The Prospector's Only Prospect, page 21
“Yes, but wait, Marigold. You got a parcel!”
“Oh?”
He hurried up to the front of the wagon and retrieved her carpetbag from beneath the bench. She’d loaned it to him, and the sides were swollen with more than his spare set of clothes. It looked like a snake that had swallowed a shipping tin. “I put it in here so it wouldn’t get lost.”
“Thank you.” Marigold accepted the bag. “Goodness, it’s heavy.”
“It’s from Pearl. It says ‘Happy Birthday,’” Levi informed her.
“It’s your birthday?” Nettie looked up with wonder.
“Two weeks ago,” Marigold dismissed. “Long past.”
Virgil turned from looking into the back of the wagon. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He had to ask? They hadn’t been speaking.
“It’s not worth fussing over.” Not when it was such a stark reminder that she wasn’t anywhere near where she had imagined she would be at twenty-seven. “Yeller, may I have two tins of milk and a jar of peaches? We’ll have a treat later to celebrate Levi arriving home safe and sound.”
Chapter Nineteen
Virgil tried telling himself that a new mattress was a hell of a birthday present, but since everyone in the house got one, it didn’t really count.
“You gave me my sister’s portrait,” Marigold said when he brought it up. “That was very thoughtful.”
It had been an emotional bribe. A grovel. They both knew that. Virgil wanted to give her something that made her smile the way she did when she opened the tin box her sister had sent her. There were three colored bookplates showing poisonous and edible mushrooms, a book of home remedies with illustrated descriptions of medicinal plants, and sheets of cheesecloth wrapped around packets of seeds. So many seeds.
“I can’t imagine how she collected such a variety. Asked for donations at church, perhaps.”
There were more than two dozen folded envelopes, each neatly labeled. She handled them with great care so they didn’t spill. They ran the gamut from lavender and thyme to onions, beets, and peas to violets and foxglove. There were even a few strawberry runners and some gnarled roots with wilted raspberry leaves clinging to them.
“I need to find a sheltered place to plant those where they might survive the winter.” She looked to the window. A sharp wind was buffeting the glass behind the curtain she’d hung.
“There’s a hot pool up on the plateau. Ground stays warmer there. I could plant them and fetch them in the spring,” he suggested.
“Levi told me about that.” Her expression brightened with curiosity. “You wouldn’t mind walking all that way?”
“I’ll ride,” he said drily. “But no. It won’t take any time at all.” After a moment of hesitation, he asked, “Do you want to come with me?”
“With the children?”
He winced. “That’s a full day’s outing, best left for when there’s not so much work waiting. I can be up and back in an hour if I go alone.”
“That’s probably best, then,” she said with a faltering nod. He heard her disappointment, though.
Ah, screw it.
When he arrived at the office the next morning, he said to Emmett, “Levi can’t help you today. I’m leaving the children for a few hours while I take Marigold to the hot pool.”
All the men paused what they were doing to give him looks of speculation, suspicion, and affront.
“I’ll turn my back,” he growled. “It’s a birthday treat.”
“I wish she had told us about that.” Ira squared the promissory notes he’d been recording and set them under a quartz rock they used as a paperweight. “I can sit with the little ones if you want to finish that gate with Levi,” he said to Emmett.
“I promised I’d show him how to make a peg-board puzzle,” Emmett said. “Maybe we could make it for her. Let’s both go and keep them amused, help them make some gifts for her.”
“Stoney and I will operate the rock crush by ourselves, then?” Owen griped.
“I’ll make her a bread oven,” Stoney said, drying the face he’d just washed. “Then she can make us bread without walking so far.”
“You’re going to do that today, are you?” Virgil asked with a skeptically cocked brow.
“I can start. I’ll find a good site, measure it out, calculate how many bricks it will need.” Stoney nodded with satisfaction.
“Then you’ll come help me at the rock crush?” Owen asked.
“You’ll be here minding the vault,” Stoney said.
“I hate being here by myself.” Owen scowled with annoyance. “I’d rather play with the children.”
“Then speak up sooner next time,” Ira suggested. “Sweep and wash the windows, since there’s nothing else that needs doing around here.”
“Fuck that,” Owen said without heat.
Virgil left them bickering while he saddled one of the horses.
Ira and Emmett walked up to the cabin with him. Neither said a word, but he could feel their smug sense of having won a sure-thing bet.
Not true, he wanted to say. It was all Marigold could do to speak to him in a civil tone, and all he could do to keep his wayward thoughts in check.
I need you as an employee. That’s all, he had told her, but it wasn’t true. She was under his roof every night, he saw her every day, yet he missed her. He wanted to go back to their easy friendship. If that meant literally softening her up in a warm bath, so be it.
Marigold was visibly taken aback when he told her the plan.
“I can’t leave the children to…sit and do nothing.”
“Have you tried it?” Ira asked with a smirk. “It’s pretty easy.”
“I don’t have a bathing costume,” she added with a discomfited look toward Virgil.
“Drawers will do. Or your nightdress.”
