Chapter Three
For what felt like the thousandth time that day, Aidan pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation.
When he reopened his eyes, Mr. Johannes, the builder, was still looking at him expectantly.
He was a man of few words, a stone mason by trade who had assembled a crew in the rapidly expanding town.
He also had the bushiest eyebrows Aidan had ever seen on a human being. Talking to him was a little like carrying on a conversation with one of those sheepdogs whose fur was forever falling across its eyes.
“If you please, I just need the dimensions you require,” Mr. Johannes said in his stark, clipped accent.
The man had a reputation for efficiency, and Aidan could easily believe it; he wrote everything down at lightning speed in incomprehensible scribbles.
Even now his pencil hovered over a small leatherbound notebook.
“Well, I’m only looking to have the two or three studs at most, so—” Aidan began. They’d had this part of the conversation several times, and he’d harbored hopes of getting farther. He had no business having the man out at all and knew it; he had told himself he was only asking after a price.
It wasn’t to be. Brendan’s three children ran shrieking by him again, making more noise than any three children should be able to make, jostling Mr. Johannes and putting Aidan at the very edge of his patience.
Mr. Johannes bore it with the same blank calm he gave to Aidan, but his brows seemed to flutter in censure.
“Perhaps I might return at a later date,” Mr. Johannes said, and began to put away the measuring tape looped over his arm. “It seems that you have your hands full at this very moment.”
“No, it’s fine,” Aidan insisted. “Please, just wait there a moment while I see to the children.” He gave Mr. Johannes a placating smile, which the man did not return.
The moment he turned away, his face fell. He stalked after the children. Whatever they’d been playing had come apart somewhere out on the property, and they were all on the ground now, wrestling and shouting in a dusty tangle of knees and elbows.
A roll of baling wire sat coiled nearby, and they were rolling closer to it by the second.
Aidan waded into the fray and began pulling them apart by arms and shirt collars, anything he could get hold of. “That is enough!” he shouted over the din. He managed to get Danny, the oldest at ten, by the back of his suspenders and dragged him backward.
The younger two, Bella and Gary, stilled, staring up at Aidan with matching expressions of pouty petulance. Bella, her brown hair badly plaited into two uneven ropes, pointed at Danny. “He started it!” she proclaimed.
“Did not!” Danny shot back.
“Did so!” Bella insisted. “He said you were going to sell me as a maid to one of the bettermost families in town because you couldn’t afford to keep us all!”
Aidan stared at Bella for a moment, then glared down at Danny. “Boy—” he began, but before he could say anything further, Danny was wriggling in his grasp like a fish on the line.
“That’s a right lie, Bella, and you know it!” Danny cried. “It’s a lie, ain’t it, Gary?”
All eyes fell on the youngest Rawlins, who was no more than five. He had surprisingly light hair, a relic from their mother, and wide brown eyes. He looked from Danny to Aidan and then to Bella, his fingers in his mouth. Danny glared at him, and Gary colored and glanced at Bella again.
Aidan resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose again. He knew full well he wouldn’t get a straight answer—Gary was Danny’s faithful lieutenant. Aidan released Danny and put him in line with the other children.
“I don’t care who started it,” Aidan said, his voice low. He glared at each of the children in turn. “I’m going to finish it. Now, you all go find some useful way to spend your time, or I will find one for you. I’ll have no more interruptions today, or there’ll be no dinner for the lot of you.”
Danny kicked at the dirt and mumbled something Aidan couldn’t quite hear, but he was fairly sure it was to the effect that no dinner would be a mercy, given Aidan’s cooking.
He stood over the three dirty faces and waited. They all avoided his gaze, and he worried, not for the first time, that he had only succeeded in uniting them against him.
“Now, don’t the three of you have chores to be tending to?” Aidan continued.
All three pulled identical mutinous faces. Aidan inhaled sharply. They didn’t resemble his brother much, favoring their late mother as a rule. Still, sometimes they made a face that reminded him so much of Brendan as a child that it was like a knife between the ribs.
“You’re not our pa,” Danny said at last. When Aidan’s gaze landed on the boy, he thrust his chin up defiantly.
“No, I’m not,” Aidan agreed in a low voice. “But I’m the best you three got right now. You need someone to look after you, and I’m of a mind to bring someone here for that very purpose. Lord knows I’ve had about my fill of it.”
