Rescue Ranch — Susan Hart

In the spring of 1875, Amelia Dawson watched the city of Boston recede behind her carriage with a thrill bordering on terror. The last of the crocuses had barely opened their purple mouths in the Public Garden when she left, her sole trunk lashed to the back and her mother's tears barely dry. The air was thick with the coal-smoke of factories and, in her mind, the suffocating expectations of her family.She had come of age behind lace curtains and piano music, with a plate always warm and a future mapped in the careful script of debutante invitations. Her mother, a woman of subtle tyranny, was convinced that Amelia's destiny was to marry a wholesaler's son and bear children sturdy enough to survive the New England winters.Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Dawson household had a ritualistic quality that bordered on the liturgical. At precisely four o'clock, the drawing room curtains were pinned back to gather every stray sunbeam, and a crackling fire was coaxed to life regardless of the calendar's insistence on spring.