Sweet Briar Rose

by Lena Goldfinch

  “Listen...” He gently took her napkin and set both cloths in the pool of tea. “We don’t have to decide anything just now, where anything goes. Would you like me to leave your trunks in the shop tonight? Or bring them up?”

  He gathered their mugs, their empty plates, and the utensils and set them in the sink. He moved slowly and methodically, giving her time to think.

  Somehow he felt giving her even the smallest of choices might settle her nerves.

  When he glanced back from where he stood rinsing the plates, he thought the slight tightness around her mouth had eased.

  “We don’t have to decide anything just now,” she echoed with what sounded like a measure of relief. “No, they don’t need to come up now. I have everything I need for tonight.”

  “All right.”

  “Can I help with the dishes?” she asked. “I could dry them.”

  “Just sit and relax,” he told her. “You’ve had a long day.”

  She didn’t fight him on that.

  As he continued washing and drying the dishes, she sat in silence. She seemed to prefer the quiet. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but it wasn’t what he’d envisioned. He’d thought they might sit around the table this evening, enjoying the warmth of the fire together. He’d imagined reading their letters aloud to each other.

  He could see that wasn’t likely to happen, not tonight.

  Chapter 6

  It snowed all night. Rose woke several times, not knowing where she was, her mind racing. She missed her old bedroom. And her house, in the days when her father had been just down the hall. That deep feeling of security she’d once felt. She missed everything. The sound of the ocean breaking. She even missed her brother, Frank, who had so carelessly jeopardized the business and then left her to fend for herself after Papa’s death. How could he?

  At least she had known him. He was family. And Frank could be quite funny at times, she admitted to herself, especially when he was relating a tale. He might leave the kitchen a mess, but he could cook a tasty fish chowder. He could be good company when he put his mind to it.

  Frank had his finer qualities, as everyone did.

  Here, nothing was familiar. She knew no one, not really. She wouldn’t even know how to get to the grocer’s from here. Although, surely she could find her way. By all appearances, it was a small town. She could meet the neighbors up and down the street. She could attempt to make friends. There must be a few women, perhaps even someone close to her age. Though age wouldn’t matter if she found someone kind—someone she could talk to.

  But would she ever truly feel at home here?

  Would she ever share the same easy comfortability with Emmett that she’d once enjoyed with her father and brother? Would he ever feel like family? Let alone like a husband. To marry a stranger... She shook her head, marveling at her own actions. It seemed so incredible now. She was actually here, in Sweet Briar, Colorado, a place she’d never heard of before. With a man she barely knew. Perhaps she’d truly been foolish, as her mother had said when she’d learned of Rose’s plans.

  When it was clear she wasn’t going to drift back to sleep, Rose got up. Lighting the bedside gas lamp would only wake her more fully, so she shuffled slowly across the room in utter darkness, hands outstretched to feel for obstacles in her path, until she was finally able to peer out the bedroom window.

  Outside, a heavy blanket of darkness swallowed any light. She couldn’t make out the muted glow of a single lantern in any windows up and down the street. She couldn’t even make out the shapes of the houses or stores. Hard icy snow pinged sharply against the glass, the only sign it was still snowing.

  They’d sometimes gotten blizzards like this on the coast of Maine—nor’easters. Endless snow paired with the hardest of driving winds.

  Across the room, Boston groaned. Rose couldn’t see him in the gloom, but she could hear his legs twitching against the rug in his sleep. He must have been dreaming. Chasing something he couldn’t catch. Poor old fellow.

  “Get it, boy,” she encouraged softly.

  He must have heard her, for he groaned again, then lumbered noisily to his feet to join her. The weight of his body against her leg was oddly familiar and comforting, as if she’d known him for many years. As if he were her dog, or almost. She scratched his head and he yawned impressively.

  She let out a soft laugh. “Am I keeping you up?”

  He merely yawned again, seemingly determined to keep his new mistress company despite his drowsiness.

