Another hour went by. Perspiration beaded on her brow and trickled into her eyes, making her squint with the sting as she picked her way through the vegetation. Her lower back ached with every step. Her stomach cramped with her monthly cycle. She paused to take off her wool jacket, stuffed it in her bag and resumed walking.
When the sun reached the zenith in the sky, Charlotte knew she’d been walking at least four hours. Her tongue was thick in her mouth. Her eyes burned in their sockets. Her steps dragged. Sweat ran in rivulets down her back. Her pulse throbbed, a steady, painful thudding as her heart labored to pump blood to her tired muscles.
Something tripped her up. She toppled headlong to the ground. Her elbow smashed painfully against a rock. “Nothing broken, nothing broken.” Charlotte muttered the words of reassurance to herself as she scrambled up, unsteady on her feet.
The sun was a ball of fire in the sky. The air shimmered in front of her eyes. She could feel her lips blistering, could taste the blood on them. Her legs gave and she fell to her knees. She struggled up, swayed on her feet, found her balance.
In her head, she sang, forcing her feet forward, one step at a time.
Oh, have you heard the news, me Thomas?
One more step.
We’re homeward bound tomorrow.
One more step.
She fell. She got up. Time and again, she fell and got up.
And when she fell for the final time, when she no longer possessed the strength to get up and resume walking, she accepted the grim truth. She was a sea captain’s daughter, and she knew how to keep on course. But she had made a mistake following those wheel ruts and assuming that Gold Crossing lay due east from the valley.
She closed her eyes, made another attempt to let her memory drift back in time. She was sitting beside Thomas Greenwood on the hard bench of the cart. He was holding the lines, urging the chestnut gelding into a canter to make it up the slope ahead. Like a chill breaking through the desert heat, the memory flooded back to her.
Just before Thomas slapped the reins, he took a sharp turn to the left.
Instead of east, she should have been walking south.
Chapter Nine
Thomas leaped down from the lathered, panting Shadow and took the porch steps in two long leaps. The front door banged against the wall as he flung it open. He rushed across the floor to the bedroom—and froze at the doorway.
She was gone.
His feet became alive again. He strode to the bedside, boots thudding on the floorboards, and pulled aside the covers, as if not trusting what his eyes had already told him. The bloodstains on the sheets had dried to form stiff patches, but they were smaller than he’d feared.
“Charlotte,” he bellowed, and hurried back to the parlor.
The coffeepot on the stove was still warm. A rinsed cup stood upside down on the counter. Surely a dying woman wouldn’t pause to make coffee and rinse the cup? Surely if she was bleeding to death, there would be bloodstains on the floor?
Thomas went back to the bedroom, his gaze searching the plank floor. Nothing. No trail of dark drops. He took quick inventory of the contents of the room. Her clothes were gone, the ones she’d arrived in. Her leather bag was gone, too.
He hurried back outside. Shadow stood by the porch steps, waiting patiently. Thomas mounted, rode him to the creek. “Drink, boy,” he said. Every second might count, but a dead horse would not take him far.
When Shadow stopped slurping and blowing and lifted his head, Thomas dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and surged up the slope back toward the cabin. He jumped down one more time and went inside. He filled a canteen with water and bundled up a blanket and tied both to the saddle.
Then he was off on his way. As he crested the hill, he halted Shadow at the top of the ridge and scanned the barren landscape. Which way had she gone?
“Charlotte!”
“Charlotte!”
His frantic cries rippled across the desert. Only the wind replied.
Thomas marshaled his powers of reasoning. He had not seen any sign of Charlotte on his way back from Doc Timmerman’s, and that must mean she had taken the wrong way. Or perhaps she was not aiming for Gold Crossing, but might be wandering through the desert without any aim.
Would her logic be impaired?
Did a woman lose her mind when she lost her baby?
Thomas didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about women, pregnant or otherwise, and now he cursed his lack of experience. For it might make a difference between finding his wife dead and finding her while she was still alive.
