She got up, and for a moment he feared she meant to leave, but instead she began to pace, like a lawyer formulating an impassioned appeal to put before a waiting jury. “Where would I sleep?” she asked.
The question caught him so off guard that he nearly swallowed his tongue. “With me,” he replied, at some length, and in a voice he nearly didn’t recognize.
She stopped, and her eyes were wide again. “You mean—?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he clarified. “A wife is a wife. I expect mine to share my bed.” No sense having any misunderstandings on that score.
“I am not a whore, Dr. Parrish. I don’t sell myself for money, and I won’t take a wedding ring for payment either.”
He wanted to shake her. Why couldn’t she let herself be happy? But he knew, of course. She was afraid of being hurt, not just physically, but emotionally, too. “I didn’t say you were. I said if you marry me, you’ll have to lie beside me every night. That’s what wives do, among other things.” He stood, went to face her, laid his hands gently on her cheeks. “I swear to God, Savannah, I’m not like him. I won’t let you down.”
She seemed to want to fly off in every direction, and she was trembling, but he could tell that she was entertaining the prospect of marrying him, that she really did want to wear calico and have babies and be called “Mrs.” Somebody. Mrs. Parrish, he thought, would do nicely.
“Nobody within fifty miles will be surprised,” he said, in case it made a difference. He forgave himself this inanity on grounds of being in shock.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Remember how the men cheered when I kissed you, Savannah?” he countered. He dropped his hands from her face, took a light, supportive hold on her upper arms. “Everyone knows we want each other. Everyone but you and, all right, me too, until very recently.”
She looked him over, rather like a farmer’s wife inspecting a rooster at the fair, prior to purchase. “Suppose you take to drinking again?”
He raised one hand, as if in an oath. “I won’t,” he argued, but calmly, placing just the merest emphasis on the second word. “I didn’t drink before I went into the Army, or during my term of service. It started afterward, Savannah, when I had to stand still long enough for all of it to catch up with me.”
She bit her lower lip again and furrowed her brow, afraid to believe in happy endings. He didn’t blame her. “Suppose I came to care for you very deeply, and you never returned the sentiment? Suppose you took a mistress—”
“The best kind of love isn’t spontaneous, Savannah,” he said, wondering where the declaration had come from even as he uttered it. “It grows, over time, because two people live and work together. Because they share a life.”
She folded her arms. She was weakening, he could tell. “And the mistress?”
“I wouldn’t have the time, let alone the inclination. You have my permission to shoot me if I ever break our vows.”
“Don’t worry,” she said decisively, “I would. With or without your permission.”
He grinned. “Then it’s settled. When’s the wedding?”
She gulped. “It isn’t settled. Not at all.”
He kissed her then, tenderly at first, teasing her lips apart, then with a passion that, like Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, might just leave him blind for three days. Or so it seemed at the time.
Savannah gasped when he finally withdrew, but she didn’t pull out of his arms; indeed, she leaned against him, breathing deeply, letting her forehead rest against his shoulder. “I wouldn’t be the sort of wife who takes orders,” she warned, after a few moments. “I won’t carry your slippers, like a pet spaniel, and if women ever get the vote, I’ll cast my ballot for whatever candidate I choose. I won’t necessarily hold the same opinions as you do. And if I sell my share of the Brimstone to Trey, it might be a very long time before I see a penny of the money. When I do, I intend to bank it in Great Falls or Denver or even San Francisco, under my name and my name alone.”
He laughed. “Fine,” he said. “I don’t mind supporting you. Just be forewarned—country doctors don’t make much money, so we won’t be living in grand style.”
Her eyes were alight with the desire to trust him, to step out of the fortress she’d erected around herself. “I need time to think,” she said.
He was jubilant that she hadn’t turned him down out of hand. “Do all the thinking you want,” he said, but he kissed her again and, again, she didn’t resist.
*
Marriage. To Prescott Parrish.
Was she mad?
