CHAPTER THREE
Junction City did not so much announce itself as accumulate, the way Margaret imagined a sandbar might accumulate in a river—not built, exactly, but deposited, piece by piece, wherever the current of the rail line happened to slow.
The depot itself was solid enough, freshly timbered, the paint on its sign still bright.
But beyond it the town seemed to trail off into its own uncertainty: a main street of raw lumber buildings, some with fitting false fronts and glass windows, others still half-framed, their skeletons standing open to the sky as though the town hadn't yet decided how permanent it meant to be.
The platform was chaos—crates of freight being unloaded, a crew of rail workers shouting to one another over the hiss of the engine, two dogs locked in a disagreement near the water tower that no one seemed inclined to interrupt.
A cattle pen stood within sight of the depot itself, close enough that Margaret could hear the low complaint of the animals penned there awaiting shipment, and beyond it the town's single suitable street ran off at an angle that suggested it had been laid out more by habit than by any surveyor's plan.
She counted, without quite meaning to, three establishments advertising themselves as hotels, a mercantile with a freshly painted sign, and what she took to be a church only by the modest cross nailed above its door, since otherwise it looked much like every other unpainted building around it.
It was, she thought, nothing at all like the engravings of Western towns she'd seen in the illustrated papers back home—not so much lawless as unfinished, a place still deciding what it meant to become.
There was an energy to it, though, that she hadn't expected: men moving with purpose, wagons loaded and unloaded with the brisk efficiency of a town that had somewhere to be, the constant undertone of the rail line itself, steam and iron and the specific smell of a place built around arrival and departure.
She found she rather liked it, despite the mud already threatening the hem of her good traveling skirt.
Margaret stood beside her trunk with Mr. Draycott's letters still clutched in one gloved hand, scanning the crowd for a face that might match the plain, unadorned handwriting she'd read a hundred times over the past four days, and finding, of course, that handwriting told a person nothing useful at all about a face.
A young man was approaching her, she realized—tall, sun-browned, hat in hand in a gesture of old-fashioned courtesy that seemed almost startling against the general roughness of the platform around them.
He had the look of a man who spent his life outdoors and had dressed, not badly, but clearly, for an occasion he wasn't entirely comfortable with.
"Miss Colston?" he said, and there was something careful in the way he said it, as though he were reading her name off a page in his mind rather than speaking it with any familiarity.
"I am." Margaret felt her pulse quicken—not unpleasantly, though not entirely comfortably either—and extended her hand in what she hoped was a fully composed manner for meeting one's intended husband for the first time on a public platform.
"Mr. Draycott. I confess I hardly knew what to look for, beyond your letters, and letters tell one so little of a person's actual—"
"Ah." The young man's face did something complicated—surprise, then a kind of rueful amusement, then an expression that looked almost like relief on someone else's behalf.
He took her offered hand anyway, shook it with perfect politeness, and did not correct her immediately, which Margaret would later decide was either very kind of him or very unhelpful, depending on her mood when she remembered it.
"No, ma'am. I'm sorry—I ought to have said straightaway.
Tobias Reyes. I work Mr. Draycott's ranch as foreman.
He sent me to fetch you, along with your trunk and whatever else you've brought. "
Margaret felt her face go warm despite the cold wind coming off the platform, and withdrew her hand with as much dignity as she could manage on short notice. "I see. Forgive me, Mr. Reyes. I hope I haven't caused you any embarrassment."
"None at all, ma'am. Happens more than you'd think, meeting brides off this train.
I've been mistook for three different men in as many months, and once for a lady's uncle, which I still can't rightly explain.
" There was an easy warmth in the way he said it, clearly meant to put her at ease, and Margaret found herself grateful for it even as a small, unromantic disappointment settled somewhere beneath her ribs—not at Tobias Reyes, who seemed perfectly agreeable, but at the plain fact that the man she'd crossed a continent to marry hadn't troubled himself to meet her train.
"Mr. Draycott couldn't come himself?" She kept her voice light, the way she'd have kept it discussing a minor discrepancy in a ledger—noted, not yet judged.
