CHAPTER ELEVEN
Whatever tender ground Margaret and Caleb had found for themselves in the days following their visit to Silas's sickroom, the town of Junction City seemed completely uninterested in allowing them the leisure to walk it slowly.
"Doc Fielding says as much to me himself, not two days past," Mrs. Pruitt announced over breakfast, in the brisk, no-nonsense tone she reserved for matters she considered too important to approach delicately.
"Silas Draycott's failing faster than anyone cares to say plain, and if that wedding's meant to happen while the old man's well enough to attend it fully, you'd do better moving the date up than holding to the second Saturday in December.
I don't say it to frighten you, Miss Colston.
I say it because someone ought to, and I've never yet met a difficulty improved by pretending it wasn't there. "
Margaret set down her teacup with hands that were not quite steady. "How much sooner does the doctor think we ought to move it?"
"A fortnight, at the outside, if you want Silas well enough to sit through the whole of it without tiring past bearing.
" Mrs. Pruitt's eyes softened, just slightly, the brisk delivery giving way to something gentler beneath it.
"I know it's not the leisurely courtship a young woman dreams of, dear, rushing a wedding forward on a dying man's account.
But I've buried enough husbands and watched enough weddings in this town to tell you plainly—there's no shame in marrying quick for love of an old man's peace of mind, and a good deal of regret waiting for those who wait too long out of pride in doing things the fitting, unhurried way. "
It was, Margaret reflected later that morning, precisely the kind of practical urgency the whole territory seemed to run on—grief and joy and necessity all tangled together with no particular patience for the neat, separate categories Boston society preferred to keep them in.
She thought of her own mother's careful plans for a wedding someday, whenever it came, complete with suitable months of engagement and calling cards and slowly gathered trousseau, and found the memory belonged, now, to a different woman's life wholly.
Caleb, when she rode out to tell him the news that same afternoon, took it with less surprise than she'd expected.
"Doc Fielding said much the same to me a week back, though I hadn't the heart to press the matter with you so soon after everything else we'd already worked through.
" He stood at the fence line, watching the cattle in the near pasture with an expression she'd learned to read as the particular stillness that meant he was doing careful arithmetic behind a composed face.
"I don't like rushing you, Margaret. You deserve better than a wedding hurried forward on a dying man's account, whatever practical sense it makes. "
"I don't think I mind it so very much, if I'm honest." She came to stand beside him, and found she meant what she said, turning the idea over and finding it settled more easily than she'd expected.
"I came here for practical reasons from the start, Caleb.
A rushed wedding for a dying man's comfort is, if anything, rather more honest to how this whole arrangement began than a long, leisurely courtship pretending otherwise would be. "
"There's a part of me that wonders whether you say that only to spare my conscience over it.
" He turned to look at her fully then, and there was a searching quality in his gaze that she'd come to recognize as real, not merely careful.
"I'd rather know the truth of it, Margaret, whatever the truth turns out to be.
If a longer engagement is what you'd have wanted, under different circumstances, I'd rather hear you say so plainly than have you swallow the wish for my father's sake or mine. "
"Then I'll tell you openly." She met his gaze and held it, steady.
"A longer engagement might have suited a different courtship, Caleb—one begun in romance rather than arithmetic, with time enough to wonder and wait and be correctly courted in the manner Boston taught me to expect.
But that was never the courtship we had, and I find, examining my own heart honestly, that I don't especially mourn its absence.
What we've built these past weeks was built faster and harder than that, out of necessity rather than leisure, and I find I trust it rather more for having been tested so soon and so clearly, rather than less. "
Something in his face eased at that, some tension she hadn't fully registered until it left him.
"Two weeks, then. Mrs. Pruitt will have the whole town in an uproar arranging it, I don't doubt, and my father will complain the entire while that we're making too great a fuss over an old man's failing heart.
But I think—" He paused, and when he continued his voice had gone quieter, more uncertain than his usual composed manner allowed.
"I think I'd like it to be soon, regardless of my father.
I find I'm no longer merely resigned to this marriage, Margaret, whatever it began as.
I find I want it, for its own sake, sooner rather than later. "
It was the closest he'd come, in all their weeks of careful acquaintance, to naming outright the thing that had been growing quietly between them since the day of the mended fence, and Margaret felt her own composure waver in response, warmth spreading through her chest despite the cold November wind.
"I find I want the same," she admitted, "though I confess it startles me a little, how quickly I've come to want it, given how carefully I meant to guard myself against wanting anything at all when I first boarded that train. "
"I'll not pretend I haven't noticed the guarding," he said, with the ghost of a smile. "You've a formidable composure, Margaret Colston, when you mean to keep something close. I begin to understand where I might have learned a trick or two of my own, watching you manage it."
"That," she said, "is either a compliment or an accusation, and I find I can't quite tell which."
"Both, perhaps. I've found I rather admire it in you, even the parts of it I've had cause to argue against."
? ? ?
The following fortnight passed in a blur of preparation that left Margaret little leisure to dwell on nerves she might otherwise have indulged more fully.
Mrs. Pruitt threw herself into the arrangements with the ferocious efficiency of a woman who considered a rushed wedding a personal challenge to her own competence rather than any cause for regret, commandeering half the boarding house's parlor for dress fittings and enlisting Hannah Whitcombe's careful needlework to finish the alterations in time.
