am going to finish it. I promise...I will be back.” And before her Ma could call out to her to make her stay, Abbey escaped from the confines of the cottage, clutching her book in hand.<br/>In part people underestimated Abbey because she was small: five-two and a hundred and two pounds, not physically imposing, certainly not intimidating, likewise she was shapely but not a doll with delicate features, slender shoulders, tiny waist—all contributed to an impression of fragility that was misleading. She was a strange girl and a farmer’s daughter with no clear prospects in the world but marriage, babies, and farm chores. And as she hurried further and further away from the small home where she lived with her ma and pa and her brothers—she felt the shackles of her circumstance fall away, especially as she escaped to the tops of the hills.<br/>