Emmeline shared her supper with Gil, just as she had shared her lunch, but few words passed between them, and when the meal was over, she announced that she was going home. Izannah was waiting when she reached the surrey, followed by Gil, who’d insisted on carrying the picnic basket and the blanket.
“Mrs. Bickham says I can stay with Becky and sleep in their tent,” Izannah blurted. “Please, Emmeline—say it’s all right! It’s likely to be five years before there’s another preaching like this one.”
Emmeline was conscious of Gil, standing so close behind her, listening. He would know, if she granted Izannah’s plea, that she would be home alone that night. On the other hand, to refuse would be both unkind and unfair, when the girl had such trustworthy chaperons as the Reverend and Mrs. Bickham.
“All right,” Emmeline agreed with a sigh. “You may stay. But mind you don’t do anything foolish.”
Izannah thanked Emmeline with an exuberant kiss on the cheek, promised not to be foolish, and hurried away, with Becky, in search of adventure. Emmeline stood for a long time, watching them go.
Gil placed the basket in the backseat, along with the blanket, and crouched to remove Lysandra’s hobbles. After tossing those into the rig as well, he came to stand next to Emmeline.
“I love you,” he said in a grave and quiet voice. “When the last star winks out, you will still own my soul.”
With that, he turned and strode into the darkness, leaving Emmeline standing mute beside her surrey, her heart falling into fragments.
Gil’s ranch was not far from the field where Brother Joy had erected his tents, and Emmeline guessed correctly that he would have walked the short distance rather than hitching a mule to a wagon or saddling a horse. After collecting herself she set out along that curving, star-washed road in the surrey, and found him in five minutes.
He kept walking when she drew up beside him, though not at a fast pace and with his face was turned toward her, his expression questioning. He refused to speak first, which was, to Emmeline’s way of thinking, rather ungentlemanly of him.
“I just wanted to say,” she began awkwardly, as Lysandra trundled along the bumpy track, “that I love you very much.”
Gil thrust his hands into his pockets and kept walking, his head lowered, obviously deep in thought. At last, he looked at her again. “That’s the tragedy of it,” he said. “This would be easier in some ways, for you at least, if I’d never come back. No, don’t deny it, Emmeline. You would have been married to Neal Montgomery by now, and while you might not feel for him what you claim you do for me, I know you well enough to think you’d have made a success of the marriage. You’d agreed to it, after all, and so you must have been ready to share the man’s bed.”
An insight came to Emmeline. It was so simple; she should have seen it before, and would have, if she hadn’t been so caught up in her own dilemma. “I think I’m not the only one with something to forgive,” she said gently. “You’re angry with me, aren’t you—because you suffered so much, and you were faithful, and all you thought about was getting home to me. And when you got here, you found me about to marry another man. One you’d never liked.”
The look he flung at her was mildly venomous. “I was celibate for seven years, Emmeline,” he said with some bitterness. “Granted, I had no opportunity for intimate congress—at least not of the type I would have ever been able to live with—while I was aboard the Nellie May, but there were women in Sydney Town that I could have turned to after I escaped. But I had a wife, one I loved, and I wanted to honor my vows.”
Emmeline ached for him. It could not have been easy, after all he’d been through, to forswear such elemental comfort, and while she was selfishly glad he had been true to her, she wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d found temporary solace in another woman’s arms. “Most men couldn’t have managed that,” she said softly.
He stepped onto the running board, and Emmeline scooted over on the seat so that he could climb in and take the reins. Despite this small overture, he was stiff with fury and hurt. “Did you lie with him, Emmeline?” he asked, drawing the surrey to a halt in the middle of the empty road. Cries of “hallelujah” echoed on the night breeze. “With Montgomery, I mean?”
“Of course not,” Emmeline said. “He wasn’t my husband yet. And if you’ll recall, Mr. Hartwell, I wasn’t intimate with you, either, until our wedding night.”
Gil relaxed, ever so slightly, and she saw in his eyes, even in the shadow of the surrey’s canvas roof, that he believed her. “I guess it isn’t fair to hold what you would have done against you,” he allowed.
