“Did you post the letter?” she called out as she clomped down the front steps, hurrying to Shadow’s side before he had even dismounted.
He let his gaze drift over her upturned, expectant features. Already, the first stabs of disappointment and loss sliced through him. “Yes,” he replied. “I posted it.” The letter to Charlotte Fairfax in Boston.
“Good.” Her smile appeared forced, lacking its usual sparkle. “I’m ready to go and see the irrigation pump.” She stepped back and stomped her booted feet against the earth, as if to demonstrate her eagerness.
Thomas swung down from the saddle. “I’ll take care of Shadow first. And I’d like a cup of coffee. I had lunch in town. Art Langley sends his regards. I bought more sugar and a bar of soap. The mercantile didn’t have lavender. I got vanilla.”
He dug in the satchel tied to his saddle and handed her the parcel. The soap had been much too expensive, but he wanted her to wash with it every day, so he could breathe in her scent while they slept.
Fool, he told himself. The more you let yourself get used to her, the more it will hurt if she abandons you.
“Thank you.” Charlotte unwrapped the small cake of soap and held it up to her nose. Eyes closed, she inhaled a deep breath. “It’s lovely. Just as nice as the lavender.”
A sudden sense of desperation flooded over Thomas. He could not bear to watch. Every second, her beauty and her good humor and her childish enthusiasm about small things cut a bit deeper into his lonely heart.
“I’ll see to the horse.” He took Shadow by the bit and led the blue roan down the path to the barn.
By the time he came back into the cabin and sat down for a coffee, Thomas had his emotions under a semblance of control. Gruff and morose, he avoided looking at Charlotte as he gave brief replies to her questions about the folk in town, Art Langley and the doc and his wife and the few others who remained.
When his cup was empty, he rose to his feet. “Let’s go.”
Thomas strode along the path to the lake, too fast for Charlotte to keep up, and gained a moment of solitude to calm down while she scampered along after him in her big boots that looked like clumps of dried mud on her feet.
His valley. His home. He glanced up into the sky that spread blue overhead, watched the tiny butterflies dancing over the yellow flowers in the row of bushes that bordered the lake. He might end up alone again, but he belonged to a place, his own land. Like so many other times during the past six years, Thomas immersed himself in the task at hand. A man who kept busy had no time to brood.
“Careful.” He reached out a hand to steady Charlotte as she jumped onto the small wooden jetty he’d built at the shore of the lake.
She craned forward to inspect the iron handle on the metal pipe that rose from the water. “It’s like the well pump,” she commented.
“It’s exactly the same.” He opened the timber storage box, took out the long hose he used for irrigation and gestured for her to step back. “Watch out.”
She scooted back and craned her neck to watch as he joined one end of the long gutta-percha hose into the pump and clipped the metal sprinkler to the opposite end of the hose.
He pointed at the various parts of his irrigation system as he spoke. “When I crank the pump, water goes into the hose. Once the hose is full, the pressure from the pump forces the water out at the other end. The metal piece is a sprinkler, with holes to distribute the water over a larger area. I have two different sprinklers. For the vegetable patch, a curved one with holes at the top, so the water comes out like rain. For the corn, a flat one with holes at the side. Corn should be watered at the base.”
Thomas looped the coil of the hose over one arm, stepped from the jetty onto the muddy bank and held out his other hand to help Charlotte down. Her slender fingers clung to his callused ones. He maintained the contact for a moment longer, even after she was safely on firm ground.
Then he strode up the bank, at the same time unraveling the coiled hose to stretch it out like a long snake along the ground. “The tricky part of the job is moving the hose,” he explained. “Corn does not like to get waterlogged. You need to reposition the sprinklers every few minutes.”
“Can I help?”
She was standing still, looking at him with the eagerness of an army recruit on the first day of parade. It stirred something inside Thomas, her keen desire to help him. That much of her at least was sincere.
“Your help might make a big difference,” he told her. “I need to stop pumping when I move the sprinkler around, and the pressure goes out of the hose. If you do the moving, I can keep pumping all the time. Mind you,” he added, “you can’t just drag the hose over the rows of produce. You’d crush the plants. You’ll have to lift it over the plants, or drag the hose back to the edge of the field and drag it out again.”
“Show me.” Her hands flittered in front of her face with an impatient, utterly feminine gesture. “I want to try.”
“All right.”
Together, they rolled out the hose. Charlotte was darting and leaping around him, clumsy in her big boots, hindering as much as helping. Little by little, Thomas conquered the tension her hidden secrets had stirred up in him.
There was no point in spoiling the present by worrying about the future. If he allowed bitterness to make him surly, he’d ruin whatever time he had left with her. He wanted to build up memories, something he could look back on during the lonely nights after she was gone.
“I’ll go and pump,” he told her. “You keep an eye on the sprinkler.”
He’d chosen the rows of cabbages and beets on purpose, because the upright sprinkler created a mist of rain. Anticipating the next few moments, Thomas hurried back to the jetty and put all his energies into cranking the handle of the pump.
