Chapter Six
Six
Lizbet watched from behind a curtain in one of the windows in Ornetta’s front room as the matched team of horses pulling Henry Middlebrook’s surrey stomped and whinnied to a stop in front of the house.
Behind them, as it had been the day before, was a simple wagon, piled high with valises and trunks.
Lizbet offered a silent prayer of thanks that Frankie and Jubal were out back, out of sight, playing in Ornetta’s yard. Ornetta herself had walked across the street to the general store only minutes earlier to see if her order of embroidery floss had come in yet.
Off in the distance, the engine of the approaching jitney could be heard, popping loudly, as if it ran on firecrackers and gunpowder instead of gasoline and oil.
Only Pearl, busy dusting the piano with fidgety slaps of a cleaning rag, remained nearby, and her eyes were enormous in her thin little face.
“Who’s out there?” she asked, sounding scared.
“Just some folks about to leave town on the jitney,” Lizbet answered, hoping the tremor in her throat hadn’t come out in her voice. “No need to worry, Pearl.”
No need to worry.
Inside, Lizbet was shaking as she bravely opened Ornetta’s front door and stepped out onto the shaded porch.
A light breeze set Ornetta’s chair to rocking, and somehow, Lizbet found that reassuring.
The man driving the surrey set the brake, leaned back in his seat and tugged his hat down over his eyes, arms folded across his chest.
William jumped from the rig, leaving Marietta fanning herself and sneering.
He came as far as the front gate, William did, but he made no move to open it, which was a relief—sort of.
There was every possibility that he’d come to collect the children—they were his, after all—and Lizbet knew she couldn’t stop him from taking them away.
The thought of losing Frankie and Jubal nearly dissolved her, right there on Ornetta Parkin’s porch, but she managed to gather every last shred of composure she possessed and stood with her chin up and her backbone straight.
And she waited.
William’s too-handsome face was pale with rage, and a vein pulsed in a thin purple line across his forehead. “You, Elizabeth, have disgraced us!” he accused, without preamble. “Marietta and I are humiliated .”
A spark of disdain set Lizbet’s cheeks ablaze. William and Marietta Keller disgraced? Humiliated? Unthinkable.
“I’m not chattel, William,” Lizbet heard herself say, as the man at the reins of the loaded wagon climbed down from his high perch and went around to the back. “I’m not a commodity you can trade away for your own purposes.”
William spat. Resettled his hat, which was already dusty, even though he’d probably given it a thorough brushing before leaving Henry Middlebrook’s stately home. His suit looked gritty, even from a distance.
“You could have been a wealthy woman,” William said, wagging a finger at Lizbet. “You could have had everything you could possibly want, if only you weren’t so damnably stubborn .”
Marietta, who had somehow managed to evade the ever-present dust of the road, sat pristine and calm in her smart green dress, silk stockings, veiled hat and high-heeled shoes.
“What I want , William, is for me to decide. No one else.” She spoke quietly, but with consummate dignity, encouraged and strengthened by her own words. “Not you and certainly not Mr. Middlebrook.”
Just saying that awful man’s name made her feel hunted, like some poor creature of the woods, set upon by foxes or even wolves.
She gave an involuntary shudder, remembering that connecting door and the threat it represented.
At once determined and terrified, she recalled her and the children’s hasty escape from the Middlebrook mansion just a few hours before.
She had allowed the children to sleep in, blind-tired herself after keeping watch through the long hours of night, which had been silent except for the ponderous hourly chimes of the longcase clock on the landing, and finally urged them to dress quickly and to behave quietly.
While they complied, sleepily, Lizbet stood beside the window, gazing out over the lawn and side garden, hoping to see Tom, the stable worker she’d met the day before, when he’d delivered some of her baggage, along with small cases labeled with the children’s names.
Once last night’s interminable dinner had ended and the children were asleep, she’d crept down the rear stairway, crossed the blessedly empty kitchen, and slipped outside as soundlessly as if she’d had no more substance than a ghost.
After some searching, she’d found Tom near the barn, sitting atop a fence railing, smoking a nasty-smelling cigar.
Praying she hadn’t misjudged him earlier in the day, when he’d come to the room she and the children were sharing, lugging in their baggage from where he’d previously piled it—noisily—in the hallway, she approached.
He’d seemed friendly enough then; maybe he’d even disapproved of that dreadful door linking the room she was meant to sleep in to Mr. Middlebrook’s private quarters.
After making casual conversation for a few minutes, she’d taken a chance and asked if he would help her get away. Take her and Frankie and Jubal to Mrs. Parkin’s boarding house in the morning.
Then she’d waited with her heart in her throat, afraid the man would say he was loyal to his employer and could not deceive him.
Instead, he’d pondered the question for a while, still smoking, then jumped nimbly down from the fence rail, dusting the legs of his rough trousers with loud slaps of his hands as he walked toward her.
“Ten dollars,” he’d said decisively. “I’ll take you to town tomorrow morning, after the boss man has gone off to the bank. He’ll be busy countin’ his money then.” A pause. “Fair enough?”
Ten dollars was a fortune, but she was desperate.
So Lizbet had nodded, thinking of the small mountain of bags standing in the center of the guest room she’d just left. She had no idea where the rest of her things might be.
“About our things—”
“You just pack up what you need to get by for now,” he’d interrupted, not unkindly, “and I’ll bring the rest of your things around later. Tellin’ you now, though, Mr. Middlebrook ain’t gonna be happy to find you gone.”
“He has no say over what I do,” Lizbet had pointed out stiffly. This was a fragile situation, she knew, but that didn’t mean she had to cater to Henry Middlebrook’s wishes. “Are you going to drive us to town or not?”
