Chapter Twelve

Phoebe found Fiona reading in the parlor. She did not invite herself in but stood in the doorway until Fiona looked up from her book.

“Already finding yourself at sixes and sevens?” asked Fiona. She marked her place with a green grosgrain ribbon before setting the book aside. “Thaddeus has a surprisingly varied selection of books. It cannot compare to the library you frequented in New York, but I believe you will find something to enlighten or entertain, depending on your mood. Shall I show you to his study?”

Phoebe shook her head. She pointed to the fringed shawl that was folded over her forearm. “I thought I would like to go out. It’s a beautiful day. I wondered if you would show me around?” She was unsure of Fiona’s response, but she thought she should make the overture. Phoebe knew she would not receive an answer of any kind until Fiona had finished inspecting her. Like a good soldier, she stood at attention and waited for the pronouncement.

“I should take you into town,” said Fiona, rising from the sofa. She wore a pink-and-white-striped silk day dress with three-quarter-length sleeves that puffed high at her shoulders. There was nothing fussy about the dress, no ruching, no flounces, but none was necessary when she filled the bodice so admirably. “That’s what I should do. Take you shopping. Thaddeus established a line of credit for me at the shops I told him I would like to frequent, not that there were so very many choices, you understand. I know he won’t mind if I make purchases for you.”

Phoebe watched Fiona’s complexion bloom pink with excitement and wondered how it was possible that the roses in her cheeks complemented the pink stripes in her dress so precisely. “Fiona,” she said gently. “I couldn’t possibly. I would be very uncomfortable.”

“I mean it. Thaddeus won’t mind, but if you like, I will ask him. He’ll give it his blessing.”

Phoebe shook her head. “No, I’m sure you’re right, but I meant that I would not be comfortable riding.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t be on horseback. That’s absurd. We will take the buggy.”

“Fiona.” Phoebe saw Fiona blink. It was the reaction she had hoped for. “I do not want to go anywhere that my feet won’t carry me.” To emphasize her point, Phoebe placed one hand on her backside. “I have bruises.”

“Oh. Well, there’s no need to be crude about it. Please remove your hand before someone sees you.”

Phoebe did not address the fact that there was no one around since everyone else was engaged with work. To appease Fiona, she let her hand fall to her side. “And to the other point, while I appreciate that you would like to take me shopping, I don’t need anything.” There was no missing Fiona’s skepticism, not when the highest point of her arched eyebrow was halfway to her hairline. “Before you find fault with what I am wearing, perhaps you’ll want to remember that you chose it for me. The pattern. The material. The trim.”

“Did I?” She sighed. “Was I in a mood?”

“You are always in a mood.” To give her hands something to do, Phoebe smoothed her lichen green skirt at the front. The tailored bodice required no attention. The fit was exact, following the line of her shoulders, her arms, the curve of her breasts and waist. Armor would not have protected her so well, she thought, which was why Fiona had suggested it. Phoebe had added a black tie around the high collar and arranged the tails so that they lay flat against the bodice. The knot she had fashioned at her throat was secured with a mother-of-pearl stickpin. The accessories were masculine; the effect was entirely feminine.

“I suppose it’s not completely wrong for you,” Fiona said. Her eyes narrowed on the stickpin. “Is that the pin that Jonathan Halstead gave me?”

Phoebe put her hand to her throat. “I don’t know. It might be, but you gave it to me.”

“Did I? I’m sure it’s the one I had from Jonathan. I have fond memories of him, you know.”

“I’m sure. Do you want it back?”

“No.” She waved one hand airily. “You must keep it. I will think of him when I see you.” She frowned slightly. “When I see you wearing it, I mean. I don’t think of anyone else when I see you.”

“Don’t you?”

Fiona set her jaw. A muscle jumped in her cheek before the line of her mouth relaxed and her lips parted. “My, now who is in a mood? You are entirely disagreeable, Phoebe. I wonder that you are here at all since you are clearly out of sorts with me.”

