Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Thomas Avery had been at the depot nearly an hour when the train came in.
He had left the ranch too early. The platform was empty. The clock said half past ten. He checked the wagon, checked it again. Stood on the platform with nothing to do but look at the tracks.
Hannah Bell. That was the name on the forms. No middle name.
Her letters had never given one, and he had not thought to ask.
He had thought to ask whether she could cook, keep accounts, manage a garden, and care for a ten-year-old girl.
He had asked whether she understood that the house was small and the work hard.
Her middle name had not seemed important at the time.
It did now, standing on the platform with nothing in front of him but the empty track and forty-five minutes to fill, except that a man ought to know the full name of the woman he was about to marry, and he did not, and the not-knowing sat with him the way a crooked picture sits with a man who cannot reach it from where he stands.
He had received three answers to his advertisement.
One woman wanted to know whether there were servants.
Another had written four pages about the sort of husband she hoped God would send her and nothing Thomas particularly needed to know; her handwriting was large and looping, and by the third page she had begun to repeat herself, and Thomas had folded the letter and put it away like a man who has been talked at in a store and cannot find the door.
Then Hannah Bell’s letter had come. She had told him what she could do, what she could not do, and what she wanted to know before she would consider him.
She had not tried to make herself sound warmer or softer or more willing than she was.
The letter was one page, and the page was full, and every line of it did work.
Thomas had read it twice, and the second time he had set it down on the table and looked at it the way he looked at a fence line that was straight and tight and properly stapled — with the satisfaction of a man who knows sound work when he sees it.
Jessup had shown him the questions she sent separately. Violence. Drink. Debt. Whether Sarah had been well treated.
Thomas had sat in Jessup’s study with the letter in his hands and read each one.
His jaw had not tightened. His pride had not flared.
A woman willing to cross half the country to marry a stranger ought to have sense enough to find out whether he was a drunkard before she boarded the train.
He was glad she had the sense. He was glad Jessup could answer the way he did.
A whistle sounded beyond the bend.
Thomas moved nearer the edge of the platform and put one hand into his coat pocket and felt the folded paper there, and took his hand out again because there was nothing useful he could do with paperwork on a platform, and put both hands at his sides.
There was trouble he had not yet told her about.
Jessup should have been here. Yesterday Thomas had received word that Jessup had been called to Rosita for a sick parishioner and would not be back before the end of the month.
Thomas had found another minister — Reverend Palmer, who rode circuit and would be in Silver Cliff on Thursday, and he had arranged for Hannah to stay with Dell and Alma Pryor until then.
It was properly done. Three days made no great difference.
That was what he had told himself making the arrangements.
Watching the train draw into the depot, trailing smoke, slowing with the long iron shriek of it, he was less certain.
Hannah had been promised a wedding the day she arrived.
She had got on a train in Peoria with that understanding, and she had ridden for three days on that understanding, and he was about to tell her it would be three days more, and he would have preferred to keep his word exactly as he had given it.
The train stopped. Doors opened. The passengers came down: an elderly couple, a man carrying two cases, a mother with a boy clinging to her skirts. Thomas searched the faces. None of them was hers. His hands went still at his sides.
Then a woman appeared at the door of the second carriage.
Thomas knew her before she turned his way. She had not looked at him yet. She was standing in the doorway with her bag in one hand, pausing at the top of the step as though the ground below were unfamiliar.
She was taller than he had expected. She was standing in front of him and their eyes were nearly level.
Her travelling dress was brown, plain, dusty at the hem from three days’ wear.
Brown hair showed beneath her hat, pinned neatly despite the journey, and he could see where a piece of it had come loose on one side and been pinned back, and the pinning had been done recently, and without a mirror, and he knew she had done it on the train.
Then she lifted her face and looked along the platform, and her gaze passed him, and came back, and stayed.
Grey eyes. There was tiredness around them from the journey, but there was no uncertainty in her. She was studying him the way she would study a house she was deciding whether to enter. He stood and let her look.
