by Merry Farmer
“By lying with—” He stopped himself with an abrupt shake of his head. “I’m not going to get into this with you here, Bonnie. I’ve got work to do.”
He headed back to the construction site without giving her the chance to say another word. And blast it, if that wasn’t just like a man. If he’d stop and listen to what she had to say, get past his own ego and the fear of being wrong, she would tell him the stories of her girls—about Pearl’s steadfast determination to help others the way she had been helped, about the progress Samantha had made in learning to read and figure and behave like a proper lady, in Domenica’s way of reaching out to the Spanish girls who seemed to have it twice as bad as the others. But no, Rupert could only see one thing, and he was pinning it to her.
She made up her mind not to give up without more of a fight, and surged forward and into the jumble of lumber, house frames, and masonry. If Rupert stubbornly believed that she spent her time with Rex on her back, that she’d entertained men the way her girls did all these long years, then she would just have to set him straight. She’d explain a thing or two about how grateful a man could be to give the world the appearance of virility when the exact opposite was his misfortune. She’d tell Rupert flat out that she hadn’t—
“Ouch!” Her sharp cry drew attention from half of the building crew as she trod on a nail. “Oh, ow, ow!” she hollered, thumping to sit on a stack of boards and clutching her foot. Even though she wore boots, the soles were thinner than they should have been. A fat nail now stuck out near the toe. She could feel it piercing close to the ball of her foot.
“Bonnie!” Rupert jerked away from what he was doing and dashed to her side, jumping piles of stones and dodging tools as he did. He skidded as he came to a stop beside her. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Bonnie whined. She pushed Rupert’s hand away from her boot, then grabbed the nail and yanked it out. As she’d suspected—and hoped—it wasn’t all that long and it hadn’t gored deep.
Rupert took the nail from her, studied it, then tossed it aside. He grasped her boot tenderly, worry bright in his eyes. “I told you not to come out onto the construction site.”
“No you didn’t.” She winced.
“Well, you should have known better.”
“Since when have you known me to know better?”
“All the time, you silly goose.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. He’d called her silly goose in those first, glorious days of their marriage. Hearing it now made her want to weep. At least if she did, she could blame it on her foot.
“Rupert, I’ll be fine.” She reached for his hands, intent on pushing them away from her boot. Instead, she clutched them as if holding on for dear life.
He glanced up, meeting her eyes. All of his worry and fear coalesced into such a deep look of longing that tears stung the backs of Bonnie’s eyes. How had they made such a mess of things? Why hadn’t they tried to put it all right years ago? And how was she ever going to shove him aside now to shackle herself to Rex?
His lips moved, as if he was working up the courage to say something…something that should have been said years ago. Bonnie opened her mouth to reply, but no sound came out. The world held still. Every other sound vanished. It was just the two of them and all of the things that had been left unsaid between them for years.
“You should go see a doctor.” Skipper broke the beautiful, heartbreaking moment as he rushed up to them. “Our nails aren’t rusty, but there are dangers all the same.” He flinched as he reached them, likely realizing he’d interrupted an important moment. “Oh.”
The moment was gone. Rupert rocked back, letting go of Bonnie’s hands. Bonnie stood. “Just point me in the right direction and I’ll go see someone.”
“Isn’t that the doctor over there?” one of the nearby workers said, pointing toward the last buildings on the edge of town.
Bonnie followed the line of his arm, but all she saw was a woman with dark hair, just a few wisps of grey visible, walking briskly by with a basket on her arm.
“Yeah, that’s Meri Carpenter,” Skipper said, confirming.
In spite of everything, Bonnie’s brow flew up. “A woman doctor?”
“Yep.” Skipper nodded.
Bonnie stood, wincing at the twinge in her foot. Odd though it was, the thought of being around a woman instead of a bunch of men when her emotions were so overworked was comforting. “I’ll catch up with her.” She started around the pile of boards and after the dark-haired woman.
“Bonnie, are you sure you shouldn’t—”
“I’ll be fine, Rupert,” she called back over her shoulder, knowing she’d be anything but.
