The Bridegroom (16 page)

Gideon took pride in that, took pride in
Lydia
.

He went to the stove, took his somewhat shriveled
supper—some sort of meat, boiled cabbage and a baked potato—from the warming oven. If he hadn’t been in the presence of a lady, he wouldn’t even have bothered to get silverware and sit down at the table to eat.

“Is something wrong?” he asked moderately, when Helga kept staring at him with undisguised irritation.

“Lydia is unhappy,” Helga said, keeping her distance but showing no signs of retreating to her bedroom under the stairs and leaving him to eat in peace. “And that’s your doing, unless I miss my guess.”

“She’s worried about Lark,” Gideon said, sitting down, jabbing a fork into the potato. That was true, wasn’t it? Lydia looked up to Lark, took every word the woman said as gospel.

“Lydia had been crying when Miss Mittie and Miss Millie and I got here this morning,” Helga insisted, grave and suspicious. “And that was before she knew there was anything the matter with Mrs. Yarbro.”

Gideon didn’t answer, and even though his appetite had gone, he kept eating because his hungry body wouldn’t let him stop.

“I helped you steal Lydia because I knew she’d wither away and die if she married Jacob Fitch,” Helga went on. “And I figured you must have cared about her plenty, if you’d go to all the trouble of carrying her out of that wedding and bringing her here.”

“I care,” Gideon said.

Helga studied him for a long time, her eyes narrowed. “You’d damn well better,
Mr.
Yarbro,” she finally said.
“You’d damn well better.”

With that, she turned, practically on one heel, and left Gideon alone in that empty kitchen with his stewed beef, his cabbage, his potato—and his badly bruised conscience.

L
YDIA LAY ALONE IN HER
marriage bed, listened to Gideon’s footsteps as he climbed the nearby staircase, paused outside her door, and then went on to the next room.

Her eyes smarted fiercely as she huddled there in the darkness, curled into a stiff little ball of abject sorrow. So the leaving had already begun, then; even while they still lived under the same roof, Gideon was moving away from her—one closed door at a time.

Crying would have been a relief, but Lydia had spent all her tears that morning, when Gideon had first told her he planned to go away and leave her behind, and through the long ordeal with Lark. She was dry-eyed now, scraped to a hollow rawness inside.

Had Lark been there to advise Lydia, she probably would have sent her marching right out into the hallway and then straight on into the room where Gideon clearly meant to pass the night. But Lark
wasn’t
there, or in any condition to give counsel, even if she had been, and Lydia couldn’t make herself go to her husband.

It wasn’t pride that kept her where she was—she didn’t have much of that left, thanks to Gideon. And it certainly wasn’t a lack of desire—even now, her body, like the strings of an exquisitely tuned harp, yearned for the play of Gideon’s fingers, his lips, his tongue. Everything Lydia
was—flesh and spirit, substance and space—ached with the effort to contain that soundless music and the need to set it free.

No, what bound Lydia—
Mrs. Gideon Yarbro,
she thought bitterly—to that bed was simple common sense. The parting would be difficult enough, whether it took place tomorrow or months from now, and giving herself up to Gideon’s attentions, and the inevitable, deeper craving to follow, would render it nigh onto impossible. Even if he stayed longer than expected, the waiting would be unbearable.

So Lydia didn’t move.

And she didn’t sleep until far, far into the night, when weariness at last overcame her and pulled her under.

G
IDEON AWAKENED, AFTER
a fitful sleep, fraught with nightmares and more wearying than restful, with the three blasts of the mine whistle Mike had told him would come if the mine was to be open that day.

Hastily, he rolled out of the bed he’d slept in—alas, a bed without Lydia in it, and narrow and hard in the bargain—grabbed up the clothes he’d discarded the night before, and pulled them on. Given that he’d only worked half a day in these duds, they were passably clean.

Passing Lydia’s door, Gideon paused outside it, as he had the previous night, wanting to knock, go in, say something that might soothe her, or even make her smile.

But what was there to say?

He hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly, down there in the kitchen yesterday morning, but nevertheless, he had. And he’d only told the truth—when his job in Stone Creek was finished, he’d be hitting the road, going back to Wells Fargo, working all of the country the way he had since he’d taken up his transient profession.

Most of the other detectives he knew were unmarried—they had to be ready to board a train for parts unknown at any time, with little or no advance warning, and that was no life for a woman. Especially a woman like Lydia, whose yearning for a home and a family showed plain in her face, at least to Gideon, every time she saw Lark and Rowdy or Wyatt and Sarah together.

