Willow: A Novel (No Series) (32 page)

After a few seconds, he could see quite clearly. Willow wore a white nightgown, and the hem was darkened by dampness. She had been outside, walking in the deep, chill grass, wandering.

Unsafe. Vulnerable to a world where mercy was often in short supply.

Gideon ached to speak to his wife, to touch her and comfort her, but he was afraid. There was an ethereal look about Willow, as though she might dissipate into a shimmering fog if he startled her.

His attention caught on the music box. It was not the one he had bought for her but another that he had never seen before. Atop its round silver base, a tiny lady turned, her satin dress imprisoning stray beams of moonlight. Distractedly, Gideon wished that he had given her his gifts—the mechanical monkey and the piano music box—but they were still wrapped in their brown parcel and tucked beneath the seat of his buggy.

Cautiously, Gideon crept back up the stairs. At the top, in the shadowy hallway, he braced both arms against the wall and buried his face in them, breathing deeply, raggedly. Then, resolute, he found a lamp, lit it, and made as much noise as he possibly could on his way back down the steps.

“Couldn’t you sleep?” he asked, with forced cheer, when he reached the kitchen again.

Willow smiled, not even looking up from the music box. “Steven gave me this,” she said dreamily. “Don’t you think it’s lovely?”

Gideon knew a brief, quiet terror, then quickly recovered
himself. “Yes,” he agreed, frightened, setting down the lamp and making a great clatter with the lids of the cook stove. “When was that, Willow?”

“Just after I came to live with my father,” she said, and it was as though tragedy had not touched her this day or any other. She seemed spellbound, almost bewitched, sitting there in the moonlight, smiling.

Gideon lit a fire in the stove and then crossed the room to ladle water from a bucket into the coffeepot. “I’ll bet you were scared,” he prompted carefully. “Leaving everyone you knew and going to live with the judge and my mother, I mean.”

Still, Willow did not look at him; he would have felt it if she had. “I was frightened at first, but Steven promised me everything would be all right, and Maria was with me. Your mother tried to make Maria go away, you know, but she wouldn’t.”

His throat ached. “My mother was a trial to you, wasn’t she, Willow?”

Willow nodded as Gideon passed her to set the pot back on the stove and spoon coffee grounds into the basket. “I was a trial to her, too, though. Every time Evadne looked at me, she must have seen Chastity.”

Gideon sighed and the lid of the coffeepot clattered as he replaced it. “Yes,” he said. And he stood that small distance from the woman he loved and wished that she would look up from that blasted music box, that she would spring at him or call him names as she had earlier. That would have been so much better than this odd enchantment that seemed to be upon her now.

“Sit down,” she said, finally, as though he were a neighbor come to tea and not a man she had loved into insanity in the seat of a buggy, in the lush depths of the grass, in the empty bed upstairs.

Gideon sat wishing that she would look at him instead of through him. “You’ve been outside,” he ventured, after a long, long time.

The coffee boiled over, making a hissing, snapping sound on the iron stove top. “Yes,” she answered as he bounded out of his chair and grasped the handle of the coffeepot. “I was.”

The metal seared Gideon’s hand, and he gasped in pain and muttered a curse.

Willow’s spell was immediately broken; she bounded out of her chair, insisting that he let her look at his burn. “Thunderation,” she said, sounding almost like her old self, and then she ushered him across the room to the water bucket and plunged his hand into it.

The other muscles in Gideon’s body, tensed at the moment of the burn, went slack with relief. Even greater, though, was the relief that he had been able to draw a response from Willow.

“I love you,” he told her.

She stared up at him, as though surprised. “What did you say?”

Gideon made to lift his hand out of the water and it stung as though set afire. Quickly, he submerged it again. “I said I love you,” he admitted.

“Oh,” Willow replied, and that frightening, vacuous look was back in her eyes.

Stung, Gideon took the offensive. “What were you doing outside, in the middle of the night?”

“I went to the outhouse, Gideon Marshall,” Willow answered, with just a spark of the old spirit. “Is that all right with you?”

Gideon knew that she was lying through those flawless white teeth, but he didn’t challenge her; he was too glad to see that there was still some fight in her. He only prayed that it would be enough to see her through the grim and difficult days to come.