He went forward.
“Miss Bell?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him directly. Most people didn’t hold his gaze long — Thomas knew he was not an easy man to look at.
His face gave nothing. He did not smile to put people at ease.
He did not nod or soften or offer the small signals that told a stranger they were welcome to keep looking.
Hannah Bell looked at him the way Jessup had said she wrote — directly, without softening, as though she had decided before she stepped off the train that she would not begin this marriage by looking away.
“Mr. Avery?”
“Yes.”
For a moment neither of them said anything.
She was close enough now that he could see the dust on her collar and the small crease the journey had pressed into her sleeve, and the grey eyes had found whatever they were looking for, because something in her shoulders eased — not much, but enough — and the relief that went through him caught him off guard.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she said.
“Not long enough to matter.”
That was not true. He had been on this platform for the better part of an hour, and before that he had been on the road since dawn, and before that he had lain awake in the dark listening to the coyotes and thinking about what he would say to her when she arrived, and had come up with nothing he was willing to use.
He had done better on paper. Words came easier when he could set them down and look at them before they went anywhere.
Her mouth moved — not quite a smile, but the possibility of one, held back for later.
“Your trunk?”
“Checked through.”
“I’ll see to it.”
He took her bag before she could object.
She let him, though her fingers stayed on the handle a moment before they let go, and he knew she was a woman who carried her own things and did not hand them over easily.
He turned toward the baggage car and was three steps away before he realized he was still thinking about her face, and made himself stop, and went after the trunk.
When the trunk was secured in the wagon, Hannah stood beside the platform waiting for him, her hands folded in front of her, looking at the town.
The one street, the storefronts, the mountains behind everything — he tried to see it through her eyes, a woman from Illinois who had never been west of the Mississippi standing in front of the rest of her life.
He came back to the wagon and stood beside her. His hand went to the sideboard and stayed there.
“There is something I need to tell you before we leave.”
She turned to him. The ease that had been in her shoulders a moment ago was gone, and in its place was the woman who had written to Jessup asking about violence and debt.
“Mr. Jessup isn’t here. I had word yesterday — he’s been called to Rosita, to a sick parishioner. He won’t be back before the end of the month.”
Hannah stood very still, taking something apart in her head.
“I’ve arranged for Reverend Palmer to marry us Thursday.
He rides circuit and will be in Silver Cliff then.
” Thomas kept his voice level, because making the news sound large would not make it smaller.
“Until then, I’ve arranged for you to stay with Dell and Alma Pryor.
They have a place in town. Alma knows you’re coming. ”
“Thursday,” Hannah said.
“Yes.”
“And until Thursday.”
“You’ll be under their roof. If you’d rather make some other arrangement, I’ll pay for a room at the hotel.”
“No.” The answer came quickly, and it was the quickness that told him she had already done the arithmetic, a woman alone in a hotel in a town where she knew no one, or a woman in a family’s house where she could be accounted for.
“Mrs. Pryor’s house will be quite suitable, if she is willing to have me. ”
“She is.”
Hannah’s gaze went past him, toward the tracks, the way she had come. He waited. After a moment her chin came up.
“You said the marriage would be today,” she said.
“I did.”
“And now it cannot be.”
“No.”
She turned back to him. “You couldn’t prevent Mr. Jessup being called away.”
“No.”
“Then I suppose there is little use blaming you for it.”
Thomas almost smiled. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
She did smile then — briefly, gone almost before it arrived, and the sight of it did something to his chest that he had not been expecting and did not have a name for. He looked toward the wagon.
“We can go to the ranch first, if you’re willing. Lucy’s expecting you. Then I’ll bring you to the Pryors’ before supper.”
She hesitated. Not long, a breath, maybe less, but he saw it, and knew what it was. She had come prepared to walk into a house as a wife, and now she would be walking in as a stranger, and the difference mattered to a woman who had thought carefully about what she was and was not.