CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was Hannah Whitcombe who first pointed it out to Margaret, one evening in early January while the two of them sat mending linens by the boarding house fire, Mrs. Pruitt occupied elsewhere with the supper dishes and safely out of earshot.
"Have you noticed," Hannah said, keeping her voice carefully low, "that Doc Fielding has taken to calling here rather more often than his patients strictly require?"
Margaret looked up from her needlework, truly startled by the observation. "I confess I hadn't. I'd assumed it was simply the convenience of Mrs. Pruitt's table, given how often he mentions forgetting his own meals."
"That's precisely what I thought too, at first. But count the visits with me, if you will.
" Hannah's eyes danced with the specific delight of a woman who'd stumbled onto gossip too good to keep completely to herself.
"He's called four times this past fortnight alone, and on not one of those occasions has he actually had a patient in the house requiring his attention.
He simply arrives, generally around suppertime, always with some flimsy pretext about checking on the general health of the household, and stays a good deal longer than any such pretext could reasonably justify. "
Margaret set down her needlework, turning the observation over with growing amusement. "You don't mean to suggest—"
"I mean to suggest exactly what you're now thinking, and trying not to say aloud for fear of being wrong." Hannah's smile had gone thoroughly conspiratorial. "I believe our Mrs. Pruitt, matchmaker to half this county, has become entirely blind to the courtship happening under her own roof."
It took Margaret only a few days of careful, amused observation to confirm that Hannah's instinct was almost certainly correct.
Dr. Fielding's visits, once she began fully counting them, occurred with a regularity that had nothing whatsoever to do with medical necessity—always timed to coincide with supper, always accompanied by some small, unnecessary gift (a jar of honey from a grateful patient, a length of ribbon he claimed to have won in a wager he could never quite explain the particulars of), and always conducted with a formal, careful courtesy that sat oddly against the easy, weary bluntness Margaret had come to associate with the man in every other context.
There was, too, a certain tell that Margaret found herself watching for with growing delight: Dr. Fielding's habit, whenever Mrs. Pruitt left the room on some brief errand, of watching the doorway she'd disappeared through with an expression of unguarded, almost boyish attention fully unlike the composed professionalism he wore for the rest of the world.
She caught him at it three times in a single week, and each time he'd startled and busied himself with his coffee the moment he realized he'd been observed, color rising faintly above his collar in a way that struck Margaret as remarkably endearing in a man of his age and evident dignity.
Mrs. Pruitt, for her part, seemed entirely oblivious to the pattern—brisk and welcoming as ever, fussing over the doctor's forgotten meals with her usual maternal efficiency, and apparently incapable of recognizing in another person's courtship the very signs she'd spent years professionally cultivating in others.
"It's really rather remarkable," Margaret observed to Caleb one evening, recounting the whole situation with the especial relish of a good piece of town gossip finally worth sharing.
"A woman who's arranged half the marriages in this county, completely unable to see the one happening in her own parlor. "
"My mother used to say the cobbler's children go barefoot," Caleb said, with a rare, easy laugh. "I expect the matchmaker's own heart runs on much the same principle. Too busy minding everyone else's romance to notice her own."
"Do you think we ought to say something?"
"I think," Caleb said, considering, "that Connie Pruitt has spent fifteen years managing this town's affairs with a fair hand and very little patience for being managed in return. I'd wager she'll come to it in her own time, and resent us both considerably if we try to hurry the process along."
"You're likely right, though it pains me a little to leave such a promising development wholly unassisted.
" Margaret set aside her mending, considering.
"I confess I've grown rather fond of her, these past weeks, watching her run this household and half the county's affairs besides with such tireless competence.
I find I'd like to see her happy, and soon, rather than watching her and Doc Fielding circle each other indefinitely out of matched stubbornness. "
"Then take some comfort in this," Caleb said, with a knowing look that suggested he'd observed a good deal more of the town's business than his usual quiet reserve let show.
"Stubborn as she is, Connie Pruitt's never once let a difficulty go unaddressed for long, in the whole time I've known her.
I'd wager the moment she correctly notices what's been happening under her own roof, she'll settle it herself with substantially more speed than the good doctor's managed in weeks of careful visiting. "
? ? ?
Fate, or perhaps simply the accumulated weight of Dr. Fielding's increasingly transparent visits, intervened before either Margaret or Caleb felt obliged to test that theory.
It happened on a bitter, blustery evening in mid-January, when Margaret and Hannah had both come to the boarding house for the regular meeting of Margaret's ranchers' clearinghouse, and Dr. Fielding, arriving on his now-customary pretext of checking the general health of the household, found himself pressed into service helping carry firewood when a supply run left the woodbox unexpectedly low.
