Emma Harlington's body shook against the passenger car's hard, wooden bench. Exiles from Dry Acre crowded the bench, and their mood further soured for the presence of the woman whose spasms trembled her body and made travel upon that train all the more uncomfortable. Too many hopeful passengers had crowded the small depot outside of Dry Acre in anticipation of that train to allow Emma the opportunity to purchase privacy with the coins that filled her purse. Each passenger car crowded with the living who desperately strove to lengthen the miles between them and those awful, dusty acres that languished beneath a rancher's greed and a bone-shaker's curse. Nor had Emma's coin spoken with the same persuasive powers its luster once knew. So Emma shook and trembled without privacy. Her limbs kicked uncontrollably before every eye. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Her hands clutched at the air and pulled at the locks of her frayed hair. Her teeth ground upon one another, and her jaw clutched shut. Crowded upon a hard bench, Emma Harlington, who had been considered the pearl of Dry Acre, writhed in the seizures that twisted her bones.
The seizures tormented Emma in the days following the descending swarm that devoured her father's beasts and Emma's beloved Wilson. While her father raged and salvaged any horse he could find for his posse, Emma had trembled in her room, gasping for breath as the spasms gave her little peace. Dry Acre held nothing more for Emma Harlington. Wilson's bones were buried beneath the dust. Her father was only an angry and bitter man. And so that night when her father's posse rode to inflict Harlington revenge, Emma dressed in her best lace and boarded the first train to come to that depot outside of Dry Acre. She prayed James Harlow and his tycoon family would love her regardless of her seizures, but Emma doubted they would. She doubted the Harlows would welcome her when they watched her tremble, but Emma knew of no where else to turn.
That train away from Dry Acre crowded with those fleeing Harlington gold and Turner magic. She would judge none of those as superstitious who crowded her when the first seizure gripped her. She too fled rather than further face Maggie Turner's curse. Emma prayed while she had no control of her body that those around her did not deem her unnatural.
Emma was no longer a pearl, but one passenger sympathized with that shaking Harlington daughter.
“Somebody bring me a wet cloth for her forehead.”
A middle-aged matron clothed in the dark Sunday attire demanded of a proper exodus bent over Emma and fought to keep the shaking woman's hand from clawing at those forced to share a passenger bench with one trembling in seizure.
“Leave her be, Marie,” a man who sported a handle-bar mustache and a derby hat pulled at the matron. “Let her shake. No good will come to us for helping Randolph Harlington's daughter.”
Marie grunted and freed herself from the man's tug. “You have many good qualities for a husband, Josef, but courage isn't one of them. I thought the Turner curse only applied to Harlington coin, and I know we've never had much of that.”
Josef grimaced. “You're too stubborn for a good wife. You let that girl shake.”
Marie's eyes pleaded with those in the passenger car. “Somebody. A wet cloth. Something to give the girl a little comfort until the seizures stop.”
No one moved. Too many passengers crowded upon that train, and those nearest to the shaking Emma Harlington resented that they could not find more space to back away from the cursed and trembling woman.
“Poor child.” Marie stroked Emma's hair.
Josef wrung his hands. “That shaking woman will be the ruin of us.”
“She is a wicked thing,” a faceless voice hissed in the passenger car.
“She is unnatural,” growled another stranger.
“Look how she shakes.”
“She is ugly.”
“She is an abomination!”
Thus the curse of the Turners stretched even into the fleeing passenger car. Maggie's power proved more powerful than that albino daughter imagined when she uttered the curse's words while cradling her brother Samuel's shattered face. She had summoned such terrible magic when she traced her father's symbols upon the ground of the Harlington ranch. Even her father had underestimated his daughter's inherent, unnatural strength in the focusing of the dark arts. Maggie weaved a wicked a curse, and its vengeance turned the woman Dry Acre had regarded as a pearl into an abomination.
“Leave her be, Marie.” Josef implored his wife.
Marie failed to find any mercy in the passenger car. That daughter of Randolhp Harlington was as tainted as anyone else, and, truly, each passenger upon that train would in the end face their afflictions and punishments alone. Marie was only one woman, and one wife was not enough to soothe Emma Harlington's hurt. In the end, a medicine did not always exist for each disease.