The wind was liquid as Savannah walked back toward Springwater station, through a spattering downpour, but she barely noticed. Her senses were ariot, and it was all Pres’s fault for kissing her. For talking about—about the things he’d talked about.
She couldn’t actually marry the man, of course. Oh, she felt passion for him, even longing. And she’d lived in the world too long not to know that what he’d said about love was true—it didn’t always strike unexpectedly, as it had with Rachel and Trey, or the Wainwrights. More often, especially between men and women settling out west, where the work was uncommonly hard and there were so many ways to die or be grievously injured, good marriages began as partnerships.
Across the road from the station, lights glowed in the windows of the Hargreaves’ splendid five-room house. Smoke curled from the chimney over the kitchen cookstove, and as Savannah stood there, in the gathering rainstorm, she wondered if Trey and Rachel really knew how lucky they were.
It was then that she decided, or at least, she would always remember it that way. She would accept Pres’s proposal, and take her chances. Maybe someday, she might even be able to admit that she loved him, that she had from the night he’d delivered Miranda’s baby. In the very instant he’d handed her that squalling, messy newborn child, she’d felt a telling shift, deep in her soul. She simply hadn’t recognized that fierce and sudden yearning for what it was—how could she have, when she’d never experienced anything like it before?
Perhaps, in time, Pres would come to love her in return.
She went inside the station, found the main room empty, which was both a relief and a disappointment. She wanted to tell June-bug her news, and yet she wasn’t quite ready to share it. She hadn’t gotten used to the idea herself, after all, and she would be awhile working it through.
It was only when she reached her snug little hideaway behind the cookstove and took off her cloak that she looked down at the scarlet taffeta dress she was wearing and recalled that she’d been headed for the Brimstone when she left the station. In fact, she’d only stopped to call on Dr. Parrish—Pres—on a crazy impulse. He’d kissed her, asked for her hand in marriage, and all the while she’d been wearing the clothes he hated and the “face paint” he’d taken exception to on several occasions.
A door closed in the distance, and she heard June-bug’s voice. “Savannah? Darlin’, are you sick?” The other woman appeared in the entryway to Savannah’s room, wearing a lightweight bonnet and a woolen cloak. Her brow was crumpled in a worried expression. “Weren’t you headed to the Brimstone?”
Savannah had no explanation to offer, even to herself, but in that moment, she burst into tears and sat down hard on the edge of her bed. June-bug discarded her bonnet and cloak, cluck-clucking all the while, and came to perch beside her and drape a sympathetic arm around her wobbling shoulders. “Well, sweetheart, what on earth?”
“I can’t do it anymore!” she wailed.
“Do what?” June-bug asked, reasonably enough.
“Put on these dreadful clothes and all this kohl and rouge and spend all my time in that saloon!” Savannah sobbed.
“There, now,” June-bug said, rocking her a little. “There, now.” She didn’t offer a solution or any sort of advice, and Savannah loved her for those attributes, among many others. “I’ll make us some tea. You wash your face and put on another dress. Jacob can step across the
way and tell Trey you won’t be working tonight.”
Savannah had been on her own for a long time, and it was bliss to be mothered for a little while, to be cosseted and comforted and soothed. “Th-that would be n-nice,” she snuffled, making a brave effort to collect herself.
June-bug patted Savannah’s back before rising to her feet. “Everybody needs a good cry once in a while,” she said. “You just carry on all you want.”
Savannah couldn’t help a small burst of laughter at the advice. “I feel like a perfect fool,” she said. “What good does crying do?”
“Why, tears are like medicine,” June-bug said, sounding surprised by the question. “They heal all manner of ills and soften up some of our sorrows, too.”
Savannah took a pressed handkerchief from the drawer of her bedside table and delicately blew her nose. “My grandmother used to say things like that.”
June-bug, poised on the threshold, smiled. “I reckon I would have liked her a lot, your grandmother. Now, you wash your face. You got all them colors to runnin’.”
