Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Lucy pulled her up the stairs without letting go of her hand, gripping it the way a child grips something she has been told she may hold but has not yet been told she may keep.
The house was plain, bare pine floors, whitewashed walls, a hall too narrow for two people to pass without turning sideways, and it smelled of wood and cold stove and something underneath both of those that was harder to name, the particular smell a house gets when it has been lived in by the same people for a long time and not quite lived in enough since one of them left.
“This is mine,” Lucy said, and pulled her into a small room at the top of the stairs.
A narrow bed beneath the window. A washstand against the wall.
A blue dress hung from a peg, and two books were stacked beside the bed with a ribbon laid carefully across the top one, marking a place she intended to come back to.
The room was clean, cleaner than Hannah had expected from a household run by a man and a ten-year-old, and the cleanness told her Lucy had done it before she arrived.
There was a vase on the windowsill with three stems of dried grass in it that had been put there on purpose, and recently, and by a child who wanted flowers and had none and had gone out and found what she could.
“It is a pleasant room,” she said.
Lucy’s face fell — not much, but enough.
She had wanted more. She had cleaned and put out the grass and she had wanted Hannah to see something in the room that would make her say more than pleasant, and Hannah had failed her, and she did not yet know Lucy well enough to know what the right word would have been.
“Papa made the shelf,” Lucy said, and pointed.
Hannah looked. It was plain pine, fixed to the wall with brackets Thomas had made himself. He had sanded the edges — she could see the care in that, the way the corners had been rounded so a child’s hand would not catch a splinter. The shelf sat almost level. Almost.
“Did he?” she said.
“He said it was straight.”
Hannah met Lucy’s eyes. Her mouth was pressed tight in the particular way a child’s mouth presses when she is trying to keep a secret and the secret is that her father is wrong about something and she knows it.
Lucy grinned. Hannah did too.
“He may have been mistaken,” Hannah said.
“I told him.”
“I expect he was grateful.”
Lucy considered that. “No.”
Hannah laughed, and the sound of it surprised her — she had not laughed in this house before, and the house took it in the way an empty room takes in a new piece of furniture, as though it had been waiting for something to go there.
A floorboard sounded in the passage. Thomas stood in the doorway. He looked from Lucy to Hannah and then toward the shelf, and his eyes stayed on the shelf a moment too long, and Hannah could see him working out what had happened.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” Lucy said.
Thomas turned to Hannah. She kept her face composed.
“I was admiring your carpentry,” she said.
His eyes went to the shelf again. Then to her. “It holds books.”
“So it does.”
His mouth did something she had not seen in the wagon — not quite a smile, slower than that, arriving reluctantly, as though she had caught him at something he had not meant to be caught at. The laugh had surprised him. This he was choosing to let her see.
Lucy tugged her toward the door. “Come see the rest.”
The rest of the house she took room by room, the way she would any house she meant to run. What worked. What wanted mending. Where the labour went and where it didn’t.
Lucy led her through the parlour, which was small and sparsely furnished: a settee, a chair, a rug worn through at the doorway, and Hannah took it in without commenting and followed Lucy into the kitchen.
She stopped there.
The room was larger than she had expected from the outside.
A black iron range took up one wall, and it was a good range, well-kept, the blacking still holding, and the rest of the room had been built around it: dry sink, a worktable scarred by years of cutting and kneading and setting down hot things, cupboards with plain latches, a pantry beyond.
Nothing was fine. Nothing was neglected.
It was a kitchen that had been used hard by someone who cared about it, and Hannah could see Sarah in the room without knowing anything about her except that a woman who kept a range like that knew what she was doing.
She went to the window. The kitchen garden lay beyond it, fenced, larger than she had expected, much of the summer growth finished and some of it gone over. Beds that had been planted with care and then not kept up. Dead vines still on the stakes. A few last stems of something green near the fence.
“That will be yours,” Thomas said behind her.
She turned. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, his shoulder against the frame, watching her look at his house. Not anxiously — he was not a man who asked for approval — but carefully, as though her looking told him something he wanted to know.