Emmeline laughed, not from amusement but because of the sudden release of tension. “No,” she said.
Tightening his grip on the reins again, Gil turned Lysandra in a slow circle and headed back toward Plentiful.
“I’ll see you home,” he said.
Emmeline sighed. “I wanted to see your new roof.”
He chuckled. “You’d have seen the wrong side of it, if I had my way,” he said. “And that wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not, Emmeline,” Gil told her patiently. “We agreed to wait until we were sure we wanted to be together.”
Emmeline slipped her arm through his and let her head rest against his shoulder. “Maybe waiting to be sure isn’t the right thing to do, Gil,” she ventured to say. “You might be sure one day, while I might not be sure ’til the next, by which time you might have changed your mind again. Perhaps we should just close our eyes, hold our breaths, and jump in.”
The bonfires of the revival glowed in the night as they passed Brother Joy’s burgeoning camp again. “Perhaps,” Gil answered, but he sounded uncertain.
“Stay with me tonight,” Emmeline said, before she could stop herself.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” She hoped the terrible hurt she felt wasn’t audible in her voice.
“Emmeline, what if we conceived a child?” he countered.
“That would be wonderful!”
“Not if we didn’t stay together, it wouldn’t.”
Emmeline bristled a little, despite her best intentions. “You would leave us?”
There was a brief, painful silence. “I would never abandon you, let alone an innocent baby. God in heaven, Emmeline, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
“Then what would be so dreadful about making a child together? After all, Gil, we’re married, and married people do that kind of thing all the time.”
She felt Gil tremble against her, felt his struggle to quell the emotion, whatever it was, that rocked him from within. “The ranch is in shambles,” he said at long last, not looking at her but gazing straight ahead at the road. “I have no cattle, and it’s going to be at least a year before the place is paying again. I’ve got nothing to offer a child, Emmeline. Nothing to offer a wife.”
Emmeline didn’t speak, but simply let her head rest against his shoulder. Her heart was full of love and sorrow.
Plentiful was dark and quiet, since most everyone in town was attending Brother Joy’s revival meetings. Gil drove the surrey straight down Main Street and turned into the judge’s driveway. Lysandra, who would have known her way home without any guidance, stopped in front of the carriage house and nickered, ready to be fed and watered and settled in her stall.
“I’ll see to the horse,” Gil said. “You go on inside.”
Emmeline hesitated. “Will you be coming in? You can’t very well walk all the way to your ranch in the dark.”
“I’d be a poor excuse for a man,” he replied good-naturedly, “if I couldn’t take myself three miles, whether at noon or midnight.”
“You could sleep right here, in the carriage house,” Emmeline suggested. She was every bit as stubborn as Gil, maybe more so.
“Go inside, Emmeline,” Gil repeated. He had unharnessed Lysandra and was leading her into the small barn. Like the animal, he knew the inside of that building so well that h
e didn’t need a lantern. “Do whatever it is that you do before bed,” he called back. “Make tea, let your hair down, say your prayers. Be sure to say your prayers.”
Emmeline sighed and headed for the front gate, picnic basket in hand. She moved up the walk, mounted the steps, crossed the veranda, and opened the door.
The big house yawned around her, a safe place, full of shadows.
Emmeline set the picnic basket in the entry hall and started up the stairs.
The scent of pipe tobacco filled her nostrils, pungently aromatic, and for one insane moment Emmeline thought the judge had come back to haunt the front parlor, since the smell came from that direction. A second later, rationality returned, and Emmeline realized that someone else was in the house.
Angry rather than afraid, she swept into the parlor.
There, seated on the horsehair settee, bathed in a shaft of moonlight flowing in through the front window, sat Neal Montgomery. The tobacco in his pipe glowed bright red as he drew on it.
“What are you doing here?” Emmeline demanded.
Neal took his time answering, drawing on the pipe again, savoring the smoke, letting it out in a slow stream. “I was welcome in this house once.”
“Not in the middle of the night, without even troubling yourself to knock at the front door!”