Water gurgled in the pipe that came up from the lake. The hose filled out, like a snake that had been feeding. The kinks in it straightened. The hose grew taut with the pressure and the sprinkler at the other end burst into life. Just as Thomas had guessed, in her impatience Charlotte had been crouching over the metal piece, staring at the tiny perforations, waiting for something to happen.
A feminine shriek, as much of delight as of outrage, rippled around the sunlit fields as she bounced backward and toppled over on her behind. Even from the distance, Thomas could see the rivulets of water dripping down her face.
“You rotten egg,” she yelled. “You knew that would happen, didn’t you?”
Thomas pumped harder. A fine mist of rain rose over the field, sparkling in the sunshine. Charlotte remained sitting on the ground, her legs flung out, her hands braced against the dirt as she leaned backward, her face tipped up toward the rain. Her merry laughter rang in the air, mixing with the rainbow that formed over her.
Oh, the glorious sight of seeing his wife happy, of hearing her laugh. The pleasure of it quivered like an arrow through every part of Thomas. He didn’t even mind the few heads of cabbage she had flattened beneath her rump.
For the rest of the afternoon, Thomas watched Charlotte frolicking in the spray as she moved the sprinklers around. The muscles in his arms and shoulders protested with the strain of pumping, but even then he didn’t cease. He didn’t give up until he knew that if he saturated the soil with any more water, he would risk rotting his crops.
* * *
That evening unfolded in easy companionship, adding to the happiness that held Thomas in its thrall. Under his supervision, Charlotte managed to cook an edible beef stew. She sang while she stirred the pot, her hair pulled into ringlets from the humidity of the sprinklers, her face flushed from the afternoon out in the sun and from the heat of the stove.
“What’s the song?” he asked.
“It’s a sea shanty.” She resumed her singing. “Oh, have you heard the news, me Thomas?” Dropping her voice to a low rumble, she went on, “
One more day.” Then, back in her feminine voice, “We’re homeward bound tomorrow.”
She jerked her chin toward him. “Go on. Join in.” She dropped her voice again. “One more day.”
Hesitantly, he joined in. She sang verse after verse about a sailor longing to reach the home port, each verse followed with the refrain of “One more day.”
When they came to the end, she gave him a wistful smile over her shoulder. “I told you, Papa was a sea captain. Sea shanties accompany sailors in their work. A leader sings the full verse, and then the sailors sing the refrain as they pull the ropes or deal with some other physical task. That’s why the refrain has a punchy rhythm to it. One. More. Day. Each word represents a heave on the rope.”
Thomas asked the question that had niggled inside him while he listened to her singing. “Is the sailor in the song called Thomas?”
“No. He is called John.” Another wistful smile. “But I was singing for you.”
One more day. Thomas swallowed. Was she trying to tell him something? Was it a hidden message, a warning that his time with her was coming to an end? He brushed aside the thought. It was a song. Just a song about a sailor called John. Not about a lonely farmer called Thomas and his wife, whatever her real name might be.
After they had eaten, he went outside to take the horses into the barn and give the cow her evening milking. He returned inside to find Charlotte in bed, curled on her side beneath the covers. A lamp burned with a low flame on the nightstand.
Thomas undressed quickly, almost fearful that she might vanish in a puff of smoke if he took too long. Honoring his promise, he had slotted in the bundle board. Only six inches high, it separated them, but as they continued to share the patchwork quilt over it, he could feel the presence of his wife beside him. He blew out the lamp and breathed in the scent of vanilla from the soap she had used for her evening wash.
Outside, an owl hooted. The moon had risen high. Silvery light fell across the floorboards. He’d have to ask Charlotte if she wanted him to make shutters for the windows. He’d never bothered. He liked the moonlight at night, and the secluded valley rarely suffered from heavy storms.
As Thomas lay still, the doubts he had brushed aside while they irrigated the fields and worked at the kitchen chores swamped him anew. Each minute that went by, his feelings for Charlotte grew. Not just the sudden thunderbolt of her beauty, but she was spinning a web around him with her presence, with the joy she brought to the simple tasks, with the pride that she stirred in him over his role as a protector, his masculine strength acting as a rock against which her delicate femininity could be shielded.
Had he made a mistake agreeing to wait six months?
What would happen if he went back on his word?
What would happen if he lifted himself over the bundle board and took her here and now? Would it mean she’d have to stay? Surely, if he consummated the marriage, that would give him more rights, would tie them together more firmly as man and wife.
His mind flashed back to his childhood. Don’t, his instincts screamed. Don’t do it. It might be possible to tempt Charlotte into giving her body willingly, but she would end up resenting him for being forced to stay if she had planned to leave. He had spent his childhood with a mother and father who didn’t want him. He shied away from repeating the experience with a wife who’d been saddled with him against her wishes.
Charlotte stirred beneath the bedding, as if reading his thoughts.
“How long do you think it will take my letter to get there?” she asked.
He shrugged, sending the mattress into a gentle sway. “I don’t know.”
“How long does it take for your letters to reach your family in Michigan, or their letters to get to you? It might be more or less the same duration.”
What could he say? I haven’t spared a thought to them since the day I walked out of the house for the final time? No, that was wrong. He’d thought of them aplenty. But he didn’t write. Why bother? They didn’t want to know about him, and they certainly wouldn’t write back, unless it was to tell him to stay away.
