Charlotte sat at the long table in the parlor and composed a letter to her sisters. It had to say everything without revealing anything. Thomas had gone out to work on the vegetable patch after showing her the horses—the chestnut cart horse called Trooper and a blue roan quarter horse called Shadow.
The sun was low in the sky by the time Charlotte was happy with her efforts. She hurried to read the letter one more time before sealing it in the envelope. It was addressed to her—Charlotte Fairfax.
Dear Charlotte,
I hope this letter finds you in good health, and that you remember me, Miss Emily Bickerstaff, from those few weeks you spent at the Boston Academy for Young Ladies, before you returned home to be educated by a governess.
I am writing on behalf of another student, Maude Jackson, whom you never met as she joined the Academy a year later. Her name is Maude Greenwood now. Her husband is a pioneer in the frontier region of our country. They live in Gold Crossing, Arizona Territory, and their hometown is the reason why I am writing to you now.
Teachers are very difficult to recruit out in the West. Mrs. Greenwood has contacted me to see if I might be interested in a position, but unfortunately I need to care for my elderly mother. However, it occurred to me that you might be interested in an adventure out in the territories.
If you are not in need of a position, perhaps your younger sister might be. I believe you mentioned she is only two years younger and has benefited from the same education. I am afraid I don’t recall her name. However, if she were interested in traveling out West, Mrs. Greenwood would be extremely grateful to hear from her, as would everyone in the town of Gold Crossing.
Yours truly,
Miss Emily Bickerstaff
Charlotte let her mind stray back to the few miserable weeks she’d spent at the Boston Academy for Young Ladies. The formal, rule-driven world of the school had felt stifling, full of petty jealousies. The secluded valley that now surrounded her reminded her of the happy home Merlin’s Leap had once been.
She cast aside her memories and raked one final glance over the letter. That would have to do. She daren’t give any more details. Annabel would figure it out, and her sisters would write to her, addressing the letter to Maude Greenwood, care of the Post Office, Gold Crossing, Arizona Territory.
She had considered making the sender Maude Jackson, with just a mention of Emily Bickerstaff as a mutual friend, but that might arouse suspicion in Cousin Gareth, for young ladies of quality did not write to each other without getting an introduction first.
The biggest problems with the letter were the lack of sender’s address and the prospect the post office might put marks on the envelope, revealing it had come all the way from the West. She hoped those would escape Cousin Gareth’s notice, and that he would be too lazy to seek out Emily Bickerstaff to verify the facts.
Charlotte folded the sheet, slipped it into the envelope and sealed the flap, just in time, for heavy footsteps echoed across the porch. The instant the door flung open, she bounced up to her feet and waved the letter in the air.
“I’ve written to my sisters. When can you go and post it?”
Thomas strode over to the kitchen counter and used the dipper to drink from the pail. Charlotte could see hurt and disappointment in the way he averted his face. Of course, he would have liked to have seen what she’d written, to be included in the family connection. However, it was just as important that he remained ignorant of the contents of the message.
She had hesitated before addressing the letter to herself. Thomas might study the envelope, see the name Charlotte and be puzzled by it. It couldn’t be helped. It was more important to throw Gareth off her track. His suspicions were more likely to arise if a letter came for Miranda, who had never been away from home and was unlikely to have friends Gareth didn’t know about.
For Cousin Gareth would intercept the letter. Charlotte had no doubt of it. However, in his efforts to discover her whereabouts, he was bound to share the contents with Annabel and Miranda, hoping to get some clues from their reaction. It was something Charlotte could not predict for certain, but it was a gamble she had to take.
Thomas wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Is the letter important?”
“Not really,” Charlotte told him. “But I’d like my sisters to know that I’ve arrived safely and that the wedding has taken place.”
“I’ll ride into town tomorrow.”
“There’s no need to make a special trip.”
“We need a few things from the mercantile anyway, and it’s only an hour’s fast riding. It takes longer in the cart.” Thomas held out his hand. “I’ll leave at first light tomorrow. If you give me the letter now, I’ll get my saddlebags ready.”
Charlotte felt her heartbeat quicken. She couldn’t meet Thomas’s eyes as she handed him the letter. He took it, studied the envelope. When he lifted his gaze back to her, a troubled furrow lined his brow, but he did not ask why her sister was called Charlotte Fairfax.