“Go on,” Emmett coaxed her. “You won’t catch Virgil being agreeable very often. Take advantage.” He waved his hands as though shooing a chicken from the garden.
With a waver of indecision and an anxious tsk, Marigold slipped into her room and came back with her shawl rolled around something. She set it in a basket with two leftover rolls, a chunk of cheese, and a jar of pickles.
“I nearly forgot the berry roots,” she said, flustered as she hurried about.
Virgil couldn’t tell if she was nervous about the outing itself or being with him.
A short time later, he secured everything to the saddle and mounted. Stoney boosted Marigold up behind him, tipped his cap, then went back to the spot where he had measuring chains staked out.
“It’s terrible weather for an outing.” Marigold retied her bonnet. “Are you sure about this?”
“I hate to break it to you, Marigold, but this is fine fall weather. ‘Terrible’ weather doesn’t let you out the door to use the john. Hang on.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and hunched into his back, face between his shoulder blades.
He waited until he was facing away from the cabin to let himself smile.
…
They dismounted where tall grass stood brown and brittle around a wickiup that seemed to have withstood several seasons of winds and rain. A stream burbled nearby, and a squirrel with fat cheeks scampered from a fallen pine cone up the trunk of a tree.
Marigold turned to look back on their valley. This elevation afforded a view westward as well. Through the sleet, the mountains plaited one into another into the distance. Some wore red and gold skirts in their lower valleys. All wore white crowns and a powder of sugar.
“What a beautiful view.”
“’Tis.” Virgil removed their things from the saddle and led the horse into a crude barn that she imagined had been the home for whichever animals they’d brought from California. “I think of building a house up here sometimes,” he said when he emerged and stood next to her, surveying the world. “Mostly it’s a pipe dream to get me through a shitty day,” he said with a self-deprecating quirk of his mouth.
She almost said, Like this one? The spitting rain was more like ice pellets that stung her cheeks. Not terrible weather, he claimed, but it felt pretty abysmal.
“This spot loses sunshine for a few weeks in the winter. The streams make up for it, though. That one’s cold.” He nodded to the thin trickle moving down a line of rocks, then picked up the shovel and the paper-wrapped raspberry roots. He led her to where steam rose from a thicket of cattails that were turning to fluff.
As she followed, Marigold hugged the shawl she had rolled around her nightdress and her small towel. “Hot and cold running water? Where are we? New York City?”
He snorted. “The cold water is sweet, but this warm stuff makes coffee taste like the south end of a goat. We made ourselves drink it because the Arapahoe say its medicinal. Tom knew of it and brought us here. We dammed it, then lived in that wickiup.” He thumbed back at it. “We would have rather stayed down in the valley to protect against claim jumpers, but we would have died if we hadn’t had this bath to warm up in.”
The cattails hid a pool that had been dug into the embankment and was surrounded by stones. The water was deep enough in the center that she couldn’t see the bottom. She could hardly imagine a half-dozen men jammed into such a small space, but with frost biting at them, they probably hadn’t minded rubbing shoulders.
“Did you want to change in the wickiup?” He looked back at its barely there walls. “We always stripped here and, well, we were all men so we didn’t wear anything at all.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll scout a spot for your raspberries while you—” He abruptly brushed past her, leaving her standing on the muddy shoreline.
Marigold hesitated, but the biting wind had been trying to cut her in half for the better part of an hour. She glanced to the water, then looked for Virgil. He was gone.
She crouched to touch the water. It felt too heavenly and inviting to stand on modesty. She had brought her nightdress but decided her chemise would do.
She left her outer clothes and drawers under a small lean-to she suspected had been built for this very purpose, to keep snow and rain off one’s clothes while bathing. She carefully entered the pool, inching her feet along the slippery rocks as she slowly submerged into water that was so warm it was almost uncomfortable.
As she grew used to it, she slithered farther along the edge. The water gradually grew deeper. She had never learned to swim, but she and Pearl had often waded into the neighbor’s pond on hot summer days. This was better. Marigold found a flat rock near the embankment and settled onto it.
The water covered her chest and met over her shoulders. She sighed, listening to the hiss of the wind in the drying vegetation around her. Sleet continued to peck her cheeks, but she turned her face into it, feeling invincible against it. She had a fleeting thought that she ought to look for watercress or any other plant tricked into believing it was spring because of the warm water here, but she closed her eyes, mind drifting to other things.
As birthday gifts went, this might be the best one she had ever received. She was thrilled with all that Pearl had sent her, but every single thing meant work—planting and harvesting, instructions for foraging and preserving, preparing tonics and poultices. Having a break from thinking and working and minding the children was invaluable.
Not that she resented them. They were wellsprings of love, providing affection and a sense of value that had been missing from her life for far too long, but the younger two were demanding. Harley had to be watched closely, and Nettie never ran out of questions. She reminded Marigold of herself at that age. Marigold spared a moment of pity for her parents, the headmistress at Miss Linnington’s Academy for Young Ladies, and poor, beleaguered Uncle Felix.