Phoebe spoke quietly, which was always the better course when Fiona was winding herself up. “I came at your husband’s invitation, not yours. Remember?”

“So you mean to punish me? That’s unfair, Phoebe, and beneath you. I told you this morning that I did not extend an invitation because I had it in my mind to go to New York and escort you here myself. That is not the sort of thing I could do without my husband’s permission, and I wasn’t confident that Thaddeus would agree. I was still working out the best way to approach him when he told me about the letter he had written to you. Do you see? While I cared enough to seek his approval, he presented me with a fait accompli. That was very wrong of him.”

“Are you still angry with him? Don’t you have what you wanted? I’m here.” Something flickered in Fiona’s lovely amethyst eyes and it was then that Phoebe understood the whole of the truth. “Oh, forgive me. I see now that I was a secondary consideration, really nothing more than a convenience you could use to explain your desire to go back to New York. Do you ever miss me at all, Fiona, or is it the city you miss, the theater, the applause?”

Phoebe saw Fiona raise her hand in what was surely going to be an imploring gesture followed by a plea for understanding or a denial of all that had preceded it. That script had been a cliché for a long time. “I think I will explore on my own,” she said quietly. Holding tight to the shredded remnants of her dignity, Phoebe turned on her heel and walked away.

• • •

So as not to engage Ellie in conversation when the housekeeper was preparing lunch and she herself was feeling particularly brittle, Phoebe left the house by the front door. She stood for a time on the lip of the porch, taking in the broad expanse of land before the distant mountains climbed the sky. She could see now that the road they had taken last night was hardly more than two tracks of dirt rutted by buckboard and buggy wheels. Long shafts of bright green grass were trampled by horses who were deliberately ridden clear of the road. Pink and purple and yellow wildflowers, none whose name she knew, dotted the grass and occasionally formed clusters that dipped and swayed when a breeze stirred close to the ground.

She stepped lightly down the stairs and out from under the shadow of the porch roof and into the sunlight. The warmth on her face was lovely and she basked in it until the crick in her neck forced her to lower her head. She took a path of her own making away from the porch. When she judged she had walked far enough, she turned to face the house. Last night there had been no opportunity to take in more than its silhouette in the moonlight. Now she could see that the porch ran the formidable length of the house. There was a swing she had not noticed when she stood on the porch and two rockers on the left side of it. She would sit there later, she decided, probably on the swing, and read a book from Thaddeus’s collection, or then again, she might do nothing at all.

The thought of doing nothing made her smile. It wasn’t possible. Doing nothing was hard work, and she didn’t have the constitution for it.

Thaddeus came around the house on the swing side. She raised her arm and waved to him. He put up a hand to acknowledge her and then began striding toward her.

“I’ve been looking for you. Fiona and Ellie didn’t know where you’d gone.” He took her hands, stood back, and looked her over. “Splendid, Phoebe. You look splendid. You’ll see that everything here will agree with you. The air. The sunshine. The . . . company.”

“The cows, you mean. You are talking about the cows. I can smell them from here.”

Chuckling, he gave her hands a shake before he dropped them. “That particular fragrance is coming from the barn, and we don’t keep cows in the barn. That’s horse manure and usually the wind’s blowing from the other direction and there’s no whiff of it here. Young Johnny is supposed to be mucking the stalls, but he’s harder to find when there’s work to be done than you are.”

“Oh, you have work for me?”

“Of a sort. It’s not what you think.” He turned, held out his elbow. “Will you allow me to show you around?”

“I’d like that.” She slipped her arm in his and they started to walk. “I was going to explore on my own, but this is nicer.”

“For me also. Ben volunteered early on, but I needed him to go back to town and bring the thoroughbred that Remington purchased in Chicago. There were two, but my son wants to keep Bullet. The horse is a good cutter, so I’ve decided I can forgive him.”

“So the price of me being here was more than two thousand dollars. I cost you a thoroughbred.”

