Unbearable heat was their companion. No other soul was leaving Nacogdoches that day, and therefore Thomas was the one other person to sit in the baking coach with her.
Katherine twitched her skirts away from him as he shifted in his seat.
“Oh, my apologies – did I tread on your skirts?” His voice was low, as though the heat of the day had drawn out of him the energy required for normal speech.
She shook her head and turned her face resolutely to the window – but that did not mean she could not see his gaze staring at her.
The silence continued for another hour, and Katherine reveled in it. There was a small window on each side of the coach, and though it was marked and splattered with dirt, it was still possible for her to view their journey through the stifling Texan countryside.
There was no person to see as the coach rattled slowly, mile after mile, and the few settlements they saw looked dilapidated through disrepair, or unfinished in the first place. The rolling Texas countryside, however, remained unspoiled: luscious grass as far as the eye could see, dried in the heat of the sun in parts, and large oaks standing tall and proud breaking up the vista.
“No Comanches, by the look of things.”
Katherine nodded, rather than spoke, at his words. She had never before been afraid of the Indians; they did not venture close to Nacogdoches, and what were a few extra men in the area anyway?
“Tis a good omen,” Thomas was saying. “I just hope that we can get to Sweet Grove without seeing them – they are good trackers of course, so they will probably see us before we see them . . .”
His voice droned into the background as she focused her mind on other things. She was married. She belonged to Thomas Bryant. At least it would make a change from belonging to any man who strode into her room, determined to –
The coach jerked, and Katherine looked up from the window in alarm.
“What do you think could be wrong?” she asked Thomas in a whisper. “So much for your good chance.”
He stared at her strangely as he replied, “We are at La Grange.”
Katherine blinked, and he smiled gently. “Another small town. We will be picking up a few more passengers, I dare say.”
Dread poured through Katherine’s veins like ice, cooling her in the hot mid-morning sun. More passengers? The last thing she needed was more people in this dreaded coach to heat the place up – and knowing her ‘good’ fortune, it would not be someone whose company she could either enjoy or avoid.
“Small town?” were her words. “It does not seem possible; the road looks completely barren.”
He shrugged. “There are small settlements and frontier towns being established in every quarter now, I suppose. Sweet Grove was supposed to become a town in its own right, after a time.”
The mention of Sweet Grove drew her attention, and Katherine leaned unconsciously towards him. “And why is it not?”
Thomas shrugged, but he did not meet her gaze, and she knew enough of men to know his words were untrue. “I am not entirely sure myself, but I do know it was something to do with my father.”
He may have said more if the coach had not stopped at that exact moment, but Katherine did not care much. He was lying. Why was she surprised? It was what men did.
The door was flung open by the coachman, and a trio of gentlemen were standing outside, ready to embark.
“Good morning.” Thomas nodded at the new passengers as they entered the coach, but Katherine could utter no such greeting.
To her horror, two of the three men looked familiar to her, and that could mean one thing.
Previous customers.
Heat flushed through her. How stupid was she – did she really think she could escape herself, run away from who she was? What she was? There did not seem to be a distance she could travel to put enough space between the terrible things she had been forced to do to survive, and now she would have that horrendous reminder thrown in her face for the entirety of the rest of the journey.
She now had to pray neither of them recognized her.
Squashed against the window as she already was, Katherine shrank away from the men. Thomas – her husband, she must start considering him her husband – was opposite her, and two of the new occupants of the carriage sat alongside him.
The third positioned himself by her. The smell of the three of them was overpowering; they must have come from a lumberyard of sorts, because resin and tar was streaked across their clothes as though they were giraffes. Rank sweat brought another harmony into the medley, and to top it off, the one she did not recognize brought out a pipe and began to smoke it as the coach rattled on to continue its travels.
All she had to do was be quiet. All she had to do was draw no attention to herself whatsoever. All she had to do was ignore the uncomfortable closeness that she was now forced to endure with the man who sat beside her – a little too close to comfort.
“Where you are folks headed?” the man smoking the pipe enquired in a gruff voice.
Katherine kept her gaze focused on the floor, and did not raise her gaze. Please, Thomas, she pleaded silently. Please speak.
“To El Seco.” He spoke in a clear and pleasant air, and she released the breath she had been holding in relief. “We have family there we are visiting.”
She looked up at his words to stare at him in surprise. Was there a reason they were not telling complete strangers their actual destination?
“We three also,” replied the man who was seated beside her. “But I did not realize Miss Morrison was accompanying you!”
Dread settled in her stomach and forced Katherine to lift her face to her new husband in silent apology.
He did not seem to understand at first; she marveled at his innocence as he said, “Oh, I did not know you were acquainted with my wife.”
“Wife?” The man snorted as he took a scornful look at her. “Is that what they call them these days? ‘Tis been such an age since I visited Miss Morrison, I had almost forgotten.”
The man opposite him chuckled. “No, she is more of a mistress than a wife, I would wager. How much for this, then, Katherine? I was not offered this sort of home treatment when I came to see you at Madam Nancy’s – or is this for special clients?”