*   *   *

The day of Steven’s funeral was picnic bright. All during the graveside service, his own grief a heavy ache within him, Devlin watched his daughter and worried.

Willow was a brave young woman, he knew that. But there was something disquieting about the way she stood so stolidly beside Gideon—the man she had spat at and called “Judas” only a few days before—her face placidly void of all expression.

Feeling as though he might have collapsed if Dove Triskadden hadn’t been there to hold him up, Devlin tried to shake off his own fathomless sorrow long enough to consider what it was about Willow’s firm composure that bothered him. Why wasn’t she weeping, like Daphne was? Had she accepted the fact that Steven was gone forever, or was she pretending that her brother still rode somewhere in the hills, still stopped trains and gambled with Shoshone braves?

When the graveside service ended at last, it took all the strength Devlin Gallagher had just to leave the
churchyard and cross the road to his own house. There, Maria, tearful and repeatedly crossing herself, had set out a mourners’ repast.

She had not attended the funeral.

The food Maria had spent the morning preparing was ignored by everyone except Willow, who went straight to the table, almost as soon as she entered the house, and began filling her plate. Devlin caught Gideon’s eye and beckoned him with a toss of his head.

They entered the study together, Devlin closing the double doors behind them, Gideon helping himself to a shot glass full of whiskey from the decanter at the side table.

“Willow hasn’t cried once,” Gideon said hoarsely, before Devlin could summon the strength to ask. “I don’t think she believes he’s really gone.”

“My God,” breathed the judge, filling a glass of his own, gazing bleakly into its depths before tossing back the contents. “What has she said?”

“Nothing,” Gideon ground out, his gaze distant. “Before we came to town this morning, Willow was setting bread to rise and humming as though none of this had happened.”

“It isn’t healthy,” fretted the judge. His own anguish had torn him, pummeled him, humbled him, but it was already easing up—a little.

“I know. I’ve tried to talk to her, but if I mention Steven’s death, she changes the subject. Last time I brought it up, she asked me if we could plant cherry trees in the front yard next spring.”

Devlin sighed and set his drink down with a thump.

“She-she wanders, too,” Gideon went on.

“What do you mean, she wanders?” snapped Devlin, gruff in his concern.

Gideon’s broad shoulders moved in a weary shrug. “Almost every night, I wake up to find that she’s gone off somewhere. Sometimes, she sits in the parlor and plays the piano, but once I found her halfway between our house and the pond.”

“You must have asked where she’d been. What did Willow say when you questioned her?”

“She told me she’d been to the outhouse.”

Devlin poured another drink. He would have welcomed intoxication, but it didn’t come. No matter how much whiskey he drank, the hurt didn’t leave him. “People handle grief in a lot of different ways, but there’s something about this that unnerves me. It isn’t like Willow; the way she behaved when Steven and the boys were brought in was more typical.”

“I know,” agreed Gideon, remembering. Longing for that other Willow, the one he’d found so unpredictable, so impossible to handle. “Did you hear what she did to the photographer’s camera?”

Devlin managed a parody of a grin. It was, Gideon thought, the saddest expression he had ever seen on a human face.

“Yes. And I’d have done that myself if I’d been there. Destroyed that camera, I mean. Damned buzzard, wanting
pictures
, for God’s sake.”

“It’s a custom I’ve never understood,” Gideon confessed.
He hesitated, then finally went on. “Photographing corpses, displaying them like some kind of warning.” He paused, cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to take Willow away somewhere, just for a while. We could go back to San Francisco—maybe even take a ship for Europe or the Far East.”

The prospect of losing Willow swept through Devlin’s grief-hollowed soul like a bitter wind. “San Francisco,” he mourned. “The Far East?”

“Just for a change of scene,” Gideon put in quickly. “We’d be gone a year and a half, at the most.”

The judge shook his head. It seemed an incomprehensible length of time, a year and a half.

And yet, if Willow would benefit . . .

“Do you think it would help her? Traveling to foreign places, I mean? She’s always wanted to see the world, but . . .”

