Softly Falling (48 page)

C
HAPTER
44

E
yes fierce with concentration, Luella made flowers from newspaper that Madeleine donated, with the promise that they would go in the pot-bellied stove in the dining room when all was done. While she worked, Lily taught her students to sing, “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,” from
The Mikado.

“Miss Tilton took us to London to the Savoy to see it,” Lily told them.

“You were in London last year?” Chantal asked.

Lily nodded. Was it only a year? She had worn a beautiful dress with a bustle and sat in the grand tier of the mezzanine. And here she was, trying to stay alive in Wyoming, America, the new year upon them with no change in anything. She glanced at Jack, sitting in deep conversation with Pierre. Maybe he was one of those persons susceptible to suggestion, because he turned around and blew her a kiss. Shy, she looked away.

There wasn’t much hope for her favorite dress, a green wool sadly wrinkled. Her bustle was buried under mounds of snow in her father’s house, not even surviving her removal to Jack’s house. Still, the lace collar constituted new, with an old dress. A borrowed and blue garter came from Will, surprisingly, who refused to say where he got it.

Threatening death by butcher knife to anyone foolhardy enough to stroll into the kitchen, Madeleine went to work on the wedding cake. She had requested Fothering’s assistance, broken arm and all.

Lily had no plans to sleep that night, not with the wind howling, but Luella cuddled close and warmed her. The room was dark and comforting because she had a roof over her head in no danger of flying off. Pierre and Nick had taken turns that afternoon nailing it down more firmly. The room was far from quiet, with snores and the occasional whimper from Luella, which meant Lily patted her bedmate, hoping to chase away a few demons. In spite of this, Lily felt her eyes closing.

“Lily?”

It was Jack, squatting on his haunches by her pallet.

“I have no plans to change my mind,” she whispered. “Go to sleep.”

He kissed her cheek. “I just wanted to say thank you.” He sighed and lay down on the cold floor beside her. “You’re not exactly hitching your wagon to a star, Miss Carteret,” he whispered.

“Getting cold feet?” she teased in turn.

“Lily, I wish I had a wedding ring for you.”

She turned on her side to see him better. “And I wish I had straight hair and a bank account.”

He couldn’t help his laughter, which made the other residents of Bar Dot Manor groan and demand silence. Someone threw a pillow.

“Y’all are supposed to be asleep so I can creep around and visit Mrs. Almost-Sinclair,” he protested.

“Go to bed, Jack,” she whispered. “You’re worse than my students.”

The wedding was nothing to complain about, all things considered. She dressed in the kitchen, then took the newspaper bouquet Luella handed her.

“I wish they were real flowers,” Luella said.

“I don’t. They’d freeze in no time. This is perfect.” She kissed Luella.

Before Madeleine opened the door, she pressed a dried sprig of sage in the
Cheyenne Tribune
bouquet. “Jean Baptiste gave this to me when we were married,” the cook whispered. “He wanted roses, but we live here. Just give it back when you are done.”

Madeleine opened the door, and Lily wished she had tucked her handkerchief in her sleeve. Nick cleared his throat and began to hum Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” loud enough to compete with the wind.

Jack stood at the end of the cookshack, wearing his last white shirt and a handsome paisley vest with someone’s watch fob stretched across the front. Preacher stood next to him.

To Nick’s enthusiastic accompaniment, Lily took her first step toward Jack and his crazy arrangement to keep his ranch. Chantal, Amelie, and Luella stepped in front of her and walked forward, tossing out smaller newsprint flowers with each measured tread. She wasn’t certain, because Nick was loud and so was the wind, but Lily could have sworn she heard Luella counting “one, two, three, four.”

Another step and Fothering stood beside her. He crooked out his arm. “I’m giving you away,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Ten more steps saw the journey over. As well-trained as if they were bridesmaids in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the girls moved to the side. While Lily stood there with Fothering, the girls sang “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,” coming in extra loud on each “tra la,” almost in defiance of the storm.

Delighted, Lily looked around at each face in the room. The men had frostbite scars. Will Buxton scratched discreetly at his chilblained fingers. Madeleine was already dabbing at her eyes. And there was Jack, a half smile on his face, but calm. She wondered what it would take to make him really angry and hoped she might never find out.

“Dearly beloved!” Preacher shouted to be heard above the storm. Startled, Francis arched his back, and Chantal giggled.

Fothering gave her away to Jack, who stood beside her in front of Preacher, her arm through his now. He trembled noticeably, or maybe she did.

Preacher read a verse from the book of Ruth, which made Lily swallow a few times. He asked them seriously if they would take each other for richer or poorer, better or worse, in sickness and in health until death did them part.

Or spring
, Lily thought, unsure of herself. “I will.”

Jack’s answer was more firm than hers, but she already knew he was not a man to harbor many misgivings about events.

There wasn’t a ring, which moved them right along to Preacher’s man and wife pronouncement and their first kiss. It wasn’t more than a nervous peck, but at least they didn’t bump noses.