He rose from the chair, but instead of approaching Emmeline, he stood at the window, the gauzy curtains caught between his fingers, and looked out. “You haven’t given him up. Hartwell, I mean. He’s in your blood, it appears, like some noxious fever.”
“I love him, if that’s what you’re saying,” Emmeline answered. She felt vaguely alarmed, and yet she could not believe that Neal would harm her. He had courted her so patiently and, though naturally displeased, he’d seemed to take their broken engagement in his stride.
“Then you are a fool,” Neal said, and turned to face her at last.
Before she had time to think, to read the expression on his face and the coiled tension in his body, he had crossed the room and taken her shoulders in his hands. “Let me go!” she gasped, stunned and offended. No one had ever touched her in anger before.
“Scream,” Neal urged. He was so calm, as unearthly as a specter in the moonlit parlor. “Go ahead and scream, Emmeline, so that your precious husband will rush to your rescue.”
Now, at last, when it was probably too late, she was afraid. Either Neal had changed, or she had never really known him in the first place.
“And when he does?” Emmeline asked.
Neal’s smile was ugly. “I’ll kill him,” he replied.
“I won’t allow it.”
He caught her chin in a hard, bruising grip, and suddenly Emmeline knew Gil’s kidnapping hadn’t been a random act of fate at all. “You will do what I tell you to do,” he breathed.
Emmeline stared up at him, wide-eyed, full of loathing, and a step beyond simple fear. “You,” she said. “You had my husband shanghaied.”
5
GIL SETTLED THE AGED MARE IN A STALL, WITH FRESH WATER IN the trough and a ration of oats in case a bellyful of field grass wouldn’t sustain her, and strolled, whistling, out of the small barn. The sight of the darkened house gave him pause, and he wished, for one whimsical moment, that the walls were transparent. It would have been a singular joy to watch Miss Emmeline sitting at her vanity table, letting her hair down, brushing it with long, measured strokes, and, finally, winding the coppery strands into a thick plait. He’d seen her do that a hundred times in reality and a thousand times in his dreams, and he never tired of the sight.
Just imagining that simple, ordinary ritual filled Gil with a yearning of unreasonable depths, rooted far down in his soul. He shoved splayed fingers through his hair in frustration.
Emmeline was his wife, and for seven long years he had lived only to return to her. Now, miraculously, here he was, resurrected, back from the dead, close enough to call out to her. So why was he holding back, like a thirst-ravaged man denying himself water? All the while, the great unseen and unheard clock of the universe was ticking, and with every swing of the pendulum, there was another heartbeat used and gone, another moment lost forever.
Gil was through considering, he suddenly decided, through letting fear and pique stop him from living out whatever was left of this grand, brief gift he had been allotted—his life. He would waste no more of it.
He vaulted over the garden fence and started across the judge’s front lawn. He’d batter down the door if he had to, and when Emmeline let him in, he would offer himself to her, like a knight swearing fealty to his queen. You were right, he would tell her, it’s time to close our eyes, hold our breaths, and jump.
Gil bounded up the veranda steps and over to the door, making no effort to be quiet. If any of the neighbors had straggled home from the revival camp to hear him, then so be it. Maybe he’d carry Emmeline right out into the middle of the street in his arms and turn round and round, to let the watchers see that she was his.
She opened the door before he knocked, and though a shadow veiled her face, he sensed, even before she spoke, that something was wrong.
“Go home, Gil,” Emmeline said in a strange, thin voice, gripping the edge of the door as though poised to fling it shut in his face. “Please.”
“Come in,” countered a masculine voice from behind her.
Gil’s heart spun over several beats, like a flat rock whirling across a sheet of ice, and he felt the absence of his holster and pistol as a phantom weight against his hip. Normally, he would have been armed, but he’d left his Colt at home that morning, not expecting to need it at an all-day revival meeting. Now, the hairs on his nape were standing upright, and his gut told him that that big clock he’d been thinking about earlier might be about to run down.