She laughed again, this time with spirit, and when June-bug left the room, she got up, poured water from the pitcher into the washbasin, both items being kept on a scarred table under a high window, and scrubbed her face with one of the few luxuries she allowed herself—fine-milled French soap. Then, when the last streaks of red and blue and black were gone, she let down her hair and brushed it until it crackled. The dress was the last to go—she slipped the garment down over her hips and kicked it over into a corner of the room in a symbolic act. When she joined June-bug for tea, ten minutes later, with her hair in a loose bun at the back of her head, she was wearing a blue bombazine dress, and Jacob had been despatched to deliver the message to Trey.
Her partner came across the road right away, looking worried. “Are you sick?” he asked, in much the same tone as June-bug had done earlier.
Savannah, seated in a rocking chair near the fire, teacup in hand, shook her head in response, unable, for the moment, to explain. June-bug went to look in on Miranda and the baby, still referred to as “little Isaiah-or-Ezekiel,” and Jacob herded Toby and Christabel outside to help him with the chores.
Trey drew up the other rocking chair. “What is it, then?”
“I’m going to be married,” she said, without planning to. “I don’t want to be a saloon-keeper anymore.”
From anyone else, she might have expected anger, but Trey was her friend, closer than a brother. She saw immediately that he understood, maybe because he was so happy with Rachel. “Doc Parrish?”
She nodded. So Pres had been right, then. Everyone knew.
Trey beamed. “That’s wonderful.”
“But our partnership, yours and mine, I mean—”
He was thoughtful. “I can buy you out, if you’re willing to wait a spell for the money. A long spell, I reckon. If that won’t do, we could bring somebody in from Choteau or Great Falls to take your place. Pay them a salary.”
Suddenly, Savannah was filled with panic. Suppose she hated being a doctor’s wife? Suppose she hated being Prescott Parrish’s wife? If she sold her share of the saloon to Trey or anyone else, she would have nowhere to turn, nowhere to take refuge.
But that was silly. She could take care of herself, whether penniless or with a fat bank account tucked away in Denver or San Francisco. She had already established that much; she had nothing more to prove, either to herself or to the world in general. Marrying Pres was something she would do simply because it was what she wanted to do.
“Savannah?” Trey prompted, and she realized she’d let his suggestion about bringing in someone else to take her place at the saloon go unanswered.
“No,” she said firmly, after another moment or two of hard thought. “A marriage can’t work, if you’ve got one foot in the agreement and one foot out, ready to spring for parts unknown. I’ll sell, Trey. I know you’re a fair man—I wouldn’t have dealt with you in the first place if I thought otherwise—so you make me an offer and come up with some terms, and we’ll settle the whole thing, once and for all. I don’t care how long it takes you to pay me.”
Trey’s silver eyes were alight, and it gave Savannah something of a pang to realize that he’d probably wanted to own the Brimstone outright for a long time. “I’ll have to speak with Rachel, of course,” he said, with barely controlled eagerness. “But I think we can consider the sale already made.”
Savannah leaned over and kissed her old friend lightly on the forehead. “Thank you, Trey,” she told him softly.
No looking back now, she added to herself. It was time to leave all the old demons behind, just as Pres had said, and keep company with angels instead.
CHAPTER
7
THE WEDDING WAS a quiet one, held before the hearth at Springwater station, three days after Pres’s unorthodox proposal. Jacob McCaffrey officiated, Trey and Rachel were witnesses, and the children, Emma, Toby, and Christabel, served as eager guests, along with June-bug and the pensive Miranda. Savannah felt wildly dizzy the whole time the brief but binding ceremony was going on, like someone trying to walk blindfolded over uneven ground. By the time it had ended, and Pres had kissed her exuberantly to seal the bargain, she was seeing everything through a haze, and all the ordinary sounds of the room, the station itself, and even the surrounding wilderness were underlaid with a peculiar thrumming buzz.
Pres, ever the doctor, ate cake and accepted congratulations with that strange, blunt grace that, Savannah was learning, was a hallmark of his personality, but his attention had been caught by young Christabel’s twisted foot.