Chapter 4
“Excuse me,” Bonnie called as she hobbled up behind Meri Carpenter. “Excuse me, are you a doctor?”
Meri turned to her with a curious look that quickly resolved to an alarmed, then businesslike one. “Oh, dear. What seems to be the problem?”
Bonnie heaved a sigh. “I stepped on a nail over at Rupert’s construction site.”
Meri shifted her basket to her other arm and took Bonnie’s elbow, steering her toward a bench on the porch in front of a shop. At the same time, her brow flew up. “Rupert?”
“Yes, Rupert Cole. Do you know him?”
Meri helped Bonnie to sit. “Of course I know him, but I must confess, I’m surprised to hear a woman I’ve never met call him by his first name.”
Bonnie winced, and not from untying her boot to slide it off over her bleeding foot. She shouldn’t have tipped her hand so fast. “Yes, I do know him. Well.” It must have been the pain. She wasn’t usually this blunt with people she didn’t know. But this Meri Carpenter woman was a healer, which meant she’d probably been through a lot. She helped people, and as far as Bonnie was concerned, that made her an instant comrade.
The conversation was halted as Meri peeled back Bonnie’s ripped stocking to get a look at her wound without exposing more of Bonnie’s leg than was proper in public. Not that Bonnie hadn’t ever displayed a whole lot more than was proper in public before.
“Hmm,” Meri hummed. “It looks to be a simple puncture wound. Lucky for you, it’s not that deep. It should be cleaned right away, though.”
Rather than giving Bonnie instructions on where to go to wash her feet, Meri rummaged through her basket and came up with a bottle of clear alcohol and a tidy, white rag. She hoisted Bonnie’s foot onto her knee and began washing the wound. Bonnie gasped and grimaced at the sting, but she’d felt much worse in her day.
“Someone I’ve never met who knows Rupert Cole well, eh?” Meri said as she dabbed at Bonnie’s toe. She followed the statement by looking up and fixing Bonnie with an expression that turned the whole thing into a question, a demand, even. “You seem a little upset. Not the kind of upset caused by stepping on a nail.”
Bonnie tried to keep her mouth shut. She truly did. But the stinging pain—in her heart and in her foot—the frustration of failing at the mission she’d come to Everland for, and all of the years of keeping her true feelings bottled up, chose that moment to hit her hard.
“I’m Rupert’s wife,” she muttered.
Meri froze, her eyes wide. Her moment of shock passed, she took a deep breath, and continued cleaning Bonnie’s foot. “I wasn’t aware Rupert had a wife.”
Bonnie huffed at the irony of it all. “Very few people are, and until things get sorted between us, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that to yourself.”
“Of course.” Meri nodded. “Doctor-patient confidentiality.” She put aside the rag and reached for bandages in her basket. “If you don’t mind my asking, though, if you’re Rupert’s wife, where have you been all these years?”
“Haskell,” Bonnie answered. When she saw that her answer didn’t satisfy Meri, she sighed and went on. “Things didn’t exactly work out between Rupert and I.”
Meri arched one brow. “No, I imagine they didn’t if you’re living apart.” With her eyes focused on her
work, she asked, “How did you end up married but living apart?”
Somehow it was easier to tell the story without Meri actually looking at her. “Those are two different stories,” she began. “First of all, I ended up married to Rupert because I answered his advertisement to come out West as a mail-order bride.”
“Yes, I hear quite a few young women are doing that these days,” she answered with a mysterious grin, as if she knew more about the topic than she was letting on. It was something of a relief to have Meri take such an emotionally-charged part of Bonnie’s life and make polite conversation from it.
“Well, what they don’t tell you when you answer those advertisements is that those marriages have just as good a chance of being an unmitigated disaster as they do of providing love and security.”
Meri finished wrapping Bonnie’s bandage and glanced up at her, questions in her eyes.
Bonnie let her shoulders drop. Might as well get it all out. “I come from a coal-mining family in West Virginia. Papa worked hard and provided for us, but we weren’t what you would call well-off or sophisticated. I always did well in school, though. So well that folks kept telling me I should pool together my resources and go to teacher’s college, that if I worked hard I could make a good living.”
