Chapter 6
Six
The gate posts came up out of the dusk with a crossbar between them. Burned into the graying wood announced the ranch name: SILVER SAGE.
Della sat forward, a small frisson of excitement as she read the words.
She’d imagined this place, too. Something quaint and square with a porch across the front, and a yard, and lamplight in the windows.
What she got was bigger than she'd pictured, and a great deal worse.
It was a long, low house of gray timber, two stories at one end and one at the other, with a porch that ran the whole width of it. There were nine windows facing her, ablaze with the golden sunlight that pooled in glorious golds and pinks at the horizon.
The barn beyond it was enormous, far larger than the house, a great black shape with a roof line that sagged in the middle like an aging horse's back.
There were pens and sheds and a bunkhouse and a windmill turning slowly against the last of the light, and all of it, every building, spoke of a place that had long since passed its prime.
Beau steered the wagon into the yard, a rough, circular shape. The horse plunged its nose into the water barrel at the fence.
Up close, Della counted four of the windows stopped with board.
"It's a fine house," she said, trying to hide her disappointment.
Beau didn't answer that.
He set the brake, and got down and came round to her side. It was only when he stopped below her, those sapphire blue eyes shining up at her, that her mind tripped from the house to her husband. He lifted both hands and her heart stuttered in her chest.
She had been handed out of carriages her whole life. Gloved fingertips. A steadying elbow. A footman looking somewhere past her shoulder.
Beau Hawkins put his hands at her waist and took her weight, and for a moment she was in the air with nothing at all beneath her and her hands closed hard on his big shoulders, and then she was standing in the dirt of a Montana ranch yard and he had already stepped back.
Della found she had to remind herself to breathe. “Thank you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
His attention had already gone to an older man making his way across from the bunkhouse. He was old and bandy, with a roll in his gait. He removed his hat and swiped at the little bit of hair that remained across his head.
Della offered him a smile.
"Duke Darby, the foreman here at Silver Sage," Beau made the introductions. "Duke, this is Adele Hawkins."
The name was startlingly unfamiliar, especially heard in that low rumble.
"Well, now," Duke grinned, bobbing his head. "Mighty fine to meet you, Mrs. Hawkins.” The name rolled together as flicked his grin at Beau. “You did well, my boy."
"How do you do, Mr. Darby."
"Duke, ma'am. Just Duke." He looked her over frankly, top to bottom, and appeared to be entirely delighted with what he found. "Forty year I've been on this place and there ain't been a lady stood on them ol’ steps since the late Mrs. Hawkins, Beau’s mama, passed. It’s just right that we have us some feminine ways back here. You’re right an’ welcome.”
“Well,” Della replied, touched by his words. He certainly said more than his boss.
“You'll want feeding,” Duke surmised, and before she could reply, he bellowed, “Colt!"
A young man, little more than a boy, came out of the dark by the barn so fast he must have been standing there some while. Barely twenty, she’d guess. He got as far as the back of the cart, looked at Della, went scarlet to the ears, and addressed his remarks to the porch rail at his left.
"Ma'am."
Della tried to catch his eye. "Hello, Mr. Colt."
"Just Colt, ma'am."
"Help me with the case first," Beau said to him, “Then we’ll see about supper.”
The men lifted the cases and the trunk, and Colt retreated back into the long shadows.
“Well, you be sure ‘n settle in well. Me an’ the boys won’t be here for a while," Duke said to Della, standing with one foot on the step, smiling up at her.
“Oh?”
"General roundup. Every outfit in the district sends a man and a wagon. We start up at the forks of the Tongue and work our way south to the Powder, then swing back and sort out what's ours." He said it as though she knew these places he mentioned. "Biggest three weeks of the year."
"I ought to be riding it,” Beau said.
"You ought to be here." Duke jerked his chin at Della without looking at her, and there was nothing unkind in it at all. "Man don't leave a bride in an empty house her first fortnight. Bad luck. I've rode that roundup for too many years, boy. I'll bring you a count."
“I missed the last two counts,” Beau said.
“Just bad timing,” Duke shook his head as though he couldn't help it. “And there's always next year.”
Della stood holding her reticule and her parasol, and understood perhaps one word in four that they shared. The two men held a look between them a beat longer than they needed to, and she wondered what was in it.
"We're pulling out at first light," Duke said. "Me and Boyd and Jed. Wagon's loaded, and I've had the shoes off the gray and back on again, so we're square." He resettled his hat. "Three weeks, maybe four. Depends how far south they work before they turn. I’ll see you right, boy."
Beau looked at those he wanted to say more, but the foreman turned, hollered for Colt. Then, with a sigh, he looked at Della. “Ready?”
Inside, the house smelled of cold ash and dust and something faintly sweet underneath, like apples gone over.
Beau went ahead with the lamp, and she followed him down a hall floored in wide, dark boards, and Della, well-schooled in running a household by both her mother and their staff, read the place as she went.
Damp bloomed on the paper by the front door, not two feet up from the floor. That was a gutter gone, and not this year.
A stair rail with a spindle missing. Dust and cobwebs gathered in the corners.
A parlor on the right with the shutters closed and the furniture standing under sheets, grayed with a thick layer of dust. Nobody had been in there for a long while.
Everywhere, the same thing: nothing broken that couldn't have been mended in an afternoon, and nothing mended. Not poverty. Just…forlorn. A lack of love. But if there were tasks that took Beau and his men away from the ranch for weeks at a time, was it any wonder?
