by Jo Goodman
“That’s Sylvie,” he said quietly.
Rachel looked up, startled. He’d spoken her precise thought. “How did you know?”
He didn’t think he could explain it properly, and after a moment, said, “Something in your face, I suppose.” He thrust an arm outside the covers and held out his hand. “May I?”
Nodding, Rachel leaned forward and extended her arm over the open chest lid and placed the photograph between Wyatt’s fingertips. “When did you make the picture?”
Wyatt stared at the photograph. The sepia tones softened Sylvianna’s features, making her seem more amenable to sitting for her portrait than she’d actually been. “A few months after I brought her here,” he said. “We had wedding portraits made in Boston, but they were in a trunk that didn’t follow us here. We never recovered it, and Sylvie…well, she never forgave me.”
He returned the photograph to Rachel, pushed upright, and leaned against the headboard. “She wanted to go to Denver for another portrait, but I convinced her to allow me to make one first. If she didn’t like it, I promised to take her to Denver.”
Rachel’s eyes fell on Sylvie’s heart-shaped face. Her chin was small, but it jutted forward at a sharp angle, hinting at her resentment. Her lightly colored eyes were steady, even compelling. The bridge of her nose was narrow, but the line of her mouth was full. She had high cheekbones and finely arched eyebrows. Her hair curled softly across her forehead and was coiled in a loose knot at the crown of her head. Red? she wondered. Perhaps strawberry blonde.
“I don’t think she wanted to like it,” Rachel said. “But it’s beautiful all the same. She’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said. “She is.” It did not seem strange to think of Sylvianna in the present tense. “And you’re right. She didn’t want to like it. She didn’t want to like anything about being away from Boston. I should have sent her back, but I wouldn’t make the decision for her, and she wouldn’t leave. If you’re thinking that was admirable, that her reluctance was because of the vows we took, then—”
“I was thinking she stayed because she loved you and that being away from you was more difficult than being away from Boston.”
“That was part of it,” he said quietly. There was regret in his eyes and a faint, rueful tilt to his mouth.
“Then what was the other part?”
“Punishment.”
Inwardly, Rachel recoiled from the notion. “You don’t mean that.” But even as she said it, she saw that he meant exactly that. She hardly knew what to say, so she fell back on an inadequate “I’m sorry.”
“Not for me, I hope,” he said roughly. “Sylvie deserves it. You shouldn’t forget that I punished her. That was the state of our marriage almost from the beginning, impossible to reconcile.”
“But you loved her.”
“Yes, I did. It made both of us miserable.”
Rachel was quiet, contemplative. It made a terrible kind of sense that neither would allow themselves to be happy at the expense of the other, but that they also could not live apart. Was it love that truly kept them together or something else? She looked at the photograph again and decided that perhaps the thrust of that small jaw wasn’t resentment at all, but determination, and the gaze was more gently persuasive than compelling.
“What happened, Wyatt? In the end, I mean. How did Sylvianna die?”
“I killed her.”
Rachel could have understood if he’d hesitated, or offered it reluctantly, but his flat declaration surprised her and revealed the certainty with which he had come to accept it. She said quietly, “I doubt that it’s true in the way you intend for me to believe.”
He shrugged. “It’s straightforward, Rachel. I was in the mountains making photographs, and she was at home. She hated when I left her, especially when she knew I’d be gone for days at a time, so we argued as I was leaving. I invited her to come with me. She was a good, confident rider, and sometimes she would accompany me. But not this time. She was insistent about staying back, more insistent than usual that I remain with her. She wouldn’t explain herself, so I thought we were repeating one of those arguments we had from time to time, the kind that start in a fog and end up clearing the air for a while.”
“So you left,” said Rachel.
He nodded. “I was gone four days. I wasn’t sheriff then. I didn’t have responsibilities to the town, only to Sylvie. And I was gone four days.”
