Chapter 2
“Redstone in twenty minutes.”
The driver’s voice came through the coach wall like a fist on a door, and Clara Whitford startled awake and sat up straighter on the bench seat.
She pressed her palm flat against the letter in her lap, feeling the creases where she had folded and unfolded it so many times the paper had gone soft as cloth.
Edward Langley’s handwriting slanted to the right in neat, careful strokes, the script of someone who chose his words with care and meant every one of them.
She hoped that was true. She had staked everything on it.
The Montana Territory unrolled outside the coach window in long sweeps of brown grass and distant blue mountains.
Nothing like the cramped streets and coal-stained brick of the East, and certainly not like the orphanage with its narrow corridors and windows that looked out on other windows.
Here the land stretched so far it seemed to curve with the earth itself, and the sky sat on top of it all like a lid that someone had forgotten to close.
Clara tucked a strand of auburn hair behind her ear and leaned closer to the glass. Her reflection stared back at her. Hazel eyes too large for her face. A dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks that no amount of bonnet-wearing had ever faded.
A mouth she had been told was pretty, though she suspected the woman who said it was being kind because Clara had just scrubbed the dormitory floor without being asked.
She was small. Petite, the matron had called her, which was a polite way of saying she had to stand on a stool to reach the top pantry shelf and that children half her age could look her in the eye.
She smoothed the front of her calico dress, the nicer of the two she owned.
Blue with tiny white flowers. She had pressed it that morning at the last stage stop, heating the iron on the cookstove while the other passengers ate breakfast. First impressions mattered.
Edward Langley was meeting his bride today, and Clara wanted him to see someone worth choosing.
The letter lay open in her lap. She had memorized it weeks ago, but her eyes found the lines again the way a person returned to a favorite passage in a book.
I am not a wealthy man, Miss Whitford, but I am an honest one.
I have a timber business, modest but steady, and a house with a good roof and a sound chimney.
I am looking for a partner in the truest sense.
Someone willing to build a life in a place that asks more of its people than most places do.
If that appeals to you, I would be honored to make your acquaintance.
Clara folded the letter and pressed it between her hands. Before Edward’s reply, she had answered fourteen advertisements, sending each letter out with a fragile thread of hope. Each silence had only confirmed what she had always suspected.
Nobody chose the orphan girl. Nobody picked the woman with no family, no dowry, and no connections. She was wallpaper in a crowded room, the chair no one thought to sit in, the last name called and the first one forgotten.
Edward Langley had written back within a week.
His second letter asked about her interests. His third described the mountains outside his window. His fourth mentioned that his sister Harriet lived nearby and would be glad for female company.
Each letter was longer than the last, warmer, more open, as if he were building a house one room at a time and inviting her to walk through it.
Clara had read them so many times she could recite them from memory, and she carried all four in the pocket of her traveling coat, bundled together with a ribbon she had taken from the orphanage sewing box.
All the way there, Clara rehearsed their first meeting in her mind.
The words needed to be simple, polished enough to hide the quick beat of her heart and the trembling of her hands inside her gloves.
Mr. Langley, I am so pleased to finally meet you.
Even the smile required practice, warm but not too eager, grateful but not desperate.
The coach lurched over a rut, and Clara grabbed the edge of the seat. The only other passenger, an older man in a gray coat who had slept most of the way from Helena, grunted and shifted but did not wake. Clara envied his ease. She had not slept soundly for days.
The closer she got to Redstone, the louder the voice in her head became. The voice whispered that she had been foolish to come, that Edward would take one look at her plain dress and freckled face and wonder what he had been thinking.
She told the voice to be quiet. It never listened, but the telling helped.
The coach slowed. Buildings appeared on either side of the road, low wooden structures with false fronts and painted signs.
A livery stable. A feed store. A saloon with its doors propped open despite the October chill.
Clara gathered her things and waited for the coach to stop, her pulse ticking in her throat.
The driver opened the door and offered his hand. Clara stepped down onto the packed-dirt street, and Redstone greeted her with wind and dust and the smell of horse and sage. Her trunk came down from the top of the coach with a heavy thud.
The driver tipped his hat and climbed back into his seat. The coach pulled away, and Clara stood alone on the main street of a town she had never seen, holding a letter from a man she had never met, with everything she owned in a single trunk at her feet.
Clara stood on the main street of Redstone and looked for Edward Langley.
She had described herself in her last letter so he would know her. Small, auburn hair, a blue calico dress with white flowers. She scanned the sidewalks, the storefronts, the handful of people moving through the afternoon. No one stepped forward. No one seemed to be waiting for an arrival.
The stage had made better time than expected, nearly half a day ahead of the schedule she had written to Edward.
He would not have known to come early. She smoothed her skirts and settled herself beside her trunk to wait, hands folded in her lap, watching the street with the patient stillness of a woman who had spent her whole life waiting for things to begin.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. The shadows on the main street shifted as the sun moved westward.
A man came out of the livery and glanced at her, then went back inside.
A woman crossed the street with a basket on her arm and did not look at her at all.
Redstone carried on with its afternoon, and no one came.
Clara stood. If Edward did not know the stage had arrived early, she would go to him. She had his directions. East of the main street, past the church to a house with a white fence and a cedar tree in the yard. She could find it on her own. She had been finding her own way for eighteen years.
She picked up one end of the trunk and dragged it forward. The weight of it pulled at her shoulders and bit into her palm, packed as it was with her two dresses, her spare boots, a Bible the matron had given her, and the quilt she had sewn from scraps during her last winter at the orphanage.
Each square was a different fabric, cut from donations that had come through the door over the years. It was the only thing Clara owned that felt like history.
People noticed her. A woman sweeping the porch of a boarding house paused mid-stroke and watched. Two men outside the feed store exchanged a glance.
A girl of perhaps ten, carrying a basket of eggs, stopped in the middle of the street and stared until her mother called her inside. Clara was accustomed to being overlooked, but this was different. In Redstone, she suspected strangers were an event.
She needed directions. Edward’s letters had described the house as sitting east of the main street, past the church, with a white fence and a cedar tree in the yard.
Clara looked east and saw nothing that matched.
The streets forked and wandered. The buildings all looked the same in the flat afternoon light.
Clara turned in a slow circle, trying to make sense of the street and the bustle around her. A man was walking in her direction and she gathered her courage. He looked as though he might know where he was going, which was more than she could say for herself.
He came up the street from the direction of the livery, a tall man with broad shoulders and a canvas sack slung over one arm.
He walked with a pronounced limp, his left leg swinging stiff at the knee, and even from a distance she could see the effort each step cost him.
As he drew closer, she noticed the scars.
The left side of his face was mottled and drawn, the skin tight and discolored from what must have been a terrible burn. His jaw on that side looked as though it had been reshaped by something brutal, and the damage climbed his cheek and disappeared beneath his hat.
He was heading toward her, or rather toward the street beyond her, and Clara saw the moment he registered her presence. His blue eyes met hers for half a breath, then dropped. His chin tucked toward his chest. He angled his path to give her a wider berth.
Clara planted herself in his path. “Pardon me.”
He stopped. His eyes came up again, wary, and she saw surprise flicker across the unscarred side of his face. He had not expected her to speak to him.
“I’m looking for the Langley house. Edward Langley. I was told it’s east of the main street, but I’ve gotten myself turned around.” She offered a small smile. “I’m afraid I don’t know a soul in this town.”
The man studied her for a moment, and Clara had the strange sense that he was bracing for something. A flinch. A gasp. The instinctive recoil that people gave when they saw his face up close. She held his gaze and waited.