Chapter 9
The wedding was set for the second morning, because there was nowhere else to put her.
Harriet Bowen said so at breakfast, with the coffeepot in one hand and the reverend's toast in the other.
There was no hotel in Galena Springs, only the boarding house on Silver Street, and that was full of single men.
The Bowens had one settle and a house already bursting.
A woman could not lodge on a settle for a month while the town watched her.
"It's not respectable. It's not sensible. And it's not kind to you," Harriet said. "Josiah will marry you tomorrow at ten. I've told the doctor. He said, very well, in that voice of his, and went off to lance a boil."
Olivia said that tomorrow at ten would suit her.
She found that it did. She had come a thousand miles to be married. Two days more or two days fewer made no odds. But that night on the settle she lay awake again, and this time it was not the camphor.
What did she know of him? A photograph. Half a dozen letters. A cold hand on a platform and a list read aloud. She knew that he had not lied to her, because she had gone over every line looking for the lie and had not found one.
He had signed a paper for a child he did not want, then sat up until three to lay a fire for her. Harriet had told her that, on the settle, along with the rest. And he had written one true sentence at the end of an advertisement, then tried to pretend he had not.
It was not nothing. It was not a great deal, either.
Well, she thought. I have married for less. I have married for nothing at all, in fact, for ten years, and the house never once said thank you.
She turned over and slept.
* * *
The church was very cold.
It was a plank church with a stove at the back that had been lit an hour before and had not yet made any difference.
Olivia could see her breath. She stood at the front in her gray wool, which was the best she had.
Harriet was on one side of her, nobody on the other. She waited for the door to open.
He came in at ten exactly, with the child.
He had on a black coat that had been brushed, and he had shaved with more care than usual. She could see the nick on his jaw. He walked up the aisle without hurrying and stood beside her. She smelled carbolic, cold air, and something under them that was only him.
"Miss Baker."
"Dr. Aldridge."
"Well," Harriet said, loudly enough for the rafters. "At least the man had sense enough to send for quality. I said so before, and I'll say so now. Get on with it, Josiah."
The reverend got on with it.
He read the service in a gentle, worn voice that she found she liked. She listened to the words as she had never listened to them before. To have and to hold. For better, for worse. In sickness and in health. She had spent ten years in sickness. She knew what the word cost.
"Wilt thou have this man?"
"I will," she said.
She meant it the way she would have meant a contract. Honestly. She would keep his house, mother his ward, and be a fair woman to live with. He had asked for a sensible wife, and she would be one. That was the promise, and she did not make promises lightly.
"Wilt thou have this woman?"
"I will."
He said it the same way. Plainly, as terms. She heard that. She was glad of it, and surprised at how much.
Then the reverend said, "Join hands." Charles turned to her and took her hand in his.
His hand was cold. She had expected that. What she had not expected was that he would look at her while he held it. He went on looking, as the reverend spoke the words over them. His eyes were gray, tired, and very steady. She found that she could not look away from them.
Neither could he.
It lasted only as long as the words did. Then the reverend said, "I pronounce you man and wife." The hand let go. They were looking at the reverend again like two sensible people.
But she had felt it. It was not in the contract.
* * *
Antonia sat in the front pew in her Sunday dress, the one with the mended hem, and watched them.
She watched as she always watched, one detail at a time. The doctor's back, very straight. The lady's straighter. Spectacles sliding down the reverend's nose and being pushed up. Mrs. Bowen's shawl, which had a dropped stitch on the left side that nobody had noticed but her.
She heard the words. Man and wife. She turned them over, as she turned every new word over, and set them beside what she already knew.
Man and wife meant a house. It meant the doctor and the lady in the house together, with the stove lit, the lamp on.
She had seen married people. Mrs. Costa and Mr. Costa on the third floor, before the fire.
Mama and Papa. Married people had a house with children in it, and the children were theirs.
Antonia was not theirs.
She was a paper on the hall table that said until spring.
The lady had come for the doctor. The doctor had sent for the lady.