“The garden?” she said.
“The house and garden both. Same as I wrote.”
Lucy had gone to the cupboard and was reaching for something on an upper shelf, up on her toes, her fingers just short of it.
Thomas crossed the room without breaking his sentence, took down the jar, and handed it to her, and came back to where he had been standing.
The whole thing took perhaps three seconds.
He had not looked at Lucy. He had not needed to.
He had known where she was and what she wanted the way he knew where the cupboard was, from years of being in the same room.
“Harlan sees to the cattle with me,” he said. “Most days we’re on horseback from sunup. There’ll be times I need another hand, but that’s my concern.”
Hannah looked back through the window. She could see the garden fence, the pump, part of the barn, and beyond all of it the land running out toward the mountains, pale and enormous under the afternoon light.
Yours.
Not truly. The ranch was Thomas’s. The house was Thomas’s.
In three days she would be Thomas’s wife, and every part of her daily life would belong to the man she had married, the way every part of it for ten years had belonged to the woman she had worked for.
She knew that. She had known it getting on the train.
But this was where she would work and eat and sleep.
Where she would spend more hours than Thomas did.
The kitchen, the garden, the cupboards: she would learn them by use, by repetition, by standing in the same room every morning until the room became hers in every way that mattered except the one way that was written on paper.
It was more than she had been able to say of any place since Mrs. Corliss died. She would take it.
“How large a garden did you generally plant?” she asked.
Thomas came to the window beside her. He stood closer than he needed to, or perhaps the window was narrower than she had thought, and she was aware of him next to her, the warmth of him, and the smell of dust and horse and something cleaner underneath.
“Sarah planted most of what’s fenced,” he said.
The name lay between them. It was the first time Hannah had heard him say it aloud, and said it straight, without flinching, and Hannah was glad, because she had no wish to marry a man who could only speak of his dead wife by pretending she had never existed.
“Then I shall see what comes up in spring before I decide what wants changing,” she said.
Thomas looked at her. She felt the look, a beat longer than the words required, and wondered whether she had presumed too much, talking about changing a dead woman’s garden on the first afternoon.
“That’s sound,” he said.
Lucy had opened the jar. “May Hannah have one?”
Thomas glanced at the jar of hard candies. “You’d best ask Hannah.”
Lucy came to her solemnly and offered the jar. “Would you like one?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Lucy chose a red one for herself and held out a yellow for Hannah. Thomas declined when she offered him the jar.
“You always take the brown ones,” Lucy said.
“Not always.”
“Yes, you do.”
Thomas looked at the jar. He took a brown one.
“See?” Lucy said.
“Somebody has to.”
Hannah ate her candy and said nothing.
Thomas went to see to the horses, and Lucy filled the quarter-hour the way water fills a glass, immediately and completely.
She talked the way children talk, one thing spilling into the next: she disliked arithmetic but liked reading, she liked horses better than either, her father’s bay mare was too big for her and she thought this grossly unjust, her friend Nellie lived two miles away and had three brothers none of whom Lucy considered worth the trouble of having.
Hannah sat at the kitchen table and listened and said very little, and Lucy did not seem to need her to.
Then Lucy stopped, mid-sentence, and looked toward the wall beside the kitchen door.
“Mama made that,” she said.
Hannah followed her gaze. A sampler hung in a plain frame, the stitching neat and small, the kind of work a girl does when she is being watched by someone who will not let her finish until it is right. WHITHER THOU GOEST, I WILL GO. SARAH ANN MILLER, 1872.
Hannah went closer. The thread had faded — the blues gone pale, the greens still holding, and the border had a knot in one corner where the girl had made a mistake and corrected it instead of unpicking it all, and Hannah stood in front of it and looked at the correction and liked Sarah Miller for it, for deciding the knot was good enough and moving on.
“She did fine work,” she said.
“She was sixteen.”
“Did she tell you that?”
Lucy nodded. “She said Grandma made her pick out every crooked stitch.”
Hannah smiled. “My mother did the same.”