Rachel slowly closed the lid on the chest. She still held the photograph in her hands, but didn’t glance toward it. Her eyes remained on Wyatt’s.
“Grace and Estella had her laid out on our bed when I got home. It was Ned and a couple of Sid’s boys that rode out to find me. I was heading back by then, but that hardly mattered. Sylvie didn’t know I was coming home.” He took a steadying breath, absently rubbed his palm over his knee. “She was taking a walk with the pastor’s wife. There was a disagreement over cards at the Miner Key between a couple of sharps. Rudy Martin told them to take it into the street. He just didn’t want his place busted up in a brawl. He didn’t know they were going to shoot it out with their fancy derringers.
“Sylvie was hit when the first shot went wide. It nicked an artery in her neck. She bled to death in Mrs. Duun’s arms. Doc never had a chance with her.”
“That’s a tragedy, Wyatt, but you aren’t responsible.”
“Some days I’m almost convinced of it. Most days, not. I brought her here, remember. That’s the part that always sticks. And I know, too, that if I’d been the one walking with her that day, there would have been a different outcome.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“But I do. I would have been walking on the street side of the sidewalk, and Sylvie would have been on the inside. That’s what a man does for a woman. He protects her by providing escort on the outside. That bullet should have been mine, Rachel. I would have taken it in the back, not the neck, and I might not even have died, but I wasn’t there, and Sylvianna was.”
Rachel closed her eyes momentarily, remembering the evening they’d left the Commodore together. Wyatt had moved immediately to the outside, the time-honored way of making certain a woman wasn’t splashed by carriages rollicking through puddles or wasn’t accosted by clumps of mud thrown up by a horse’s hooves. Or, in Reidsville, wasn’t the victim of a stray bullet.
“It’s not important that you say anything, Rachel. You looked at my photographs and thought you knew my soul, but you didn’t know this. It seemed to me that you should.”
“Then say it all, Wyatt.”
Perhaps she did know his soul, even the darkest regions, because she was pressing him to say the thing that always stuck in his throat, the thing that was known to one other person at the time of his wife’s death and only shared with him afterward with the greatest reluctance. But he had pressed Doc Diggins just as Rachel was pressing him, and he wondered if the time finally had come to say it aloud. To say it all.
“Sylvie was pregnant,” he told her. Tears burned, first at the back of his eyes, then along the rim of his lashes. They hovered there. “She was carrying our child.”
Although it was the answer Rachel had expected, it was difficult to hear, more difficult yet to look upon the despair shadowing Wyatt’s face. The photograph fell from her nerveless fingers. She threw off the quilt and crawled across the bed toward him. He opened his arms, took her in, but she was the one who offered shelter.
She hugged him to her, pressing one hand to the back of his head, the other to his back. He didn’t sob, but she felt his tears dampen the thin fabric of her gown. She offered no words. He would have fought those. It was her silence that broke him, and her silence that kept him sane.
He shuddered once, then was still. She stroked his hair, waiting him out the way he often did with her. When she felt his shoulders bunch, she let her arms fall away. He sat up and rubbed his face with his hands. When he came out from behind them, his eyes were clear and his features were no longer shut
tered.
“When I look back,” he said, “I wonder if I suspected, and that’s why I resisted her pleas to stay behind. She was going to tell me, I think, and I didn’t want to hear.”
Rachel sat back on her legs and reached for the quilt. She dragged it toward her and wrapped it around her shoulders. Wyatt looked as if he couldn’t feel the room’s chill. “What would a child have meant?”
Her ability to go straight to the heart of it no longer caught him off guard. “Boston,” he said. “We would have returned. I know that. Her family. Mine. It was like swimming against the tide. I’d have sold my interest in the mine to the town and settled into a law practice.”
Rachel ached for him. She imagined there had been a moment, something even smaller than a moment, when it had crossed his mind that Sylvie’s death, and the death of their child, meant he didn’t have to go back to Boston, and in that infinitesimal span of time he had known relief. Guilt had been crushing him ever since.
