by Alice White
“Miss? Should I send for a doctor? I will, right away. It might take just a bit of time but he’ll be here, that’s for sure.”
With what felt like a very great effort, Sacha once again pulled herself out of her own head. She was being terribly rude, something she never was, and the last thing she wanted was to make this man uncomfortable. She was just struggling to navigate her way through her ghosts, who were threatening to envelope her all of the way in Kansas. But no. No. She would not allow them to. She had come here for a new kind of a life and that was what she intended to have. She didn’t expect it to be a brilliant life, to be everything she had once hoped for. The sickening ushering into the true way of the world handed to her with William’s harsh words had hammered that idealism right out of her. But it would be a more quiet life, at least. She was relatively certain of that and for the time being, that was enough. Or it was enough if she could make it so that the people she had come to live with did not immediately decide that she was crazy. She was going to have to start speaking for that to occur.
“No!” she replied quickly and with just a little bit too much volume, “No, thank you. That’s very sweet but I don’t need a doctor. I’m sorry to have alarmed you. I suppose I’m just a bit tired from the journey. I’ve come quite a long way.”
Something about the man’s face changed when she said that, changed in some way she could not begin to understand. Looking at that face was the first time she stopped to really look at the man at all, and once she did she felt herself blush ever so slightly. He was not like any man she had ever seen before. She sincerely doubted that there were any men who looked like him in all of New York City. If there were, she had certainly never seen them. The best word she could think of to describe him was rugged. Yes, that was it, he was rugged. He was alarmingly tall, hovering almost exactly between six foot tall and seven feet, with a lanky and somehow still decidedly athletic body. His hair was thick and dark the way her father’s was and his eyes were the color of honey, unlike any she had encountered before. The bottom half of his face was covered with a thick beard that hid his mouth so that, depending on the angle from which she looked at him, he may or may not look like he had no mouth at all. There was no two ways around it, no denying it at all, he was a handsome man. He was very handsome in fact, but that was not the reason for the blush she was still struggling to contain. No, she was blushing because of the expression he wore on his face, his head cocked to one side and his eyes disbelieving and perhaps even a little suspicious. Clearly there was something she had said to cause him to look at her like that, but for the life of her she could not figure out why.
“Have-- I-I’m sorry, have I said something to offend you? I feel like I have. I didn’t mean to. Honestly, I didn’t.”
“No,” he said somewhat tersely, “you haven’t offended me. Why is it that you’ve traveled so far? Where is it you’ve traveled from?”
“I’ve come from New York City. I’ve answered an advertisement for a bride and was told that this was the place. I’m meant to find a Thomas Monroe. Do I have the wrong place? Do tell me which direction I’m to head, then. I fear I may have gotten myself hopelessly lost.”
“Why is it that you’re driving your own wagon to begin with? Did he not offer to come and retrieve you?”
“He did,” she quavered, feeling more and more unsure of herself with each second that ticked by, “but I thought I might try and make things a little easier on him.”
“Where’d you get the wagon? Borrow it?”
My goodness, this man had a lot of questions! The way he asked them, quick succession and rapid fire, made her feel unsure of herself, like she had done something wrong. Anyway, why did he care about where she got her wagon and why she was the one driving it? Perhaps he was another one of those men who believed her to be incapable of anything aside from looking pretty. Well, if that as the case, the she wasn’t having it. She had traveled a long, long way to escape that very thing and if there was ever a place to take a stand for herself, this was it.
“No,” using her own best curt tone of voice, “I didn’t borrow it. I purchased it. I thought it might not be a bad thing to have out here and that perhaps the man I’m to meet might appreciate the gesture. Now, if you don’t mind, could you please point me in the direction of the Monroe Ranch? I would very much like to get settled before it gets dark.”
“I’m sure you would. Fortunately for you, you don’t need to travel any further. This is the ranch you’re looking for. My name is Thomas Monroe. It’s a very nice wagon, although you didn’t need to buy it on my account. Now if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you where you may put it.”
This was him. This was Thomas Monroe, the man she was supposed to marry. If there was a worse way to meet him, Sacha could not think of what it might be. She wanted nothing more than to sink into the Kansas earth beneath her, but, as was the case with many things, she was not destined to have her wish fulfilled.
Chapter Four
“Did you imagine that it would be easy, girly? You seem like a sweet one and I believe you’ve got a solid head on your shoulders, but if you believed that, you’ve got to be downright daft. I don’t mean to hurt you, just to tell you the way it looks to me.”
Sacha laughed merrily and went right on helping the wonderful Mrs. Walden make the week’s bread. She understood that while the older woman’s words were harsh, they came from a place of love and love only. Women like Mrs. Walden (who reminded Sacha very much of her Irish grandmother, easily the most formidable of all of the formidable women Sacha had ever known) didn’t beat around the bush with things and that was something that Sacha had grown to appreciate greatly over her some four, no, almost five months on the Monroe ranch. Five months! Had it really been so long? Five months and she felt no closer to cracking the man who was to be her husband than she had on that very first day. If a person could be made up entirely of riddles, that’s exactly what Thomas’s insides would have been comprised of. He was brooding and sometimes sullen and just as apt to change his mood from one moment to the next as another man might be to change his shirt.
