by Ginny Aiken
Could Robby’s dire condition explain his lack of coherence?
But then, as she turned it all over in her mind, it began to make a strange kind of sense. “And you believe I’m what needs to be done for the… ranch?”
“Yes! You’re just a part of the whole.” Then he frowned, as if he realized how unappealing his response had been. “Not exactly. Not the ranch, that is. I think you’re what we need. We need you here more’n the city man who asked your hand in marriage does.” He gave her a narrow-eyed scrutiny that made her squirm. “From the looks of it, you gave the poor soul your word, but not your heart.”
She didn’t respond; she didn’t know how without making a bigger mess of things than she already had.
Peter continued. “You know Robby needs a mother, and you love him—it shows every time you look at him—and he loves you. Colley needs a friend, and I need say no more there. Me? Well, I need a—a partner for my future, a companion for all those lonely days to come, and you’d certainly provide more than enough challenge to keep a man on his toes, and fill his days with… with—oh, I don’t know! But you’d be the one to do it, all right.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Besides, you said I needed civilizing… or some such nonsense.”
“Nonsense? Your last few minutes, sir, reveal better than anything I might utter how truly desperate your need of civilizing is.”
“I meant no offense, Emma. I just meant to offer what I reckon is best for everyone. Well, except for your papa, sure, but you can visit him anytime you wish, and as soon as you want. I’ll make sure you get word to him that you’re quite all right straight away. I’m sure Adam will help.”
“Pfft! The marshal? The one that’s jailed Colley? I’m not sure that man can see a hole in the road, even if it were big enough to swallow his horse.”
“Adam’s a decent fellow, and a solid lawman.” He drew himself up to his full height and then looked down to meet her gaze, a determined expression on his face. “But that’s for you to learn when you get to know him better. What I need to know is if you’ll consider my proposal.”
Her turn to sigh. She was sorely tempted, but she couldn’t. Not in good conscience. “I told you, Peter, I’m already promised to another. He’s part of the reason I really can’t just send Papa a telegraph message. Papa would be here at a moment’s notice, just by saying the word. But, Joshua… I must go to Portland as soon—” She glanced toward the examination room. “As soon as Robby regains consciousness.”
Peter gave a sharp nod. “Very well. We will never speak of this sorry matter again. You can, of course, stay at Robby’s side that long, and then I’ll make certain you reach Pendleton safely. From there, I’ll send you to Portland, your father, and your real life.”
The biting tone of his words spoke of more behind his proposal than his words would have her believe. Or perhaps that was her hope, in spite of everything. Just as the kiss back at the camp had revealed more than just… just—oh, who knew what. But she knew what she had to do.
Peter turned without another word and limped into the room where his son lay. He was the kind of man who would, indeed, keep his word. And he’d just spoken. Something inside Emma felt as though it had died. No, as though he’d killed it off.
Her real life.
What did that mean? She didn’t know anymore.
But she supposed she must be on the verge of finding out.
No matter what else happened, only two things mattered: Robby’s health and Papa’s broken heart. She would see to them in that order. Joshua she would worry about after the first two. There was nothing more she could do for Colley. Not at the moment.
And Peter… well, she would have to think and pray about him.
And his proposal.
Dear Lord… she began when a shaky voice called out.
“Papa…?”
Joy sparked to life in Emma’s heart; tears sprang to well in her eyes. Through the small space of the partially open door she watched Peter bend down over the boy, a tremor in his shoulders. Robby had awoken. By God’s grace, he should recover now, as the doctor had hoped. But the moment soon turned bittersweet. Her time in the Lowery men’s world had come to an end.
As the carriage wheels beneath her rolled over the road that was to bring her home, Emma could hardly bear the anticipation, much less all the other sensations that roiled inside her. She would see Papa again at last. She had sent a telegram as soon as she was able, and he had rushed home from a business trip to New York. Her heart pounded and emotions filled her throat. In spite of the blessings she’d found on Peter’s mountain, many times she’d thought she’d never see her home again. Or her father.
The carriage driver who had brought her from the Portland train station opened the carriage door. As Pippa bounded out with a short, excited bark, Emma stared at the large white house through a veil of tears. Its tall, elegant façade was graced with a generous porch that swept from side to side, and the numerous windows had shiny black shutters to frame and highlight them. The door, embellished with a substantial brass knocker, opened inward as she watched.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she sprang down from the vehicle. In her rush, she caught the heel of one new boot on the steps the driver had set out for her. She nearly crashed down onto the dusty road. “Oh, no!”
“Emma!” Papa cried out, his voice rough with emotion. “It really is you…”
A moment later, strong arms wrapped around her, sheltering her as they always had.
“Papa… Papa… Papa…”
The flood of feelings made it impossible to utter another word, but she didn’t have to speak at all. Her father seemed as overcome with his own emotions and simply held her close, rocking her gently from side to side. “Princess…”
The pet name he’d used for her since her earliest memories brought up another swell of tears, and Emma gave herself over to the moment. She relished the joy of seeing her father again, regretted the new lines she saw etched on his dear face, fresh since she’d last seen him. Her disappearance had surely carved them there.
