Widow Woman

by Patricia McLinn

  He suspected she would have left it at that, and he was tempted. But he owed her more of an explanation for why she’d be sleeping in the cramped wagon another night.

  “Shag’s dead, the foreman I told you about.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry.” Her soft voice still carried the mark of being educated by the sisters whose English had been a third language behind Spanish and Latin. “I know you respected this man. What will . . .?” He could practically hear the questions piling up in her head, as she tried to figure out how that might affect things he’d told her—and things he hadn’t come out and told her, but she might have figured on her own.

  Finally, she gave a nervous kind of sound, then asked, “Did you ask about . . . about Rachel?”

  His tone had been curt, and he could hear in her voice what courage it took for her to pursue the questioning. In three brutal years of marriage she’d learned not to ask. It was a lesson she hadn’t yet unlearned.

  Because of that, he answered when he’d much rather have remained silent. “She’s married.”

  “Oh.” Her breath came out in a sigh of empathetic pain.

  “To the owner of the big ranch who’d been trying to buy her out—one of them, anyway. She married Wood.” Letting the bitterness out didn’t sweeten the taste in his soul, more bitterness just welled up to replace it. “She’s going to have a baby.”

  “I am sorry.”

  They rode in silence a while, before he said the rest of it. “I’m going to see her.”

  “Why would you give yourself such pain? Can’t you leave it behind you, like you tell me to do? Go ahead with your life, and leave the past there in the dust?”

  He shook his head.

  “But Nicholas—”

  “It could be my baby.”

  The mules plodded on.

  When she spoke again, her response was soft and piercing. “And what will you do if it is?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  As the days slipped deeper into autumn, Alba allowed herself to hope her brother had thought better of seeing Rachel Terhune Wood. Or had simply forgotten it under the weight of backbreaking work.

  That hope had suffered a bad moment at the beginning.

  They had slept two more nights in the wagon before they reached Nick’s ranch near midday. She saw a house—a log square with a shed added on the side—a pole barn, smaller structures and a corral. Each showed the patchwork of raw repairs against the original exposure-darkened wood.

  When a lanky figure appeared behind the house on a slope rising sharply to the west, Nick raised an arm in salute. The figure waved before scrambling down. Nick’s introduction was terse.

  “Davis Andresson. And this is my sister, Mrs.—”

  “No.”

  That was all she got out, but Nick had understood; she didn’t want to be identified as the wife of Harve Martin. Not every day, not in her new home.

  “Alba Martin,” Nick supplied.

  “Pleasure, ma’am.” Davis Andresson took his hat off, revealing thick, pale hair that glistened in the sun.

  Alba had not conversed with a strange man in years. She had gone from the convent school to her husband, who never allowed her to speak to any other man. Then she had returned to the sisters’ shelter with such relief that she had prayed never to leave.

  Now Nick had taken her from that haven, pledging a home and security. Though it would be easier to stay with the sisters, she did not have a true calling, so remaining would also be cowardly. And ungrateful. She must learn to make her way in Nick’s world so she could help him.

  “What were you doing up there, Andresson?”

  Nick’s question drew Andresson’s attention, allowing her to covertly study this man who also would share their life. He was not as young as Nick had led her to believe.

  “I have an idea if we change the creek flow a bit up top, it’d follow the dry bed and mean less distance to tote water.” He launched into details she didn’t heed.

  Amusement long in hibernation twitched at her lips at Nick’s amazed expression. He had told her Andresson talked little, but here he rattled on without pause. Nick had not taken into account, she imagined, how solitude could build a flow of conversation in even the quietest man, the way a dam created a lake from the smallest stream given time.

  Her brother had spoken as if Davis Andresson were little more than a boy. She saw before her a man. His lanky stature could be mistaken for boyishness, but Alba saw, as he helped Nick unload a trunk from the wagon, that he had a man’s full strength.

  Perhaps Nick had spoken of Andresson as no more than a boy to ease her concerns.

