“They’re frozen to my woolens,” he murmured, closing his eyes. “If I pull them off, the skin comes too.”
Adela did not sigh. She laid her mending aside, rose with that slow, deliberate gravity that made her look like a landmark, and fetched the kettle of warm water she kept for the tea-steeping. She didn’t ask for permission. She dropped to her knees—an awkward, heavy motion that made her bombazine skirt rustle loud against the floorboards—and set her large, warm hands directly over his boots, right where the stiff leather gripped his instep.
Lawrence jerked slightly, his eyes snapping open. “Adela—”
“Quiet,” she said. Her voice was not soft; it had the dry, raspy scrape of a schoolmistress handling an unpromising pupil. “If you lose those toes, I’ll have to haul you to Muscogee myself, and the wagon has no springs.”
She poured the warm water slowly down the tongue of the boot, letting the heat soak through the wool and the cracked cowhide until the leather softened. Her fingers, red-knuckled from the lye-tub and calloused from the pen, worked the stiff leather away from his heels with a steady, unhurried pressure. She didn’t look at his face; she looked only at the boots, her breath coming out in small, rhythmic puffs in the cold air between them.
Lawrence sat very still. His hands, which had been trembling with the bone-chill of the north wind, lowered slowly until his palms rested flat on her shoulders—not in an embrace, but as if he needed a post to steady himself against the turning of the room. He didn’t say anything. He simply watched her ear, where a stray lock of rusted-iron hair had come loose and was dangling down toward her collar.
When the left boot finally slipped off with a wet *schlop*, Adela didn’t move away. She stayed kneeling there on the cold puncheon floor, her hands holding his bare, blue-veined foot between her palms, breathing the smell of wet wool and horse-sweat and liniment.
“You’re an obstinate woman, Miss Albright,” he whispered.
“And you’re a reckless man, Dr. Redfield,” she answered, her thumbs moving once, very lightly, over the arch of his foot before she let go and stood up with a grunt of effort. “Eat your bacon. It’s greased with lard and tastes of nothing, but it’s warm.”
That was the SPARK—not a grand declaration under the prairie stars, but the sudden realization that they were both terribly tired, remarkably stubborn, and entirely necessary to one another’s survival in a cabin that leaked when the wind came from the west.
By January, the arrangement had shifted without a word being signed. Toby called him “Doctor Laurie” and spent his afternoons carving whistles out of willow twigs while Lawrence showed him how to mix powdered chalk with gum arabic to make pills for the town shopkeeper. Adela kept the accounts, such as they were—mostly entries of twenty pounds of flour for a set of splints or three cords of oak wood for a Latin grammar for the blacksmith’s sixteen-year-old boy, who wanted to read Caesar before he died of the ague.
They did not speak of love. They spoke of salt pork, the price of oats in Fort Gibson, and whether the well was going to freeze solid before the New Year. But when Lawrence sat across the table at night, scraping his scalpels with an oil-stone, his eyes followed her as she moved between the hearth and the cot where Toby was breathing in the heavy, whistling rhythm of a child with a winter cold.
And then, on the third of February, the mail-rider dropped a square, heavy envelope into the post-box at the general store—an envelope addressed in a thin, spidery hand that Adela recognized before she even broke the blue wax seal.
It was from her cousin Arthur in Philadelphia.
Lawrence came in late that night, shaking the snow from his hat and stamping his boots on the scraper outside the door. He stopped when he saw Adela sitting by the dead hearth, the candle burned down to a greasy nub, holding a single sheet of heavy cream-laid paper in her lap. She hadn’t lit the grease-lamp for Toby, and the room was so cold her breath plumed white against the dark wall.
“Adela?” he said, hanging his coat on the peg with a dry rattle of wood. “Is the boy worse?”
“No,” she said. Her voice was quite flat. “Toby is sleeping. But my aunt is dead.”
Lawrence paused, his hand still on the peg. He looked at her back—broad, rigid, enclosed in the gray bombazine that had grown too tight across her shoulder-blades since October. “I’m sorry. Was she—did you care for her?”
“I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve,” Adela said. She turned the paper over. The cream-colored stock looked absurdly clean against the scarred pine of the table. “She left the house on Lombard Street to me. And fifty dollars a month from the woolen mills, provided I return within six months to take up residence and dismiss ‘such entanglements as might compromise the family dignity.'”
The silence in the cabin grew very large. Outside, a coyote barked once down by the river-bend, a thin, sharp sound that died away into the cottonwoods.
Lawrence walked slowly across the room, his boots making no sound on the dirt-packed floor where the rug had worn thin. He didn’t touch her; he stopped two feet away, his hands shoved deep into his trousers pockets, looking down at the top of her rusted-iron bun.
“That’s a comfortable house, I expect,” he said carefully. “Lombard Street. Brick walks. Paved gutters. Real glass in the windows.”
“It has a coal grate in the parlor,” Adela said. “And an upstairs maid named Bridget who knows how to starch a collar without scorching it.”
“And the boy?”
“Arthur says there are parish schools in Philadelphia that don’t charge three cents a week for slate pencils.” She looked up then, her eyes dry and hard as river stones. “He says I’m a fool to stay down here in the mud among people who don’t know the difference between an ablative and an accusative.”
“Arthur is probably right,” Lawrence said. He didn’t look away from her. His jaw was set so tight the muscle twitched just below his ear. “It’s no place for a woman with Lombard Street blood. You’ve got ink on your fingers that won’t wash off with lye-soap, Adela, but you don’t belong in a harness shop.”
“And you?” she asked, her voice dropping into that low, dangerous register that meant she was waiting for him to say the wrong thing so she could have the satisfaction of being entirely correct. “What happens to the quinine and the blacksmith’s boy if I take the stage north on Monday?”
“I’ll buy some better labels,” Lawrence said, and for the first time that winter there was no humor in his voice at all. “And I’ll probably let the wood-pile rot.”
They sat there in the dark for a long time, neither of them moving, while the tallow candle flickered out and left them in the gray, shifting light of the moon on the snow outside.
*
The stage-coach from Atoka did not run on Mondays if the mud was over the hubs, but Monday came anyway, gray and wet and smelling of thawed horse-muck.
Adela had her trunk packed by dawn—the old leather-bound trunk with the brass corners that her father had brought out from Ohio twenty years ago. It sat by the door like a squat, disapproving visitor, taking up three square feet of the harness shop’s limited floor space. Toby was sitting on top of it, swinging his short legs and trying to scrape a dried glob of red clay off his heel with a broken table-knife.
Lawrence was not in the room. He had been gone since four o’clock, riding out toward the bottoms where a bay mare belonging to the freight contractor had dropped a breech-calf in the sleet.
“Is Dr. Laurie coming back before the horses get here?” Toby asked, squinting down at the knife-blade.