The concept was almost frightening, and she rocked slightly back and forth, trying to calm herself and gather in her scattered thoughts. It was bad enough that Landry was so handsome, that just looking at him always left an aching thumbprint on her heart. If he was going to be generous on top of it all, well, she didn’t for sure know what she’d do. Did he expect something from her, besides the things he’d outlined when he’d proposed to her back at Spring’ water? Would he come to the spare room in the night, to lie with her, or look for her to come to him?
She recollected how it was before, giving herself to a man, lying in the tall grass, with the stars scattered all across the sky like a spill of crystal beads and the breeze washing over her bare flesh, cool and smelling of prairie wildflowers …
Miranda closed her eyes tight and hugged herself harder, but it didn’t help. She remembered being taken, remembered it all too clearly. It hadn’t been pleasant, the way Evangeline and Rachel and Savannah all hinted that such things were supposed to be, not at all. She’d merely endured, and listened to him whisper pretty words that she’d guessed, even then, were lies. Still, to someone as starved for affection as Miranda had been, lies notwithstanding, the trade was worthwhile.
Landry, now, he made her feel entirely different about the whole subject. Ever since she’d first glimpsed him, not long after her arrival at Springwater, in fact, she’d dreamed about lying down with him. Hadn’t been able to help imagining what it would be like if it were Landry who unbuttoned her dress, loosed the ribbons of her camisole, bared her breasts, lifted her skirts—
She moaned aloud. Stop, she commanded herself. Stop thinking about that, stop thinking about him!
It did no good at all, giving herself such an order. Her mind, her body, even her soul, were full to bursting of Landry Kildare.
A rap at her door startled her so badly that she actually gasped aloud. “Y-yes?” she called, when she’d reined in her runaway breath.
Landry’s voice came through the door, pitched low, but with no effort at persuasion. “I forgot to ask if you needed to go outside. If you’re afraid, I’ll walk with you.”
Miranda closed her eyes again, tighter than ever, and realized that her bladder was painfully full. “No, thanks,” she chimed, in what she hoped was a cheerful and offhand tone. She’d die of mortification, sitting there in the privy, relieving herself, with Landry standing guard right outside the door. “I’ll just take a lamp.”
He hesitated, then bid her good-night. She heard him walking away. When the sound of his door closing reached her ears, she jumped up, grabbed the kerosene lantern on her bedside table, and hurried through the house. She was back in the darkened main room of the cabin, washing her hands and face at the basin, before she realized that Landry was in the room, still fully clothed except for his boots and seated in a chair before the hearth.
She started again. “I didn’t see you,” she said.
He didn’t answer for a long while, but simply stared into the embers in the grate. “Five years,” he mused aloud, without so much as glancing her way. “This March, it’ll be five years since Caroline died.”
Miranda didn’t bear any ill feelings toward the dead woman; in fact, she felt a certain odd kinship with her. It was indeed a tragedy for a young wife and mother to pass over before her time the way Caroline had. Still, Miranda was glad to be the one to take her place—after a fashion.
Without thinking it through first, she moved to stand behind Landry’s chair and laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. He jerked, as though she’d touched his flesh with a flat-iron fresh off a hot stove, and just when she was afraid he would thrust her arm aside, he reached up instead, and laid his own hand over hers.
“Who was he?” he asked. His voice was quiet, and there was no rancor in his tone. None of the judgment and contempt that had been forthcoming from so many other people before she got to Springwater.
He was asking about the baby’s father, of course, and she supposed he had a right to know, being her legal husband and all. She removed her hand from under his and came around to face him, seating herself on the apple box he used for a footstool. She stared into the fire awhile, arms wrapped around her knees.
“We came west with a wagon train. Tom was the scout—he knew the terrain and Indian habits and the like from being a sergeant in the cavalry. He told me he loved me, and that we’d be married as soon as we got as far as Laramie, and I believed him. We made a baby.”
“Does he know? About his son, I mean?” Landry’s voice revealed no emotion at all, and she didn’t dare look at his face just then. She doubted she could have read his expression if she had, since she’d turned down the lantern when she came in from the privy, and it was dark in the room, except for the faint glow of the dying fire.
She thought a long time, debating whether or not she ought to answer, then gave a brisk, reluctant nod. “He said I must have been with somebody else, because he and his wife had tried to have children for the better part of ten years and never had any luck. That was the first time I knew he had a wife.” She paused, blinked hard, and swallowed. After all that time, she still felt the sting of Tom’s rebuff. “She had a millinery shop in Laramie,” she added, for no particular reason. “It was all her own, too. Her name was Katherine.”
“You met her?” Just the faintest trace of surprise in his voice, but still no verdict on her morals, one way or the other.
“I didn’t actually meet her, to shake hands and the like. I was in our wagon, holding the reins while Pa was in the livery stable, trying to swap our oxen for a couple of horses, and I saw her then. She came running out of that shop when Tom rode in behind the last of the wagons, and her face was shining fit to shame the moon. When he caught sight of her, he broke into a smile and hauled her right up onto the horse with him, kissed her right there in front of the whole town.”
