Chapter 16
Cordelia stood on the steps of the Barclay porch with Boone behind her shoulder and watched the men of Fox Hollow swing down out of their saddles in ones and twos and walk up the grass toward the rail.
They came in a loose line. Shea Wardell at the head of them.
Drew at his elbow. A grey-bearded man a step behind Drew, his rifle still on his shoulder but his finger nowhere near a trigger.
McAfee. The Lacey brothers. Calder. They stopped at the rail in a half-circle and Mr. Barclay was at the top of the porch above them with his hands flat on the wood.
His knuckles whitened, eased, whitened again.
He was not going to move from where he stood unless one of them lifted a rifle.
She did not stay behind him.
She came down the two steps and stood at his side, one hand on the porch rail an inch from his.
"Mrs. Barclay," Drew said. He had moved her name forward, ahead of the wedding. She did not correct him.
"Mr. Drew."
"You are bold."
Bold. Her knees were water under her skirt and her hands were dry on the rail. Bold would do.
"I am scared, Mr. Drew. The two have not been opposites in my life so far."
A man at the back of the half-circle let out one short, surprised breath of a laugh, and caught it too late.
Cordelia looked along the half-circle.
She was looking for the man she had seen on the boardwalk, the man with the grey beard at the chin who had set a hand on the girl's shoulder.
He was there, at the rail.
A name had been spoken once or twice since the men rode up, Foster Fairchild, and she had held it each time against the memory of that man.
She thought the two might be one. She did not yet know it for certain.
If she was right, his daughter was the girl in the pale dress with the bonnet pushed back. The girl had a name.
She did not say the name. She did not have it.
She lifted her hand off the rail.
"Sir."
The man looked up at her, a hard expression on his weatherbeaten face.
"Ma'am."
"Who are you, please? Forgive me. I haven't been told."
"Foster Fairchild. I have a farm out the south road."
So she had been right. Her pulse went up into her ears, and she asked the question anyway.
"And the young woman I saw across from the sheriff's office. You spoke to her. Who was she?"
The rail went quiet.
Boone, behind her shoulder, made a sound. Not a word. A breath taken in fast.
Foster looked at her without understanding.
"My daughter. Gillie. She was in town with me. She was at the milliner's."
"She was at the boardwalk across from the sheriff's office, Mr. Fairchild. She was looking through the front window of the office. Mr. Keaton was looking back at her. They were holding each other in a long look. I saw it."
Foster's face did not move. Behind him a man stepped half a pace forward, then back.
"My daughter has never met Boone Keaton."
"Ma'am." Boone, behind her. His voice low. "Please."
She did not turn her head.
"Mr. Keaton. I’m sorry."
"Please."
She looked at Foster Fairchild, then at Rufus. She looked last at Shea Wardell, who had not yet said anything since the rail, and whose face had gone bloodless.
"Gentlemen." She drew breath. Her mouth had gone dry.
Her pulse was in her throat. "Hear me out.
I am a stranger. I have known your boy two days.
I will tell you what I have understood. Mr. Keaton was in town the night of the shots because he was meeting a young woman.
He has been silent the whole week because he has been protecting her name.
Not because he was at Sippy Wardell's box. He was nowhere near it."
The rail did not move.
Foster Fairchild put both hands on the porch rail. His knuckles went white in the same place Mr. Barclay's had gone white earlier. She did not flinch.
"My daughter would not."
“I'm not saying she did anything you would not have permitted in the daylight, Mr. Fairchild.
I am saying a sixteen-year-old girl agreed to take a walk with a young man, and his asking her to has cost him his name in this town for a week.
He has paid for it without speaking hers.
That is what I have understood. You may correct me. I will hear it."
"She would never risk her reputation."
His voice had begun to bargain.
"She did not risk it. He carried the whole risk himself."
Rufus turned his head, slowly. He looked at Boone.
Boone closed his eyes.
"Boone. Is what the lady has said true?"
Boone did not open his eyes.
"Yes, sir."
A sound went through the half-circle at the rail. Not anger. Not quite. The sound of fourteen men who had ridden out on one story and were being asked, in their saddles, to ride home on another.
"Boys," Drew said. "Wait."
Foster Fairchild had not moved. His knuckles had not eased.
"Boone Keaton. You will tell me whether you have laid one hand on my daughter."
"No, sir, Mr. Fairchild. I have not and I would not. I asked her to walk. I respect and admire her, and even the asking of it was wrong. I’m ashamed to have asked her to leave her house at night to go walking, but please know I only did so because I believe her to be a good, decent young woman, and I bore no ill-intent.
The shots came and I ran. I’ve not spoken to her since. "
Foster looked at him. His knuckles eased a fraction, not all the way back to ordinary, but somewhere in between.
“You put my daughter’s reputation at risk.”
Cordelia took a breath.
“He did. But he was willing to lose his own reputation to protect her when he realized what he’d wrought.”
Fairchild turned his head toward Shea Wardell at the end of the rail.
The men at the rail turned their heads with him.
Shea Wardell did not look back at any of them. He was looking at his hands on the wood. His knuckles were white. The line of his jaw had a tremble in it, the tremble of a boy who has gone the wrong direction in front of fourteen witnesses and has not yet been told to turn around.
He said nothing.
The half-circle was quiet. Cordelia did not breathe.
She had not looked at Rufus through any of it.
Now she did. His jaw was set, the muscles along it taut, his eyes on the rail and not on her.
He had stepped back and let her carry it, and it showed on him as effort, and she knew that for a gift.
Rufus Barclay set his hands one over the other on the porch rail, in the same folding she herself had used on the train.
His jaw held. His hands held. This man would hold.
He took one breath and asked the next question himself.