She reached up and cupped his cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry you had to go through all this—”
“Hush, dear heart.” He shook his head. His voice came out as ragged and ravaged as it had after Mama’s death. Emma’s heart squeezed tighter with guilt and anguish. “You were right. I was too stubborn to listen to reason. I should have gone with you and Joshua—”
She stopped herself. No, that wasn’t quite right. While she should have considered Papa’s concerns more carefully, she couldn’t bring herself to regret her experience. If she’d gone with Papa and Joshua she never would have found herself on Peter’s mountain. More important, she never would have met Robby, and would have missed learning what it meant to love a child with all her heart. Still, as meaningful as that experience was, it didn’t compare with what had filled her thoughts and dreams all the way from Bountiful to Portland.
If she’d gone with her father she never would have met Peter.
She never would have fallen in love.
There! She’d admitted it.
Even if only to herself.
Papa held her at arm’s length and studied her. “Are you truly well? And will you listen to me in the future? Have you learned anything from this awful, dreadful disaster?”
Emma clasped the hands on her shoulders. “Well, Papa. I daresay you won’t believe me when I tell you it was no real disaster, even though it was as difficult and painful as you imagine. I learned more than either you or I in our wildest imaginations ever could have envisioned.” She drew a deep breath, more certain of who she was and what mattered most to her than at any other time in her life. “I’m not the same Emma you kissed good-bye in Denver—not one bit. But it’s not something to tell on the front stoop of the house. Let’s go inside, shall we? Then I’ll tell you everything.”
As she slipped her arm through his, he slanted her a skeptical sideways look. “Everything, right
? You won’t skip anything or color tidbits with a rosier wash?”
Her thoughts flew to the moments in Peter’s arms. To the kiss…
Surely that didn’t count. That was only for her and the man she loved.
The man who’d sent her away.
A different sharp emotion stabbed her heart, and she fought the instinctive wince. Aside from that one precious and private moment, she could answer her father with complete honesty.
“Everything, Papa,” she said, her voice serious and strong. “I’ll tell you everything that happened to me.”
They stepped together toward the wide-open front door. He slipped his arm around her waist, held her close to his side. Emma laid her head on his shoulder.
“My dear, dear child. I thought I’d never see you again this side of heaven…”
“Oh, Papa…”
“You’ve done what?” Papa asked ten days later in response to her declaration. He bounded up from where he’d sat in his favorite leather armchair, a gossamer cloud of his trademark cherry-scented pipe smoke all around him. “Here I thought I’d recovered you, all of you, but now it appears you’ve left your mind behind.”
Not just her mind, it would appear. “I’ve decided, Papa,” she repeated firmly. Emma shook her head. Then she softened her tone. “It’s lovely to be here with you again, and with Ophelia and Jedediah. But… now you know I’m not the same person who danced with Joshua in Denver, bought mountains of frocks in New York and London and Paris, and thought of nothing else. I’m not the same person who accepted a proposal because Joshua was the nicest man I’d met and wouldn’t be dreadful to see day after day, year after year. Now I know that was the saddest thing I could have done. It was wrong, Papa, and I must see him to make things right. I can’t marry him.”
Her father frowned.
She went on before he could come up with further arguments. “I—I just can’t marry Joshua because I never loved him. I liked him, and there was never anyone else I truly cared for. I just didn’t know a thing about life.”
Papa puffed on his pipe, then jabbed the mouthpiece in her direction. “And a handful of weeks up on a mountain with outlaws, sheep, and a peculiar, manly woman has taught you all about life?”
Outrage filled Emma. “I’ll have you know, Colley is not peculiar! Not one bit. Why, if it weren’t for her, I might not be here.” She drew herself up to her full height, and fought down the fear that now lived so close to the surface. After all, Peter had sent her packing.
But she intended to fight him on that. As she had on other matters before. “I now know I don’t belong in a ball gown for the rest of my life, doing nothing more than learning the newest waltz. There are many other more interesting things to learn about and do in the world. And I’ve grown quite partial to… to… um—well, to sheep ranching, and Hope County is the loveliest of places—a bit rough, but that roughness is its beauty. And then, I’ve come to love Robby.” She smiled. “He needs me, Papa. I must go back.”
Standing, her father paced before the empty hearth. The weather was quite warm and the evening pleasant with no need of a fire. “I suspect there’s more to this than Robby and sheep ranching, Emma. What do either of those have to do with Joshua?”
“I can’t marry a man I don’t love.”
“But you can marry a rancher you’ve just met.”
“Of course—er… no! That’s not it at all.”
“Too late, my girl.” His frown returned, deeper this time. “An infatuation is a dangerous thing.”
“I don’t believe I’m infatuated, Papa. But I’ll never know for certain unless I return, will I?”
She watched him struggle with the value of her words. Still, his love and concern seemed to win out. “No self-respecting father would let his daughter go back to a wild mountain man who runs sheep in the middle of nowhere,” he said in a stern voice. “That would be negligent and irresponsible of me. I love you too much to do that to you.”