Whatever this was that they were doing at the front of the cold church with their hands joined, it was between the two of them.
It was for the two of them. It would go on after the thaw.
She would not.
Antonia knew this in her bones, the way she knew the smell of smoke. She was not angry about it. It was only how the world went. When the pen came out, you did not let anything in your chest open, because it would only have to close again.
The doctor turned from the altar with the lady on his arm.
His eyes found the front pew. He looked at her for a moment. Something in his face was different from the way it had been on the porch that first night. She did not know what to call it. Then the lady looked too, and smiled, a small, quick smile like a door opening a crack.
Antonia could not smile back. She had forgotten how. But she stood up when they came down the aisle. She walked behind them out into the snow, at exactly the distance she had walked behind Mr. Croft.
Not close. Not far. Ready.
* * *
At the house he showed her the rooms, in order.
"This is your room."
It was at the front, with a window on the gulch.
There was a bed with a white counterpane, a washstand, a chest of drawers, a chair.
Somebody had put a jug of water on the washstand and a clean towel beside it.
The room smelled of soap and of cold. She thought that he had scrubbed it himself, and kept the thought to herself.
"The key is on the inside. I will not come in. If you want me, or the child wants me, knock on the wall. My room is through there."
"Thank you."
"The household books."
He laid them on the kitchen table. A ledger of accounts, a ledger of stores, a small tin box with the money in it. He opened the tin and showed her. He showed her how much came in, and from where. A good part of it came as sides of bacon or cords of wood instead of coin.
"You keep this as you see fit. You need not account to me for it. If it runs short, tell me, and I will find more."
"Thank you."
"The surgery bell."
It was a brass bell on a bracket by the surgery door, with a wire that ran up through the ceiling.
One pull meant a caller. Three quick pulls meant a man hurt at the mine.
For that he went at once, whatever he was doing.
A pull that did not stop meant the caller could not let go of the rope. If he was out, she was to go herself.
He said all of this the way he had said each word since the platform. Completely. In order. As if he had written it down and was reading from it.
"Is there anything else you wish to know?"
He stood in his own kitchen with his hat in his hand, courteous as a hotelkeeper showing a guest the gas.
"No," she said. "I think you've been very thorough."
He nodded. He seemed relieved. Then the surgery bell rang, one long pull, and a boy's voice shouted through the door. He was gone with his bag before she had drawn breath. She heard his boots go down the steps two at a time.
The kitchen was quiet.
The child was on her stool by the stove, with her hands around her knees. She had been there the whole time.
"Well," Olivia said. "It seems it will be the two of us for supper."
Antonia's eyes were on the door he had gone out of.
"He went to Mrs. Kinney," she said. "Up the creek. The baby's turned wrong. He said so yesterday."
"Did he? Then he'll be some hours." Olivia took off her bonnet. She hung it on the peg where a woman's bonnet had clearly not hung for some time. "Do you know where the flour is kept?"
The child got down off the stool and showed her.
* * *
She unpacked her trunk alone, after the child was asleep.
There was not much in it. Three dresses, of which she had on the best. Underthings. Her mother's shawl. A workbasket, a hairbrush, her writing case with his letters in it. And the Bible, which she set on the shelf above the washstand where she could see it from the bed.
Then she sat down on the white counterpane in her wedding dress and took in the room.
It was a good room. It was the first room she had ever had with a key on the inside. She turned the key over in her fingers for a while. Then she set it on the washstand. She left the door unlocked. There was nobody in this house she needed to lock out.
Down the hall, the child slept.
Olivia had looked in on her. She slept the way she sat, folded up small, with her back to the wall and her face to the door. The carpetbag was beside the bed. It was not unpacked. Olivia had stood in the doorway with her eyes on that carpetbag a good while before she came away.
Whatever this marriage was, or was not, she thought. Whatever the doctor meant by it, with his lists, his bell, his room through there. Whatever he did or did not feel when he looked at her at the altar, and she at him.
The child down the hall was not going to pass another month unmothered.
That, at least, was in the contract. And Olivia Aldridge kept her contracts.