Thaddeus stopped dead in his tracks. “Damn me for a clod. Is that what you heard? I wasn’t talking about the money. I was talking about my son. Fiona says my sense of humor is impoverished. That’s what she says. Impoverished. Always tickles me to hear her say so. She breaks it down to all its syllables. Might even add one that’s not supposed to be there.”

That made Phoebe laugh. “Where is Remington?”

“Probably trying to scare up Johnny Sutton. Could be anywhere.”

“You gave him the photograph I gave you. Why did you do that?”

“The way I remember it, he asked for it. Turns out it was a good thing because he might not have spotted you without it. You don’t mind that I wanted to provide you with an escort, do you?”

“It’s hard to mind when it turned out to be a good thing as well.”

Nodding, Thaddeus steered her around the back of the house, past where the chickens were scratching the ground and the rooster was strutting, past the smokehouse, the woodshed, the pump and troughs, and the pigpen, past the large rectangle of overturned earth and the furrows where tiny green shoots would rise soon and reveal the promise of a garden.

He led her past the bunkhouse to the corral. The three horses inside wandered aimlessly until the smallest one spied them at the rail.

“That’s the mare I rode,” Phoebe said. “At least I think it is.”

“It is.”

“Do you think she recognizes me?”

“Maybe your smell.”

Phoebe was quite sure that between Fiona’s bath salts and Ellie’s balm, she smelled nothing at all like she did when the mare was forced to accept her as a rider. She did not explain any of that. “You’re probably right,” she said.

Thaddeus folded his forearms and placed them on the top rail of the corral and told her about the homestead, some of which she knew from conversations in New York, but had a better appreciation for now. He pointed out the distant grazing pastures in a pocket formed by verdant hillsides. The cattle were already beginning to move there, he told her, and by summer those that weren’t clustered around watering holes would spread like the wildflowers she’d been admiring earlier.

Phoebe was loath to interrupt, but in good conscience, she could not allow him to go on as if there was nothing else they needed to discuss. She laid her hand on his forearm and squeezed gently. “Why am I here, Thaddeus? May I still call you that?”

“Of course,” he said quietly.

While he stared straight ahead, Phoebe studied his profile. She could not say it was troubled—a profile that stoic did not reveal troubled thoughts—but in the taut set of his bluntly carved features, Phoebe saw evidence of his grit and his reticence.

“Do you want to know what I think?” she asked.

“Honestly? I’m not sure. You scare me, Phoebe.”

“I do not.”

He glanced at her, an eyebrow cocked. “No? Believe that if you like.” He returned to staring straight ahead. “All right. Tell me. What do you think?”

“It’s Fiona. I’m here because of Fiona. What has she done, Thaddeus? What is it that I’m expected to make right?”

He pressed his lips together, shook his head. “No expectations. Just hoping.”

“I see. Then what is it that you hope I’ll make right?”

“She wants to leave. Me. Twin Star. It’s not one or the other. They’re one and the same.”

“I know.”

“Do you think she understands that? Would it matter if she did?”

“I can’t answer either of those things.” She watched him nod as if her answer did not surprise him. She said carefully, “What makes you think Fiona wants to leave? Did she tell you that?”

“She wanted to go back to New York, allegedly—there’s a lawyer’s word for you—to bring you here.”

“Remington told you this?”

“Because he overheard Fiona practicing her lines.”

Phoebe did not require an explanation. Fiona’s approach to managing or manipulating difficult situations was to compose the script in her head and find the right tone by engaging in a conversation with an imaginary partner. Sometimes she would speak in front of her vanity mirror to find complementary expressions, but just as often, she spoke aloud as she paced the floor or soaked in her bath.

“You said ‘allegedly.’ Is that because you don’t believe her? The part about bringing me here, I mean.”

“That’s right. That’s my judgment, not my son’s. He encouraged me to confront her, hear it from her. It was one of the few times I did not take his advice. I chose to head her off at the pass, so to speak.”

“I understand. You invited me and told her afterward.”