He hadn’t meant to tell them of his plan, but they were driving him to distraction. He knew what it was to lose a parent young, and he had no wish to add to it, but he plain didn’t know what to do with them.
To the little gang’s credit, they took it without flinching. There may have been a pouting lip from Gary, but he quickly sniffed and put it away.
“We don’t want a new ma!” Bella cried at last. “We just want our pa back!”
So do I, Aidan was on the verge of saying but checked his tongue at the last possible moment. Surely nothing would be helped by adding his own grief to theirs.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Gary had gone very still, the way he did when the talk got above his head, and he could tell it was bad anyway.
Danny tugged at Gary’s arm. “Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s go find some lizards.” Gary allowed himself to be pulled away, his fingers in his mouth again. Danny gave Aidan a last sullen look over his shoulder.
Bella, clearly hoping to have gained some sort of approval for her outburst, glanced after the boys, then back to Aidan.
She hurried after her brothers and then slowed, trailing along a few paces behind.
Aidan knew she wasn’t particularly fond of frogs, lizards, or any of the other vermin that lived around the ranch, but she was desperate to be included.
Aidan sighed and watched them go. He knew he should stop them and insist they do their chores, but he frankly didn’t know how.
That’s enough, he told himself sharply. Straighten up and get back to work.
Aidan squared his shoulders and put away his feelings again. By the time he got back to Mr. Johannes, he felt like the picture of composure. Only a small doubt lingered that the picture might be out of focus.
***
By the time Aidan had fed the horses and finished work for the evening, he scarcely had the energy to feed himself, let alone three children who all looked at him and waited.
Maria wasn’t coming anymore; her mother didn’t think it appropriate, Aidan being a bachelor.
He wasn’t entirely sure of the logic, since his brother had been a widower these five years and had never shown the least interest in changing it.
But he hadn’t the time to argue the point.
He managed a dinner of boiled eggs, bread, and cheese, most of which was spent with everyone’s heads down. He must have dozed off with his head propped on his hand, because he opened his eyes and they were gone. He blinked blearily and heard sounds up above in their rooms.
He sighed and sat up, rubbing his face with both palms. He couldn’t leave them alone in the big house, but he wanted the quiet of the small house at the front of the property, and his own bed.
He had been in and out of this house every day for eleven years and had never once felt like an intruder in it. These were Brendan’s rooms, his furniture, his quilt on the bed. There was a thump from somewhere above him, and then the sound of Bella whining in protest.
“If you have the energy to cause mischief, you have the energy to do some scrubbin’,” Aidan yelled in the direction of the ceiling. “You all either pipe down and get to bed, or you’ll be put to work.”
A scurrying stampede of feet followed, and then merciful silence.
Aidan let his eyes fall closed, rubbing at the back of his neck.
When he opened them, they landed on the small pile of post delivered that afternoon: a few mourning cards with hastily scribbled regards, and a letter from the school reminding him about enrollment come fall.
He flipped through them without much heed. At the bottom of the stack, his hand stilled on handwriting he didn’t recognize. He lifted the small envelope and turned it over; the return was for Philadelphia. He frowned, trying to remember whether he’d spoken to a horse dealer in the city.
Carelessly, he ripped the end of the envelope and pulled out the letter. It ran to more than two pages and was very clearly not from a horse dealer. It was a response to his ad looking for a wife to mind the children and the ranch.
Aidan skimmed the lines, stifling a yawn. Between the flowery phrases and long explanations, he gleaned that the young lady in question worked in a bookshop, had no relations save an aunt, and wasn’t ill-disposed toward children.
Aidan frowned. The letter wasn’t succinct, nor was it filling him with confidence. The lady wished to bring her aunt, which was not great news; another mouth to feed, and, he suspected, someone to interfere.
Still, he wasn’t spoiled for choice. He’d received the one reply. He stood and took the letter to the small study that served as the ranch office, sat down, and began drafting something to the point but not curt, inviting the young lady out. He frowned again as he wrote out the address.
“Philadelphia?” he muttered. What would a city girl know about life out here? As if to emphasize his point, a coyote began to yip somewhere in the night.
He signed it anyway. Above him, a floorboard shifted as someone turned over in bed, and he thought of Bella standing in the yard, saying she wanted her pa back while he said nothing at all. A stranger could hardly do worse than he was doing.