“I’m sorry,” Landry said, in his own good time.
Miranda sighed. She didn’t regret bringing little Isaiah-or-Ezekiel into the world. Never that. All the same, she wished she hadn’t made a fool of herself, not to mention an adulteress. “So am I,” she replied softly, still watching the bright orange coals in the fireplace. “So am I.”
CHAPTER
3
FIRST THING the next morning, Landry commenced to slaughtering and butchering the hogs. Miranda reckoned she’d be called upon to help him, and she dreaded that wholeheartedly, being that bloodshed—animal or human—always made her swoony, but he left the house at sunup, having made his own breakfast without so much as a rap on her door to awaken her.
She’d nursed the baby hastily, sleepily, then washed and dressed and poured herself a cup of Landry’s coffee by the time the boys straggled out of their room, still in long Johns, looking rumpled and none-too-amiable. They had obviously forgotten their new stepmother; when they caught sight of her, they high-tailed it back where they’d come from. When they returned, wearing pants and shirts, if not shoes, Miranda was already frying eggs and salt pork to feed them.
They ate a pile of food between them, and seemed glad enough to go off to school. The alternative would have been to help their father with the pigs, so they probably considered themselves lucky. Miranda’s own pa would have made her stay home and work right alongside him.
She dallied as long as she could, cleaning up the breakfast dishes, sweeping the floor and the hearth, making up her and the boys’ beds. She couldn’t quite bring herself to step over the threshold of Landry’s room again, but she figured he’d probably already tidied the place anyway. He was that sort of man, and Miranda couldn’t rightly recall ever knowing another one quite like him.
Even Jacob McCaffrey, a man she looked up to and had come to love like a father, didn’t cook for himself, sweep floors, or spread up the beds. He expected June-bug to do that kind of work, and she did, without seeming to mind. Mrs. McCaffrey had been known to aid her husband by pitching hay, too, as well as milking cows and even shoeing horses, and nobody,
most especially Miranda, thought it unusual. It was just the way of things.
Now, standing inside the solid, tidy house to which she’d come as a bride less than twenty-four hours before, Miranda braced herself to be summoned to the hog pen. When considerable time had passed, with no word from Landry, she made a sling to carry little Isaiah-or-Ezekiel against her chest and set out, ready to work.
The hog pen, boasting six sows and a boar just the night before, was empty, and there was no sound of pigs squealing, no sign of the spilled blood and gore typical of such an enterprise. In fact, the whole place seemed eerily quiet.
“Landry?” she called out, in a tentative voice, raised only high enough to carry.
He appeared in the doorway of the smokehouse, crimson from the middle of his chest to his feet. He did not look pleased at the interruption, though he was, as usual, mannerly. “What is it?”
Miranda swayed as the crisp fall breeze brought the coppery scent of blood to her nostrils, mingled with the pleasant scents of dried leaves and wood smoke. “I was just—just wondering if you wanted me to—to help—”
Landry looked at her curiously. “Are you all right?”
She was, in fact, woozy. Only the fact that her baby would fall with her if she went down kept her on her feet. “I don’t much like—b-blood.”
His expression was eloquently ironic. “It’s not my favorite part of raising pigs,” he agreed, in dry tones. “You go ahead in the house and find Caroline’s—find the big kettle, the one we use for laundry and making soap and the like. Carry it outside, fill it with water, and build a fire under it. You can boil up a couple of the heads while I finish hanging these critters up to cure.”
Miranda gulped and turned blindly away. She was infinitely relieved to be spared the slaughtering and butchering, and she didn’t let herself think as far as “boiling up a couple of the heads.” She’d get through this challenge hand-over-hand, she told herself, a moment at a time if necessary.
The kettle Landry had mentioned turned out to be more of a cauldron, made of solid iron, and after several attempts at lifting the thing, she finally turned it onto its side and rolled it across the floor and over the threshold, into the front yard. She built the fire, as instructed, after fetching kindling and wood from the appropriate shed, and began lugging water from the outside pump to fill it. On about the fourth trip, with the weight of a bucket pulling either shoulder halfway out of its socket, she began to wish she’d built the fire closer to the well.
She’d just gotten the kettle to a nice rolling boil, and she was damp with sweat from hairline to toenail with the effort, when Landry appeared, carrying something big and bloody in both arms. He flung it into the pot with a resounding splash, and headed back toward the smokehouse with no more than a nod to Miranda.
She used an old broom handle to stir the grisly contents of the kettle, and kept herself half turned away. All the same, she saw Landry approaching with another horrendous burden out of the corner of her eye, winced when she heard a second splash.
“Miranda.”
She couldn’t look at him, didn’t dare. “W-what?”
“You don’t have to stand here the whole time those heads are boiling down, chilling yourself and that baby to the bone. Just come out and make sure the fire’s going once in a while. Maybe pour on some more water.”
She stiffened her backbone and nodded, careful to keep her chin high. Fact was, she wanted to break down and weep with gratitude and relief. “You’ll be coming in for dinner after a spell?” she asked, with a spindly effort at good cheer.