“Do you think it’s wrong to be selfish?” she asked.
Wyatt blinked. She’d pulled him suddenly from a very dark place. He regarded her, thoughtful, but uncertain. She peered at him with the intensity of his most formidable law professor, the one who insisted that questions be considered from all angles, like a jeweler admiring the facets of a diamond, looking for flaws with his loop.
“Wrong to be selfish?” he repeated. “No, not wrong. Not in the abstract, at least.”
“And when it’s concrete?”
He was silent.
“Perhaps it’s that you and Sylvie weren’t selfish enough. Maybe it was the marriage that needed to be sacrificed, not one of you for the other.”
Wyatt let his head fall back against the headboard and briefly closed his eyes. “You may be right,” he said at last.
“I don’t know, Wyatt. There were no simple choices, not one among them that would have made things right for everyone.”
He nodded faintly. “You’re the only one besides Doc and me that knows about the baby. I made Doc tell me, but sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”
“I understand.”
Wyatt studied her face for a long moment. “I believe you do.”
Rachel leaned forward and kissed him softly on the mouth. She felt his arms come up, but before he could embrace her she moved outside his reach. She held up her index finger to indicate she needed time, then scrambled out of bed. Gathering up the photographs that lay scattered at the foot of the bed, including Sylvie’s portrait, Rachel put them in the chest, then moved the chest to the floor, this time putting it beside the dresser, not under the bed.
Wyatt lifted the blankets for her when she was ready to return. They slid down together, each seeking the other for warmth and comfort. She rubbed her feet against his legs.
“Are you trying to start a fire?” he asked.
Rachel’s laugh stayed at the back of her throat. “If only I could. Quick. Take my hands.”
He did, placing his own firmly around them. “Better?”
“Mmm.” She stopped fidgeting. “Infinitely.”
Much later it occurred to her that perhaps she had started a fire, but that didn’t come to her mind when Wyatt began to make love to her. She was overwhelmed, first by his tenderness, then by his hunger. He demanded nothing from her in the beginning, took everything in the end.
It suited her exactly, this long spiraling climb to pleasure. His mouth followed the trail of his hands. He lingered as he pleased, and he was often pleased to do so. His kisses were by turns deep and drugging, then tempered by his teasing, and he always drew a like response from her.
The damp edge of his tongue dipped into the hollow of her throat and darted over her nipples. He made a track from her breasts to her navel, then lower, lifting her knees and settling his mouth between her thighs. Her fingers threaded in his hair, then splayed stiffly as he flicked her swollen clitoris. She released him, and her hands fisted in the sheets on either side of her.
She came noisily, though she was hardly aware of it. He told her once he was seated deeply inside her, and her doubt became his challenge. She heard herself the second time in spite of pressing the fleshy ball of her hand against her open mouth.
What began sweetly ended on a decidedly different note, one that was deeply and abidingly satisfying. They fell asleep in a tangle of limbs that was only comfortable because of its novelty. By morning, they were cramped or numb, depending on which one of them had a limb trapped under the other’s. It was the stiff climb out of bed and the first hobbling steps to their respective destinations that made them collapse back on the mattress in paroxysms of laughter.
That their laughter was out of all proportion to the experience only made it seem that much richer. Rachel found herself gulping for air. Wyatt’s need to breathe was equally severe. They had tears in their eyes and lay sprawled on top of the covers as their breathing eased. His hand found hers, and he squeezed it lightly. She turned her head sideways to look at him, a question in her eyes.
“Thank you,” he said.
Rachel didn’t ask why he was thanking her, understanding it in a way that was not easy to put into words for either of them. She simply nodded.
Wyatt let go of her hand and sat up. He made furrows in his hair with his fingertips. “I’ll see about putting some wood in the stoves. You go ahead and use the washroom first.” He could see that she was starting to shiver. “You know, Rachel, it’s cold mornings like this that I wish we hadn’t left the Commodore.”
