Chapter 6
The train set her down in a heat she had never known, in a town where nobody had ever heard of a West farm.
That was Samantha’s first thought, standing on the platform with her bundle in her arms. Nobody here knew. Not one soul. The thought was so large she could not hold all of it at once. So she held the edge of it, the way she had held the paper tag through her mitten, and looked about her.
The town was small and pale under a white sky.
It stood on a rise above a shallow river.
A courthouse of yellow stone stood at one end of its single street, a church at the other.
Live oaks grew everywhere, dark and heavy, throwing pools of shade that looked cool but were not.
The air smelled of dust, cedar, horses. Somewhere a blacksmith was working, and the ring of it carried a long way in the stillness.
It was nothing like Iowa. That was her second thought, and it steadied her.
She had been four days on the rails, and she had scarcely slept.
Her dress was the blue one, the better of her two, and it was creased past saving.
There was still straw in the seams of her bundle.
She had washed her face in a depot basin in Missouri.
She had pinned her hair as best she could without a glass.
Without needing one, she knew she looked exactly like what she was. A woman who had run.
Passengers came down around her. They were met, or were not, and went away. The platform emptied. She stood in the middle of it and made herself breathe.
Then a man in good plain clothes stepped forward out of the shade of the depot wall, and took off his hat.
He was tall. That was the first of him she saw, because she had to look up.
Tall, weather-browned to the color of saddle leather, with a hard, clean-shaven jaw.
His gray eyes gave nothing away. He wore a dark coat, a white shirt, and boots that had been blacked for the occasion.
The coat was exactly what his letter had said it would be.
He was perhaps thirty-five, and older about the eyes.
“Miss Bree,” he said. It was not quite a question.
“Yes.”
“Ramsay Stuart.” He said it as he had signed it, plainly, without ornament. Then he stopped, as if he had prepared no more than that and was discovering it. A moment went by. He turned his hat once by the brim. “You had a hard trip, I expect. It’s a long way.”
“It was a long way,” she said. “But I’m here.”
He nodded, seeming to find that a fair answer. His eyes went over her once, quickly. She braced for it, the pricing look, and it did not come. He looked at her the way a man looks at weather he has been waiting on. Then he looked at the bundle in her arms and put out his hand for it.
“I’ll take that. The wagon’s this side.”
She let him take it. She had not let anyone carry a load for her in twelve years, and her arms felt strange without the weight.
The wagon was a good one, a light spring wagon with a matched bay team standing patient in the shade. He set her bundle in the back as carefully as if it held eggs. Then he came round to the near side, stood by the wheel, and offered his hand to help her up.
Samantha put her hand in his.
His palm was hard, dry, warm. He did not grip. He only held, steady, while she found the step and the seat. Then he let her go and went round to his own side. That was all. It was nothing. A man handing a woman into a wagon, as men did every day on every street in Texas.
But she sat on the seat with her hand still feeling the shape of his, and a tightness in her chest gave way a little. It was a small loosening. It was like a knot pulled tight for years, touched once by someone who does not mean to hurt.
He was not what she had braced for.
She had braced herself for a great deal on the long way south.
A hard man. A rough one. Someone who smiled in hallways.
She had told herself she would bear whatever met her on that platform, because whatever it was, it was not Nathan West. She had not told herself it might be a quiet man who took his hat off and did not know what to say next.
He drove out of town without hurry, and for a mile he said nothing.
She did not mind it. The silence was not the kind she knew. It did not watch her. It only sat between them on the seat like a third passenger who was easy in company, and let her look at the country.
The country was worth looking at. The road climbed away from the river through hills she had not expected.
They were low, rolling, thick with live oak and cedar.
Limestone showed through the grass in pale shelves.
Cattle grazed on the slopes, red, white, dun, more cattle than she had ever seen in one place.
The sky went up forever. The land was green still, the deep dusty green of a spring nearly over.
The air moving over the wagon smelled of cedar and warm stone.
“You’ll find it hot,” Ramsay said at last. “Hotter than you’re used to. I put that in a letter.”
“You did. I said I didn’t mind it.”
“I recall.” He was quiet a moment. Then, awkwardly, as if it cost him something: “It’s a fair country, though. Once you’re used to it. It grows on a person.”
“I can see that it might.”
He glanced at her sideways at that. There might have been something near a smile at the corner of his mouth. It was gone before she could be sure. He turned back to the team.
“You cook, you said.”
“I do.”
“My mother will be glad of that. She’s kept the house alone since my father passed. It’s a good deal of house.” He drove a while. “She’s particular. I told you that too, I think.”