Gideon lowered his head. “To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t even know if Willow would agree to leave Virginia City. But I’ve got to do something to reach her—she’s drifting away, Devlin. Like a ship that’s come unmoored.”

Before the judge could respond to that, a soft knock sounded at the study doors. At Devlin’s gruff invitation, Maria entered.

“There is a telegraph message for Señor Marshall,” she said, approaching Gideon, extending a folded sheet of cheap paper.

His hand trembled as he accepted it.

Devlin watched with distracted interest as Gideon scanned the message, wondering what it contained. In the final analysis, he didn’t give a damn.

Steven was dead and Willow was probably going to go away, maybe never to return. Desolate, Devlin turned his back and folded his arms across his chest.

*   *   *

“I can’t believe you want to go riding, now of all times!” cried Daphne, her mourner’s handkerchief poised within inches of her puffy, reddened eyes. She was all in black, and it made a startling contrast to her white face. She watched in stricken amazement as her friend turned from the window of her bedroom, looking determined. “Willow Marshall, your brother is dead. Can you grasp that? We saw Steven buried today, with our own eyes, and there’s a
wake
going on in this house.”

Willow knelt and began digging through the trunk at the foot of her childhood bed, hauling out trousers and a shirt to replace the black sateen dress she had been wearing since morning. “Daphne, just shut up and change your clothes, will you?” she snapped. “It will be dark soon.”

“Do you really believe for one infernal minute that Gideon and your father are going to allow you to go
riding
?
Now
, of all times?”

Willow shimmied out of the hateful, restrictive dress and began pulling on the trousers. She paused long enough to fling a second pair across the room to Daphne. “Papa and Gideon won’t even notice that we’re gone,” she said. “They’re shut up in Papa’s study, both of them, drowning their sorrows in whiskey no doubt, and they will probably stay there half the night.”

Daphne looked appalled. “Willow, how can you be so callous, so, so blithe! I thought you loved Steven!”

“I do.”

“You mean you did,” insisted Daphne.

Willow sighed, tugging on her riding boots. “I mean I do,” she corrected firmly.

Daphne went completely white. Then, at last, she began divesting herself of her dress and petticoats to don the trousers and shirt Willow had tossed her.

*   *   *

Gideon folded the telegraph message and tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. Jack Roberts had heard about Daphne’s affection for Steven Gallagher, most likely from Hilda, and he was on his way to Virginia City. Probably, it was already too late to send a return wire and inform him that the danger to his daughter’s virtue had been permanently removed.

Having wandered outside into the garden encompassing one side of the judge’s property, Gideon sat down on a marble bench. What with everything else that was going on in his life right now, he really didn’t need a confrontation with Daphne’s father. On the other hand, he was going to have to explain everything sooner or later anyway. It might as well be sooner.

“Señor?”

Gideon looked up to see one of Maria’s cousins standing near the lilac bushes, his hat turning nervously in his hands. “Yes—Juan?”

“I am Pablito,” said the boy stoically. “Señor, I come to tell you that the señora—Willow—she rides toward the hills.”

Gideon was alarmed. “Willow? Is she alone?”

“No. She is with the other señorita, the one who visits here.”

“I see.” Gideon ground out the words.

Pablito looked worried. “You will not follow them? Bring them back home?”

Gideon sighed. If going riding would help Willow deal with what had happened to her beloved older brother, and to the younger ones, he wasn’t about to get in her way. Nothing he’d said or done so far had been of any comfort and, besides, she was with Daphne.

There was some comfort in that.

“No,” he heard himself say. “Let them go.”

Approval flashed in the dark eyes—along with something else that was harder to recognize and define.
“Sí,”
Pablito said, and then he turned and left the garden as quietly as he had entered it.

Gideon sat for a while longer and then rose from the bench. It wouldn’t be right to go chasing after Willow, yet he couldn’t remain in or near this house much longer, either. The sense of loss was oppressive.

First his mother, whom he missed more than he’d expected to, and now Steven and his and Willow’s young half brothers.

Would the dying stop now? Gideon wondered.

He thought briefly of his brother, wondering where Zachary had gone without so much as a word of farewell, let alone explanation. But he was used to the distance between himself and his brother, whether that distance was measured by miles or by the human heart.