Margaret, passing through the kitchen on some errand of her own, arrived in time to witness the whole small drama: Dr. Fielding, arms full of split logs, slipping on a patch of ice just outside the kitchen door and going down hard enough to send the firewood scattering, and Mrs. Pruitt, hearing the commotion, rushing out without even pausing for her shawl, dropping to her knees in the snow beside him with an expression of such naked, unguarded alarm that it left no further room for anyone's doubt about the true nature of her feelings.
"Amos! Are you hurt? Say something, you fool man, don't just lie there—"
"I'm quite well, Connie, only winded." Dr. Fielding, propped on one elbow in the snow, looked up at her with an expression that had gone, in the space of a single frightened moment, fully undisguised—all his careful, formal courtship courtesy stripped away by simple fear for his own safety and something warmer besides, clearly visible now to anyone watching.
"Though I confess I hadn't expected quite so dramatic a response to a man falling over his own feet. "
"You might have broken something, at your age, falling on ice like that—"
"At my age, Connie, is precisely the same age as your own, so I'll thank you not to make it sound as though I'm decrepit while you remain in the first bloom of youth.
" He said it with a warmth that took the sting utterly out of the words, and reached up to let her help him to his feet, their hands remaining joined a good deal longer than the simple business of standing required.
Mrs. Pruitt seemed to realize it in the same instant Margaret did, watching from the kitchen doorway—the sudden, unguarded honesty of the moment, the plain evidence of feeling neither of them had quite managed to hide, once genuine alarm had stripped away the careful pretexts both had been hiding behind for weeks.
She went very still, her hand still caught in his, color rising in her weathered cheeks in a manner Margaret would not have believed possible from a woman she'd never once seen flustered by anything in the whole of their acquaintance.
"Well," Mrs. Pruitt said finally, recovering something of her usual brisk composure, though her voice had gone noticeably unsteady, "I suppose you'd better come in and warm yourself properly, before you catch your death on top of everything else."
"I suppose I'd better," Dr. Fielding agreed, and followed her inside with an expression of such quiet, hopeful satisfaction that Margaret, still watching from the doorway, had to press her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing outright at the sheer, unguarded transparency of it.
? ? ?
The whole household, by unspoken agreement, said nothing directly of what had passed in the yard, though Margaret caught Hannah's eye across the supper table more than once that evening, both women fighting identical struggles against outright laughter as they watched Mrs. Pruitt fuss over Dr. Fielding's coffee with a solicitude markedly warmer than her usual brisk hospitality, and Dr. Fielding accept the fussing with the particular besotted patience of a man who'd apparently decided, somewhere in the course of that single frightened moment in the snow, to stop pretending indifference to something he'd clearly felt for a good deal longer than his careful visits had let show.
"I give it a fortnight," Hannah murmured to Margaret, once supper had concluded and the two of them found themselves alone again by the parlor fire, "before Connie Pruitt finds herself matched by her own methods, whether she admits to needing the matching or not."
"I'll take that wager, though I confess I hope you're right rather than wrong about it.
" Margaret smiled, warmed by the small, ordinary happiness of it—a welcome brightness against the harder, colder concerns that had occupied so much of the winter thus far.
"It does the heart good, doesn't it, watching two people who've spent so long managing everyone else's affairs finally attend to their own. "
"It does, rather." Hannah's smile had gone softer, something more wistful beneath the earlier amusement.
"I find I hope for it especially, given everything else.
A town needs its happy stories alongside its hard ones, I think, especially in a winter that's shown every sign of being harder than most. Connie Pruitt deserves whatever gladness comes her way, after everything she's given so freely to the rest of us. "
They lost the wager's terms to laughter before either had thought to name a fitting stake, and spent a companionable half hour afterward inventing increasingly elaborate theories about how Dr. Fielding might eventually work up the courage to declare himself clearly, rather than simply continuing his campaign of transparent pretexts indefinitely.
Hannah favored the theory that it would take some further small catastrophe to force the issue, given how thoroughly the fall in the snow had already proven effective; Margaret argued that Mrs. Pruitt herself, once she'd fully registered what was happening, would likely grow impatient with the doctor's careful courtship and simply settle the matter herself, in the same brisk, no-nonsense manner she brought to every other challenge life set before her.
"I'd wager on the second," Margaret said. "She's not a woman inclined to wait patiently for anything, in my admittedly brief acquaintance with her."
"Nor am I inclined to disagree," Hannah said, laughing. "Poor Doc Fielding may find himself proposed to before he's quite finished working up his own nerve to do the proposing."
Margaret thought of that observation often in the days that followed, watching Connie Pruitt's brisk composure soften by careful degrees under Dr. Fielding's patient, persistent attention—a small, warm thread of ordinary hope woven through a season that had, in every other specific, given the whole county precious little cause for lightness.
Whatever the coming months held for the herd, for the ranch, for the wider reckoning still building somewhere beyond the edge of the firelight, Margaret found she was grateful, at least, for this: proof that even in the hardest of winters, there remained room enough for small, unlikely joys to take root and flourish, however unexpectedly they arrived.