Something crossed Tobias Reyes's face then, quick and gone before she could correctly read it.
"His father's took a turn, ma'am, these past two days.
Mr. Draycott didn't want to leave him, not even for an afternoon, not knowing how things'll go.
He asked me to say he's sorry for it, and that he'll explain himself truly the moment you're settled. "
"His father is very ill, then." She said it as a statement, though it was really a question, and watched Tobias Reyes's face for the answer beneath the answer.
"He's an old man with a bad heart and a stubborn refusal to slow down for it, ma'am, if you'll forgive my plain speaking.
Doc Fielding's been out twice this month already.
" He said it kindly, but there was a carefulness underneath the words that Margaret filed away, the same way she'd have filed away an unexplained figure in a column—not alarming in itself, but worth remembering when the total came due.
He hefted her trunk onto his shoulder with an ease that suggested long practice, and led her off the platform toward a wagon waiting at the edge of the street, talking easily as they walked in the manner of a man accustomed to putting nervous strangers at their ease.
"You'll like Mrs. Pruitt, ma'am, if I may say so.
Runs the best table in town, and she's got opinions on most everything, but she means well by all of them.
Half the marriages hereabouts have gone through her parlor one way or another. "
"Including this one, I understand—though not by her own arranging."
"No, ma'am. Mr. Draycott wrote his own advertisement, which I believe put Mrs. Pruitt's nose somewhat out of joint, though she'd never say so plain.
" A flicker of amusement crossed his face.
"She'll likely tell you as much herself, given half a chance.
Doesn't take her long to say what's on her mind. "
"That sounds as though it might be a comfort, after four days of a train car full of strangers being carefully polite."
"I expect it will be, ma'am." He set her trunk into the wagon bed and offered his hand to help her up onto the seat, an afterthought of courtesy that seemed real rather than performed.
"Come on, now. Mrs. Pruitt's expecting you at the boarding house, and I expect you'd rather sit by a fire than stand about on this platform in the wind. "
? ? ?
The boarding house sat two streets back from the depot, a solid two-story building with lace curtains in the windows that struck Margaret as almost startlingly domestic against the raw lumber and mud of the street outside.
The woman who opened the door before Tobias had even finished knocking was perhaps forty-five, broad-shouldered and handsome in the way of women who'd worked hard all their lives and had stopped apologizing for it decades ago, with sharp, kind eyes that took in Margaret's travel-worn dress and hopeful, uncertain expression in a single practiced sweep.
"You'll be Miss Colston." It wasn't a question. "Connie Pruitt. Come in out of that wind before you catch your death, and Tobias, mind you wipe your boots or I'll have your hide, foreman or no."
"Yes, ma'am," Tobias said, with the easy obedience of a man who'd clearly had this exact exchange many times before, and set about wiping his boots with theatrical thoroughness.
The parlor Margaret was ushered into was warm and close, a fire going despite the early hour, and smelled of woodsmoke and something baking that made Margaret realize, with some surprise, how hungry she'd become without noticing it over four days of travel.
Mrs. Pruitt sat her down in the best chair near the fire, produced tea with the brisk efficiency of a woman running a household on a tight schedule, and settled herself opposite with the frank, assessing look of someone about to ask questions she considered fully her business to ask.
"So. You're Caleb Draycott's bride." Mrs. Pruitt said it simply, without romance or apology, much the way Margaret had learned to say it herself over the course of the journey.
"I run the correspondence for half the marriages in this town, one way or another, though yours came through Caleb's own arranging rather than mine, more's the pity—I'd have vetted him a sight more thoroughly than his letters likely did, if you'll forgive my saying so. "
"You know him well, then." Margaret wrapped her hands around the teacup, grateful for its warmth after the platform's cold. "I confess I know almost nothing beyond four letters and a foreman's account of his father's health."
"I know him as well as anyone in this town does, which isn't so well as you'd think, for a man who's lived here his whole life.
