CHAPTER FIVE
True to his word, Caleb Draycott called again two days later, and this time he came with a wagon rather than merely his own two feet, and an invitation Margaret had been quietly hoping for since their first meeting.
"I thought you might like to see the ranch," he said, standing in Mrs. Pruitt's doorway with his hat already in hand, "before we settle any further particulars of the wedding. A woman ought to see what she's marrying into, not just hear it described secondhand."
"I'd like that very much, Mr. Draycott." Margaret was already reaching for her coat, and caught, from the corner of her eye, Mrs. Pruitt's small, satisfied nod, as though this were precisely the sort of sensible arrangement she approved of.
"Mind you have her back before dark," Mrs. Pruitt called after them, "and mind you bring a blanket for the wagon bed, Caleb Draycott, I'll not have her catching her death for want of proper wool between here and your father's front gate."
"Yes, ma'am," Caleb said, with the same resigned patience Margaret had noted at their first meeting, and handed Margaret up into the wagon seat with a care that seemed, this time, slightly less uncertain than before.
? ? ?
The ranch lay some four miles north of town, and the drive out gave Margaret her first real look at the country she meant to make her home in—rolling grassland stretching in every direction, silvered now with the first hard frost of the season, distant hills rising blue and indistinct toward a horizon that seemed, after the close, hedged landscape of New England, almost improbably wide.
She found herself unexpectedly moved by it, the sheer scale of the thing, the sense of standing at the edge of something too large to properly take in at once.
"It's beautiful," she said, and meant it. "I hadn't expected that, somehow. The advertisements make it sound like nothing but hardship."
"It's both, most years." Caleb's eyes were on the road, but there was something in his voice that suggested the country meant more to him than his careful manner usually let show.
"My father used to say a man could go half mad from the beauty of it and half mad from the hardship, and never rightly tell which madness was which.
I've come to think he wasn't completely joking. "
They crested a low rise, and the ranch came into view below them—a solid two-story house, weathered but well-kept, a scatter of outbuildings, a barn large enough to suggest real prosperity, and beyond it all, spreading out across the grassland in every direction Margaret could see, cattle.
More cattle than she had ever seen gathered in one place in her life, dark shapes dotting the pale grass in loose clusters that seemed, from this distance, to have no particular end.
"Oh," she said, and heard the note of genuine astonishment in her own voice. "Mr. Draycott, I had no idea. This is—this is a great deal more than I pictured, reading your letters."
Something that might have been pride, carefully restrained, crossed his face.
"My father built this from nothing, Miss Colston.
Came out in the fifties with a handful of cattle and enough grit to see him through winters that would've broken most men.
This is thirty years of his work, and mine alongside him these past ten.
" He clicked the horses forward, down toward the house.
"There's more grazing land besides what you can see from here.
We run cattle clear out past that far ridge, near on to the county line some seasons. "
As they descended, two riders crossed their path at a distance, driving a small knot of cattle toward what she took to be a holding pen near the barn, and Caleb lifted a hand in greeting that one of the riders returned before continuing on.
"Your hands?" Margaret asked.
"Two of them, of the six I keep on through the season.
Tobias you've met. The rest come and go with the work—more in branding and shipping season, fewer once the snow sets in and there's less call for extra hands.
" He said it easily enough, but Margaret noted, filing it away with the rest, that he'd answered a question about his workforce with rather more precision than he'd yet offered about his herd, as though numbers of men troubled him a good deal less than numbers of cattle.
"How many head, all told?" She asked it lightly, deliberately echoing her earlier question, watching for whether two days had changed his willingness to answer it clearly.
The small stillness came into his face again, the same fractional recalculation she'd noticed at their first meeting, though this time he covered it more smoothly, with the ease of a man who'd had two days to prepare himself for the question's return.
"More than most outfits in the territory, and fewer than my father ran in his best years, before the market softened some seasons back.
It's a sound operation, Miss Colston. You needn't trouble yourself over the accounting of it—that's my burden to carry, not yours. "
"I don't ask because I doubt your competence, Mr. Draycott.
I ask because I intend to be your wife, and a wife who keeps her eyes closed to her husband's affairs isn't the kind of wife I mean to be, whatever burden you'd rather carry alone.
" She kept her voice even, unaccusing, though she felt the small, cool certainty settling again in her chest. "I kept my father's books for two years, before his shop failed despite everything I could do to help him see it coming.
I understand a great deal more about numbers than you might expect from a woman who's spent her life in Boston. "
That seemed to land somewhere it hadn't before—she saw it in the slight change of his grip on the reins, the fractional pause before he answered.
"I don't doubt your competence either, Miss Colston.