The wedding dinner was hardly more than the usual fare, but with the menu written in French in Will’s lovely handwriting. Each place at the table had a stiff card announcing
Haricot avec des oignons
(beans with onions),
Rôti de boeuf
(roast beef),
Pain san buerre
(bread courtesy of the Buxton’s, without butter), and
Raisins sec dans le riz
(raisins and rice, thanks to the recovery of rice from the Buxton pantry).

The wedding cake was a smallish loaf cake, sweetened with Buxton sugar and a little lemon juice from Jack’s hoarded anti-scurvy supply. Madeleine had somehow worked the canned milk and a little more sugar into frosting.

Pierre toasted the happy couple with coffee, with tea for Lily and canned milk for the children. He raised his mug. “I’m not sure how this is really done, but Jack says I must.” He looked from Lily to Jack and back again. “Be very good to each other,” he said simply and drank.

There wasn’t anywhere for Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair to go, not with a blizzard outside wanting in like an uninvited guest, but the children threw dried beans because “Mama said to save the rice,” then Luella swept them up to wash off and use in the next day’s batch of
haricot avec des oignons
. Soon there would be a small sort of dance to “Sur le Pont,” and then a livelier one to “Turkey in the Straw,” Preacher’s favorite. He promised to teach them “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” if they weren’t too weary with the dissipation of such a wedding.

“What do you think, Mrs. Sinclair?” Jack asked her, after “Turkey in the Straw,” accompanied by Preacher on the harmonica, left them close to breathless.

“As weddings go?”

He had given her a wary look, and she nudged him. “I believe it met all my expectations.”

“If you had to do it over again, you’d do it differently, wouldn’t you?”

His question deserved a thoughtful answer, and she gave it one. Her friends were all here, she had a lovely bouquet, the music was excellent, the flower girls and bridesmaids didn’t misbehave, and no one hummed “The Wedding March” with more fervor than Nick Sansever. She smiled and went to nudge him again, but she ended up just leaning against his arm, which went around her in such a natural way.

“I would change one thing. Rice instead of beans. Beans hurt.”

In some ways, nothing changed on the Bar Dot. Storms rolled through, dropping a seemingly endless amount of snow. The wind stirred the snow like a petulant child at play, blowing here, then there, until the almost-laughable danger of being lost only a few feet from a building became a harsh possibility.

When the sun struggled into its rightful place in the daytime sky, and the temperatures weren’t so low they burned the lungs, the men saddled up and rode, searching for strays. There were more mercy killings than rescues, which made Jack glad that Mr. Buxton was stuck in Cheyenne and not peering over numbers in his precious ledger, now buried under snow.

In other ways, everything was different. For the first time in his life, someone waited at home for him. Jack hadn’t known that Lily would do that, but Preacher told him otherwise. Forced to stay in bed because of a racking cough, Preacher told him how Lily opened the door several times and peered outside.

“I asked Lily what she was doing, and she said you were overdue and it bothered her,” Preacher said when Lily was in the kitchen helping Madeleine.

“Surely not,” Jack said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, even though he was secretly pleased.

Preacher just shrugged. “That’s what you get for marrying someone like Lily. She has her eye on you, whether you like it or not.”

He did like it. He only half-believed Preacher until one late afternoon he rode in and spent more time currying Sunny Boy in the barn because his horse had broken through ice several times and his shins were scratched and bleeding. When he finally opened the door to the cookshack, he couldn’t overlook the sudden raising and lowering of Lily’s shoulders, which looked remarkably like relief.

“Don’t worry about me,” he had told her, which only made her brown eyes well up with tears, something he had no proof against.

“I can’t help myself,” she had replied. Then she’d busied herself setting the table, preparing for another meal of everlasting beef and beans, made just a little more special because Lily insisted he have her bit of salt pork. “I don’t like it,” she had whispered to him, but he saw how her eyes followed his hand from spoon to mouth.

They worked their way through January, one day much like the next. In spite of that, even if he and the boys were only outside dismantling unneeded sheds to add to the rapidly shrinking woodpile, Lily always had something to tell him about her day. It might be Francis allowing gentle Amelie to comb all the knots and tangles from his long-neglected fur. Or maybe Nick had mastered long division. Once it was as simple as the first day when Luella didn’t cry about her mother and her distant father. Jack came to savor every little detail, because it felt remarkably like his idea of what a home of his own would be.

In early February, all four rode north on a clear day to see how McMurdy had fared. They met the rancher and two of his men hunkered down in a sheltered draw for a palaver.

“It’s grim up here,” McMurdy admitted. “I have barely any cattle left and no idea if the drifters are safe somewhere.”

“Same with us,” Jack said.

Not sure why he blushed to give his nearest neighbor the news, but Jack told McMurdy about his wedding. McMurdy just smiled.

“Do you realize that’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard in months?” McMurdy asked. “Not sure what you have that she wanted, but I hope you get down on your knees every night and give thanks.” McMurdy slapped Jack on the back. “Boy howdy, can you blush! Do you realize if word gets out, your tough image is ruined forever?”