Chapter Thirteen
The house was, in a word, chaotic. Mornings were the worst; despite the women’s best efforts, the children were still behaving like a pack of scapegraces.
Bella might have been moderately tamed, but the boys ran wild.
Breakfasts were shouting affairs, and Aidan longed for the days when he could eat his bread and cheese in silence.
Aidan had begun to treasure his weekly trips into town for supplies, and most importantly, quiet. There was no shouting or whining as he drove into town, where he might converse with other adults without a child interrupting him.
So he took to rising earlier and earlier on Tuesdays.
He crept through the house in his socks, stepping carefully to avoid the floorboards that creaked.
The biggest challenge was making it through the sitting room to the kitchen without stepping on an errant book, toy, shoe buckle, candlestick, or anything else abandoned haphazardly on the floor.
It was like a strange sort of dance, and he was sure he’d look absurd to anyone watching. It baffled him that the house could be in this condition with two grown women living in it.
For all the good that does, he grumbled inwardly as he took an exaggerated step over a pile of paper cuttings on the floor.
He stopped long enough in the larder to pack some cheese and bread from the day before in a handkerchief.
There was a creak from the ceiling above him, and he froze like a deer sensing a wolf.
The house remained otherwise silent, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
He hastily pulled his boots on at the back door and scampered out to the barn.
The sun wasn’t even really up yet, the sky a feathery gray tinged with ink in the west. A couple of stars could still be seen near the horizon, flickering faintly. When he stepped into the small side door of the barn, the horses’ heads flew up to look at him.
Working in silence, Aidan quickly fed the cart horses (they were treated to a breakfast of barley, while the breeding stock was simply turned out to the pasture) and harnessed them. He wanted to be on the road before the household was fully awake, lest someone ask to accompany him.
The horses were backed to the wagon and hitched in record time.
The sun was peeking over the horizon by the time that Aidan took his perch on the driver’s box.
With a merry click to the horses, they set off.
As he passed the house, he could see smoke rising from the kitchen chimney.
Hastily, Aidan hunkered down and gave the horses another click, encouraging them into an energetic trot until they had turned off the lane and onto the road that ran into town.
Once safely out on the road, Aidan eased the horses back; they snorted at having to check their pace. They were hard workers, and always full of beans in the morning, but Aidan wanted to take his time getting to town. After all, Virginia City would still be waking up for the day.
He coiled the ends of the reins up and tucked them under his leg so that he could eat as the horses went along. The drive into town grew shorter every year as the city’s borders crept outward. The grass was sparse this time of year, dotted with small, stubborn trees and rocks.
To one side of the town, the spoil heap from the mine grew steadily, rising up in an unnaturally symmetrical cone. Behind him, mountains with impossibly snowy peaks jutted up into the sky. The ranch was snugged up against the foothills of these mountains, where the grass grew thicker and greener.
Aidan was just taking the last bite of his humble breakfast when the horses’ hooves began to clop softly on the packed dirt of the main road through town.
Shopkeepers and merchants were preparing their businesses for the day, surprised to see him so early.
He couldn’t resist tipping his hat and nodding to those who were sweeping sidewalks and doorways.
He was in a jaunty mood, having made such a good escape.
The morning crowd was split between the hardware store and the general store.
Aidan parked at a spot midway between the two, hitching the horses to a post near a trough that a boy was sleepily filling with water.
Aidan made his way to the hardware store, walking slowly so that the shopkeeper would have time to open the store.
Harvey Pitt, a man of about fifty, owned the hardware store.
According to local legend, he had been something of a wild frontier man in his youth, having killed a cougar with his bare hands when he couldn’t reload his gun fast enough.
Aidan wasn’t sure if he believed that, and Pitt wasn’t the bragging (or even chatting) type, but he did boast a deep scar across one side of his face.
Pitt grunted and nodded a greeting to Aidan, which was his version of an enthusiastic “hello.” Aidan dipped his head in response and went to inspect the selection of nails.
Ready money was nonexistent, but that wasn’t such an unusual position to be in—most of the ranches ran up tabs through the year, and paid them off when they sold their cattle.
Aidan had never really been in such dire financial straits, though, and he hoped that it didn’t provoke rumor.
The very last thing he needed was to be seen as untrustworthy because of a connection to a man like Kevin Black, who was running around town lending money to anyone desperate enough to take it.
Even so, Aidan wasn’t daunted; he’d build the ranch back up from nothing with his own two hands if he needed to.
He made his purchase quickly, with another exchange of grunts and nods with Pitt before sauntering down to the general store.
While the hardware store tended to attract more masculine clientele, the general store was definitely the center of the petticoat and gossip trade, at least until the haberdasher opened for the day.