The town's one proper seamstress, overwhelmed by the compressed timeline, accepted Hannah's help with visible relief, and the two women spent long evenings by the parlor fire, Margaret seated between them being fitted and pinned while they worked, the domestic ordinariness of it steadying her more than any amount of solitary reflection could have.
"You're not frightened, are you?" Hannah asked, one such evening, through a mouthful of pins, her question pitched low enough that Mrs. Pruitt, occupied across the room with the flower arrangements, wouldn't overhear.
"A little," Margaret admitted. "Not of the marriage itself, I think—that part feels more settled now than I'd have believed possible a month ago.
I'm frightened of the winter behind it. The herd, the numbers, all of it.
I know the shape of the trouble now, at least, which is more than I knew before.
But knowing the shape of a trouble isn't the same as knowing how it ends. "
"No," Hannah agreed, quietly. "It isn't. But it's a great deal better than not knowing at all, whatever comfort ignorance might have offered in the meanwhile.
I'd rather walk into a hard winter with my eyes open beside a man who's learned to be honest with me than walk into an easy one beside a man who hasn't.
" She set the last pin and stepped back to survey her work.
"For what it's worth, Miss Colston, I think you've done something rather remarkable these past weeks, pulling that especial honesty out of Caleb Draycott.
I've known the family a fair while, through my late husband's dealings with the rail line, and I don't believe I've ever heard of Silas or Caleb either one speaking so simply to anybody about anything, before you arrived to insist on it. "
Margaret found the observation lodged somewhere warm in her chest, and carried it with her through the remaining days of preparation—through the final dress fitting, through Mrs. Pruitt's increasingly elaborate plans for the wedding supper, through a brief, tender visit to Silas's sickroom in which the old man, propped higher on his pillows than he'd managed in weeks, declared himself determined to see the whole ceremony through without so much as a cough to spoil it.
Tobias came by the boarding house two days before the wedding, hat in hand and evidently uncomfortable with the formality of the visit, to deliver, he said, a small gift on Caleb's behalf that he hadn't the courage to bring himself.
It was a length of blue ribbon, plain but well made, the sort a woman might wear in her hair or use to trim a bonnet, and a short note in Caleb's familiar, unadorned hand: My mother wore blue on her wedding day, and always said it brought her luck enough to last a lifetime with my father, hard years and all.
I find I'd like you to have some of that luck too, whatever this winter brings.
"He near talked himself out of sending it three times over," Tobias confided, with the distinct fond exasperation of a man who'd known his employer too long to be surprised by his awkwardness.
"Said it seemed a foolish, sentimental thing for a man in his position to be sending, given everything else unsettled between the two of you.
I told him a foolish sentimental thing was likely exactly what was wanted, under the circumstances, and that a woman who'd forgiven him as much as you have this past fortnight deserved a bit of foolishness in return. "
Margaret held the ribbon a long moment after Tobias had gone, turning it over in her fingers much as she'd once turned over Louisa's brass button, and found herself unexpectedly moved by the plain, unpolished sentiment of it—a man unused to gestures of the heart, reaching for one anyway, however clumsily, because he'd wanted her to have some small piece of luck to carry into a winter he couldn't yet promise her would be kind.
The evening before the wedding, Margaret sat alone in her room at Mrs. Pruitt's, the wedding dress hanging finished and ready on its hook by the window, and found herself, for the first time since her arrival in Junction City, truly uncertain what she felt—not fear exactly, and not merely the ordinary nervousness of any bride on the eve of her wedding, but something more complicated: a kind of cautious, hard-won hope, tempered by the plain knowledge of everything still unresolved and looming ahead of them.
The herd not yet sold down to a sustainable number.
The winter not yet arrived, though every sign the town could offer suggested it would be a hard one when it came.
A marriage beginning not in the easy certainty of romance but in the harder, more honest ground of two people learning, imperfectly and under significant pressure, to trust each other with difficult truths.
She took out Louisa's handkerchief, the small brass button still wrapped inside it, and turned it over in her fingers as she had so many times since leaving Boston, and found herself composing, silently, the letter she meant to write her sister once the wedding was behind her.
I am marrying a good man tomorrow, Lou, though I did not know it openly when I first arrived here.
I am marrying him sooner than either of us expected, and under circumstances neither romantic nor easy.
But I find I am not sorry for any of it—not the rush, not the hard truths we've had to claw our way toward together, not even the uncertain winter still ahead of us.
I came west believing I was traveling toward stability.
I understand now that stability was never the thing worth wanting.
What I wanted, without knowing it, was a man willing to learn, however imperfectly, how to stop carrying his burdens alone—and I believe, tomorrow, I am about to marry exactly that man, unfinished in the learning as he still is.
She folded the handkerchief closed around the button once more, set it carefully on the small table beside her bed, and turned down the lamp, and lay a long while listening to the wind testing the shutters, thinking not of the numbers or the winter or anything that still lay unresolved ahead of them, but simply of Caleb's face in the fading light beside the mended fence, and the particular warmth of hearing him say, for the first time, that he wanted this marriage for its own sake.
Tomorrow, she thought, drifting finally toward sleep, she would become Margaret Draycott. Whatever the winter held beyond that, she found she was ready, at last, to meet it as his wife rather than merely his intended.