“Charlotte!”
“Charlotte!”
On the trail toward Flagstaff he spotted a row of dainty footprints in a soft patch of sand. When he went out that way, he brought back heavy wagonloads, such as the cookstove on his last trip, and the wheel ruts were deep. Perhaps she’d followed them.
Thomas urged Shadow into a canter and headed east, riding to and fro in ever-increasing semicircles, like ripples expanding on the surface of a pond.
“Charlotte!”
“Charlotte!”
His voice grew hoarse. The sun began to sink in the sky. Thomas ignored Shadow’s tired grunts, merely pausing occasionally to rinse the horse’s mouth with a drop of water from his cupped palm.
He ignored the painful rasp in his throat, the sting of grit in his eyes, the ache that throbbed through his muscles. But one thing he couldn’t ignore was the fear that throbbed through him with every beat of his pulse.
“Charlotte.” His croaky call no longer carried far.
He found his wife when the sloping rays of the sun cast long shadows across the desert and lit up the gravel with hues of red and gold. She lay beside a prickly pear covered in pink blooms. Crumpled on the ground, she was curled into a tight ball, the wide hems of her skirts fanned out about her. One of her arms was flung over her head, shielding her downturned face. The green bonnet hung askew on top of her unraveling upsweep.
Thomas slid down from the saddle, crouched beside her. “Charlotte.”
She didn’t move. Gently, he pulled her arm aside to reveal her face. Her skin was burned bright red. Her eyes were shut. Her lips were peeling and crusted with blood. He held the backs of his fingers to her mouth, felt the small puff of warm air.
She was breathing.
Thomas jumped up to his feet and hurried over to his horse. He untied the canteen from the saddle, went back to crouch beside Charlotte and unscrewed the cap. Slipping one arm behind Charlotte’s neck, he cradled her head in the crook of his arm and pressed the spout of the canteen against her mouth. Her eyelids flickered but refused to lift.
“Charlotte. Look at me. Look at me. You need to drink.”
He tipped the canteen to her lips but she was too weak to swallow and the water ran in rivulets down her chin. She tried to turn her head away. A faint moan rose in her throat.
Thomas lowered her back down, poured water into his cupped palm and trickled it over her lips with his fingertips. She made another moaning sound, stronger this time, and her lips parted. Thomas refilled his palm, managed to tip some water into her mouth. She shuddered, a tiny spasm racking her. At first, Thomas thought she was choking, that she would retch and spit out the water, but then her throat rippled in an awkward, labored swallow.
“That’s it,” he said. “A little more.”
He kept trickling water into her mouth. After he had counted ten measures from his cupped palm, Thomas paused to let her rest. For a few moments, Charlotte lay absolutely still, her eyes closed. Then her tongue peeked out and slid over her lips, moistening the cracked skin. Thomas eased his arm around her shoulders and propped her up to a half sitting position, her back resting against the side of his thigh.
“Charlotte?” he said. “Can you hear me?”<
br />
“No doctor. No doctor.” Her voice was a faint whisper. Her eyes remained shut. Thomas frowned. How did she know the doctor couldn’t come?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The doc’s up on Desperation Hill. A miner was trapped in a rock fall. He is too badly hurt to move, so someone rode into town to fetch the doc and he is still out there. Gus Junior has gone after him.”
“No doctor. No doctor.”
“Hush.” Thomas stroked the loose curls that fluttered around her face. He adjusted her slipping bonnet to protect her skin from the last rays of the sun. “It’s all right,” he reassured her. “The doc’s wife knows a lot about nursing. I’ll take you into town when you feel up to getting on the horse. Drink a bit more first.”
He held the canteen up to her mouth. She was able to drink properly now, swallowing in greedy gulps. He limited her to a few mouthfuls. She’d been without water for less than a day, so it was unlikely that she would retch, but the canteen was already half empty and he didn’t want to risk a drop of it going to waste.