But there's a difference between a shop's ledger and thirty years of a man's life work, and I'd rather you judge the second by seeing it with your own eyes than by numbers alone, which can be read a dozen different ways by a dozen different people with a dozen different worries driving their reading of them. "
It was, she thought, a cleverer evasion than his previous ones—not a refusal exactly, but a redirection dressed up as reasonable caution, and she filed it away alongside everything else she was learning about the certain architecture of Caleb Draycott's honesty: true in every part taken separately, and yet somehow, taken together, never quite arriving at the whole truth she was asking for.
They drew up in front of the house, and a boy of perhaps fourteen came running out to take the horses, greeting Caleb with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance and eyeing Margaret with open, unguarded curiosity that made her smile despite herself.
"That's Sam. Works the horses for us since his pa broke his leg in the spring.
" Caleb helped her down from the wagon, his hand steady under her elbow, and for a moment—brief, unexpected—she was aware of him not as a puzzle to be solved but simply as a man, solid and near, with careful dark eyes that met hers a beat longer than strict propriety required before he stepped back.
"Come. I'll show you the house first, and then, if you've a mind for it, the barn and the near pasture.
I won't pretend it's Boston, but my mother kept it well before she passed, and I've tried to keep it the same since. "
The house was plain but solidly built, well-kept in the manner of a home whose owner took true care with what he had rather than merely what he could afford to add to it—good sturdy furniture, a kitchen large enough for real work, a parlor with a fireplace built of river stone that Margaret found herself admiring despite every intention of remaining focused on her original purpose.
Sunlight came through clean windows, and there was, she noted, a woman's careful touch still evident in small details—curtains someone had chosen with real thought, a garden visible through the kitchen window that had clearly once been tended with love, now grown over with the neglect of a household missing its mistress.
"My mother's garden," Caleb said, following her gaze, and something in his voice had gone quieter, less guarded than she'd yet heard it.
"She died when I was twelve. My father never had the heart to tend it after, and I confess I haven't the gift for growing things myself.
It's been let go rather badly, I'm afraid. "
"It could be restored," Margaret said, before she'd quite decided to say it, and then found she meant it wholly. "If I'm to live here, I should like to try, come spring."
He looked at her then with an expression she hadn't yet seen on his face—something unguarded, almost startled, as though she'd offered him something he hadn't known he wanted until it was set in front of him.
"I'd like that," he said, simply, and for a moment the careful distance between them seemed to thin, just slightly, into something that might, with time, become sincere warmth.
The moment held, and then passed, and he was leading her toward the barn again with his usual composed courtesy, pointing out features of the operation with evident pride—the well-built stalls, the tack room kept in meticulous order, the small office where, she noted, a locked ledger sat on the desk beneath a stack of correspondence he made no move to show her.
She said nothing of the ledger, not yet.
But she saw it, and understood, with the same cool clarity that had guided her through two years of her father's ruin, that whatever Caleb Draycott was choosing not to show her lived precisely in that room, behind that particular lock—and that she would, sooner or later, need to see what it contained, whatever careful evasions stood between herself and the answer.
"You keep your accounts locked even from your own household?" she asked, nodding toward the desk as they turned to leave, and kept her tone light, though the question was anything but idle.
"Habit more than distrust, Miss Colston.
My father's kept that ledger under lock since before I was old enough to write my own name in it, and I've never seen cause to change the practice.
" He said it easily, but she noted the faint tightness at the corner of his jaw, the same small tell she'd begun to recognize as the mark of a question landing closer to its target than he cared to admit.
"There's nothing in it I mean to keep from you forever.
Only nothing I'm ready to discuss before I've had the chance to set it in proper order myself. "
"That sounds," she said carefully, "like an order that wants setting rather urgently, if you'll forgive my saying so."
"Every ledger wants setting in order, sooner or later.
Mine's no different from any other rancher's in this county.
" He held the office door for her, and the small, deflecting smile he offered as she passed through it told her, more plainly than any words could have, that the subject was closed for the present—though not, she resolved, forever.
They walked out past the barn toward the near pasture, where the cattle grazed close enough now that Margaret could make out individual animals rather than the great dark mass she'd seen from the ridge—shaggy, sturdy creatures, their breath showing faintly in the cold afternoon air, cropping at grass already silvered with frost and, she noticed now that she looked more closely, considerably shorter and sparser near the fence lines than it had appeared from a distance.
"The grass looks thin here," she said, before she could stop herself, "compared to what I saw riding in."
"It's grazed closer near the home pasture, naturally enough, since it's easiest for the hands to bring cattle in close for tending.
" He said it without hesitation, the answer coming quick and smooth, though Margaret found herself wondering, watching the cropped, silvered ground beneath her feet, whether easiest for the hands was the whole of the reason, or merely the most convenient part of it to say aloud.
For now, she let herself simply admire the scale of what he'd shown her—the great sweep of grassland, the scattered dark shapes of cattle stretching toward a horizon too wide to correctly measure by eye alone—and did not yet let herself wonder, as she would come to wonder soon enough, whether a horizon that wide could truly hold as much as it appeared to.