Charlotte prayed in her mind for him to remain silent. If he asked, she could tell him her middle name was Charlotte and she used it because she disliked Maude, and her sister was also called Charlotte and she was married to a man named Fairfax, but the thought of adding to her lies filled her with shame.
The silence in the cabin went on and on until it grew oppressive. Like so many times during the day, Charlotte could feel Thomas’s assessing gaze lingering on her slim waist. The denim trousers made the flatness of her belly even more obvious.
He suspects. The thought flashed through her mind.
With a bright smile that hid her ill conscience, Charlotte hurried up to the kitchen cupboards. Chattering like a demented magpie, she banged doors and shuffled cardboard boxes and glass jars and small burlap sacks.
“I see that you mostly have dry goods,” she said. “Do you know, they are preserving things in metal cans now? Meat and fruit and even fish. Not in glass jars, like people do at home, but in metal cans.”
“I read the newspapers,” Thomas said. “When I can afford one.”
Charlotte fell silent. She’d already seen the small pile of carefully preserved back issues of the Arizona Citizen and the San Francisco Call. There had even been a copy of the Matrimonial News, with some advertisements circled in pencil.
“I know.” She spoke into the depths of the cupboard. “I wasn’t implying that you’re a country yokel. I simply assumed that such things may not have arrived here, because of the cost of transport.”
Thomas didn’t reply. Charlotte stole a glance at him over her shoulder. He was rubbing a hand over his eyes.
“Are you tired?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I’ll cook for you.”
“I’ll cook. I’m more hungry than I’m tired.”
There it was again. The dismissal that suggested she might be a pretty face but useless otherwise. Didn’t he realize how much she wanted to be of help to him? Didn’t he see how hard she was trying?
Charlotte shook off the surge of frustration. It was too nice an evening to brood, with a chorus of birdsong coming in through the open front door and the last rays of the sun gilding the grass and the trees. “Fine,” she said, her spirits rallying. “But tomorrow, after you are back from town, you must show me how to irrigate the fields, and then I can help you with the task.”
* * *
Thomas stopped fighting the doubts as he rode home from Gold Crossing where he’d gone to post Charlotte’s letter. The envelope—the contents of which his wife had taken care to conceal from him—had been addressed to Charlotte Fairfax, Merlin’s Leap, Boston, Massachusetts.
He’d married Maude Jackson from New York City.
And yet his wife had asked him to call her Charlotte, and now it appeared that her sister was also called Charlotte, but with a different last name, Fairfax. Perhaps the sister was married, or they were half sisters, with a different father.
But there was more to it. Several times, he’d caught his wife talking about Boston when she referred to her home in the East. When she noticed the slip, she’d made some flimsy explanation about having moved from one city to another.
Who was she?
Was she Maude Jackson? If so, why did she answer to Charlotte?
Was she Charlotte Fairfax? If so, why write a letter to herself?
And the pregnancy? However hard he looked, he could see no sign that she was with child. Weren’t women supposed to have funny cravings for food? And morning sickness?
But each time Thomas pondered the matter, he came to the same conclusion: being in the family way outside marriage brought such shame, no woman would tell such a lie. Lies went the other way round, denying a pregnancy.
The photograph of Maude Jackson burned like a silent protest in his pocket, adding to his turbulent thoughts. More and more he felt unable to reconcile the plain features and pinched expression in the picture with the beauty he’d married.
Thomas could only come to one conclusion.
For some reason, his wife was deceiving him.
The old pain flared up inside him. The pain of being excluded, of not being worthy, of being rejected. He’d grown up wanting to belong, wanting to be loved, and now a fear surged inside him, a premonition that nothing had changed for him.
He was being used, and he didn’t know why, or even exactly how. Perhaps his wife had contracted to the marriage as a temporary solution, to conceal her pregnancy from family and friends, and she planned to leave him as soon as the baby was born.
As the thought formed in his mind, an idea struck him.
If she planned to leave, might she let him keep the child?
Resolve hardened within Thomas. Even if he failed to hold on to his wife, he’d fight to be a father to the child. That might help him heal—saving another human being from the burden of growing up unwanted and unloved.
* * *
Thomas found Charlotte waiting for him on the porch steps, dressed in her boy’s clothing, a pair of big rubber boots weighing down her movements, like anchors on her feet.
“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.