Chapter Thirty-Eight

Rain fell from the sky in sheets of silken grey, gathering in the moonlight-pitted pools that formed in sunken patches of ground, overflowing into rivulets of glistening grey-black water that raced down Main Street.

Her coat drenched and the hems of her skirt and petticoats muddied, Charity ran into the livery stable and came to a stop inside the barn. She stood there, looking around for Joe as the rain hosed noisily on to the wooden roof, its insistent beat reverberating in the hollow space beneath. One of the horses whinnied. And then another.

Water ran off her coat and pooled around her feet on the wooden floor. ‘Joe,’ she shouted, unbuttoning her coat and moving further into the barn. She shook her coat and then squeezed the water from the end of her braid.

‘Joe!’ she shouted again, more loudly this time to be heard above the sounds of the rain and of the horses kicking against the wooden walls of the stalls.

He’d be somewhere nearby, she knew, and she just had to talk to him.

For the whole of the last two days, she’d been watching for a moment to ask if he’d been able to get to the priest, but to her intense frustration there hadn’t been one. Martha had been up early each morning, before either of them had left their rooms, and Hiram had taken to sitting with them at night. Although clearly exhausted and hardly able to keep awake, he hadn’t retired to bed until after they’d gone to their rooms.

She’d begun to despair of ever having a chance to speak alone with Joe when Phebe had hammered on the door that evening, frantically pleading for help with Thomas. He was flushed and sweating and had a bad cough, she’d said, fear on her face. Martha had thrown on her coat to go down to Sam’s house, and Charity had seen her chance.

She’d told Martha she’d run into town for a chicken. If Thomas turned out to have pneumonia, she’d said, they’d need a fresh chicken, and it’d be better to get it while there were still people at work in the stores rather than have to disturb someone later at night if he took a turn for the worse. Martha had nodded her agreement, and had then hurried down to Sam’s house.

She’d grabbed her coat and had run to the livery as fast as she could, heedless of the mud and the rain, fearful that Martha might not be with Thomas for long.

She glanced round the stable again, wondering where Joe could be. A moment later, she heard the back door click shut and footsteps come along the corridor towards her.

‘Joe,’ she called again.

‘Charity!’ he exclaimed as he came into the barn and saw her. His face broke out into a broad smile. ‘I thought I’d imagined hearin’ you call me,’ he added with a laugh, and he pulled off his hat and oilcloth duster coat, slung them over a nearby stool and came across to her, bringing with him the earthy smell of damp hay and wet leather. ‘What in tarnation, you’re soaked!’

‘It’s nothin’ that won’t dry,’ she said, laughing. The horses neighed in unison, and she glanced anxiously towards the stalls, then back at Joe. ‘The horses seem restless.’

‘They’re always like this in a storm – you should’ve seen them in the corral this afternoon; they just couldn’t be settled. It means we’ll have thunder and lightning before the night’s out. But if you think horses are noisy, you should hear cattle lowin’ when there’s a storm on the way. Which I hope you will hear one day,’ he added, with a grin.

‘Me, too,’ she said, gazing up at him.

‘Anyway.’ He came closer, and raised his hand to brush away a cloud of tiny black flies that hovered around her damp face. ‘What brings you here in weather like this? It’s rainin’ pitchforks.’ He ran his fingers slowly down her wet hair, and she felt the touch of his love. ‘Your eyes are as dark as the sky’s gotten,’ he said huskily. ‘They’re beautiful, Charity. You’re beautiful.’

At the expression in his eyes, a sigh of happiness ran through her, and she moved closer to him, her face raised to his, her lips parting slightly.

He put his hand to her cheek, and trailed it lingeringly down the side of her face, and down the slender column of her throat.

Then he let his gaze fall to the line of her body beneath her dress, visible between the flaps of her open coat. ‘You’re so lovely,’ he said softly. ‘Wet or dry, with the sun on your face or when you’re covered in mud, you’re never anythin’ but real beautiful. I wanna hold you right now and never let you go.’

‘Oh, Joe.’ She reached up to him and brushed her lips against his, then she stepped back. ‘That’s as close as I’m gonna get to you for now,’ she said, laughing. ‘You won’t want to be covered in that mud you mentioned.’

He held out his arms at his side and grinned at her. ‘Come as close as you want. I don’t mind; not one little bit.’

She gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘If only I could, but there isn’t time. I doubt your ma will be with Phebe for long, so I must get back soon. And I’ve gotta get a chicken first.’

He lowered his arms. ‘What’s Phebe want this time?’

‘Advice about Thomas. She said he wasn’t well, and she and Sam were worried. It sounds like a bad cold and nothin’ more, but it gave me an excuse to come out and see you. Your folks have clearly decided we’re not to be left alone together,’ she added with an amused smile, ‘so I’ve not yet been able to ask if you’ve been to the priest.’

He nodded. ‘I have and it’s fine. He was pleased to be able to return the favour I did him, and he was also real keen on doin’ somethin’ that asserted the right of the Chinese to sort things out for themselves, whatever the laws of the whites said.’

She clasped her hands together in glee.

‘And he had a grand suggestion to make. We can’t do it here in Carter, but we might be able to do it in Sheridan as Sheridan’s a sight bigger than Carter. He said we could get a lawyer to draw up a marriage contract. We can never be wed in the eyes of American law, but with a contract, and a Chinese weddin’, we’d be as wed as we can be.’

‘That would be wonderful. So where and when’s the weddin’ gonna be?’

‘In the tong in just over a week; on the Monday like we wanted. He’ll use one of the downstairs rooms. It’ll be early in the mornin’, when the Carter women are doin’ their washin’. He asked if we wanted food afterwards – some cake and wine perhaps, as that’s a real important part of the weddin’ for the Chinese – but I’ve told him there won’t be time.’

She shrugged in dismissal. ‘We don’t need any food.’

‘What we’ll need to do is get out of town as fast as we can. I’ll load the wagon the night before, and then just before sunup on the Monday, drive it out to the plain and leave it there with one of the horses. I’ll ride back on the other. I’ve ordered the horses through some drovers I know. I’m not usin’ Seth’s contacts, as I don’t wanna risk him bein’ blamed for any part of this.’

‘I’m real pleased about that. Seth mustn’t be in any trouble for what we’re doin’.’

He nodded. ‘As soon as you’ve had breakfast,’ he went on, ‘you’ll tell Ma and Pa you’re goin’ to the station and that you’d rather go alone. When you’ve said goodbye to them, go straight to the tong. When we leave the tong, you’ll walk out to the plain. I’ll collect the horse from the stable and ride out of town, lookin’ like I’m exercisin’ it. I’ll hitch it to the wagon and drive the wagon to meet you when you’re far enough out of town.’

‘I do hope nothin’ goes wrong,’ she said, biting her lip anxiously. ‘I keep thinkin’ back to the Chinaman who was lynched in Denver, and the violence you stopped here. But for you, the priest would’ve been lynched.’

‘It won’t go wrong, Charity. By the time anyone realises you didn’t get on that train and that I’ve gone, too, we’ll be far away, and we’ll not have left any sign of where we’ve gone.’

‘Suppose the priest says somethin’ to someone before the weddin’ and they tell the Marshal?’

‘He won’t. He made a point of sayin’ that neither of us should tell anyone. He knows that tensions are high and he doesn’t want to risk what might happen in town if we were found out. And the Chens have friends. There’ll be people in both communities who’d try to get us thrown into jail at the very least if they knew, and the priest knows that. And also he’ll be encouragin’ us to break American law, so they could put him in jail, too.’

‘D’you think they’ll come after us when they find we’re gone?’

‘I don’t rightly know. I guess it depends on how soon they find out. The Marshal could easily round up a posse with all the anti-Chinese feelin’ in town. But if they do come after us, they’ll most likely think we’ve gone due south towards the Rockies or west to Evanston. They’re likely to think we’d hide in the forests south of Evanston and then head out of Wyoming. I’d be surprised if they thought we’d stay in Wyoming Territory.’

There was a distant rumble of thunder.

‘I must go,’ she said quickly.

He nodded. ‘We’ll speak again as soon as we can.’

Turning away, she started buttoning up her coat. He caught her arm. She stopped moving and stared up at him. For a long moment, they gazed at each other, their eyes filled with a powerful yearning.

Somewhere outside, thunder rumbled again; this time closer.

As they stood there in thrall to love, a jagged bolt of lightning streaked through the stormy sky and cracked it open. A pristine white light lit up the town and fell through the stable entrance on to them.

Momentarily blinded by its shining intensity, Joe put his hands to his eyes and rubbed them.

When he opened his eyes again, Charity had gone.