Caleb Draycott keeps his own counsel." Mrs. Pruitt's eyes were kind but shrewd, and Margaret had the distinct sense of being read the way she herself read a column of figures—carefully, for what didn't add up as much as for what did.
"He's a good man underneath it, mind. Works harder than any three men in this county and never complains of it.
But he's the sort who'll carry a burden alone rather than trouble another soul with it, and that's not always the kindness he thinks it is. "
"That sounds," Margaret said carefully, "like a certain kind of warning, Mrs. Pruitt."
"It's an observation, Miss Colston, from a woman who's watched this town grow up around her for going on fifteen years.
What you make of it is your own business.
" Mrs. Pruitt's expression softened, and she reached over to pat Margaret's hand with the same brisk, unsentimental warmth Mrs. Kessler had shown her on the train, as though the whole territory ran on some shared understanding of practical kindness that Boston had never quite taught her.
"You'll meet him true soon enough and judge for yourself.
In the meantime, you'll stay here at the boarding house until the wedding's arranged decent and real—I'll not have talk in this town, arrangement or no arrangement, and Caleb agreed to it himself before you'd even boarded your train.
There's a room made up for you at the top of the stairs, and supper's at six, and you're welcome to whatever hours of daylight you need to recover from that journey before anyone comes calling. "
"Thank you, Mrs. Pruitt. That's very kind."
"It's very practical," Mrs. Pruitt said, though not unkindly, "which I find serves better than kindness alone, out here. Now drink your tea before it goes cold. You've a long enough road behind you without starting the next stretch on an empty stomach."
Margaret obeyed, and for a while they sat in companionable quiet, the fire popping and the wind testing the window glass, until curiosity got the better of her restraint. "May I ask how long you've kept this house, Mrs. Pruitt?"
"Going on nine years now. Came out with my husband in '77, when this town was little more than a water stop and a handful of tents.
" Something crossed Mrs. Pruitt's face, brief and old, the especial shuttered look of a woman who'd long since made peace with a grief she didn't care to examine in front of a stranger.
"He's gone now. I kept the house on after, and found I had more use running it as a boarding house than I ever did keeping it for just the two of us.
Idle hands out here don't stay idle long, not if a woman means to eat regular. "
"I'm sorry for your loss."
"It was a long while ago, and I've made my peace with it.
" Mrs. Pruitt's tone closed the subject gently but firmly, in the manner of a woman who'd had a great deal of practice redirecting sympathy she hadn't asked for.
"You'll find most everyone out here has buried someone the winters took, one way or another, and precious few of us care to dwell on it before supper.
Now—tell me about Boston, if you don't mind the question.
I've never seen it myself, and I confess I'm curious what a woman leaves behind to come all this way for a man she's never laid eyes on. "
Margaret found herself talking, then, more freely than she'd intended—of her father's shop, of Louisa and the brass button still tucked in her pocket, of the distinct arithmetic that had brought her west—and Mrs. Pruitt listened with the attentive, unhurried patience of a woman who'd heard a hundred variations of the same story and had never once tired of it.
It was, Margaret thought, the first real conversation she'd had since leaving Boston in which she hadn't felt the need to guard some part of herself, and she was grateful for it more than she quite knew how to say.
Margaret did as she was told, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that the warmth of the fire and the plain, unromantic competence of Connie Pruitt's household did more to steady her than any amount of reassurance could have.
She thought of Mrs. Kessler's warning on the train, and of Tobias Reyes's careful account of an ill old man and an absent bridegroom, and of the particular weight in Mrs. Pruitt's words—he'll carry a burden alone rather than trouble another soul with it—and understood, with the same cool clarity she brought to a column of unbalanced figures, that she had arrived in Junction City with more questions than she'd departed Boston carrying, and precisely no one yet to answer them.
She meant to find her answers regardless. She had not come two thousand miles to be managed by vague reassurance, whatever the reason for it.
Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the lace curtains against the window glass, and somewhere beyond the edge of town, unseen and unhurried, the first true cold of the season was beginning, very quietly, to settle in.