The shame drenching her was nothing to what she felt as Thomas leaned forward and whispered to her below the guffaws of the men. “Am I to be shamed by every man in Texas? Was there no one that you did not give yourself to? Could you not have warned me that you had been in your . . . your profession for such a long time?”
He turned from her in disgust and stared out of the window.
Two pink spots appeared in her cheeks as Katherine stared at him. Finally, she whispered, “Tis of no concern to you, of course, why I was forced into such servitude – why I was left alone, unprotected, and unsupported? No, your only concern is that you are not embarrassed by two idiots and their companion in a coach!”
The men caught her last words and stared at her.
“You heard me right.” Katherine tried to bite back her words, but now she had spoken, they were pouring out of her. “What right do you have to laugh, when you sell your bodies to the nearest woodsman to get that lumber ready? None of your prejudice is justified, and it pains me to think you cannot sympathize with my position.”
“Do not shout at us, missy.” The man with the pipe removed it from his mouth as he spoke. “You chose to be there, and from the sound of it, you had a mighty fine time there.”
She could not help sarcasm dripping from her words. “I did not choose to be there, you fool, I was forced by complete lack of options!”
“Katherine! Please,” pleaded Thomas quietly. “You do not need to speak so loud.”
She stared at him, stunned. “Is your hypocrisy so great that it cannot even recognize itself? Do you forget, sir, that our very meeting was orchestrated by your lust and desire for my body? That we would not even know each other if your weakness had not succumbed to a temptation that you now decry as sinful?”
He had the decency to blush, but he said nothing. Katherine sighed bitterly. “Do you think I enjoyed baring my body and my soul to any man with four dollars rattling in his pocket? Do you think I relished the chance to have slimy hands on me, and rank breath pouring stupidity in my ears? And do not attempt to look surprised, Evan Grainstreet, because your wife came to me last autumn in full knowledge of your weaknesses, and that is why I refused to see you again!”
“Katherine . . .” It was Thomas, and her name was spoken with tenderness, but she did not heed it.
“Have none of you done anything that shamed you?” she spat out, anger reaching a pitch now that made it impossible to draw back the words. “Are none of you running from your own past? For I pray to God that it meets you as mine always does!”
Katherine gasped for air, breathless after her long speech; she felt she was to faint if she did not pause. She turned to the window and closed her eyes. Perhaps if she were quiet, she could pretend they were not there. To sit with a man and not be required to make conversation – to be able to be silent!
Shame burned Thomas like a branding iron, but it was not merely for her, it was his own.
It had been mortifying to look around at the two men whose brutish fingers had travelled across Katherine’s body – his wife’s body – but unbearably shameful to think he had tried to punish her for it.
The laughter and the chatter had subsided, and now the five of them were travelling in silence – but he was not at peace. He had meant his words, at least; were they to meet with such men everywhere they travelled? Would he have to endure this knowledge for their whole lives; the knowledge he had never known her, while more or less every man in a twenty-mile radius had?
As the miles disappeared under them, he could not help but listen to her words over and over again in his memory.
“Tis of no concern to you, of course, why I was forced into such servitude – why I was left alone, unprotected, and unsupported?”
Thomas thought of his youngest sister, Abigail, and shuddered. She would always have a brother to protect her, surely? And yet, where was he? Where was Aaron? Both had left the family, and Jonathan was the one brother to stay with her. What if he had caught a fever? Who would have been left to protect Abigail?
A quick glance at Katherine gave him no information on her past, but she must have had parents – maybe a brother. What had happened to them? Why was she alone? Unprotected so that men like him could walk into a room and demand the most precious thing that a woman could offer?
“Is your hypocrisy so great that it cannot even recognize itself? Do you forget, sir, that our very meeting was orchestrated by your lust and desire for my body? That we would not even know each other if your weakness had not succumbed to a temptation that you now decry as sinful?”
He had forgotten it – or rather, he had chosen to forget it. For a swift moment, it had been easier to revel in the idea that they were married due to equal and mutual affection, one for the other, and that they had been irresistibly drawn together. But the truth was far darker than that.
“Do you think I enjoyed baring my body and my soul to any man with four dollars rattling in his pocket?”
Thomas grimaced. He had been such a man, and had he not fainted by complete chance, would he have not been one of the list who had forced his presence on her? Why did men have this idea anyway that a woman such as her could be had for the asking?
“None of your prejudice is justified, and it pains me to think you cannot sympathize with my position.”
He stared at her. There were no tears in her eyes, but they glistened in the sparkling sunshine as they rushed past another group of houses near the road. What sort of a woman was she? At one time timid, at another, fierce. Which was the true Katherine? And what unfortunate set of circumstances had befallen her that she was taken in by Madam Nancy to ply her trade around the town of Nacogdoches?
“Have none of you done anything that shamed you? Are none of you running from your own past?”
Thomas shivered, despite the heat. Her words were far closer to the mark than she could possibly know. His own actions had none of the real and genuine desperation explaining hers. His had been planted in greed, and grown in shame.
There was a reason he had not returned to Sweet Grove until this moment.