When he eased the canteen away, Charlotte reclined against his thigh and closed her eyes again. Thomas took the opportunity to survey her condition. One sleeve of her pale gray blouse was torn. The shadow from the green bonnet across her face gave her burned skin a purplish hue. Ignoring propriety, he lifted the hem of her skirts to peer underneath and saw streaks of blood on her petticoats.
Charlotte must have felt his bold inspection, for she emitted a distraught sound. One small hand came alive and flapped away his fumbling fingers with a surprising amount of strength.
Startled, Thomas swept his gaze back to her face. Her eyes were open. He’d never seen such anguish on a woman’s face. Except perhaps once. On his mother’s face, on the day he left his home in Michigan.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’ll be other babies.”
“No.” She exhaled a sigh that held as much frustration as grief. “No baby.”
He uncapped the canteen and held it to her mouth. “Drink a little more.”
Appearing to overcome her distress, Charlotte gripped the leather-covered canteen with both hands and clung tight when he tried to pull it away. He let her drink. She took deep swallows that rocked her body against the support of his thigh.
When she’d had enough, she slumped down, as if survival instinct had given her enough energy to consume the life-saving water but nothing beyond that. Thomas could see a dazed look enter into her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered down.
“I’ll take you into town. Doc’s wife will know what to do.” He draped the canteen by its strap over his shoulder and eased onto his feet. Bending down to her, he gathered Charlotte in his arms and lifted her up.
He propped her across Shadow’s back, and then he swung up behind her and settled her in his lap and set off toward Gold Crossing. He kept the pace to an easy lope. Speed was less important than not jolting her. She sat sideways in his lap, huddled against his chest. One small fist clung to the front of his shirt.
“Thomas... Thomas,” she muttered.
“I’m here. You’re safe.” He wanted to ask why she had left the cabin, but it could wait. Perhaps the anguish of losing an unborn child muddled a woman’s mind. Pity welled up inside him. Later, he would do his best to console her.
Her eyes flared open. Fever burned in them. Maybe sunstroke.
“There is no baby...never was any baby... This is just the normal flux a woman has every month... No baby...no miscarriage... Don’t let people think...”
Startled, he stared down at her sunburned face. Her eyes closed again. The parched lips moved. “No baby...no miscarriage... Don’t let people think... They’ll laugh at you...for believing... For not being able to tell... Flat stomach...no baby...”
Thomas stiffened in the saddle. He knew little of the world, and even less about women, but it was still insulting to hear it spelled out.
“I’m not...your wife...not Maude Jackson... She died...on the train...I took her ticket...your letter... Ran away... Hide...away from Merlin’s Leap...”
“Who are you?” Thomas asked bluntly.
He knew the answer even before she spoke.
Charlotte Fairfax, Merlin’s Leap, Boston, Massachusetts.
“Charlotte... Fairfax... Don’t tell anyone... Ran away...away from Cousin Gareth...”
So, a small part of her story had to be true. How small a part, he’d have to wait and see. Thomas cradled his wife—not his wife, a stranger called Charlotte Fairfax—in his arms as he made his way to Gold Crossing. By the time they reached the doc’s house, Charlotte was sound asleep. Thomas came up with a story of his own and told his lies to Dottie Timmerman.
Then he went out and slept in the yard of doc’s small frame house.
He wanted to stay with Charlotte, but he knew that he had no right to.
No right to watch her sleep. No right to touch her. No right to kiss her.
For she was not his wife.
He had no wife.
He was alone again.
* * *
Charlotte came awake slowly. She was in a small room, with tiny pink roses on the wallpaper. The acrid scent of carbolic floated in the air. She lay between pristine linen sheets in a narrow bed. She wore a thick cotton nightgown, and she could feel a rag secured in place to trap her monthly flow.
She tried to move. A moan burst from her lips. Every muscle in her body ached. Her legs felt as if they might never support her weight again and the skin on her face felt as if someone had rubbed a sanding block over it.
“Good morning, dear.” It was a female voice, pitched low. Accented, with a sharp, rolling r. Good morrrning.