She crossed her arms in front of her. Her sigh was wistful. “Maybe we could have hot and cold running water here, like at the hotel. It wouldn’t be an extravagance.”
That made him smile. “Come spring,” he said, standing up. “It’s at the top of my list.” He tilted his head toward the washroom. “Go on. Get going before I regret my offer.”
Rachel rolled to the edge of the bed, but she wasn’t quick enough to escape the flat of his hand on her rump. She jumped up, cast him a withering glance over her shoulder, and darted for the washroom before he changed his mind and blocked her path.
Wyatt enjoyed the view, brief though it was. Chuckling softly, he pulled on a pair of woolen socks and a shirt, then padded to the mudroom for a short stack of wood. He caught the parlor stove before it was cold, but he had to fire up the kitchen stove. He started by setting the covers on top, closing the front and back damper, and opening the one to the oven. He turned the grate, let the ashes fall, then carefully removed the pan.
It was when he opened the back door and took notice of eight inches of fresh powder that he truly regretted leaving the Commodore. Bracing himself, he stepped out onto the protected porch just long enough to fling the ashes. They were carried by the wind in a wide arc, mingling with the falling snow. In a matter of moments, the gray and blackened residue was covered.
He was on the point of turning back into the house when he saw movement at the corner of the house. In spite of the cold, he stayed where he was, instantly recognizing the tall bundle of dark wool and leather that came trudging through the snow toward him.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Coffee,” Will Beatty said. “Biscuits, if your wife has any fresh.”
Wyatt held up the ash pan in mock menace. “You’ll take day-old biscuits the same as me. Come on in. Mind your boots. Rachel’s particular about the floors.” He lowered the ash pan and ushered Will inside, barely avoiding the shower of snowflakes that his deputy shook off like a wet, frisky puppy.
He pointed Will to a chair at the table while he set about building the fire. “So, what brings you here? It’s early for a social call.”
Will looked over his shoulder toward the alcove. He raised an eyebrow.
Wyatt understood. “She’s still dressing.”
“Artie woke me up first thing. There was a message this morning from John Clay that Foster Maddox is in Denver. He’d be on his way now if it wasn’t for snow blocking the tracks at Brady’s Bend. Depending on
how much we get, it could take a few days, maybe as long as a week, to break through. He thought you’d want to know.”
Wyatt swore. “I was supposed to know if Foster arrived in Cheyenne. You’re sure he’s in Denver?”
“I’m not sure of anything, but that’s what Artie got from John Clay’s message.”
“Well, there’s nothing much to be done about that now. What’s Sid saying about the storm?”
“Last I heard, he was talking a two-day whiteout.”
Wyatt considered that. “Do you think we could get better than a week out of the blockage?”
“Probably. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t made provision for it. Sir Nigel might suffer a bit with the train not running, but he’ll keep the guests he has, so I guess it evens out. Why? What are you thinking to gain by a couple of extra days?”
“Time to hide the mining equipment, for one thing. Shut it all down.”
“Shut it down? That’s going to happen anyway, on account of the snow burying us.” It was not much of an exaggeration.
“We need to make it look abandoned. If he knows about it, he’s going to insist on seeing it. It would be good if folks don’t look too prosperous, either.”
Will glanced around the homey kitchen, then fixed his stare on Wyatt’s sooty hands and the pair of split logs in them. “I’ll tell them they should follow your example.”
Wyatt shot him a wry look, then tossed the wood in the stove. “They could do worse,” he said, opening the dampers. “They could follow yours.”
Not offended in the least, Will grinned. He stood up and waved Wyatt away from the stove. “Go get dressed. I’ll finish. It’s like diving headlong into an avalanche in here.”
Will had coffee ready by the time Rachel appeared in the kitchen. “Mornin’, ma’am.”
Rachel smiled warmly at him. “Wyatt says you came for biscuits.”
“And coffee,” he said, holding up a dainty cup, his little finger extended.