  “Perhaps I should at least attempt to fall back asleep,” she told him. She patted his massive head once more and found her way back to the bed in the dark, drawing the covers up to her chin. Boston again settled onto his spot on the rug.

  There was only one thing for it, Rose thought as she lay there. She’d simply get to know Emmett. And then she’d make her decision. She didn’t have to marry him. She still had a choice.

  Emmett himself had said much the same thing in the kitchen earlier. They didn’t have to decide anything right away.

  Although she’d traveled nearly a week to get here, what did a week matter?

  This was her life.

  If a life with Emmett—and Boston—didn’t suit her, there was no reason she couldn’t return to her mother’s. As dry and unappealing as that idea sounded.

  Rose wasn’t exactly sure when she fell asleep, or what time the winds stopped rattling the windows and trying to strip the siding off the house. When she awakened next, a bitter chill had set in, penetrating her covers and turning her toes to ice.

  An absolute quiet seemed to have settled outside, a sort of ominous presence of its own.

  Something was very wrong.

  Sometime before dawn, Emmett was awakened by cold. Blind in the darkness, he tried to get his bearings. The mattress under him felt wrong, too narrow and lumpy, the pillow under his head too thin. There was no sound of Boston snoring on the rug next to him. Then he remembered. He was up in the attic bedroom.

  One story below him—in his room—Rose slept. Or at least he hoped she was sleeping. Boston was downstairs with her, guarding her door from the inside. The old dog wouldn’t have come up to the attic anyway. He’d never trusted the open treads of the back stairs and refused to come up, which was just as well these days with his painful joints.

  Emmett sat up gingerly, taking care not to strike his head against the attic’s steeply sloped ceiling. Any last bit of warmth abandoned him as his soft pile of covers fell away.

  Piercing cold hit him, even sharper now. Coming down off the rafters, off the floor and walls. If it had a color, it would be blue. The pale blue frost of an iced-over mountain stream. Still in a haze of sleep, he rubbed his hands down his face. The tip of his nose was cold. His cheeks. His ears.

  He couldn’t see a lick in the dark, but he could certainly feel.

  It shouldn’t be this cold, not even up here in the attic. It felt much like the front door had been left open, but he had no sense of a draft against his bare feet and ankles. Had the fire gone out? He’d tended to it at midnight, or thereabouts, adding more logs to the cast-iron kitchen stove. He’d gotten a blaze roaring, then banked it down real nice. That was usually enough to heat the entire upstairs all night.

  The vaguely heavy scent of smoke from that evening ritual still lingered in the air.

  Emmett reached down to the floor, fumbled around for his heavy wool socks, and yanked them on. He’d never been able to sleep with socks on, no matter how cold it got. He lit the lantern he’d left on the nightstand and drew a flannel shirt over his usual winter sleeping attire: a long-sleeved undershirt that hit him mid-thigh and his long drawers. He left the flannel shirt open at the front, an extra layer to stave off the cold.

  After creeping down the narrow stairway at the back of the house, he found the kitchen stove making the distinctive tink-tink-tink sound of metal cooling. Inside the firebox, a few embers were glowing in the ash, hopefully enough to get the fire going agai
n. He’d stored up pinecones in the fall for winter. They were usually good for starter and smelled nice. Unfortunately, to get the fire going again, he had to use up the last of the supply he’d brought in from the woodshed yesterday, as well as the remainder of the logs he’d stowed in the big oblong copper tub by the stove.

  As he watched, the fire ate through wood too fast. Must have been the sharp cold which had set in.

  He cupped his hands against the kitchen window and peered out back. He could just barely make out the shadowy shapes of evergreens, bowed down by the weight of snow. Other than that the world outside was a pale sea of nothingness. Near as he could tell, it had stopped snowing. The wind had stopped beating against the house. Seemed the blizzard had blown through finally, but dragged some icy temperatures in behind it. The glass against his hands radiated a frigid cold.

  Boston padded up beside him, sat, and leaned heavily against his leg.

