Chapter 7
Eleanor Stuart would not hear of a hasty wedding, and she said so before the supper plates were cleared.
She said it to her son, not to Samantha, across the length of a table that could have seated twelve.
The dining room was paneled in dark wood.
A lamp with a painted glass shade hung over the cloth.
The light fell on silver polished that afternoon, on china with a blue rim, on Eleanor’s folded hands.
“There is no call to rush to the church,” she said. “None. A Stuart does not marry a stranger off a train the week she arrives. Your father courted me for a twelvemonth. His people had known mine for twenty years before that.”
“Times are different, Mother.”
“The name is not different.” Eleanor did not raise her voice. She had no need to. “Miss Bree has come a long way, and I do not doubt she is tired. She may rest. She may see the place, and let the place see her. When we know one another a little, there will be time enough to talk of weddings.”
Ramsay looked at his plate a moment. Then he looked at Samantha, and she saw him weigh it.
“That’s fair, I suppose,” he said slowly. “If it suits Miss Bree.”
They both looked at her.
Samantha set down her fork. Her heart was going hard, but she had learned long ago that her heart and her face need not keep company.
It was not what she had planned. She had planned a wedding at the church in town on the first Sunday.
A ring on her finger. A name that shut the door on Iowa forever.
Married, a woman was settled. An unmarried one, living in a stranger’s house, was a question waiting to be asked.
But she was in no position to refuse. She had known that since the platform.
“It suits me very well, ma’am,” she said. “I would rather be known before I’m wed than after.”
“Sensible,” Eleanor said. Her gray eyes rested on Samantha a moment longer than the word required. “Then it is settled. You will have the blue room at the end of the upper hall. My son sleeps at the other end of the house, and I sleep between. Nobody in this county will have cause to talk.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good.” Eleanor rose. “Ramsay, you will show Miss Bree the house in the morning. I have letters to write.”
So Samantha was installed at the Stuart place, a bride on approval, with the vows deferred. Nobody could have said for how long.
The blue room was larger than the whole West kitchen.
She stood in the middle of it that first night with the lamp lit and could not think what to do with so much room.
There was a bed with posts. There was a washstand with a jug, a wardrobe, a window that opened on the valley.
Somebody had braided a rag rug in blue and cream.
The walls were white. The ceiling was so far above her head that she could have stood on the bed and not touched it.
The loft came into her mind. She sat down on the edge of the bed rather quickly.
It suited Ramsay, this arrangement. She had seen that in his face at the table. He did nothing in a hurry, and a wedding in a week would have hurried him past bearing. He was glad of the time. Glad, she thought, not to have to say a great deal to her yet.
And it suited her, too. It bought her time to learn the house and the country. Time to become so useful that no one could imagine the place without her. She knew how to do that. It was the one thing in her life she had never failed at.
What she did not think, that night, was that time cut both ways. A woman who wanted to watch, wonder, and dig might find a courtship on approval the most convenient arrangement in the world.
She would think it later. That night she only lay down in the great bed and listened to the house settle around her. For the first time in a week, she slept.
Making herself needed came next. It took her a fortnight, and it was not hard.
She had done it all her life, and this house had been waiting for it.
Eleanor kept the place well, but she kept it alone.
There was a hired girl who came three days a week from town.
The cook had left at Christmas and not been replaced.
The kitchen was a good kitchen with a stove Samantha would have wept over in Iowa.
Nobody had baked in it properly for months.
She baked. She was up before the hands on the second morning, with the stove roaring and four loaves rising under a cloth. By the time Ramsay came down, there were biscuits. By the time the foreman looked in at the kitchen door, there was coffee that made him stop and sniff.
“Ma’am,” he said, taking his hat off. “That coffee?”
“It is. There’s a pot for the bunkhouse if somebody will carry it.”
Somebody carried it. Somebody carried it every morning after that.
By the end of the week, the ranch hands had taken to finding reasons to pass by the kitchen door.
She fed them. She mended for them when she found a shirt with the elbow out.
One of the young ones came in with a hand laid open on wire.
She washed it and bound it before anybody thought to send for the doctor. He did not lose the use of it.
The hands allowed, among themselves, that the boss had done all right.
Slower to come round were the neighbor wives, but they came.
It was a county that took a look at a new woman, and Samantha understood that.
