“There is no shame in a bad hand, Miss Albright, so long as the ink is dry before you fold the page,” Lawrence Redfield said, not looking up from the tallow-dip he was trimming. “Though if you keep pressing the nib so hard against the ledger, you’ll punch clean through to yesterday’s butter account.”
Adela Albright did not lift her chin from her palm, nor did she unbend her fingers from the steel pen. The Cherokee Strip wind was rattling the cottonwood shingles of the lean-to with the dry, steady percussion of dry bone against wood, and the smell of boiled elderberry bark and carbolic hung heavy between them like an unwashed quilt. “My hand is my own concern, Dr. Redfield, and so is the butter account. If you find my penmanship too thunderous for your quiet room, the crossing is six miles north and the ferry is running.”
“The ferry’s snagged on a cypress root and won’t be hauled till Tuesday,” Laurie remarked, finally turning. He had a smudge of dried gentian across his left cheekbone and eyes the color of stagnant river water under a gray sky, bright and terribly observant. “Besides, I didn’t say it sounded like thunder. I said it sounded like you were trying to kill the paper. Which, considering you lugged three crates of Latin grammars and a nine-year-old orphan across the Arkansas line in a springless wagon, is perhaps only your natural way of greeting the territory.”
Adela set the pen down with meticulous care, wiping her thumb on her apron—a garment of stout gray bombazine that had seen better days in St. Louis and was now slowly acquiring the red clay of the Red River bottomlands. She was a large woman, broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, with hair the color of rusted iron pinned into a bun that was already sliding over her left ear. She did not possess the kind of small, bird-like agility that the Missouri pamphlets promised frontier women; she moved with a heavy, deliberate grace, as though every square inch of her required an explicit decision before shifting.
“The grammars,” she said, her voice dropping into that low, flat register she used when she was trying very hard not to lose her temper in front of a child, “were bought with my own father’s probate money, and Toby is asleep behind the curtain, where he has been since five o’clock. If you have nothing better to do with your lamp oil than criticize my punctuation, perhaps you would care to explain why the apothecary jars on your shelf are labeled in three different handwritings, none of which appear to know what willow bark is used for.”
Lawrence laughed—not the booming, stage-play laugh of the cattle buyers who came down from Kansas, but a dry, rattling sound that ended in a cough. “The middle row is my predecessor’s. He believed in brandy and prayer, in that order. The left row is mine. The right row belongs to Mrs. Hallowell down at the ford, who collects the roots because she likes the exercise and doesn’t trust a man who shaves every day.”
“I do not shave,” Adela said severely.
“I am aware, Miss Albright. I was speaking of myself.”
That was how they began in the settlement of Red Fork—not with a rescue from a flood or a dramatic collision on the trail, but with an argument over grammar books and dried roots in a cabin that smelled permanently of scorched grease and damp wool.
Adela had come south because there was nothing left for her in Independence after her uncle’s estate was settled and her cousins made it abundantly clear that an unmarried woman of twenty-eight with an inclination toward Greek roots and a waistline like a hay bale was an expensive piece of furniture to keep in the parlor. She had brought Toby—the son of her father’s laundress, orphaned by the winter lung-fever—because the alternative was the county asylum or the mercy of people who would have worked him until his knuckles split. She had arrived with forty dollars in gold sewn into her stays, a trunk full of school-books, and the stubborn conviction that if she could teach roughneck boys how to parse an ablative absolute, she could earn enough to keep a roof over her head and a tin plate of corn-pone on the table.
Lawrence Redfield had been four years in the Territory, having drifted down from Iowa after a typhoid winter in which he had lost thirty-two patients and his belief in the efficacy of calomel. He was twenty-nine, nominally a doctor, practically a horse-doctor who occasionally set a collarbone or pulled a rotten molar for a quarter or a bushel of dried beans. He lived in the back of the disused harness shop because the floor was dry and the rent was two wild turkeys a month, which he generally forgot to collect.
They lived ten feet apart—she behind a calico curtain with Toby, he among his pill-tiles and liniment crocks—and for the first six weeks they spoke only when the stove smoked or when Toby needed his knee painted with iodine after a tumble through the barbed wire behind the blacksmith’s shed.
It was an arrangement born of scarcity. There was only one dry room with a sound roof between the river and the timber-line, and neither had the capital to build another. Adela spent her mornings listening to Toby stumble through his multiplication tables while the red mud dried on her boots into a crust like glazed pottery, and her afternoons walking three miles to the creek to wash shirts for the freight-haulers. Laurie spent his days riding his roan gelding out to the scattered homesteads where men with chills and ague lay sweating on corn-husk mattresses, returning after dark to clean his instruments by the light of a single tallow candle and mutter at his ledgers.
The change came not from an accident or a shared peril, but from a pair of gray wool socks.
It was late November when the first freeze crusted the puddles into glass. Adela had been sitting by the hearth until her eyes ached, darning Toby’s stockings with coarse gray yarn that left her fingers smelling of mutton tallow. Lawrence came in from a three-day ride out to the salt-fork; his sheepskin coat was stiff with frozen sleet, his lips were blue, and he dropped his saddlebags with a thud that shook the dry-measure corn bins against the wall.
“They’ve got the blackleg in the cattle over on Wildhorse Creek,” he said without preamble, sinking onto the bench opposite her and holding his red, swollen hands out to the small embers. “Man named Gentry lost twelve head before he’d even smelled the rot. I told him to burn the carcasses, and he threatened to fill my hat with buckshot.”
“Did he?” Adela didn’t look up from her darning. Her needle went *snip-clack* through the heel. “And did you burn them?”
“I waited until he went into the kitchen for his corn-whiskey, then I set the hay-stacks myself.” Laurie leaned his head back against the log wall with a dull *thunk*. “He’ll shoot me tomorrow.”
“He won’t,” Adela said. “He needs someone to pull his tooth on Saturday, and you’re the only man within forty miles who doesn’t use a pair of blacksmith’s tongs and a quart of bourbon.”
Lawrence turned his head slowly to look at her. The candle flickered between them, throwing long, greasy shadows across his stubbled jaw and the dark hollows under his eyes. “You have a remarkably low opinion of my profession, Miss Albright.”
“I have a remarkably low opinion of men who think a burnt hay-stack is a substitute for a civil conversation,” she replied, biting off a length of gray wool with a sharp snap of her teeth. She laid the finished stocking neatly on the stack beside her—six pairs, all mended with the same square, stubborn stitches. Then she looked at him, really looked at him, noting the graying hem of his woolen muffler and the way his fingers twitched where he held them over the coals. “Take those boots off, Dr. Redfield. You’re steaming like a wet mule.”