Lucy looked at her with sudden interest, the kind of interest that arrives when a child discovers that the stranger in her kitchen was once a child too, with a mother who made her do things.
“Your mama sewed?”
“Very well.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-three.”
Lucy absorbed that, quickly, completely, filed somewhere Hannah could not see.
“I was nine,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Mama got sick before my birthday.”
Hannah did not know what to say that would improve the fact. Nothing would. A woman could offer comfort, and comfort was worth something, but comfort did not change the thing it was offered for, and Hannah was not going to pretend that it did.
“Your father told me she was ill for some time,” she said.
Lucy picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “Papa slept in the chair.”
Hannah looked toward the doorway. Thomas was nowhere in sight.
“Beside her bed?”
Lucy nodded. “Sometimes I did too, but Papa carried me back.”
Hannah stood in the kitchen with the sampler on the wall beside her and a ten-year-old girl picking at her sleeve and did not move.
She thought of Mr. Jessup’s letter — devoted to Sarah throughout their marriage and particularly during her final illness — and she thought of the man who had written those words and the man who had slept in the chair, and they were the same man, but the chair was a different thing from the letter, the way a house is a different thing from a drawing of a house, and she stood with it.
Footsteps on the porch. Thomas came in with his hat in his hand, his hair flattened beneath it and disordered at the front where he had run his hand through it or the wind had, and he looked at Hannah and then at Lucy and took in the silence between them.
“We ought to go,” he said.
Lucy turned to him. “Already?”
“Miss Bell’s been travelling for days.”
“She could stay for supper.”
“She’ll eat at the Pryors’.”
“She could sleep here.”
Thomas’s gaze went to Hannah — briefly, no more than a second, and came back to Lucy. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not married.”
Lucy frowned. “You were supposed to be.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not Hannah’s fault.”
“No.”
“Then why does she have to go?”
Thomas drew a breath, and Hannah could see him searching for the answer that would satisfy a ten-year-old who did not yet understand why an unmarried woman could not sleep in a man’s house, and was not going to understand it today, and would keep asking until she got an answer or until someone changed the subject.
“Because Mrs. Pryor has prepared a room for me,” Hannah said, “and it would be very poor manners to leave it empty after she has taken the trouble.”
Lucy considered this. It was not the truth, and Hannah suspected Lucy knew it, but it carried enough weight to stop the asking, and Lucy let it stop her.
“Could you come tomorrow?”
Hannah turned to Thomas.
“I have work tomorrow,” he said.
Lucy gave him a look that suggested this was a personal failing. Thomas ignored it with the particular blankness of a man who has seen the look before and has learned that the safest response is no response.
“I’ll see Miss Bell before Thursday. You will too.”
Lucy came to Hannah as she put on her gloves.
“Thursday is three days.”
“It is.”
“You won’t change your mind before then?”
Thomas went still. Not a large stillness — he was a still man to begin with — but Hannah saw it. Lucy was asking whether Hannah would stay. Thomas was hearing his daughter ask it. That was the harder thing.
Hannah looked down at the child. She could have said yes, I’ll be here, don’t worry, everything will be fine.
It would have cost her nothing and it would have given Lucy what she wanted.
But Hannah had spent ten years being promised things by a woman who meant every word and put none of them on paper, and she was not going to stand in Thomas Avery’s hallway and make promises she could not yet be certain of keeping.
“I have come a very long way to marry your father,” she said. “And I have seen nothing today that makes me sorry I came.”
Lucy looked pleased.
Thomas said nothing until they were in the wagon. Then, as he took up the reins, he said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Lucy. You didn’t promise what you couldn’t know.”
Hannah looked at him. “I don’t make promises merely because someone wants to hear them.”
“No,” Thomas said. He looked at her, and it was the same look he had given her in the kitchen — steady, unhurried, as though he were reading something he had already read and finding more in it the second time. “I didn’t think you did.”
The horses started forward. Hannah watched the house grow smaller behind them and did not turn around in the seat, though she wanted to, because turning around would have meant something she was not ready to have it mean.