“You did.”
“Well,” he said, and did not seem to know how to finish it. So he did not. The wagon rolled on through the hills, and Samantha found she was not afraid of him.
It was strange to find that out, and she turned it over twice, to be sure. Four days on the rails braced for the worst, and twelve years before that. And here she sat beside a reserved man who was courteous to her, hard put for words, honest about his mother. She was not afraid.
She had come, in the space of a week, from the loft over the West kitchen to this. She held very still on the wagon seat, in case it should turn out to be a dream.
The Stuart place came up out of the oak country in the last of the afternoon.
She had cooked in it in her mind for weeks.
Lying in the loft with the letters under her, she had built it plank by plank out of the little he had told her.
A good spread in oak land. A sound roof.
She had given it a kitchen with a window over the basin, a porch, a well that did not freeze.
Sternly, she had told herself not to build it too fine.
It had not been built fine enough.
The road came round the shoulder of a hill, and there it lay, in a long green valley with a creek running down the middle.
A house of pale stone and dark timber, two stories, broad.
A deep porch ran across the whole front, with chimneys at either end.
Behind it were barns, corrals, a bunkhouse, outbuildings enough for a village.
Live oaks stood about the house like old men who had been there first. Beyond it, the valley opened out mile on mile of grass with cattle on it, all the way to the far blue hills.
Samantha stopped breathing.
“That’s the place,” Ramsay said. He said it as a man says the plainest fact in the world, and did not look at her.
She could not answer. She sat with her hands gripped together in her lap and looked at it. The wagon carried her nearer. It did not go away.
The finest in the county. She saw that without being told.
She saw it in the size of the barns, in the good fences running straight as rulers.
It was in the number of men who came out into the yard as the wagon rolled in.
Ranch hands, a dozen of them at least, all making a show of being busy at nothing while they looked at the master’s bride.
She saw it in the house itself, which had glass in every window, a bell by the door, roses grown up the porch posts.
Roses. Somebody had planted roses in this hard, hot country and made them grow.
Ramsay drew up before the porch steps. He got down, came round, and handed her down as he had handed her up, steady.
Then he let her go. Her boots found the ground.
She stood at the foot of the steps of the finest house in the county, in her creased blue dress, with her straw-seamed bundle. She could scarcely believe it real.
Then she looked up, and saw that she was not the only one who could not quite believe it.
A woman stood on the porch.
She had been standing there, Samantha understood at once, for some while.
Since the wagon first showed on the hill road, most likely.
She was tall, upright, iron-gray, with her hair drawn back hard and her hands folded before her at the waist. Her dress was black silk, good and sober.
It had cost more than all Samantha owned.
She wore a jet brooch at her throat. She did not come down the steps.
“Mother,” Ramsay said. “This is Miss Bree. Miss Bree, my mother, Mrs. Stuart.”
“Ma’am,” Samantha said.
Eleanor Stuart inclined her head perhaps an inch.
And her eyes came down.
They were gray like her son’s, but they were not like her son’s at all.
His gave nothing away. Hers took. They traveled over Samantha from the crown of her pinned hair to the dust on her boots, without haste, missing nothing.
A housekeeper’s eyes go over a room like that before company.
The creased dress. The straw in the bundle.
Her hands, which Samantha had forgotten to fold, and which showed every one of twelve years. Last, and longest, her face.
Samantha met that look and held it. She had been looked at all her life. But she had not been looked at like this, and she knew, standing there, precisely what it was.
It was the look of a woman finding a great deal to wonder about.
“You are very welcome, Miss Bree,” Eleanor Stuart said. Her voice was cool and even. It did not match the words. “You will want to wash. Ramsay, have one of the men bring her things. Supper is at six. We keep hours in this house.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You are younger than I looked for.” The gray eyes had not moved. “And a good deal handsomer. My son did not mention it.”
“I don’t suppose he had cause to, ma’am.”
“No,” Eleanor said. “I don’t suppose he did.” She turned, at last, and went in through the open door. She left it standing open behind her.
Samantha stood at the foot of the steps.
The evening was warm and gold. The roses smelled sweet on the porch posts.
Behind her, the ranch hands were drifting back to their work, and Ramsay was saying a word to one of them about the team.
It was the finest house in the county. She was to live in it.
A decent man had handed her down at its door.
She felt her old secret settle cold against her ribs, exactly where it had lain in the loft. And she knew.
She had escaped one watchful house. She had crossed half a country to do it. And she had walked, on her own two feet, in her creased blue dress, straight up to the door of another.