In twos and threes of an afternoon, they came, calling on Eleanor, looking at the bride.
Samantha poured the coffee, served the cake she had made that morning, and let them look.
What they saw was a beautiful, quiet young woman who did not push herself forward.
They saw a house that ran better than it had in a year.
The cake, they tasted. One of them, a broad, kind, red-faced woman whose husband ran cattle up the valley, went so far as to ask for the recipe.
Samantha wrote it out for her on the spot in her fine even hand.
The woman looked at the hand for some time. Then she looked at Samantha.
“Well, now,” she said. “You’re a rare find, aren’t you? Ramsay Stuart’s a lucky man.”
Samantha felt the color come up in her face, and could not stop it.
By the third week, half the county allowed the same.
The new Stuart bride was a rare find. It went round the church porch, the store, the blacksmith’s.
It came back to the ranch on the wind, as talk will.
Handsome, quiet, clever with her hands. A credit to the place.
Ramsay heard it and said nothing, but she caught him looking at her once, across the yard, with an expression she could not read.
She held on to that. She had never been anybody’s rare find.
Only Eleanor withheld.
It was not that the old woman was unkind. She was never that. She was courteous, correct, cool. Samantha would have known how to bear unkindness better. Eleanor thanked her for the bread. She noted the coffee. She said, once, that the parlor had not looked so well since her husband was alive.
But she watched, with a patience that never showed and never rested. When Samantha crossed the yard, Eleanor was at the window. When she sat with her mending of an evening, Eleanor sat opposite with her own. The gray eyes came up from it, went back down, came up again.
And she asked. Never much at once. A question here, a question there, dropped into the talk as easy as sugar into coffee.
“You have no people, Miss Bree?”
“None living, ma’am.”
“No aunts. No cousins. Nobody in Iowa who will want to know you are safely arrived.”
“Nobody, ma’am. I was raised on a farm. The couple who raised me are dead this spring.”
“So you said.” A stitch went in. “And before the farm?”
“I don’t remember much before the farm, ma’am. I was small.”
“I see.” Another stitch. “You write a very fine hand, for a farm girl.”
“A hired man taught me, ma’am. He was good to me.”
“How fortunate,” Eleanor said. The needle went in and out. The subject was let go, and Samantha knew it was not let go at all.
She had no letters from home. Eleanor noted that.
There was no likeness of anyone, no keepsake.
There was no name she ever spoke of but the couple who had raised her, and them only when asked.
Samantha saw all of it go into the old woman’s ledger, entry by entry, and could not think of a single way to stop it.
Then the county’s talk turned, and an unease older than Eleanor’s questions stirred in Samantha’s chest.
It began at church, in the third week. The preacher gave out the notices from the pulpit, and among them was this.
The Children’s Aid Society would be sending a party of orphan children west by the railroad.
It was to stop at the town depot within a few weeks.
Families of good Christian character willing to give a child a home were asked to make themselves known to the committee.
Samantha sat in the Stuart pew, between Ramsay and his mother. She did not move.
Around her the church stirred and murmured.
An orphan train. She heard the words go up and down the pews.
There had not been one to the county in a dozen years, someone said.
Someone else said her cousin in Missouri had taken a boy off one and he had turned out very well.
A third voice, lower, said you never knew what you got with that sort.
Gutter blood. Better a hired man you could send back.
She held her hymnal in both hands and looked at the page without seeing it.
Ramsay, beside her, was listening the way he listened to everything, with his face giving nothing away. Eleanor, on the other side, had her head a little on one side, and Samantha could feel her thinking.
The train sat over the county after that like weather coming.
It was talked of at the store. It was talked of on the church porch, and in the Stuart parlor of an afternoon when the neighbor wives came.
Who might take a child, what kind, how old.
Whether a girl was more use in the house or a boy in the field.
Samantha poured the coffee. She served the cake.
She kept her face still, and said nothing.
But something in her had turned over, and would not lie flat again.
She knew that platform. Somewhere in a Society house in the East, right now, a scrubbed child was being buttoned into a coat that had belonged to someone else. In a few weeks, that child would stand in a row on Texas boards, while the county walked the row and looked.
And she would be standing in the county, on the wrong side of the row.
She had crossed half a country to get away from that platform. It had taken her four weeks to find that it was coming to her.