A few—a very few—of the company wives did travel with their husbands, but the strain soon showed. City to city, hotel to hotel, boardinghouse to boardinghouse, always another train to catch, it wore on the women, and on the men, too.

No, Lydia would not be happy with such an existence, and she’d never leave the elderly aunts on their own anyway, not even with Helga around to look out for them.

So Gideon wrenched himself away from Lydia’s door, went on down the corridor to the bathroom. There, he washed up, brushed his teeth, ran a dampened comb quickly through his hair.

He descended the back stairs carrying his boots, not wanting to awaken the household, and was unsettled when he found Helga already up and dressed, and one of the aunts—Mittie or Millie?—seated at the table.

The older woman was polishing an ornate silver vase, surely rescued from the house in Phoenix before the exodus, and when she saw Gideon, she smiled wistfully and said, “The Washingtons gave this to the Fairmont family many years ago.”

Gideon said nothing.

“George and Martha Washington,”
Mittie-or-Millie elaborated.

He probably looked impressed then, since he was.

“I’ve fried up a few sausages and baked biscuits for your
breakfast,” Helga said, jamming herself into the conversation like a wedge, and her tone and manner were as patently unfriendly as they had been last night. “Put together a dinner pail, too.”

The smell of the sausage and biscuits made Gideon almost light-headed; since starting work at the mine, he’d been perennially hungry. “Thanks,” he said. On another morning, in another mood, he would have tried to coax a smile from Helga, just on general principle, but he had enough hard labor ahead of him at the mine without trying to ingratiate himself to a sphinx.

“We had a platter that Mrs. Robert E. Lee presented to us, too,” Millie-or-Mittie prattled on dreamily. “But I imagine that’s gone to auction by now, since it surely wouldn’t have fit in Sister’s or my reticule.”

Gideon felt a pang, hearing that. Like Lydia, the aunts had given up so many things—because of him.

He took the sausages and the biscuits Helga thrust at him, bundled into a dish towel and tucked into the lard pail and, on impulse, returned to the table side to lean down and kiss the top of Mittie-or-Millie’s shimmering-white head. “That,” he said, meaning it, “is a story I’d like to hear.”

The tiny woman beamed up at him. “They’re only things, you know. Platters and books and the like. It’s the
stories
that matter. My, but Mrs. Lee was a fine lady, though sickly.”

“Let the man go, Miss Mittie,” Helga said, solving one mystery, anyway, and holding out the lard tin with Gideon’s lunch inside. “He’s got a job to get to, and you’d keep him all day, prattling on about the Washingtons and the Lees.”

“They were Virginians, you know,” Miss Mittie confided, twinkling, “just like the Fairmonts.”

Gideon grinned. “Soon as I get home, Miss Mittie,” he
said, with a quelling glance at Helga, “you can tell me as much as you want to—Lees, Washingtons, Joneses.”

Miss Mittie twittered at that, pleased.

Gideon crossed to Helga, accepted the lard tin with a nod of thanks, and hurried out the back door into the predawn light.

As he strode in the direction of the mine, he consumed the sausages and biscuits almost as gracelessly as Paddy had stuffed down his pickled eggs the day before. Mike would ask more questions if he got a look at the food—would anyway, when and if he learned what a fine house Gideon lived in—and Gideon wanted to
ask
questions, not answer them.

Moreover, he was famished.

Mike was waiting with the others, when Gideon got to the mine, all of them lined up to take orders from the mean-eyed foreman.

“My wee-ones,” Mike said quietly, when Gideon took the open place beside him, “surely relished their supper last night, young Yarbro. Can’t recall when there was ham on my table before this.”

Gideon merely nodded in acknowledgment.

The foreman was pacing in front of them now, a telegram in one hand, and he cleared his throat to stop the early-morning chatter.

“Here it comes,” Mike whispered. “And the lot of us, standing here like fools, with our mouths open so he can spoon us shit.”

“O’Hanlon,” the foreman said, “shut up.”

Mike saluted. Some of the other men, including Gideon, snickered.

The foreman scowled and then held the telegram up, like a paper flag. “This here’s come from the bosses, all the way back in Chicago,” he said. “There’ll be no more half days.”

A murmur of relief rippled through the crowd, but there were a few skeptical grunts, too. One of them came from Mike O’Hanlon.

“Steady work, right on through the winter,” the foreman went on. “That’s their promise.”

“But,”
Mike muttered, in angry anticipation.