  She frowned. She would not have Nick spending all his days looking out for her. She would help, not burden him. She had sworn that to herself. She would begin by making him see she was not afraid of this young man.

  So, when they carried a trunk into the house—cabin, they called it—she fought the instinct to flinch as Davis Andresson accidentally brushed against her. She held very still. He blinked a look toward her that gave her an impression of startled blue, then he jerked away as if burned by the contact of arm to arm.

  “You’ll have the separate room, of course, Alba.” Her brother gestured to an open narrow door beyond which she saw a rough bedstead, whitewashed walls and a window covered by cloth. “Davis and I’ll bunk out here. So, what do you think, Alba?” Nick asked, his eyes tracing over the rounded log walls and bare floors.

  “It is a fine ranch. Not so primitive as you said.”

  “Looks better than I’d hoped,” he admitted. “You’ve done a lot of work, Davis.”

  Davis Andresson’s face shone bright with embarrassed pleasure. “I tried real hard to keep it up all season.”

  Nick’s swift frown was dark and dangerous. “All season?”

  To Alba’s surprise, the younger man did not quail before her formidable brother. “I came by every week or two. Shag said it was okay at the start, then . . . Well, Mrs. Terhune, I mean Mrs. Wood said to keep on as I’d been doing. She gave me makings for the pallet I’m using, a real coffeepot and that chair you turned into a rocker last winter at the shack.”

  Nick’s eyes had gone to the rough chair in a dark corner. Without a word, he had walked out, his good mood shattered by such a simple mention of the woman Rachel, leaving Alba and this young man to stare at each other for an instant before both hurriedly looked away. “Best get to work,” he’d muttered.

  The good saints knew there was work to get to.

  In the ten days before the herd arrived, the two men unloaded and stored provisions, added a room to the barn to hold saddles and tack, replaced rotted stall walls, checked and repaired corral fence to hold the working stock. And spent long, long hours cutting hay.

  The hay, Nick had said, was vital in his plan to winter over cattle. He’d told her on the long journey from Texas that he’d fence in head and feed them, instead of hoping they’d survive winter. To her, watching piles of pungent hay grow higher and more numerous, it seemed they could feed all the stock in Wyoming. But when Nick and Davis scratched out figures in the dust the evening before the herd arrived, both wore frowns to supper.

  Alba spent long, silent days alone. Cooking was her first task, for she considered most important serving her brother and Davis Andresson hearty meals to carry them through brutal days. She tended the chickens and milk cow. There was no garden, but Davis Andresson mentioned wild berries on a brushy slope behind the cabin, and she found them easily. Not so easily, she separated the fruit from the branches, then turned it into preserves and pies.

  She carried water from the stream and firewood from the stack. She scrubbed the cabin and set out the lamp her husband had given her for a marriage gift, a wooden cross from the padre and delicate pieces of lace and embroidered cloth the sisters had given her in farewell. On one of these she set a tin cup holding graceful dried branches she’d found.

  The quiet of her days was broken only by the company come evening of men so e
xhausted they could barely swallow what she put before them. Even without exhaustion, neither of these men would have filled the meal with talk. Her brother had kept his thoughts largely to himself his whole life. And Davis, though not as shy as Nick might have led her to believe, was not, she recognized, a person to speak without cause.

  She didn’t mind.

  Solitude, Alba learned, had a different quality when it didn’t dread a particular arrival. Silence had a different sound when it didn’t strain to guess the next outbreak of rage.

  If it hadn’t been for her brother’s pain, so ruthlessly hidden behind a mask of indifference, she would have been totally content. But to her, Nick’s pain over this woman Rachel and the child her brother believed was his but would bear another’s name, was as clear as spoken words.

  It was of Nick, the woman Rachel and the child not yet born that Alba thought as she scattered chicken feed.

  “Does it pain you?”