She hadn’t thought of her parents in a long time. In many ways, she had only been able to think of survival since they’d died in a carriage accident. She and Pearl had been caked in grief when Uncle Felix had told them they would have to leave Bedford and go to boarding school. Marigold had thought she couldn’t feel so abandoned as when they arrived there and were forced into separate rooms.
The academy had been a constant test, full of snobbish girls who had families to go home to on summer and Christmas break. She and Pearl had struggled to find their place, Pearl less so because she was naturally warm and compliant. Marigold was more assertive and competitive with her grades. She had wanted to become a teacher, but the pressure to marry had been enormous. Everyone had said she was doing the right thing marrying Ben. She had thought it would give her the stable, fulfilling life she had longed for since her parents had passed. That had been the dream that had got her through her own shitty days.
She hadn’t had any sort of fantasy to get her through her days in court, though. Her character had been publicly assassinated, and friends began crossing the street to avoid her. When Uncle Felix suggested moving to Kansas Territory, she had thought it couldn’t be any harder than what she’d been through. At least the daily struggle would be for a good cause, she had reasoned.
There had been a heartening promise in homesteading. At first, she had made a few friends through the suffragists. They had supported her decision to rid herself of her no-good husband and had loaned her books to read, then engaged in stimulating conversation about the texts.
There had been that other element, however. The angry, denigrating people who knew what she stood for—not just a free state, but voting rights for all and abolishing slavery. She believed women should be allowed to own property and pursue an education—professional employment, even! What a scandal! But if she had been allowed to obtain a law degree, perhaps she would have kept her house in her divorce.
For those radical views, she’d become a pariah, so much so that Pearl had often tried to hush her in public. Don’t say anything. Don’t embarrass me.
Uncle Felix had been equally vocal, but men were allowed to have opinions. As they had stood outside their burning house, Pearl hadn’t sent baleful looks at Uncle Felix as the reason for the arson. She had asked Marigold, Why couldn’t you let things be?
Marigold liked to think she knew better, she supposed. That she could make things better. If she didn’t try, who would? That’s why she had interfered with Hiram, nudging him toward Pearl.
Her sense that she did know better had been reinforced on that bleak morning when they had found themselves homeless. Hiram’s mother had extended an invitation to Pearl. Marigold had yet to receive a letter announcing their engagement, but she was sure it was only a matter of time. She took a lot of comfort knowing Pearl was in a good situation, and yes, perhaps she was a little smug about it, too.
It struck her that she missed her sister sorely, but she had stopped wishing that she could have stayed in Topeka. Uncle Felix had been offered a room at a men’s boarding house, but the one for women was only for spinsters and widows. I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis, but you seem to attract the wrong sort of attention. Even the church had been hard-pressed to find someone willing to let her sleep on their screened porch for a few days.
So she’d come here.
Against the odds, she had begun to feel as though she had a place in this world, until things with Virgil had become so complicated. Lately, they walked around the small cabin like a pair of horseshoe magnets aligned on the same poles, pushing against one another with invisible force. She kept trying to let go of the silly pipe dreams she’d had about him, but now he had done this incredibly nice thing for her, bringing her up to this pool and leaving her to—
Wait. Had he left her here? Completely alone?
“Virgil?” she called, fighting sudden panic.
Even if he was nearby, what if he was attacked by a wolf or a mountain lion? Her heart began to race as she realized how vulnerable she was, like a newborn baby helpless in the wilderness. She could die trying to find her way back to the cabin.
“Virgil!” she shouted.
A tromping crash sounded. He waded through the patch of cattails and looked around, then scowled at her with confusion. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She sank back to her chin, feeling silly. “I didn’t know where you went.”
“To plant your raspberries.”
“You found a suitable place?”
“Yes. They’re in the ground.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” His gaze met hers, then quickly shot off into the distance. “Are you enjoying the soak?”
It struck her that she was in her chemise and the lace-edged calico would be hiding little now that it was soaked through.
He didn’t leer, though. His profile only held a sense of listening closely, as though it mattered to him whether she was pleased.
“Very much. Thank you,” she said shyly.
“Good.” He nodded and— Was that a smile?
No. Not really. Maybe? His scar pulled his mouth offside when he smiled, making him look more threatening than he was. He wasn’t cruel at all, just thoughtless sometimes. Protective of himself. People struck out when they were defensive. She knew that because she did it herself.
“Well, I’ll—” He started to move away.
“Would you—” They had spoken at the same time.
He paused. “Would I what?” he prompted.
“I only wondered if you would be willing to tell me how you got your scar?” She bit her lip, wishing she hadn’t asked. They weren’t so close anymore that he would confide personal details just because she asked.
He shrugged. “Saloon brawl. Owen thinks he’s funny. Not everyone agrees.”
“You protected him?” Why didn’t that surprise her?
“He did it for me once.” He took hold of a bursting cattail, and a puff of fluff scattered on the wind. “More than once, but that’s how we met, when we were boys. My mother sent me to school. I have no idea how she got my father to agree to it. I didn’t go half the time because no one wanted me there. Everyone knew who my father was, but they also knew he didn’t claim me, so they made me a target without any consequence.