“How long?” Charlotte pressed.
He made a gruff sound. “Go to sleep.”
Either his wife was tired or she got the message that the topic was out of bounds, for she fell silent. She huddled deeper beneath the quilt, and little by little the moon crept across the sky as Thomas lay awake, wondering how many more times he’d get to have one more day.
Chapter Eight
Charlotte scattered a handful of flour on the baking board and kneaded the lump of dough with the heels of her palms. A pot of rabbit stew simmered on the stove. Thomas had caught the creature in a snare and had gutted and skinned it, but she had done the rest.
She’d been married for almost two weeks now.
Every morning she fed the chickens and collected fresh eggs from the barn. She knew how to boil laundry in the big iron cauldron and how to darn a pair of socks. She made excellent coffee. Some of the meals she cooked still turned out like the porridge dumpling, but not all of them.
Milking the cow had defeated her. Thomas had decided her hands were too small for the task. He had ordered her to stop annoying poor Rosamund. She was helping, though. Contributing to the running of the farm. She scrubbed and cleaned and mended and polished. In the afternoons, as the sun started to cool, she helped Thomas to irrigate the fields.
Every night she slept beside him.
Sometimes, Thomas reached over the bundle board in his sleep, his fingers tangling in her hair, as if to make sure she was still there. Once, she had woken up in the night to find herself half draped across the wooden barrier. Her head had been pillowed on his shoulder, her leg thrown across his, her palm resting on his bare chest. Gingerly, she’d eased back on her side, her heart thrumming, her nerves rioting, but Thomas had remained sound asleep.
It had been all too easy to get used to him. To his warmth, to his strength, to his kindness and patience. To his handsome features. To his powerful frame. To the slow smile that revealed an even row of white teeth and lit up his entire face. To the sparkle of humor that sometimes twinkled in his solemn gray eyes.
What if...?
What if...?
So far, Charlotte hadn’t quite dared to let the thought form in her mind, but now it broke through, like excess water spilled from the reservoir over the top of the beaver dam.
What if she confessed to her lies and offered to make the marriage real? Would Thomas forgive her? Would he accept her as his wife despite the deceit?
She knew he’d suffered in the past. It was something to do with his family, the reason he’d left his home in Michigan, but she had no inkling of the details. He never spoke of his parents or his brothers, avoiding even the most casual of questions.
No, Charlotte decided.
He wouldn’t forgive her.
He was scrupulous in his honesty, and he expected the same from others. Already, she felt he didn’t fully trust her. He had guessed she was guarding secrets. Ever since she’d written home to Merlin’s Leap without sharing the contents of the letter with him, she had felt a barrier of suspicion between them, as solid as the bundle board that separated them at night.
Charlotte sighed and kneaded the lump of dough against the baking board. What was the point of dreaming about a future with Thomas anyway? Her life was in the East, her duty with her sisters, and worry about them was spoiling the peace she had found in the small secluded valley.
Ten days had passed since Thomas went to post the letter to Merlin’s Leap. She had no idea how long it would take for a letter to reach Boston...or if Cousin Gareth might confiscate the missive...or if Miranda might be unable to mail a reply.
Charlotte recalled her conversation with her sisters on the day she escaped. Miranda and Annabel had insisted Cousin Gareth would not take out hi
s revenge on them but put his energies into finding her. Even if that were true, he might have been heavy-handed with them, believing they knew her whereabouts and attempting to force them into revealing what they knew.
She was desperate for news.
Desperate to know her sisters were safe.
Outside the cabin, Charlotte could hear the thudding of hooves and the jangle of a bridle and the creaking of leather as Thomas returned. She didn’t like it when he rode into town and left her alone, but they only had the one saddle horse, the blue roan Shadow, and it would have taken too long to harness Trooper and go in the wagon.
Five minutes later, Thomas strode in and hung his hat on the peg by the door. The summer sun had bleached his hair golden and tanned his skin to the color of nutmeg. With the blue shirt he wore, his eyes looked more blue than gray.
“Everything all right?” he asked, glancing at her waist.
Charlotte nodded. More and more, he was eyeing her flat stomach with suspicion. She had considered padding out her midriff with a folded towel, but she had resisted the thought. It would be taking the deceit one step too far. She’d told a lie. She would not compound her dishonesty with acts designed to mislead.
Thomas tossed a newspaper on the table. “Brought you the Citizen.”
Charlotte dusted the flour from her hands. “Can we afford it?”
“It’s an old copy Doc Timmerman had lying around.”
She hesitated before asking, “No mail?”
His brows furrowed. “You know it’s too soon.” He dipped his hand into his pocket, as if to count the coins he had left. “If you are worried, we could send a telegram.”
She shook her head. “I’ll wait.”
He peeked into the pot bubbling on the stove. “Smells good.”
While he unpacked his meager purchases, Charlotte fashioned a loaf from the dough and pressed it into the bread tin, which she slid into Vertie’s oven compartment. As they sat down to dinner, they talked, the way they did every night at suppertime.
His Mail-Order Bride Page 10