“It would, perhaps, be all those things if you were to let me go back just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “But I have reason to return. You see, Papa, I’m also learning to listen to God. That’s where He’s led me. He had a reason for me to wind up there. There were many things I had to see before I could learn. I was a silly girl before I found myself in those woods, at that camp—I didn’t lose myself out there, I found myself. Do you understand the difference?”
“And all that because you met a crude man unlike any you’d met before.”
“No, it’s because I saw life being born. I came to love a child who needed me. I made a true friend who would have given her life for mine—and who is sitting in a filthy jail because of what she did to save me. It’s because I learned to spin wool into yarn. I learned to bake biscuits and beans, to cook bacon and tinned chicken and make a loaf of regular bread. Oh, Papa, I learned to be a woman who was worth something, a woman you could be proud of.”
“I’ve always been proud of you, dear.”
“I know. But this is different. I’m different.”
He fell silent as he evaluated her words. “We’ll see.”
She tipped up her chin. “Indeed we will.”
The next morning, she had Jedediah deliver a message to Joshua, inviting him to tea. The event was not the most pleasant one of her life, but she did what she had to do. In the end, she repeated over and over how, while she had been sincere in Denver, she truly hadn’t known herself then. She tried to explain how much she’d learned during her time on the mountain, and how wrong she would be for Joshua now. But she didn’t think she succeeded. Only time would prove her right in his eyes.
After she dealt with that unfortunate matter, she set about gathering her belongings. Then she had to face Ophelia. To her surprise, it was much easier than she’d thought.
“Child,” the older woman said, “I knew something was different ’bout you, right from the very minute you walked in that kitchen door. Then you went and showed me how good and fluffy you’d larnt to make biscuits. M-hm… Emma Crowell making biscuits. Next thing a body knows, a man’ll be setting himself on that moon up in that sky, I tell you. Stranger thing ain’t happened yet. You’re different now, all right.”
They packed all of Emma’s sturdier garments, and they shopped for adequate shoes and boots. Stockings and petticoats and warm cloaks and coats, cotton dimity nighties and flannel ones, too, all went into the vast steamer trunk that had come ahead of her from Denver. Now, it would return to Bountiful, but with different contents, indeed.
As a side parcel, Emma purchased every children’s story book she could find on short notice, and she also gathered an assortment of history texts, a Latin grammar, a French one, and books on art, European architecture, mathematics, and a collection on scientific subjects she found at the last bookseller she visited. Le Morte D’Arthur was marvelous, of course, but Robby needed much more than that to become a well-educated man. She also bought him a sturdy leather-bound Bible of his own. The time had come for the boy to begin his own devotions rather than be subjected to his father’s impertinent lectures. Or hers.
She bought a lovely bolt of navy-blue floral chintz for Colley, since she would not let herself believe the marshal would remain obstinate about the woman’s freedom. In the case of the worst scenario, she would make sure Papa investigated what kind of legal assistance they could provide. Emma was not going to let Colley suffer because of her any longer than she was forced to. She would see to it right away. And then maybe the older woman would let herself soften back to the woman she always should have been, before life and a brute had stolen that part of who she was.
“Well, Papa,” she finally said on the night she’d been home for three weeks. “I’m packed and all set to return. Remember. You promised to do something so I can help Colley. She does not deserve the dreadful treatment that horrid Marshal Blair has subjected her to.”
“I have made inquiries, dear. Just as I told you I would.”
She flew at hi
m, hugging him around the neck. “Thank you, thank you!”
“Easy there, my girl. We’ll do everything possible, but you must understand it won’t necessarily be up to us.”
“I do understand, Papa. But I also understand now how great our God truly is. And He is in control of this—”
Emma drew up short when she realized she’d been about to quote Peter. How much she missed him! She couldn’t wait to see him in a few days, to accept his proposal, to become his wife and partner for the rest of their lives.
That was her plan. She prayed it lined up with his.
She stood up straight. “What I meant to say is that I’m not a child any longer. I understand the situation quite well.” She stepped back, and tried to remember what she’d been talking about before concern for Colley had distracted her. “Oh, yes. I was about to tell you how Peter insisted I’d always be able to visit you whenever I wanted, and I will do just that, quite regularly, too. I could never do without seeing you for very long, Papa. And you must come see us, too.”
“Oh, I think I’ll satisfy myself with your visits here. I’m truly not the sheep-ranch sort, you know.”
Although his words disappointed her, she knew he was right. He’d always be a businessman, more at home in his office or in a bank, completing his latest transaction, than he’d ever be in the outdoors. Once upon a time, she’d thought the same of herself. Maybe Papa could be persuaded…
That night, she fell asleep with a smile on her lips and sweet dreams in her head.
Chapter 21
All through the journey on the train that rolled down the tracks to Milton, and then on the carriage she took from there to Bountiful, Emma’s stomach tightened into ever more tangled knots. Her head filled with what-ifs, and she experienced anxiety unlike anything she’d known before.
What if Robby hadn’t recovered as well as she’d hoped? What if that horrid Marshal Blair had done something dreadful with poor Colley? What if Peter’s flock had suffered because of the lawman’s obstinacy? What if Peter had changed his mind about her?