Chapter One #2
Ruth Maddox sat near the table, hemming a blue day dress with quick, capable stitches. The sight of her steadiness nearly undid Eliza. Ruth always had that way about her, as if hardship might bend her but never break her.
Beside her, Clara Mae Dawson looked up from the pattern she had been marking with chalk. A loose chestnut curl had slipped down her face, and there was chalk dust on the side of her hand. Clara Mae was usually smiling before she ever spoke, her cheerfulness filling the room as surely as stove heat.
But that smile faded the moment she saw Eliza’s face.
Ruth set down her needle. “Eliza?”
That was all it took. The tears came so suddenly that Eliza could not stop them. She pressed both hands to her mouth, but the first sob broke through. Ruth was across the room in an instant, with her arms around her.
“What happened?” Ruth asked.
“I have been dismissed.” Eliza dragged the words out between breaths. “Mrs. Ashbury knows about Papa’s debts. Mr. Whitcomb went to them.”
Ruth’s eyes sharpened. “That snake.”
“Ruth,” Clara Mae murmured, though without much conviction.
“He is,” Ruth frowned.
Eliza laughed weakly through tears. “My stepmother says his offer is the only solution. He will settle everything if I marry him.” She looked at Ruth then, frightened in a way she had been trying not to be. “As if I am just another debt to be paid.”
Clara Mae’s chalk snapped in her fingers. Ruth went very still.
That stillness frightened Eliza more than outrage might have.
Ruth had grown up with silence in ways she rarely spoke of.
There were shadows in her past that sometimes moved behind her eyes, especially when loud men entered a room or when horses came too quickly up a road.
Eliza knew only pieces: parents lost violently when Ruth was a child, a brother who raised her more fiercely than gently, a house far west in Wyoming Territory that Ruth had left for a time but never truly abandoned.
“Did your stepmother agree?” Ruth asked.
“She has arranged it in her mind, which is nearly the same thing.” Eliza wiped her cheeks.
“You cannot stay here,” Ruth urged.
Eliza lowered her hand. “Where would I go?”
“Away.”
The word opened something in the room. Even Clara Mae looked toward the window, as if away might be visible beyond the muddy yard and gray afternoon.
Eliza shook her head. “I have no money”
The shame of saying it aloud nearly broke her in two, because it meant there was no door she could open, no ticket she could buy, and no road she could take that Whitcomb’s offer wouldn’t follow.
“I have some.”
“No.”
Ruth ignored that. “There are trains west. Stage routes, too. Women leave every day.”
“Not women in situations like mine.”
“Especially women in situations like yours.”
Ruth’s fingers moved to the thimble on her thumb. She twisted it once, thinking.
“My house,” Ruth whispered. “Outside Buffalo, in Wyoming Territory.”
Buffalo.
The name itself seemed impossible, a place made of wind and mountains and unknown roads. Eliza had seen drawings of the western territories in newspapers, all jagged ridgelines and endless grass.
Ruth’s voice gentled. “It is empty. My brother is away in Rawlins for work and will be for some time.”
Cole Maddox, Ruth’s elder brother, was a man Eliza knew mostly through absence. Ruth spoke of him rarely and carefully, as if his name were a locked box, a Sheriff with a reputation for competence and a temper Ruth described as “not dangerous unless a person deserved it.”
“You would be safe there,” Ruth urged.
“In an empty house in Wyoming?”
“In a house Silas Whitcomb does not know exists.”
That silenced Eliza.
Ruth leaned closer. “You could go before dawn. Take the early train south, change where you must, and get as far as Springfield. From there, you can take the stage north to Buffalo. I will write it all down for you.” She reached for a scrap of paper with a steady hand.
“There is a neighbor near the property, Mrs. Bell, a widow with two sons grown and gone. She would look in on you if needed.”
Eliza’s heart began to beat in a new way. The unsettling terror remained, yet beneath it something stirred, small and bright and painful.
“What of my stepmother?” she asked. “What of the debts?”
Ruth’s gaze did not waver. “They aren’t worth your life.”
She thought of waking every morning beside a man who had used her father’s grave, her stepmother’s fear, and the town’s gossip to corner her.
Clara Mae crossed to the shelf and pulled down a small, battered biscuit tin. “I have three dollars and seventy cents hidden from my last alterations. You will take it.”
“I cannot take your money.”
“You can and you will.” Clara Mae set the tin on the table with great authority. “Seems like preventing a woman from marrying the wrong man is reason enough.”
Ruth rose. “We have to be careful. You can’t pack too much, or your stepmother will notice. A carpetbag only, and plain clothes. No keepsakes that would slow you down.”
A pang went through Eliza. There were so few keepsakes: her mother’s small ivory comb, her father’s worn copy of Tennyson with notes in the margins, and a ribbon from childhood, faded nearly white.
Ruth seemed to understand. “One or two things,” she amended softly. “Only what you can carry.”
Eliza nodded. The tears hadn’t dried, and her future still remained uncertain, but the helplessness was gone. In its place came a stubborn determination. She had been knocked down before. She would not stay down.
She looked at Ruth, then Clara Mae, and drew one careful breath.
“I will go,” she whispered.
The words left her pale and shaken… they also left her free.