That was the most maddening part of it for Sacha, if she was forced to pick one thing only. It was how inconsistent things were between the two of them. Because contrary to all things she had considered (and she was rapidly learning not to expect anything in particular of any given situation), she had fallen for Thomas Monroe quickly. There was something about the way he stood apart from things that made her heart go out to him. He had the air of a person who had suffered and who could not quite find it within himself to rejoin the world at large. It was something she could identify with and something that made her dearly wished to soothe him, if only he would let her. But his feelings for her could only be described as inconsistent, and that was if she chose to look at things with a glass-half-full kind of a disposition, something she hadn’t done much of after her ill-fated engagement ball. It seemed to Sacha that there were these moments when Thomas would forget to be weary of her, and in those moments he was delighted with her. He would load his pipe and sip a mug of ale, leaning back beside the fire and coming down from a day of hard work and she would sit as close to him as she dared, hanging on every smile and laugh he doled out. Those moments made her heart flutter inside of her chest and they were the thing that gave her hope that there might be a true marriage between them. It was a good thing, too, because the rest of the time he spent either looking on her with distaste or ignoring her completely.
And the real rub of it all, the thing she would gladly shove inside of the erstwhile empty Pandora’s box, was that it was almost surely Thomas’s unpredictability with her that allowed her to grow to love him. She had asked for a man who did not fall all over himself to tell her how beautiful she was, who hardly seemed to value that at all. In Thomas, that was exactly what she had found. As far as Sacha could tell, Thomas had hardly ever looked at her, let alone decided that he found her to be appealing to the eye. When he interacted with
her, even in those times when he seemed happy to have her near, it never seemed to have anything to do with her loveliness. There was nothing about the way he dealt with her that made her feel decorative. He would talk to her about his favorite books, about God, about all manner of things no man had ever been interested enough in her to ask. He would do those things and she would begin to feel herself glow from the inside out. But then he would get that same queer look on his face that she had seen that very first day and he would be gone, picking himself up and taking himself somewhere she dared not follow. He had given her a large and lovely bedroom in the sprawling house (as was only fit for two people not yet married) and that was where she would go after he disappeared. She would pace the room and ask herself what she was doing in this place to begin with. Was she really so eager to be hurt all over again? And this time would be so much worse! This time she truly cared for the man and his not wanting her would hurt more than she cared to think about. He hadn’t once spoken of when their actual wedding might be, not once, and seeing as it was he who put the advertisement in the paper to begin with, she was fairly certain that this wasn’t a good sign. Perhaps he just didn’t want her. It was a perfectly viable explanation. Just because she was taken with him did not mean by any means that he felt that same way about her.
“Where’d you go now, girl? I suppose this is what you meant when you spoke of your kinfolk thinking of you as flighty. You really do have a habit of going off inside of yourself, don’t you?”
“I do,” Sacha said sheepishly, not minding discussing that kind of thing with Mrs. Walden one bit, “sometimes I get caught up inside of my own thoughts.”
“And do your thoughts happen to have anything to do with what I’m talking about? With Mr. Monroe?”
“They might.” Cheeks burning, unable to even look at the woman she was rapidly starting to think of as a kind of surrogate mother. The two of them had spent hours in the kitchen on this particular day talking on and off about all kinds of things. Thomas was going on a trip to see some people he was considering doing work with and he would be gone for at least a couple of weeks. They were preparing things for him to take with him, and almost all of Sacha’s thoughts turned to him whether she wanted them to or not.
“Things haven’t always been so easy for him, you know. Things haven’t gone according to his plans any more than things have gone according to yours.”
Sacha continued to knead the dough, the rhythmic motion of it soothing her. She hardly dared to breathe for fear that doing so might stop Mrs. Walden from her talking. But she went on, determined to say her piece.
“You aren’t the first woman he brought out this way to be the bride on this ranch. I know it’s not a romantic notion, not being the first, but there you have it. Things aren’t always the kind of romantic we want them to be, not out here in the real world.”
“No, I suppose they aren’t. But if I’m not the first, what happened? Why is it that he’s not already married?”
“Mr. Monroe has got to have the worst luck of any man ever to live when it comes to that sort of thing. I’ve known him since he was only a wee lad and all he ever wanted was a ranch like this one and a little family to call his own. His own family left much to be desired, I’m afraid. His parents were...troubled, and I’ll speak no more on that, so don’t ask. And don’t you go asking him, neither.”
“I won’t,” she responded quickly, wanting badly for this woman she so admired to trust her, “not ever.”