“But,” the foreman continued, “there will be a cut in wages.”

This announcement met with loud groans and a few curses, and O’Brien, the man who’d spoken up in the bar the day before, only to be quickly shushed by Mike, growled, “I say we throw down our picks and shovels and be done with it!”

More than one man agreed, though Mike turned and sent a glare down the line that silenced all of them.

The foreman, red faced, the telegram no longer flapping at the end of his arm like a flag on a pole, but crumpled in his right fist, looked as though the top of his head might fly off on a geyser of steam. “Go ahead,” he thundered, “walk out! They’ll have a trainload of coolies here to replace you by nightfall, and then what will you do?”

“No need to call in the Chinamen, Wilson,” Mike said to the foreman. His tone was deceptively mild; Gideon felt his rage, like heat emanating from an overstoked furnace. “We’ll do the work, and we’ll take the cut in pay, because we don’t have a choice, do we? We’ve got babes at home, every one of them hungry.”

Wilson stormed over to Mike, stood nose to nose with him. “Don’t you yammer on about hungry babies, O’Hanlon,” he snarled. “Do you think I don’t know how much money you spend at Paddy’s, and here’s your wife taking in laundry to take up the slack?”

No one saw it coming, least of all, Wilson.

One moment, he was standing, the next he was flat on
his back, bleeding from the nose and groaning in pain, and O’Hanlon was flexing the fingers of his right hand, as though he feared he’d broken them.

No one moved.

No one spoke.

Wilson hauled himself to a sitting position, the wadded telegraph forgotten on the ground beside him. He glared up at Mike, his hatred almost palpable in the soft coolness of the morning.

“I ought to fire you,” he said. “Send you packing, right here, and right now.”

“But you won’t, will you,
Mr.
Wilson?” Mike asked, lethally affable. “Because if you do, why, I won’t have nothin’ left to lose, will I? And with nothin’ left to lose, I might just stomp you into a pulp your own sainted mama wouldn’t recognize, mightn’t I?”

“Mike,” someone muttered, but the tone wasn’t one of protest. It was a warning.

“To work, then,” Mike said, to the whole company. “A full day’s sweat for half a day’s pay.” He looked down at Wilson, actually extended a hand to help the man rise, a hand that was pointedly ignored. “Is that about right, Mr. Wilson?” he asked. “Half what we were getting before?”

“It’s right,” Wilson allowed, holding his forearm to his face in a vain attempt to staunch the flow of blood.

“And what about you? Is it half wages for you, as well?”

“That’s none of your damn business,” Wilson answered, on his feet now, but swaying enough that Gideon had to restrain himself from reaching out a steadying hand.

The other men were heading into the mine by then, and Gideon trailed after them, but slowly, because Mike was still standing in the same place, leaning into Wilson a little, and that meant there might be more he needed to see and hear.

“You think that’s a lot of blood, Mr. Wilson?” Mike asked, his voice as friendly as if they were two friends deciding whether to while away an afternoon playing checkers or horseshoes. “It’s a trickle compared to what will flow through the streets of this town if they send coolies in here to take our jobs. Put
that
in your telegram, when you go tattling to the owners about how the big Mick knocked you on your scrawny ass.”

Then, all but dusting his hands together, Mike turned, bent to pick up his lunch pail, and headed toward the mine entrance.

“To work, young Yarbro,” he said, as he passed Gideon. “Time’s wastin’ and we have our half wages to earn.”

“Y
OU MUSTN’T OVERDO, DEAR,”
Mittie counseled, as Lydia finished the breakfast Helga had forced her to sit down and eat before she’d allow her to leave for Lark and Rowdy’s place.

“You’re delicate,” Millie observed. “Just like your father was.”

“Nonsense,” Lydia protested, though keeping her tone moderate. “I am not the least bit delicate.”

“Nursing is hard work,” Mittie insisted. She’d been polishing the Washingtons’ vase when Lydia stepped into the kitchen, fit to wear the silver surface away, and now it gleamed so brightly that it dazzled the eyes. “Sister and I have reason to know—we helped look after wounded soldiers during the War of Northern Aggression.”

“I’m quite capable of hard work,” Lydia said firmly. She’d eaten all she could, and pushed her plate away, still nearly full, ignoring the look of disapproval the gesture brought from Helga. She stood, gathered her handbag, and a shawl and the thick volume of poetry she’d selected from Mr. Porter’s collection the day before. “Lark Yarbro looked after me when I was sick, and I will do the same for her.”