They passed by a door at the end of the hall.
"What's through there?"
"Front room."
"Another one?” Della was impressed that Hawkins' family would include such an extravagance. Perhaps in their heyday they'd entertained here. Maybe they could again.
Beau didn't slow down. "It's all shut up. There's nothing in it but boxes."
"Boxes of what?"
"Papers." He waved a quick hand. "My father's. Mine. Pa used it like an office. It's all wanting sorting and I ain't got to it."
"I could?—"
"It'll keep," Beau said, turning for the stairs. “This way.”
Her room was at the head of the landing, and somebody had been in it.
The bed was made up with clean linen. There were fresh candles. There was a jug and a basin on the washstand. Not matching, but they were functional, at least. Beside the basin, in a jar with water in it, somebody had put a fistful of small, yellow flowers.
That small welcoming touch made her eyes sting a little. “It’s lovely. The flowers, too.”
Beau lifted her case, set it at the foot of the bed. “That’ll be Duke. He’s an old romantic under all that blustering and spit.”
He paused, lifting the lamp a little higher and taking a critical look for himself.
The room was not large. The bed was barely big enough for one. Nothing like the one she’d slept in back in New York. A wardrobe. Drawers. Practical and functional.
“This is as you expected?”
She met his eyes, and suddenly the room felt smaller. Or maybe he just filled it. She didn’t trust her voice, so nodded.
“The lock,” he said, as if remembering. He went to the door, and crouched, and worked at the lock with his thumb.
Which meant that she was standing over him with nothing to do but watch.
And notice. The width of his shoulders under the mended shirt.
The curl of dark hair at the nape of his neck.
The muscles working in brown forearms, the concentration of a man doing a small careful thing with hands that were plainly not built for small careful things. A muscle moving in his jaw.
Something gave with a clack. He straightened and held the key out on his flat palm.
Della looked at it.
“It might take a few turns to get it working. This was Mama’s old sewing room, so it hadn’t been used in a while. I can take a look at the lock in the morning, see if I can make it smoother for you, but the lock is strong.” His gaze lifted, scanning her face. “Not that you’ll need it.”
She took the heavy iron key, wrapping her fingers around it. “Thank you.”
“There’ll be some supper in the kitchen,” he said, collecting the lamp, leading her back down the hall.
The kitchen was the biggest room in the house and the one that frightened her most.
It had a long, scrubbed table and a dresser with blue plates standing on it.
A wide window over the sink that would catch the morning light.
Along the whole of one wall, the largest cast-iron range Della had ever seen in her life.
It had six lids and two ovens and a warming shelf and a flue arrangement she could not begin to understand.
You keep your hand near the flue, and you watch it, said Biddy, from two thousand miles away. You don't wander off.
"Supper's bacon and bread," Beau said, "and I'll not pretend it's anything else."
"Bacon and bread would be very welcome."
He cut the bread standing up, badly, in slabs of no two thicknesses, and cooked the bacon in a heavy, black pan. He set it in front of her without a plate for himself.
"You're not eating?"
"I ate at noon."
"Mr. Hawkins."
He looked at her.
"Beau," she corrected herself, and it did something to her stomach to say it out loud in his kitchen. “Eating is a social event. Shouldn't our first meal be a shared one?”
There was a pause.
Then he got another plate down off the dresser without a word, and sat down across the corner of the table from her, and took two slabs of his own thickly-cut bread, and they ate.
It was very quiet.
It was, she thought, not entirely unpleasant.
"The range," she said eventually. "Is it temperamental?"
He swallowed, frowned at the beast of an oven. "It's a range."
"That is not an answer."
"It's an honest one." He was almost smiling. He swiped at the bacon grease with the last of his bread. "The right-hand oven runs hot. The flue sticks when the wind's in the north. My mother used to hit it."
“Hit it with what?”
He shrugged. “Whatever was in her hand at the time.”
She finished her meal and realized she couldn’t put it off any longer.
"Beau. Is there — that is… Where is the water closet?"
"The what?"
"The—" She lifted her chin. "The privy."
"Outside." He got up. "Back of the yard by the fence. There's a lamp by the door. Come on, I'll walk you."
"You needn't."
“But I’m going to,” he pushed open the door and let her precede him through it. “Besides, if you hurt yourself on the first night, I’ll never hear the end of it from Duke.”
Outside, the day had gone entirely, and the cold had come down with it.
Della stopped two steps off the porch.
She had seen stars. Of course she had, but never in her life had she seen anything quite like what was above them at that moment.
"Oh," she said.
No lines of where the land ended and the sky started - just an endless black bowl, crammed so thick with stars in places that they ran together like spilt sugar.
He’d walked a few feet ahead and stopped to look back.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so beautiful,” she whispered.
The darkness grew as he turned down the lamp to a mere glow. He came back and stood beside her, and for a while the two of them stood in a ranch yard in the dark with their heads tipped back and said nothing whatsoever.
“Is it always like this?”
“Mm-hmm,” his deep voice rumbled low beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him. “Every clear night.”
“Then I shall come out here every clear night and think about this first time,” she mused softly.
Later, when the house had gone quiet, Della sat on the edge of the bed in a room she had never seen before, in a house she now lived in.
She turned the old iron key over in her fingers.
Then she set it down on the washstand beside the little jar of flowers, nothing more than weeds, and left it there, and did not lock the door at all.