“Not like this,” Landry said. “I’ll strip off these duds down by the creek when I’m finished and sluice myself off as well as I can. You might bring out a plate around noon, though. Just set it on that crate outside the smokehouse door. Bring me some fresh clothes, too, while you’re at it.”
Miranda’s face was hot as the bottom of that iron cauldron, and the heat had nothing whatsoever to do with the crackling fire or the steam off the boiling water. Her mind had gotten snagged on the image of Landry taking off his clothes by the creek, and she’d barely heard anything he said after that. Maybe her pa had been right, she thought, thoroughly chagrined. Maybe she was just plain no good, through and through.
She nodded rapidly, dropped the stirring stick, and hurried into the cabin. The baby was hungry again, and fussy, so she fed him, changed his diaper, and laid him down in the basket to sleep. After that, she washed her hands and face and tried to neaten her sagging, steam-dampened hair a little.
Soon, she was making biscuits, the way June-bug McCaffrey had showed her back at Springwater and sorting through the pantry for canned meat and vegetables. She made a stew from a mixture of preserved venison, carrots from a sealed jar, and onions, chopped real fine.
Within an hour, the house smelled of home cooking, though she could still catch the underlying scent of boiled hog-head, wafting up from her dress and permeating her hair. She went outside periodically, to add wood to the fire and water to the cauldron, all without once looking into the brew, and when the sun reached the middle of the sky, she figured it was time to carry a meal to Landry.
The idea of it filled her with pleasure. She washed again, spruced her hair again, and then squared her shoulders and marched right into Landry’s bedroom to fetch the fresh clothes he’d requested earlier.
The window was open, lace curtain fluttering in the breeze, and the bed, to her surprise, was unmade. Even from the doorway, Miranda could catch the clean, sun-dried laundry scent of Landry, clinging to the sheets and floating through the air itself. She found the clothes, trousers and a clean shirt, stockings and another pair of boots, a lightweight set of long underwear, stacked all of them into a neat pile, and started out of the room. She intended to come back later and smooth out the bed.
As she was turning away, however, she saw the small, ornate picture frame propped on the night table, alongside a lamp and a book resting open on its spine. Knowing all the while that she shouldn’t pry, she moved toward the item that had drawn her attention, picked it up in one slightly tremulous hand.
It was a photographic likeness, oval in shape and faded with the passage of time, showing Landry and Caroline Kildare on what was presumably their wedding day. She stood behind his chair, a slender, fair-haired woman, with finely made features and the hint of a smile in her eyes, one hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. Landry, seated and sober, as was the fashion, looked as though he was barely suppressing an exuberant shout, maybe of joy, maybe of triumph.
Miranda felt a distinct pang, looking at the two of them, so happy, neither suspecting how short their time together would turn out to be. She set the picture down, after a few moments, and turned away from it, mentally as well as physically, by sheer force of will. As she left Landry’s bedroom, carrying his clean clothes, she was wondering where Jamie and Marcus had gotten their bright red hair. Certainly not from their father or from the blond Caroline.
She couldn’t help thinking about Caroline as she made the first trip to the door of the smokehouse, where she set a full plate on the upturned wooden box, covered with a pie tin. It was gone, moments later, when she returned with the stack of clothing. She hesitated a moment, there on the other side of the high threshold from her new husband, but in the end she could not make herself step inside. She doubted, in fact, that she would be able to eat pork ever again.
After going back to the cabin once more, to make sure the baby was safe, and still sleeping soundly, she went out to add wood to the fire in the dooryard, and water to the kettle. Then, with her mind still on Caroline, she made for the copse of trees on the far side of the creek, where she knew the other woman was buried.
The grave was some distance from the stream, but she found it unerringly. It was marked by the most beautifully carved wooden cross she had ever seen—mahogany, unless she was mistaken. Where had Landry gotten mahogany, there in the wilds of Montana, where the trees were mostly pine and Douglas fir, c
ottonwood and cedar and birch?
He’d carved Caroline’s full name into the marker, and surrounded it with delicately wrought flowers and vines. There were even birds, perched here and there among the foliage, and Miranda touched it with a feeling of wonder. It was, this sad creation, certainly among the most beautiful things she had ever seen, whether in nature or man-made.
“I love him,” Miranda whispered, surprising herself with the revelation. It seemed to strike her at the very moment she said it; she had fallen in love with this man who, even in a few short days’ time, had made her feel special, needed. For the very first time. “I think I have since the first time I saw him, at Springwater.”
She bit down on her lower lip. “You needn’t worry, though, because he still cares for you. I reckon he always will.” She sighed. “I’ve got to get back now. The baby might wake up, or that dratted pot could boil over, and I’d best be thinking about supper, too. I just wanted to—well, I don’t rightly know what I wanted to do. Just say a how-do-you-do, I guess.”
She stood up straight, lifting her eyes as a breeze blew through the leaves of the trees surrounding Caroline’s grave, set them raining down, rustling and bright, in a shower of red and gold, crimson and rust. She was not a fanciful person, and she didn’t for a moment think of that occurrence as any sort of blessing, but she felt a certain peace where Caroline was concerned all the same.
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