  “Hey, boy, what’re you doing here?” Emmett patted Boston’s shaggy head and looked over toward the entrance to the kitchen. He saw Rose framed in the doorway, and his chest constricted.

  She wore her long curly black hair in a braid pulled forward over her shoulder. It fell to one side down the front of her white flannel wrapper. In the vee of her robe, he could see the neckline of her white cotton nightgown, with scalloped lace and a column of tiny ivory buttons. She looked soft. Womanly. He couldn’t have dragged his eyes away from her if he’d tried his hardest.

  A beautiful woman standing in his house, dressed in her night clothes.

  Properly covered from her neck down to her dainty slippers, but still. Here. Shivering.

  “I heard you up,” she said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you,” Emmett said, unable to break his gaze away from her.

  “I was awake anyway.” She cinched the belt of her wrapper tighter and did a kind of dance from foot to foot, obviously trying to stay warm.

  “You cold?” he asked. Boston leaned even more heavily against him, as if in an attempt to draw heat off his master.

  “That’s what woke me up,” she admitted. “What time is it?”

  “Near to dawn, best I can guess.” An old longcase clock stood in the hallway outside the kitchen, but Emmett had come down the attic stairs off the back of the house, so he hadn’t gone past it. He also kept the clock set so it wouldn’t chime all through the night, repeatedly waking him. Rose must have walked right past it without noticing.

  She nodded and crept closer to the stove, her hands held out to gather its warmth. Emmett dragged one of the chairs from the table and set it facing the stove.

  “The fire went out, but I’ve got it going again. Come on and sit. This’ll warm you up.” Emmett opened the door to the firebox, exposing the red crackle of flames and letting out a blast of heat.

  She sank gratefully onto the chair and leaned as close as was safe to the stove, rubbing her hands together and then holding them out to the blaze. Since she’d come in, she’d kept her eyes averted from him, and he realized how he must look, wearing an open flannel shirt over his winter underwear. Which, given they weren’t married yet, wasn’t nearly as proper as her white wrapper. He pulled the edges of his shirt together and buttoned it down. He wished now that he’d thought to pull on trousers. He hadn’t expected to encounter Rose.

  “I need to go out for more wood,” he told her, hoping the implication that he planned to get fully dressed would set her at ease. He’d need his coat, boots, hat, and gloves too, to go out to the lean-to shed around the side of the house.

  “You’re going outside in this?” she protested.

  “Better now, while the fire’s still hot. We’re going through a lot of wood fast. Temperature must have dropped below zero.”

  “All right.” She stood as if prepared to go out with him. “I can help.”

  “If you could stay here and watch the stove, I’d be grateful.” He didn’t want her going out in this cold. He didn’t much want to go outside himself.

  In a perfect world, he’d have a doorway off his shop that led directly into the woodshed.

  But this wasn’t a perfect world.

  He had what he had, which meant he had to go out the front door and around the side of the house. It wasn’t far, and he had the sled to pull logs over to the shop, which was what he intended to do. He’d thought he’d brought in enough yesterday to outlast the storm. Normally, it would have been. Now he had to pay the price for that miscalculation.

  Chapter 7

  Rose watched as Emmett disappeared up the narrow back stairway and then reemerged fully dressed. He had on the same flannel shirt—a nice navy plaid, soft looking, as if it had been washed often—but he’d tucked it into a pair of black work trousers. Black suspenders stretched up and over his broad shoulders. He was only wearing thick-looking wool socks on his feet, but then he’d probably left his wet boots along with his coat by the front door.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he told her, and then called Boston, “You may as well go out now too.”

  As they left the kitchen, Rose perched on the edge of her chair, suddenly anxious for them.

  It was eerily quiet now, alone, with just the snapping of the fire.

  She strained to hear any sound of Emmett and Boston. She heard the door to the front stairwell creak open and close again, and the sounds of them climbing down the stairs into his shop area. And then nothing. She pictured Emmett lacing his boots and putting on his coat. She pictured Boston too, standing beside him, the long brown plume of his tail swaying, awaiting his own morning ritual.