“That sounds reasonable.” Meri shrugged.
“Yeah, reasonable for a steady, serious woman, maybe.”
“But not you?”
Bonnie shook her head. “All that book learning only made me cocky and sure of myself. It made me think I was better than the place where I was born. I wanted to see everything, do everything. I thought I was special and superior in every way.”
Meri narrowed her eyes as she studied Bonnie. “You don’t seem all that arrogant to me.”
“Not now,” Bonnie agreed. “But you should have seen me back then.” She sighed and picked at her skirt. “First, I ran away from home at age eighteen and headed to Cincinnati, since it was the closest big city downriver. The only jobs I could get were menial ones, though. What with my superior attitude, I didn’t hold much to that. Not to mention the fact that more than a few men at the hotel where I worked thought they could hire me for ‘extra service,’ if you catch my meaning.”
“Oh, my.” Meri’s cheeks flushed.
“I haven’t even gotten to that part of the story yet,” Bonnie warned her. “I stumbled across a page of requests for mail-order brides in the paper one day, and kept my eyes open for a man I thought was good enough for me.”
“And you found Rupert?”
Bonnie nodded. “He placed an ad saying he was a young, handsome, successful miner in the Colorado Territory. Well, I jumped right on that and wrote back to him. To make a long story short, we decided to give it a try. I grabbed the next train to Denver City, as it was called back then, and away I went.”
Meri’s excited expression melted to a frown. “But it didn’t work out?”
“Oh, sure, it worked out. At first.” Bonnie’s heart tightened in her chest as she remembered those first, glorious days. “Rupert was every bit as handsome as he said he was in his letters. And I’ll give myself airs enough to say I was just as pretty as I told him I was. We were married within an hour of me stepping off that train, and less than an hour after that we were in bed.”
Meri’s cheeks pinked even more. “That was certainly fast.”
“It was, but by that point I was nineteen and more than ready for it, and Rupert was just twenty with a full head of steam. We were married, fair and square, and figured why wait? I never did put much stock in all those prissy, proper rules that said a woman couldn’t feel things in the places God gave her.” She paused at Meri’s shocked expression. “Sorry. I may be older and wiser now, but I’m still a little too frank when it comes down to it.”
“No, no, it’s all right,” Meri insisted. “It’s just that you don’t often hear respectable women admitting to such…basic feelings.”
Bonnie laughed. “Make no mistake, Mrs. Carpenter, I’m not a respectable woman.”
“Oh?”
Bonnie shook her head. Her entire chest constricted with the agony of the memories that began to well up as she nudged herself to tell the rest of the story. “Those exciting, sunny first days of marriage quickly turned sour when Rupert finally up and admitted that right after sending me train fare to come marry him, he’d lost his claim.”
“He what? Oh, no!”
“Yep.” Bonnie nodded. “He’d struck a little bit of silver, but when he went to mine the rest of it, he ran into problems with his neighbors. They claimed the silver was on their property. It was too, but Rupert was hard-headed and rash, and instead of taking the truth for what it was, he got into a fight. His buddies dragged him home to the shack where we were living, broken, bloodied, and minus the deed to his mine on top of everything else. The next day, before Rupert was fully recovered, those bullies came back and kicked us off the land.”
“That’s terrible,” Meri exclaimed, pressing a hand to her chest. “Where did you go?”
Bonnie shrugged. “The only place I could think to go was back to Denver City. I used what little money we had to get us a room in a third-rate hotel long enough for Rupert to recover. Of course, once he was better, he railed at me for spending all our money.”
“Not very grateful, was he?” Meri shook her head.
“Well, he was right to a certain extent. Things got bad after that. We took work where we could, slept on back porches and sheds, and ate what scraps we could find. Things would have gotten better if Rupert weren’t so dang stubborn. He was more interested in winning his claim back than making lemonade out of the lemons we’d been given. I ended up being the one who supported us while he spent most of his time fighting and arguing.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Rupert I know.”
