Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
The way she says those last words, the weight on them, makes me realize that the energy around us has shifted in some way, like the world feels incomplete, as if a piece of a complete puzzle has been taken away.
“Gone…” I say uneasily, my heart a thunderous sound in my head.
“That he’s left Sleepy Hollow.”
And even though she doesn’t add anything to that, I can almost hear it in her head.
He’s left Sleepy Hollow for good.
At first, I think it’s me. My fault. That I scared him or that perhaps he took my innocence and ran, that I was used and discarded, or that he discovered he didn’t like me in that way after all, despite how he made it seem last night. But not only does that not seem like Brom, there’s still the thing he said to me at the start of the night:
“I’ve done a bad thing.”
Chapter 2
Kat
1875
“You’re so lucky, Kat,” Mary says to me with a sigh, leaning against the fence post as she stares up at me, a wistful look on her freckled face.
My mare, Snowdrop, shifts her weight from under me, probably wondering why I’m not dismounting and tying her up to the post as I usually do when I visit with Mary. Little does my horse know that I’m not staying. Today is the first day of classes at Sleepy Hollow Institute, and I have to stop by Mary’s house so that her younger brother, Mathias, can escort me to the school.
The whole thing is ridiculous. I know the way, and I’ve also been riding off into the town whenever I want with nary an escort, ever since I was a young girl. But my mother was insistent that I don’t ride to the school alone. I have no idea why since it’s not an especially long ride, and the weather today is warm and pleasant, like summer has bled over into autumn. And it’s not like I’m a child anymore—I just turned nineteen a month ago and am capable of taking care of myself.
But my mother isn’t someone you’ll win against when it comes to the battle of will.
“Do you want to trade places?” I ask Mary, sounding hopeful despite knowing how futile it is. Mary wanted more than anything to attend the institute. The tuition is free, they accept women in all areas of education, and many students are said to go on to do stupendous things with their degrees. Mary has always had a dream of becoming the first female botanist, and the institute has a biology and botany department.
But the school isn’t open to just anyone.
Mary scrunches up her nose. “I think they’d notice,” she says with a deeper sigh. “Just promise me that you’ll teach me everything you learn. I don’t care what it is.”
“Even Shakespeare?”
She laughs, a light ringing sound. “Even that.”
While Mary yearns for education, that school is the last place I want to be. I’d grown up believing I wouldn’t have to fulfill the family tradition of attending the institute. For so long, my future had been set out for me by my parents: become Brom Van Brunt’s wife and start a family. But ever since he disappeared four years ago, my mother changed trajectory. I thought the moment I became eighteen that she’d try to marry me off to someone else, but instead, she told me I’d be off to Sleepy Hollow Institute to earn a liberal arts degree like all the Van Tassel women before.
What I really want is to leave Sleepy Hollow for good. Part of me wants to try and find my childhood friend and onetime lover, see where Brom could have gone and ask him why he could so easily leave me behind. Another part of me wants to head west, discover the new lands and see my country through new eyes. Yet another part wants to go to Manhattan and write a book and eat at cafes and get lost in the people and sounds and life of the big city that beckons just thirty miles south of here.
But my mother had other plans for me. Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about slipping out the window, much like I did on the last night with Brom, and disappearing into the night, never to return.
Then I remember my father’s dying words.
“Watch your mother,” he said, pulling my ear to his mouth as he took his last breath. “Watch her.”
With endless tears in my eyes, I promised him I would, and since I’d already broken one promise to him, I knew this one I’d carry to the grave.
I would watch over my mother.
I would stay in Sleepy Hollow.
And because it means so much to her and that side of the family, I would go to the institute and try to become the very person I’d hoped to find if I ran away.