The man had shoved a hand through his hair, looked away, looked back at Lizbet. “I’ll drive you to town,” he affirmed, “but I can’t promise the boss won’t come after you straightaway. He’s up to something, him and that stepfather of yours.”
Lizbet let that last remark pass; she knew it was true.
“What time will you come for us?”
“Around ten o’clock,” he’d replied. “I know that’s practically the middle of the day, but that old man likes a leisurely breakfast. Reads the newspapers, too. A whole stack of them. So we’ve got to wait until he’s inside the bank and busy counting gold doubloons.”
The inference—that Mr. Middlebrook was a pirate—was not lost on Lizbet, and she’d nearly smiled, but her position was far too precarious for that.
At ten o’clock the next morning—with William and Marietta engaged in an argument in their room, Mr. Middlebrook gone to the bank and Mrs. Harriman occupied in some other part of that vast place, the wagon drew up, bold as you please, right in front of the house.
Lizbet and the children, waiting behind a huge rosebush nearby, had hurried to climb on board.
Delighted, Frankie and Jubal had scrambled into the back, giggling as though they were playing a game.
Lizbet, grim-faced and afraid, had settled herself beside the driver, clutching the handle of her heavy valise in both hands and whispered, “Quickly!”
After a bumpy ride, during which Lizbet kept looking back over one shoulder, afraid there would be someone in pursuit, they reached the town without incident.
Though she noticed that the driver kept to alleys and back roads, and, after collecting his ten dollars—probably almost as much as he earned in a month—he’d deposited the three of them a block from Ornetta’s place and vanished almost immediately, after pointing them in the right direction.
And now, much later in the day, here was William.
Here was Marietta.
Here was the moment upon which the fate of her sister and brother turned. Go with their shallow father and uncaring stepmother, or stay here, in Silver Hills with her.
Lizbet. A woman with no job, no real home, no plans whatsoever, except to love Frankie and Jubal with her whole heart and keep them safe and well.
Would she be able to do that? Would she be strong enough?
Silver Hills was a small town, which meant opportunities for gainful employment were surely limited. What if she couldn’t find work?
For now, they had a room at the boarding house, but Ornetta, kind as she was, would not be able to keep them if Lizbet’s money ran out. What then?
And, on top of all that, Henry Middlebrook would still be here in the town he practically owned, unless she missed her guess.
He represented a continuous threat.
Lizbet’s heart rose to her throat and all but shut off her breathing. But still she waited, in silence.
Finally, William threw up his hands in angry defeat.
“Stay here, then,” he almost shouted. “Maybe you’ll come to your senses and get married.”
She said nothing, because anything she could have said would have been incendiary.
William started back toward the surrey, climbed in beside Marietta and sat, staring straight ahead, looking as though he might literally explode at any moment.
The surrey, with its spectacular team of horses, turned in a wide loop, narrowly missing a wagon that had just appeared at the periphery of Lizbet’s vision.
She didn’t glance in that direction.
She didn’t move, even though her trunks and the children’s stood like a small mountain on the wooden sidewalk near the front gate, left there by the driver of the buckboard.
He was on the other side of the road now, in front of the general store, helping another man load William and Marietta’s belongings onto the roof of the jitney.
For one long minute—maybe two—Lizbet did not move or speak. She simply watched through flurries of sun-glazed dust as the couple prepared to leave Silver Hills.
She had not dared ask the question uppermost in her mind: What about the children? She had not wanted to remind William of his son and daughter, lest he insist that they join him and his viper of a wife on the next leg of their journey.
Had that happened, Lizbet would have had little re course but to accept his decision—or to ask if she mightn’t go along with them, to California.
That request, she strongly suspected, would have been flatly denied.
It was, of course, possible—even likely—that William hadn’t forgotten Frankie and Jubal at all; he’d never been especially close to them, had always chafed under the responsibility, though he’d been adept at hiding the fact when dealing with his more respectable business associates.
Quite possibly, he simply didn’t want to be bothered with them anymore, especially with Marietta’s constant harping about the inconvenience they caused.
How they were too expensive, how they were a constant reminder that William had loved another woman, how they made it so very difficult to travel, to shop, to dine in fine restaurants, to see friends, to continue in her quest to become famous. The list was endless.
And William hadn’t even asked about Frankie and Jubal.
As she stood there, watching the jitney depart, impossibly loud, firing puffs of smoke from its exhaust pipe like bullets, a seemingly infinite sadness swamped Lizbet, threatening to drown her very soul.
What kind of man could turn his back on his own children?
A heartless and selfish one, of course.
Although she was glad William hadn’t taken Frankie and Jubal with him when he left, she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive him for it.
She had finally managed to get herself moving toward the front gate and the sidewalk beyond, when Ornetta appeared on the other side, as if out of nowhere.
The woman had clearly crossed the street from the general store, but in all the dust and distraction of William’s and Marietta’s departure, Lizbet had failed to notice.
She started, pressed one hand to the base of her throat.
For the briefest second, Lizbet felt light-headed and unsteady on her feet.
Ornetta paused at the gate, a small parcel and a number of letters in her hands, and eyed the pile of luggage on the sidewalk.
“So they’ve gone,” she said. “Did your stepfather and his wife take the little ones with them, Lizbet? I was in the back of the store, where the sewing things are, when the jitney left, so I didn’t see any of the passengers.”
Lizbet swallowed, shook her head.
Her eyes widened as the wagon she’d seen minutes earlier drew to a halt in front of the boarding house.
The driver was Gabe Whitfield.
For some ridiculous and unknown reason, the moment she met his steady gaze, Lizbet’s throat tickled, and a tear slipped down her cheek.