Chapter 9
Nine
Della watched the sky lift from gray to rose from the window of a room that felt a little different this morning.
She had been awake for hours. She had heard him come home. The clinking in the kitchen, the creaking tread on the stairs. The click of his bedroom door down the hall.
Even as exhaustion pulled on his limbs, her mind would not allow sleep to claim her. Replaying the words they’d exchanged, the hurt that filled her heart.
It was not the shouting.
She had grown up in a house with a man who shouted. Her father had shouted at his clerks, at the newspaper, at the fire when it wouldn't draw. Peter shouted at whoever was cheapest to shout at.
She was used to voices raised in anger or in jest. She could deal with shouting, except when it was aimed at her.
She’d thought about what kind of man she might be traveling to meet, and had considered he might be like her father or her brother.
Men driven by status and materialistic things.
In the quiet Montana house, she’d found a man who’d fetched her water so that she wouldn’t have to.
Who stood off in the dark whilst she was in the privy because he didn’t want her out there alone.
She’d begun to think of him as someone safe to be with.
Five weeks was long enough to drop her guard.
In the pale morning gloom, she knew that this was the part that stung. How he had turned on her like a dog off a chain, and she had discovered that she did not know him at all.
She rolled off the bed, abandoning the idea of sleep.
She washed in the chipped porcelain bowl and dressed and pinned her hair up herself, missing not only Biddy’s skills but also her counsel.
Someone to share her feelings with. She would write to her, but not about Beau.
She didn’t want her friend to worry, which she would do, undoubtedly more if she knew the truth.
And what was the truth? Della didn’t even know that herself.
At the door, she listened. Nothing. She unlocked the door and made her way down the stairs in stockinged feet.
Beau’s door was still closed, though she couldn’t hear a sound beyond it.
Not even his snoring. She crept down the stairs, trying not to wake him.
Right there and then, she wished she had the money for a ticket back East.
She could write to Peter, of course. He’d crow over her how he’d been right. But she’d be back in New York. Away from here. Back to a comfortable, easier life.
A lonelier life.
She would arrive at Twelfth Street with nothing, and Peter would be enormously kind about it in front of people, and by Christmas, there would be a fancy dinner party and a widower with soft hands, and she would be told what a mercy it was that he was willing to accept her now that she was damaged goods.
She stilled at the bottom as she realized that would also mean being away from Beau. Thinking of not being near him gave her more than a pause. It wouldn’t do to think about that too much, other than she’d made him a promise.
She crept past the damp patches and the broken pieces. Her home, she thought. Her husband. She might have made the promises at the courthouse in front of strangers, to a stranger.
A man she barely knew yet was legally connected to.
Adele Warner would have gone back.
She sat at the kitchen table and put her boots on. And when she stood, she realized that last night’s pie was all gone. All of it. Including the burnt bits.
The empty dish had been washed and was on the dresser, back in its place. His cleaned dinner plate sat in its row on the dresser where it lived.
Della put her hand flat on the table. "Oh, Beau.”
He was out all hours. He worked hard. He’d said that the last few years, especially after the loss of his father, the ranch had suffered issue after issue. She was cross with him. Hurt, too. She sighed.
No one told her that she could be angry and love at the same time.
She filled the kettle and set it on and stoked the range. She fixed the coffee - the one thing she could do well. Then she took the basket off the hook and went out.
The mist had come down in the night, clinging to everything, giving an ethereal light. Beyond the yard, it went out over the grass in a flat white sea. Away south, the long ridge of hills had one side of it burnished gold where the sun had got at it, and the other was still blue with night.
There was no sound anywhere.
Della stood in the yard with the basket over her arm, eyes stinging. Not from cold, or from hurt. But because she knew at that moment this was where she wanted to be.
It was not a perfect place. There was a man upstairs she did not understand. It was not quite where she’d dreamed of.
But she had chosen it.
Nobody had arranged it, or approved it, or drawn up a settlement about it. There was not a single thing in the whole enormous quiet of this morning that belonged to Peter Warner.
My choice.
Boots crunched on the gravel behind her. She turned round fast, flooded with disappointment when Duke emerged through the murkiness.
"Mornin', Mrs. Hawkins."
"Duke." She got hold of herself, sniffed back the tears. "You're up early."
"Part of the job, ma'am." Under his arm he had a bundle of books tied about with a leather bootlace. "Old men don't sleep, and cattle don't wait."
She smiled despite the turbulent emotions running amok inside. "That sounds like a very convenient philosophy."
Duke gave her delighted smile. "It surely is." The gaze went to the house. “Is he up?”
Della realized that the foreman thought theirs was a traditional marriage, in the fullest sense. That she would have spent the night next to Beau, and that she’d know if he was awake or not. Her cheeks pinked up as she clamped off that particular line of thought. “Oh, um, he’s…”
Stormed off after an argument. Sulking. Doesn’t have two dollars to his name.
“He was out late.”
Duke frowned. “Was there trouble?”
Della shook her head. She knew for certain that Beau wouldn’t want her to share their private lives. “What’s that you’re holding?”
He shifted the books to his other arm.
"I got the ledgers. Beau needed 'em updated after roundup before he goes in. For Hollis," he clarified when Della blinked at him.
"The bank manager?" The peculiar little man with the lingering handshake.
I have the pleasure of doing business with your husband.
She had thought at the time it was the sort of thing men said. But a visit with the bank manager wasn’t usually a sign that things were going too well. With a little more context, it seems that Hollis was already well appraised of what was happening here at Silver Sage. Probably more than she was.
The door opened, and Beau stopped short when two gazes met his across the yard.
“Half the day has gone,” Duke teased him. “Even your good lady wife is out here tellin’ me she left you getting’ your beauty sleep.”
A dark scowl sat on Beau’s face as he jogged down the steps and yanked on his hat.
He looked as bad as she felt, and worse. There were brackets cut down either side of his mouth, eyes were puffy. Dark stubble shadowed his jaw. She wondered if he’d slept at all, and now was going out on the range all day.
"Good morning," said Della, smiling, aware that she might have to put a show on to save face on both their accounts.
“Morning,” he grumped.
Her mind rooted around for something to ask. In the delay, the silence dragged on. Duke examined them both.
“I was just fetching over the ledgers,” he held out the bundle.
Beau took them. As he tucked them under his arm, he avoided her gaze. She would have said, if pressed, that her husband looked ashamed. “I’ll put them inside, and then we’ll get to it.”
“I made coffee,” Della called, trotting to keep up as he strode off.
“I know.”
By the time she’d arrived in the kitchen, he was already on his way back from his office.
“I’ll get the eggs, and then I will make us some breakfast,” she began.
Beau didn’t stop. He straight-armed through the door. “I’ll eat in the bunkhouse with the others.”
“Beau.”
He stopped, shooting her a look over his shoulder, though he didn’t turn. For one absurd moment, he looked like he was going to say something else. Then the door slapped closed.
His boots faded into the mist. She could make out the rumble of male voices. The coffee pot hadn’t been touched. The kitchen was clean, but shabby.
My choice, Della thought.
She knuckled away her tears and went about her day.