Charlotte craned to look toward the doorway. A small woman, seventy if she was a day, bustled in, carrying a tray loaded with a teapot and milk jug and sugar bowl, and a pair of china teacups that matched the wallpaper. She wore a frilly pink dress. Her hair, soft and pure white, was arranged in a style that might have been fashionable thirty years ago, with ringlets dangling like icicles by her temples.
“It’s good to see you awake, dear.” She set the tray down on the bedside table, went to the window and pulled the lace curtains open. Bright sunshine streamed into the room.
Charlotte shut her eyes tight, then blinked them open and squinted against the light. It seemed around midday. She must have slept all the way through from last night, when Thomas found her. She counted in her mind. Eighteen hours.
The woman dragged a padded chair over to the bedside and flopped to sit on it. “I thought you might like a drop of tea and a wee chat.” She picked up the teapot and poured. “I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of giving you a wee tidy-up. A woman likes to be clean at her time of the month.” She gave a forceful nod, as if agreeing with herself, then peered across at Charlotte. “Plump up your pillows, dear, so you can drink your tea. Or would you like me to rearrange them for you?”
“No. I can do it.” Charlotte adjusted the pillows and sat up against them.
“That’s it, dear.” The woman added milk, offered sugar and passed Charlotte the cup on a saucer. “You’ll be right as rain,” the woman went on. “I was worried earlier, when your husband rode in looking for the doctor. I thought he said you were having a miscarriage. Then he brought you in on that blue roan horse of his and put me to rights. He’d said misadventure. Silly me.” The woman chuckled. “People say I talk too much and don’t listen, and I guess they’re right.”
The innocent blue eyes widened. “I didn’t introduce myself, did I? I’m Dorothy Timmerman. Dottie. The doctor’s wife.” Her head cocked to a mischievous tilt. “I’m fifty percent of the female population of Gold Crossing. That’s counting by numbers. If you count by weight I’m only one-third, for Miss Gladys Hayes is twice the size of me.”
Her lips pursed into a circle of disapp
roval that left no doubt about how one half of the female population of Gold Crossing felt about the other half. Then a look of eager curiosity chased away the frown and the softly rolling voice resumed its prattle, like a stream that couldn’t stop its flow. “Your husband said you were bitten by some poisonous critter.”
Dottie paused to take a sip of her tea, and Charlotte did the same, hiding her surprise and relief in the china cup. So, her incoherent ramblings had made some sense and Thomas had understood the situation. She was grateful for his quick thinking that had saved them both from embarrassment.
Dottie went on. “He feared it might have been a snake, so he made you lie still. With snakebite it’s best to restrict movement. Then, when he got back home from trying to fetch the doctor, you were incoherent and thrashing about, so he brought you in. We decided it might have been a spider. Whatever it was, you appear to have shaken it off.”
The woman gestured with her cup. “Thomas is sorry he tore your blouse. Your arm was stiff, and he wanted to take a look at the elbow where the critter bit you. The skin is too badly scraped to see any sting marks.”
“I...I think I fell...”
“Doesn’t matter, dear.” A soft hand reached out to pat her arm. “You’ll be right as rain in no time.” Dottie picked up a spoon and stirred, looking a bit awkward. “I must say I was confused when I thought Thomas had said miscarriage...seeing as you’ve only been married such a short while.”
“Two weeks.” Charlotte felt a blush heat her cheeks. Plain talk was needed if she wanted to lay the groundwork for resolving their situation without any dishonor falling upon Thomas. “Mr. Greenwood and I agreed to a trial period. Marriage in name only.”
Dottie gave a huff of dismissal and flapped her hand in the air. “I know all about that. Thomas told me.” She lowered her voice and leaned closer. “He’s sorry it didn’t work out, but he knew from the moment he laid eyes on you that you weren’t cut out for life on a farm. You’re too delicate. I’m glad he sees it, too. It would be a tragedy if he kept you and then had to watch you wilt away from the hard work and childbirth.”
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