  It was impossible to sit still, simply waiting, a sense of foreboding gathering around her. If anything happened to them, she’d well and truly be alone.

  And then she heard it, the crash of a thousand pounds falling. She didn’t know what it was, but she leapt to her feet and scrambled down the stairs after them.

  On the final step, she stopped. Emmett and Boston stood before the open door. Snow had spilled in around their feet. Thin swirls drifted across the floor and settled. More snow was piled high in the doorway, all the way to the top. Not only snow, a wall of ice.

  “What happened?” She stood on the last stair, gripping the handrail.

  Emmett turned his head toward her, as if startled by her voice. He brushed snow from his coat and quickly shut the door against the cold. His leather hat lay on the floor at his feet. It too was covered in snow.

  “What happened?” she repeated, frightened by the look on his face. His expression was grim. Had he been hurt? She tucked her robe more tightly about her. It felt too thin, not nearly enough to keep her warm. Her teeth began to chatter.

  “A sheet of ice. Up on the roof. It must have formed overnight. All that icy snow... I just opened the door and it broke free.” He said it so matter-of-factly. Despite his grim expression, it didn’t seem as if he was nearly as concerned as he should have been.

  “And it fell in the doorway?” she pressed. At his calm nod, she blurted out, “You could have been crushed—you and Boston.”

  Did he not see that they could have been severely injured, that they could have died?

  She swallowed and asked, “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m not hurt. And thankfully, Boston didn’t push out ahead of me like he usually does.” For one brief instant, a sickly expression crossed Emmett’s face. He did realize they could have been crushed. That Boston might’ve been killed if he’d rushed out the door first. Emmett reached down to ruffle the dog’s neck fur. Boston simply sat there with his eyes on the door, perhaps waiting for his master to open it again, not understanding they were quite literally snowed in.

  “I need to get out there and get more wood,” Emmett said, more to himself it seemed than to her.

  “Can you go around back, out the kitchen door?” Rose tried to recall the kitchen with the door off the back. She hadn’t paid much attention. Since there was a door, surely it led to a landing and a set of stairs.

  He looked th
oughtful. “There’s stairs out the back door, not much more than a ladder. I could possibly go that way.”

  “But?”

  “Snow’s likely to pile up deeper between the back of the house and the hill.”

  “How deep?”

  “Near ten feet some storms—I made marks on the siding one spring.”

  “Ten feet?” Rose exclaimed. “You can’t go out that way.”

  “It’s not always that deep. Just some storms.”

  “Like this one.”

  He hesitated.

  “Emmett?”

  He nodded. “Like this one. And we’ve had a few big ones back to back, piling up over the past couple of weeks. But we need wood, and soon, so I’m just going to have to dig us out. Have to dig us out anyway. Can’t let it stay like this.”

  How long would that take? Rose could only imagine. Half the day? Longer?

  She scanned the room. “Do you have a shovel? One you can get to?”

  “I usually leave it right outside the door.” He thought a moment. “But last I used it, I was clearing a path to the woodshed—to get the sled. Before I met you at the station. I must’ve left it propped inside.”

  Either way, the shovel was on the wrong side of the door. His frown said as much.

  “There’s not another shovel in here?” she asked.

  “I can manage.” He looked around the walls of his display room, perhaps weighing each item for its usefulness in digging them out. Drawer pulls, hinges, fire tools, wooden bins filled with nails... Nothing appeared suitable to Rose, but hopefully Emmett had something here he could use, or somewhere else in the house. Surely he did. Until then, they’d best keep the fire going.

  For that they needed fuel.

  Emmett watched with some curiosity as Rose crossed over to one of her trunks, her slippers shushing against the floor. The trunk was the one he’d found to be the heaviest. The one that had rattled as if it were filled with rocks. She knelt before the trunk and worked the latches on the front. The lid creaked as she opened it.