“I’d like to have a closer look at that,” he confided, with a thoughtful frown creasing his forehead.
Though Savannah was certainly not without sympathy for the shy, crippled child, her mind was fixed on other matters entirely, just then. She was married. Someday, with luck and good behavior, she might even be respectable.
And in a very short while, she would be alone with her husband. Sharing the double bed borrowed from Miranda’s room at the station; Trey, Jacob, and Pres had dismantled the thing that morning, and carried it over to Pres’s “house.” Miranda and little Isaiah-or-Ezekiel would move into Savannah’s old nook, behind the cookstove. Already, dusk was gathering at the windows, and a light rain had begun to fall, pattering on the roof and against the windows like sweet, rhythmic music. Savannah, who had known the intimate attentions of a man, however unwillingly, who had spent years in the saloon business, was so deliciously nervous that she might have been the most uninitiated of brides.
“Was Christabel born with that bad foot?” Pres asked of Jacob, who was standing nearby, tall and imposing in his dark “preachin’ suit.” “Or was there an accident?”
“Born with it, I reckon,” Jacob said, in his quiet, rumbling way.
June-bug poked Pres in the ribs. He looked wonderfully handsome in the clothes she’d provided, no doubt belonging to one or the other of the lost twins. “Never mind that,” she said. “Christabel’s foot will keep; she’s lived with it this long. This is your wedding day, Doc.”
A broad grin broke over Pres’s handsome face. “Yes,” he said, with a sidelong glance at Savannah, who blushed in spite of her best resolve to be circumspect. “It is indeed. I think perhaps it’s time for the bride and me to say our farewells, for the night, at least.”
Savannah, standing there in her best dress, an ivory silk from her saloon-girl days, hastily altered with bits and pieces from other frocks, judiciously assembled—Savannah, who did not have a retiring bone in her body, lowered her eyes and could not bring herself to raise them again.
She was therefore caught completely by surprise when Pres suddenly swept her up into his arms, right there in the main room of the Springwater station. Everyone applauded merrily, and someone opened the door. A moist breeze rushed in and made the rainy-day fire dance in the grate.
“Put me down,” Savannah whispered, though half heartedly, her face buried in Pre
s’s neck.
“Oh, I will,” he promised softly, for her ears only. “As soon as we get to our bed.” And so it was that he carried her down the middle of the Springwater road, through a misty benediction of rainfall, the skirts of her improvised wedding dress tumbling down over his legs as well as hers. Indeed, he carried her around the back of the Brimstone Saloon and, finally, into the little house/office that would be their home.
The place was chilly, but Savannah didn’t feel the low temperature. She was warmed by an inner fire, being held like that, and in such close proximity to Pres’s—her husband’s—strong chest, wrapped in his arms. He didn’t set her down to open their front door, but bent awkwardly, and kicked it closed with the heel of one boot once they’d crossed the threshold. Without so much as pausing, he made for the single room that would be their living quarters for the foreseeable future.
Finally, as promised, he dropped her playfully onto the bed, where she landed in a heap of silk and ruffles and lace, a make-do bride in a make-do wedding dress. His expression was somber as he looked down at her.
“You’ll never regret taking me for a husband, Savannah Parrish,” he said, and his voice sounded gruff.
Her throat tightened with some emotion it seemed better not to name. “I know that,” she replied, and somehow, she did know. For all his arrogance, for all his terse tongue and errant past, Pres was a good man, the one the Fates had chosen for her, and presented as a gift. She wanted to say she loved him then, that she’d fallen for him on that first night in Springwater, but she couldn’t risk being rebuffed.
He began by undoing his borrowed string tie, loosened his collar, tossed aside his coat. Savannah watched, as if entranced; it was like the beginning of a dance, this encounter between them, this first sweet, fiery union. She had expected to feel fear; instead, she felt excitement and anticipation. She’d been a girl when Burke entered her life and turned it upside down, but she was a woman now, and she wasn’t afraid to trust her assessment of this man she’d married. She could believe in him.
Springwater Seasons Page 21