  She didn’t start, even though she hadn’t heard anyone approach. The voice was Davis Andresson’s and her instincts had accepted nearly from the first that she had nothing to fear from him. In fact, when she turned to find him watching her from the barn doorway, he seemed more likely to flee than to harm her.

  “What did you say, Davis?”

  “I shouldn’t have . . . Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean no harm. Beggin’ your pardon, Miss Alba.”

  “I can extend no pardon if I do not know what it is you said,” she pointed out.

  He rocked a little, as if his muscles and his will waged a battle between running and standing his ground. “I just wondered . . . When you walk, I see how you favor that left leg—”

  Remembrance ripped across Alba’s fragile peace. Remembrance that she was not like other women. Remembrance of how she came to be that way.

  “And I was thinkin’ while Nick and me was haying about how you walk and . . .”

  When he trailed off into misery, his skin darkening even beyond the reddening it absorbed from the sun, she knew he had caught her reaction.

  “It is natural to notice,” she said mildly, unwilling to allow someone else to carry any measure of her discomfort. She moved toward the doorway to replace the feed bucket.

  Davis shuffled his feet and turned redder yet, but he didn’t move, even when she got within half a foot. She looked at him questioningly, but his gaze was aimed at his shoes. When he spoke, words came in a rush, as if all those silent breakfasts and suppers had saved up for this.

  “It wasn’t just noticin’, ma’am. See, I got to thinking. I had a pup as a boy, and it got a bad leg after my brother, Lem, he kicked it. Pa and Lem and the others, they said shoot it, since it could barely get itself around, but I said let me tend it. So I started trying liniments on him, and nothing seemed to work until I mixed up some myself.”

  Abruptly, he extended his arm, nearly clipping her elbow with the small amber bottle he thrust at her. Automatically, she accepted it.

  “Here. You rub it in wherever it’s paining you, especially at night, when it’s sore from the day. It might help your leg—like it helped him.”

  Then he was gone.

  Gone so quickly her faint, bemused thank-you was spoken to empty space.

  She stared at the bottle as if it could explain the strange conversation. Eventually, she put it in her apron pocket, returned the bucket and headed to the cabin. She limped as she crossed the bare earth. She would limp until they laid her in the ground. She accepted that. But for the first time in a long, long time, the corners of her mouth edged toward a small, private smile. Not to reassure anyone else. Not to ease anyone else’s discomfort. But from a faint, precious pleasure.

  * * * *

  Rachel stood in front of the stairway landing’s window seat, facing the sinking November sun.

  She could return to her large, well-furnished room. But she’d come from there, driven by a restlessness that had ridden her hard of late.

  She could go downstairs, perhaps see if she could do anything useful in the kitchen . . . and face another stolid rejection from Esther, the middle-aged housekeeper who ran Gordon Wood’s home.

  The daughter of a white father and Indian mother, Esther had arrived with Gordon, and word had it she’d kept house for him as long as anyone could remember. She’d made it clear from the start she wanted no interference from Rachel in the running of the Natchez household.

  Rachel couldn’t much blame her. At the Circle T, she’d left the house to Ruth. Rachel wasn’t ignorant, she could surely get by, but from the blinding white linens and spotless floors, Esther held to a higher standard than “getting by.”

  What Rachel knew was running a ranch, but her assistance wasn’t wanted there either. When she offered, Gordon smiled indulgently and told her she no longer needed to carry that burden. She could do whatever she wanted.

  Rachel sighed.

  She wanted to go home, to the Circle T. She wanted to ride Dandy in a flat-out run with the wind in her face. She wanted to have Shag beside her, scolding and protecting. She wanted a pair of black eyes glittering at her in a quiet shack.

  She wanted a lot of things that could never be. And she’d better get used to it.

  She needed to learn to be content with what was.