“It doesn’t. He’s changed a lot. So have I.”
Somehow, those simple statements tugged so hard at Bonnie’s heartstrings that she wanted to abandon her whole endeavor and rush back into Rupert’s arms. But she couldn’t, and she knew damn well why not.
“I ended up leaving him,” she confessed, averting her eyes as she reached the most painful part of her sad history. “I had to.” She dropped her head to look at her hands. “I was starving. Truly and genuinely starving. I knew Rupert wouldn’t raise a hand to feed me or himself if he thought he had me to fall back on. The only thing that was going to turn his mind away from that fight over his lost claim was if he faced death. So I walked out.”
“Maybe you did the right thing?” Meri patted Bonnie’s foot, which was still in her lap.
Bonnie made a noncommittal noise. “Hunger makes you desperate,” she said so quietly she wasn’t sure Meri could hear her. “It makes you lose your mind, do things you never would have done otherwise. I knew there was one sure way I could get a big, hot meal instantly. I didn’t even think about it. I just walked into a saloon and told the first likely candidate that I met that if he’d buy me supper, I’d let him put it in the oven.”
“Oh, sweetie.” Meri’s eyes filled with compassion. She reached for Bonnie’s hand.
Bonnie shook her head and pushed her hand away. Meri didn’t know the whole story yet. “It was far too easy,” she went on in a somber voice. “That’s the problem with that profession. It’s far, far too easy. As unpleasant as it can get, you know it’ll all be over in a couple of minutes if you can just hang on to your sanity and keep that smile in place long enough. And believe you me, there’s nothing more seductive than a full stomach.”
“I…I suppose so.” Meri lowered her head.
“Denver City was big enough that there were several dedicated houses for that sort of thing. Girls signed contracts with the proprietors and worked as they saw fit. It didn’t take me long to pick one of the houses and sign on the dotted line.”
“But what about Rupert?” Meri asked.
“I didn’t hear from him for over a year,” Bonnie confessed. “I don’t know if he ke
pt trying to fight for his claim or if he was drunk in a ditch. He showed up a year after I’d been working for Flo—Miss Florence, that is, and you’d better remember to treat her with respect or she’d toss you in with the rough sort—when he showed up in town looking for me. He found me, and when he saw what I’d been reduced to, well, let’s just say there are probably still folks talking about the fight we had.
Meri remained silent. Bonnie chewed her lip before going on.
“The thing is, I knew as well as Rupert knew that it wasn’t anger we felt for each other. I don’t think it ever was. It was grief. Bone-deep sorrow that things had gone as far as they had. But we were both still young then, and neither of us was willing to back down or make concessions. And I still had my contract and couldn’t buy my way out of it. As soon as he heard that, he was so angry and hurt that he walked off.” She glanced up at Meri at last. “I didn’t see him for another four years after that.”
Meri blinked in shock, considering Bonnie’s words. Then she shook her head. “But you said you were from Haskell, not Denver. How did you get there?”
Bonnie laughed. “That’s where fate or Nature or God or whatever you believe in comes into the story.”
“Oh?”
Bonnie adjusted her stance, pulling her foot back and putting her punctured boot back on as she spoke. “It was another nine months or so after that incident with Rupert. I’d pretty much resigned myself to my fate by then. I saw girls come and go, battered, mistreated, hopeless. Some took their own lives, they were so desperate. Some were killed by patrons. It ate me up inside. I wasn’t the sort to give up, so I took all that frustrated, irate, indignant energy and poured it into prayers that one day I could get back at all the folks who had done me wrong.”
“Get back at them?” Meri balked.
Bonnie chuckled. “I was still young and stupid at that point. But not for much longer.” She finished with her boot, lowered her foot, and brushed her skirts back into place. “One day, this brash young gentleman came into the establishment where I worked. He was rich and arrogant, he liked whiskey and women and cards. He was a real show-off. Threw his money around like it grew on a tree he kept in his backyard. In reality, his parents back East were loaded. They couldn’t handle his wild ways anymore, so they sent him West.” She paused. “His name was George Pickering.”