He greeted the other man calmly, with a nod and a murmured “Montgomery.” As Gil passed Emmeline on the wide threshold, however, he eased her behind him, out onto the veranda.
Any other female might have had the God-given good sense to run, but not Emmeline, Gil said to himself as he saw her try to get past him, back into the house.
“He’s the one,” she cried as Gil barred her way. “It was Neal who had you shanghaied.”
The news did not surprise Gil; in fact, it seemed so glaringly obvious that he wondered why he’d never guessed it. “This is between Montgomery and me,” he said firmly, his gaze locked with that of his old adversary. He did not turn to look at his wife. “You run along, Emmeline, and stay out of this.”
“I’ll get Marshal Scead,” Emmeline said.
“You do that,” agreed Gil. Scead was eighty-two if he was a day, and probably sound asleep in the town’s single jail cell by now, if he wasn’t out at the revival, getting himself saved. There hadn’t been a crime in Plentiful, as far as Gil knew, since Billy the Kid had come through ten years before and refused to pay the blacksmith for shoeing his horse.
Montgomery held a pistol loosely in his right hand, and when he heard Emmeline clatter down the veranda steps to fetch the law, he aimed it square at Gil’s middle and repeated himself in a cordial tone. “Come in.”
Gil strained in every bone and muscle for a fight, but his mind was cool, almost detached. Miss Emmeline treasured her bric-a-brac and fancy furniture, and if they got to shooting and rolling around on the floor, things were bound to get blood-spattered, if not broken.
“We ought to settle this outside,” he said.
Montgomery shrugged and gestured, with the glinting barrel of his pistol, toward the door. “You go first.”
Well aware that Montgomery might simply shoot him in the back, Gil nevertheless led the way out onto the porch, then down the walk. At the gate, he paused and looked back. “If there’s going to be a gunfight,” he said, “you’ve got an unfair advantage.”
The other man smiled and set the Colt on the square, flat top of a gatepost. “I don’t need a gun to kill you,” he replied. “I can do it with my bare hands.”
Gil led th
e way into the silent street, which was lighted only by the glow of the moon and stars. Gas-powered streetlamps, while common in large cities, had not yet come to Plentiful.
They faced each other, Gil and Montgomery, in the middle of that dusty, unpaved road. While Gil supposed the scene had its comic side, he knew Montgomery truly intended to kill him, and was willing to die trying. Thinking of all Montgomery had cost him, by paying thugs to knock him over the head that night in San Francisco and then turn him over to a sea captain willing to pay for able-bodied men, Gil was filled with a cold, quiet rage.
“What made you decide to tell the truth now, after all this time?” he asked, standing just six feet from Montgomery, clenching and unclenching his fists, his only weapons, in preparation for the coming fight.
Montgomery cast a glance over one shoulder, toward the field where Brother Joy’s tents were erected. There was a faint glow against the sky from the bonfires. “Old Dillard, the postmaster, got himself saved today,” he said. He smiled and laid the spread fingers of one hand to his breast. “He was truly repentant.”
Gil thought of his letters to Emmeline, scratched out a sentence at a time, on paper he’d stolen or traded his dinner for, posted by freemen in return for his whiskey ration. They might as well have been penned in blood, those missives, so great was the risk of writing them, and he’d written them without knowing whether even one would ever get through.
“Dillard was repentant,” Gil repeated. He wanted to get the fight over with before old Marshal Scead showed up and got himself hurt. “Specifically, I guess, for pulling my letters to Emmeline out of the mailbag when they came to the stagecoach and turning them over to you.”
“Exactly,” Montgomery said with a smile. He’d taken a cheroot from the inside pocket of his coat, along with a wooden match, which he struck against the sole of his handmade boot. The flame flared, and the scent of sulfur uncurled in the air. “I must say, Hartwell, you write a touching letter.”
Bile rushed into the back of Gil’s throat at the idea of Montgomery reading his tenderest and most private thoughts. Every word had been wrung from his soul, and had been meant only for Emmeline’s eyes. “Let’s get on with this,” Gil said, opening his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves.
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