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The winter of 1881 found Frances Bingham reluctantly arranging for her move from the spacious comfort of her father-inlaw's bonanza farm on the Dakota prairie to her almost-completed new home six miles away in Fargo. The arrangement that had suited both Percy and Frances since she had joined him in Dakota three years earlier - in which Percy insisted that he would soon leave his job as a newspaperman for the Fargo Argus to make a new start back east, and Frances, in turn, reasoned that it made no sense for her and their son, Houghton, to move to Percy's two rooms above the Argus in the meantime - had come to an end with Percy's newfound respectability as Fargo's delegate to the upcoming Fifteenth General Assembly of Dakota Territory. A man with a promising political career, Percy now insisted, must have his own home in Fargo, and his wife must live in that home with him, and not with his sister and father-in-law nearby.
Frances could not disagree, of course. That she had married Percy not for the opportunity to live with him but to be near his sister, Anna, was logic she was unlikely to share, no matter that her plans, her patience, her desire had come to naught. An incautious advance, the slightest pressure of Frances's lips and a tightening embrace during a good-night kiss of over a year ago had changed in a moment the easy friendship between the women. Where once Frances had dreamed of heat and passion, of sinking into the very being of Anna, of moving past clothes and skin until she had claimed spirit and soul, these days she would have been satisfied with a little warmth. What she encountered as she reached out, however, was less a reserve than the ghostly chill of absence.
And then there was the young Norwegian housekeeper, Kirsten, whose warmth and spirit seemed to grow in direct proportion to the waning of Anna's, and who, upon entering a room, was certain to search for Frances, only to become suddenly unable to meet the older woman's eyes. So Kirsten went about her business, blushing all the while, entering, retreating, and discovering soon thereafter another reason to be near Frances, which drew from...