“Right. Anyway. A family and a home like this, those were the things he longed for, and he has one of them, owns it right out. But the other, that wasn’t so easy for him. The first girl he loved, when he was hardly over eighteen, that poor thing died of a sickness of the lungs that got worse and worse until there wasn’t any hope. He was determined never to involve himself with another woman again, and even when he decided that wasn’t practical he wasn’t willing to go out and court a woman. So he took to the classifieds the way he found you, only that didn’t work for him either.”
“But why? I don’t understand.”
“You’ve stayed on this land for longer than any of the others. They all go. The way Thomas is, they can’t take it, I suppose. That or they expect to be pampered and run when they discover that working a ranch is actually hard work. That’s what he’s worried about when it comes to you.”
“Me?” Sacha asked with shock, surprised to find that he had talked about her with anyone at all. “He’s worried about me?”
“Of course he is. We’ve never had a woman half so grand as you answer the advert. You with your regal disposition and fine things. He can’t believe that a woman like you could ever take to the ranch life, and who could blame him? You don’t exactly seem cut out for it, do you?”
“No,” she said with a sad, thoughtful voice, “I suppose I don’t.”
“Right. That’s what I thought.”
The sound of Thomas’s deep voice startled both women badly, Mrs. Walden letting out a funny little screech and clutching at her throat while Sacha dropped the plate in her trembling hand. The sound of the glass breaking only made her tremble more. It was too close, reminded her too much of the way things had unfolded in that kitchen when her entire future had unraveled. Only this time it was Thomas walking in and hearing something he did not like. But oh, the thing he had heard! She wanted to call out, to scream at the top of her lungs that what he thought he had heard was not what she’d meant to say! There was so much she could explain, not the least of which was that she was almost certain that she was head over heels in love with him. She wanted to speak but her throat felt as dry as a desert and she could not get a single word out. Thomas’s face only grew darker and she knew that he was going to walk out and leave her there before he ever even spoke.
“Right. I’ve got to go now. I expect there’s a good chance you won’t be here when I get back. That’s fine. That’s better. It’s got to be better that way.”
And that was it. He was gone, not even bothering to take the basket of treats they had so lovingly put together for him. There was no amount of care that could console her. She sat, wrapped in a shawl to protect her against the rapidly increasing cold, in front of the large fireplace completely mute. Long after her tears had run dry and the rest of the household had gone to bed, she sat in that same place. She sat there for so long that when she heard the cry from the front stoop, she was certain she must have gone mad. She must have. It was impossibly late and so very cold and there was no way a baby could really be outside of her door. Except that the crying continued until she stood, willing to entertain the madness if only for a moment, and drew back the latch of the door. What she saw there made her gasp, the shawl dropping forgotten to the floor, as she looked at the child who would change the rest of her life.
Chapter Five
“Shh, shh, there there, little lord. Little Charlie. Don’t fret. There’s a whole big world out there for you to explore, you’ve only to take it.”
“And learn to walk. Walking should help him along in his adventures, I would think.”
Sacha let out a delighted laugh and looked away from Charlie and up towards Mrs. Walden with a smile that made her entire face radiant. The act of doing so was surprisingly hard. Never had Sacha imagined that looking away from a creature could be as difficult as she found it to look away from this beautiful baby boy, but it actually brought her physical pain to do so. There was something magical in his perfect pink face and the bright blue eyes peering up at her with the kind of curiosity she herself had always felt. His little shock of dark hair stuck out every which way and his wild arms waved in the air, simply refusing to stay put inside of his swaddling blanket. He had a set of lungs on him, this little boy, and a will that could not be broken. Sacha still had no idea how long he had waited on the front doorstep before he started to cry, and she shuddered just to think about it. Imagine all of the terrible things that could have happened to him there! Such a tiny little boy, no more than si
x months old, left to die or survive as he chose out in the cold by a stranger’s door. If Sacha hadn’t been up and heartbroken, there was a very good chance the little lad would have died. That was what the doctor had told them when he came to deliver a perfectly clean bill of health. Sacha, although she hadn’t voiced the opinion, thought of him as her little miracle baby. He was a gift from God sent to her in her darkest hour and she was sure that he had saved her every bit as much as she had saved him. It had been Charlie who had kept her from fleeing the Monroe ranch without ever seeing Thomas again. It would have been the easier thing, that was for sure. What was her alternative? To wait there for him to come back and tell her that he hadn’t been joking? That he wanted her to go so he could try to find a wife he liked better? That would have ripped her apart from the inside out. She had no doubt that she would have left within a matter of days just to avoid that very distinct possibility, but then she had discovered Charlie and everything had changed. It was like time had stopped. While her heart still ached any time she thought of Thomas and the way he had looked at her before he had walked out, she so consumed with her love of Charlie that it hurt less. That, and the rapid course of infant care Mrs. Walden spent each day instructing her in. Because the entire household fell in love with Charlie, not just Sacha. Unbeknownst to its occupants, there had been a hole in the heart of the Monroe Ranch and it was Charlie who had filled it.