  Smoothing the wool challis of her fashionable wrapper, she lowered herself carefully to the seat. One hand went automatically to the bulge of her stomach, still unfamiliar even after all these months. The fabric under her hand was new and soft. The dress was one of the many indulgences Gordon insisted on providing her. He’d brought two from Cheyenne last month. This one for now; its flowing shape from the high yoke and Watteau pleating at the back accommodated her current shape. The trim-fitting red mahogany silk he’d brought would get her started when she was ready to venture to Cheyenne herself, he’d said.

  She was lucky. She had a roof over her head. A warm house. A solid barn to protect her horses. A handful of servants to ease her days.

  And an undemanding husband.

  “Marry me, and we’ll have the best spread north of the Colorado,” he’d said, the way he’d said it two dozen times.

  But that spring day at the Circle T had come a month and a half after Nick left, bare weeks after she knew for sure what she’d suspected—she was carrying a child—and only hours after they’d buried Doyle Shagwell next to the worn cross that marked her father’s grave.

  “I can’t marry you, Gordon.” She’d said that before, but she’d never cried over it before. He’d looked so stunned at the tears that she’d had a giddy impulse to laugh as she’d added, “I can’t do that to you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t love you.”

  He swept a big hand at the air, wiping away her words.

  “Love’s a whole different matter from marriage between a grown woman and grown man.”

  “I can’t do that to you,” she’d repeated doggedly.

  “Why?”

  Maybe it had been the gentleness of the question that drew the answer she’d told no one, unwilling to burden Ruth now and unable to tell the one person it most concerned.

  “I’m carrying another man’s child.”

  He’d sat back in the big chair in her parlor at that. Not in horror, she saw when she wiped away tears, but in concentrated thought. After a time, the silence and the strangeness of the situation had slipped past the numbness of her sorrow.

  “I’m sorry, Gordon. Truly sorry, to have burdened you with this. But I do ask that you not speak of it with anyone, until I’ve decided how to go on about this and—”

  “The father . . .”

  She met his stare, surprised to realize he didn’t know who the father was. “He . . . he won’t be involved.”

  “Bastard.”

  She was nearly certain he meant that for the father, but the word made her flinch at knowing it would label an innocent life. New tears slipped down cheeks already raw from the salty tracks.

  “Dry your tears, Rachel, and li
sten to what I have to say,” Gordon commanded, handing her a soft, white handkerchief. “Listen now like the hardheaded businesswoman I’ve always known you to be.”

  And he’d proposed again. For the last time.

  All he’d ever ask of her, he said, was her ranch and that she not dishonor his name. In return, he’d give her unborn child a respectable birth, and child and mother a lifetime of security.

  “We get on well enough. I won’t ever mistreat you, Rachel.”

  “My people . . .”

  “Will have jobs with me, if they want them. I won’t let any of ‘em go without your say-so. You can even keep on with that horse-breeding nonsense if you want.”

  “But the Circle T . . .”

  “Would become part of Natchez,” he’d said firmly.

  “My baby . . .”

  “Will be my heir. Nobody but the two of us will know it’s not mine. I swear that to you, Rachel.”

  Security she would have denied herself. She might even have gambled with her child’s security. But to sentence the child to a lifetime of being sneered at as a bastard when offered an alternative would have been unbearably selfish. She only had to marry a man she didn’t love. She’d done that for her father. Could she do less for her child?

  She’d accepted Gordon’s proposal, and he kept his word. He married her, he presented her to their world as his wife and the child in her womb as his heir-to-be. And he didn’t touch her.

  She didn’t know what she would have done if her bedroom door had opened one night and he had walked through. In the early months of their marriage, she’d spent hours lying in the big, high bed, willing the door to remain closed. It did.

  Gordon lavished gifts and clothes on her, but not time. He spent that on the range and a good number of trips, mostly to Montana or Cheyenne. Checking his holdings, she supposed, though she’d never gotten him to talk about the business. She knew little of what happened on the ranch. He turned aside her questions by saying it would be a shame to trouble such a pretty woman with matters of business. That got her to back off as nothing else. She didn’t want to stir that sleeping dog.