In the spring of 1875, Amelia Turner stood at the threshold of her parents' clapboard house on the outskirts of Hartford, gazing at the muddy lane that wound its way toward the train station. She had always been a restless soul, the kind of woman who startled society ladies by leaping astride unbroken colts and riding them at a gallop through the fields. The city's finest matrons paid handsomely for her rare gift with horses, but Amelia could never bring herself to feel at home in those perfumed parlors, sipping tepid tea and trading polite nothings.

The truth was, Amelia was tired to the bone. Not just from her chores, or the dawn-to-dusk labor of running a small country household with an aging, irritable father, but from the way her days unfurled in a ceaseless, predictable loop. Tired of the looks?sometimes pitying, more often patronizing?from neighbors who wondered aloud if she would ever marry, or why she "ran a bit wild" for a girl of respectable family. Tired of the snide laughter from the boys at the livery when she bested them at harnessing a nervous gelding, tired of the sharp cut of her father's disappointment each time a new suitor left the house and never returned. Tired, most of all, of feeling like her very self was an embarrassment, a raw and ill-mannered thing that refused to be tamed.