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your lack of faith. If God intends to make ye a Mormon, He will find a way. I won’t speak of it further.”
    “You will be the only one.”
    Catherine laughed. “Yes, we do preach, don’t we? It is because we find such happiness in our religion that we want to share it with others.”
    “But I don’t understand why you can’t be happy with it in Scotland.”
    “Because the millennium is near upon us. It is in us to want to be collected to Zion. Every loyal Saint wants to go to the Salt Lake Valley.”
    Later, when John pressed her, as he had repeatedly since they boarded the ship, to consider joining the church, Anne repeated the woman’s words: “If God wants me to become a Mormon, He, not you, will tell me.”
    The voyage was not a difficult one, with only a little rough weather, and Anne was entranced with the endless sea rolling around her, with the solitude of it, even though she was surrounded by noisy converts. When her children played or napped, she stood at the railing of the ship, watching the waves break around her, marveling at their power to move the ship. She liked staying on deck even when it rained, feeling the drops of water roll over her. Once during a storm, after she had taken cover and was watching the foam that was tossed about in the waves, she saw the sailors raise a sail and listened as one yelled, “Hoist higher.”
    “Higher,” the men called to one another across the noise of the wind, “higher.”
    An old woman who was nearly deaf heard the shout and cried out, “Fire! Fire!”
    A fire was what passengers feared most on a ship, and the Mormons ran out onto the deck, crying out to one another, looking for water buckets, only to learn there was no fire at all, only an order to hoist higher. Despite the panic, Anne found the situation comical, and she could not help thinking what fools the Mormons were.
    One night midway through the voyage, she was awakened by Emma Lee, who slept beside her on the cramped bunk, as the girl tossed about and whimpered in her sleep. Anne reached over to still the child and discovered Emma Lee’s forehead was as hot as a stovetop. She picked up the sleeping child and carried her out onto the deck, thinking the sea air would cool her. But the child began to cough and cry a little. “Wake up, Emma Lee,” Anne said to the six-year-old, thinking the girl might have had a bad dream. But the child would not wake.
    Anne found water and, using the hem of her nightdress, rubbed it on the child’s forehead, but that did nothing to cool her. “Precious girl, wake for Mama,” Anne whispered. She shook the child a little, but Emma Lee did not respond. Frightened now, Anne asked a man who was standing on the deck, looking out at the ocean, to stay with her daughter while she fetched her husband, then slipped back into the bowels of the ship to find John. He followed her to the deck and picked up the stricken girl, calling, “Emma Lee! Emma Lee!”
    The man on deck disappeared and returned a few moments later with two elders. One of them, a physician, reached out and took the child, looked into her eyes and mouth, examined her chest. “We must bring down the fever. My wife will help.” He nodded at a woman who had joined them. Without being told what to do, the woman fetched a pail of water and some cloths and began to sponge Emma Lee.
    “I’ll do it,” Anne said.
    “Then I’ll pray,” the woman told her, kneeling on the deck. The men, along with John, got down on their knees beside the woman, and although she felt the prayers of Mormons carried no special weight with God, Anne nonetheless was touched by the earnestness of these strangers. In a few minutes, a dozen of the Saints, some in their nightclothes, were kneeling beside Emma Lee, asking the Lord to spare her.
    One told Anne that she had saved an apple, which was stored in her trunk. “It might cool her throat. Would she eat it?” Anne shook her head, replying that the child was not conscious.