“Yes. God help me, Phoebe, I couldn’t let her go and just pray that she’d come back. In the first place, I’m not much for praying. Haven’t been since my Mary died. In the second place, they say God helps those who help themselves.”

“I see.”

“Do you? I can’t lose her, Phoebe. Sure, I know she’s a stick of dynamite, knew that right off. She has so many airs that it’s a wonder she doesn’t float herself back to New York. I knew that and plenty more about her when I proposed, and if I hadn’t figured it out for myself, you had a way of dropping hints that I couldn’t ignore.”

“Breadcrumbs,” she said. “Apparently I drop breadcrumbs.” When she saw his confusion, she shook her head. “Not important. What is it you’d like me to do?”

“Well, you being here is a good start. By accepting my invitation, you took away her excuse to go back to the city.”

“You’re not keeping her prisoner, are you?”

“Hell no.”

Phoebe gave a start when he slapped the heel of his hand on the rail to emphasize his denial, but then she caught his sidelong glance and definitely saw guilt there. “Thaddeus?”

“This is why you scare me, Phoebe. I have a feeling you’ve always seen too damn much, pardon the language.”

“I don’t care about the language. Tell me what else you’ve done.”

He pushed away from the rail, turned around, and settled his back against it. He crossed his arms. “I keep a tight rein on the household accounts. When I started getting an inkling that she was thinking in that particular way—and that was before Remington told me what he heard—I stopped giving her an allowance. I opened up store credit for her instead. Always had it at the mercantile, the feed store, leather goods, and such, but I set up credit at the dressmaker’s, the milliner’s, and the drugstore because Fiona does like her bath salts, soaps, and specially made fragrances. She has everything she needs but not the one thing she wants.”

“And you think that’s a ticket in her hand?”

“The money to buy a ticket. Yes.”

Phoebe said, “Is there more?”

“I don’t let her go to town alone any longer. There’s always a reason to send someone with her. Usually Ben goes along. She tolerates him better than the others.”

“Really? I thought it would be Remington.”

Thaddeus shrugged. “They’re a little like oil and water. They can be together for a while, but they prefer to be separate. It’s all right. Better than gun powder and a lighted match.”

Phoebe supposed that was true enough. “She wanted to take me shopping today. Would you have permitted that?”

“Of course. That’s even better.”

“I have a little money. You’re not worried that I’ll buy her a ticket?”

“I am depending on you to spend your money more wisely.”

Phoebe said nothing.

“You will, won’t you?”

“I’m not answering, and if I discover my money’s missing and you are the culprit, you will not like what I will do to get it back. I will promise you, though, I will not tell Fiona that I have it, nor will I put it anywhere she’s likely to find it. You’ll have to be satisfied with that. Besides, I think you hold enough sway in Frost Falls that you could persuade the station agent not to sell her a ticket.”

“Oh, I’ve already done that, but if she had the means, she could always get someone else to purchase one for her.”

Phoebe regarded him steadily until he was the one who looked away.

“I’m not proud of what I’ve done, or what I’m doing, but I am a proud man, and I love her, Phoebe. I love her.”

“Do you think I never came to know that?” she asked. “But Fiona can be careless with a man’s heart, and I worried on your account because I liked you so well. She’s never said ‘yes’ before. Not to a proposal. Did you know that?”

“She told me.”

“You probably didn’t believe her but it’s the truth. You need to do more than remember that. You need to embrace it. She had reasons for saying ‘yes’ to you. There were practical considerations, I’m sure, because Fiona is nothing if not practical, but she is also a romantic and in your case I believe love did not merely rule her heart. It ruled her head.”

Frowning, Thaddeus used his thumb and middle finger to smooth his eyebrows. He closed his eyes briefly. “What are you saying?”

“Look at me, Thaddeus.” When he did, she lifted her chin and regarded him frankly. “I am saying, quite plainly I thought, that Fiona married for love, and if she wants to leave, it is because you have been careless with her heart.”