Aidan girded himself before stepping inside, the bell over the door tinkling as it announced his arrival. As he’d predicted, there were already a few ladies within, who all nodded politely at him. He tipped his hat to them, murmuring a vague greeting.
Dried beans and corn, a bag of flour, a tin of molasses, a reel of blue cotton thread, a bottle of rosewater, Aidan repeated to himself.
He’d been given strict instructions on what was needed, though he doubted the necessity of items like rosewater and molasses.
He browsed the shelves slowly, frowning at the prices.
“Excuse me,” he said, sidling up to the wooden counter. The store was run by a short, barrel-shaped man, one Timothy Tinturn, who was never called anything but Tin Tin. “Might you have any molasses?”
Tin Tin frowned, his thumbs hooked into his crisp white apron. “Not until Monday next,” he told Aidan. “Folks don’t have much use for it around here. It’ll be on the morning train.”
Aidan sighed. “I don’t suppose you have rosewater, either?”
“Now that I can help you with,” Tin Tin said, turning to the shelves behind the counter. He rummaged among the bottles of liniment and hair oil and produced a short glass bottle with an illustrated label. “Will you be adding this to your tab?”
“Please,” Aidan said. He turned around to lean on the counter as Tin Tin bustled around gathering up the rest of the items and instructing his assistant to load them into Aidan’s wagon.
“Rosewater, eh?” one of the women said, approaching Aidan with a couple of others in tow.
She had dark hair streaked with gray and wore a dark blue silk dress.
Her companions were similar in age and dress, all powdered and curled into middle-aged respectability.
“I imagine that’s for that new wife of yours. ”
Aidan nodded politely. He couldn’t quite remember her name, but she was the sort of person who seemed to have simply always existed around town. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
“And molasses, too,” one of the others piped up, her hair the color of straw and the silk flowers on her hat faded and drooping slightly. “Don’t recall we have much call for that out here.”
“Don’t you know, Agatha, the new Mrs. Rawlins is a Yankee from Pennsylvania,” the first woman in blue chided, her Southern drawl bending the word in three places. “I imagine they have all sorts of use for it out there.”
The second woman, Agatha, frowned. “That can’t be good for the digestion,” she tutted. The third one, a meek mouse of a woman, nodded while glancing between the other two, hoping for approval, or maybe just to be noticed.
The first woman gave Aidan a pitying smile.
“It must be difficult for you, having to help adjust someone to our way of life.” When Aidan continued to just stare at her blankly, she turned to her companions.
“And she cut such an unfashionable figure at the wedding. Now, I hate to say it—you all know that I abhor unkind gossip—but I must say that it is going around town that Mr. Rawlins deserves a more handsome bride.”
The ladies with her clucked their agreement, nodding and murmuring. They all turned an eager look on Aidan, as if they expected him to join in. He merely continued to stare at them, frozen. They had said nothing he hadn’t thought himself, on a train platform, about a woman he’d never met.
Alexandra’s face swam before his eyes. He could see her as clearly as anything, as if she were there with him.
Hearing these gossips and their vinegary words would be enough to upset her; hearing that he had joined in would be devastating.
He was under no illusion—it would cut her deeply.
The thought of saying something unkind about Alexandra twisted up his guts.
He could see her face as their hands had accidentally brushed, and it only deepened his guilt.
Aidan locked eyes with the lead woman in blue. He couldn’t remember her name no matter how he reached for it. The only thing he could reliably remember about her was the rumor that she’d been a saloon girl in her younger days, something she liked to hide under layers of assumed respectability.
Without another word to them, Aidan turned and left them standing there, not even giving them a farewell, as good manners would have dictated.
He had a strange feeling, like he’d done something wrong.
It persisted even as he climbed back into the wagon, wheeling the horses around.
The notion that he’d done a disservice to Alexandra wasn’t something he was prepared for; he didn’t know when he’d developed a sort of loyalty to her, but there it was.
The journey home was considerably more subdued for him.
The landscape took on a new aspect: hard and unforgiving, dry and dusty, with a barely civilized town plunked down in the middle of nowhere.
Aidan hadn’t ever considered how it would look to an outsider, especially one from the complete opposite end of the country.
It wasn’t just the nature that was so very different; Alexandra was from a city, a big one at that. She’d been raised in a world of cobblestones and buildings taller than trees. Her life had been one of shop bells and gaslight, not mucking out stables at the edge of the high desert.
No wonder she’s having a time of it, Aidan thought to himself.
He’d thrown everything at her at once and demanded perfection, and hadn’t once given her room to get her feet under her.
It kept at him the whole way home. The house, which he had been avoiding for selfish reasons, now seemed to stare at him reproachfully as if the windows were eyes. He didn’t know how to resolve the feeling, nor was he sure that he even deserved to.