“Are you still angry with him? Don’t you have what you wanted? I’m here.” Something flickered in Fiona’s lovely amethyst eyes and it was then that Phoebe understood the whole of the truth. “Oh, forgive me. I see now that I was a secondary consideration, really nothing more than a convenience you could use to explain your desire to go back to New York. Doyou ever miss me at all, Fiona, or is it the city you miss, the theater, the applause?”
Phoebe saw Fiona raise her hand in what was surely going to be an imploring gesture followed by a plea for understanding or a denial of all that had preceded it. That script had been a cliché for a long time. “I think I will explore on my own,” she said quietly. Holding tight to the shredded remnants of her dignity, Phoebe turned on her heel and walked away.
• • •
So as not to engage Ellie in conversation when the housekeeper was preparing lunch and she herself was feeling particularly brittle, Phoebe left the house by the front door. She stood for a time on the lip of the porch, taking in the broad expanse of land before the distant mountains climbed the sky. She could see now that the road they had taken last night was hardly more than two tracks of dirt rutted by buckboard and buggy wheels. Long shafts of bright green grass were trampled by horses who were deliberately ridden clear of the road. Pink and purple and yellow wildflowers, none whose name she knew, dotted the grass and occasionally formed clusters that dipped and swayed when a breeze stirred close to the ground.
She stepped lightly down the stairs and out from under the shadow of the porch roof and into the sunlight. The warmth on her face was lovely and she basked in it until the crick in her neck forced her to lower her head. She took a path of her own making away from the porch. When she judged she had walked far enough, she turned to face the house. Last night there had been no opportunity to take in more than its silhouette in the moonlight. Now she could see that the porch ran the formidable length of the house. There was a swing she had not noticed when she stood on the porch and two rockers on the left side of it. She would sit there later, she decided, probably on the swing, and read a book from Thaddeus’s collection, or then again, she might do nothing at all.
The thought of doing nothing made her smile. It wasn’t possible. Doing nothing was hard work, and she didn’t have the constitution for it.
Thaddeus came around the house on the swing side. She raised her arm and waved to him. He put up a hand to acknowledge her and then began striding toward her.
“I’ve been looking for you. Fiona and Ellie didn’t know where you’d gone.” He took her hands, stood back, and looked her over. “Splendid, Phoebe. You look splendid. You’ll see that everything here will agree with you. The air. The sunshine. The... company.”
“The cows, you mean. You are talking about the cows. I can smell them from here.”
Chuckling, he gave her hands a shake before he dropped them. “That particular fragrance is coming from the barn, and we don’t keep cows in the barn. That’s horse manure and usually the wind’s blowing from the other direction and there’s no whiff of it here. Young Johnny is supposed to be mucking the stalls, but he’s harder to find when there’s work to be done than you are.”
“Oh, you have work for me?”
“Of a sort. It’s not what you think.” He turned, held out his elbow. “Will you allow me to show you around?”
“I’d like that.” She slipped her arm in his and they started to walk. “I was going to explore on my own, but this is nicer.”
“For me also. Ben volunteered early on, but I needed him to go back to town and bring the thoroughbred that Remington purchased in Chicago. There were two, but my son wants to keep Bullet. The horse is a good cutter, so I’ve decided I can forgive him.”
“So the price of me being here was more than two thousand dollars. I cost you a thoroughbred.”
Thaddeus stopped dead in his tracks. “Damn me for a clod. Is that what you heard? I wasn’t talking about the money. I was talking about my son. Fiona says my sense of humor is impoverished. That’s what she says. Impoverished. Always tickles me to hear her say so. She breaks it down toall its syllables. Might even add one that’s not supposed to be there.”
That made Phoebe laugh. “Where is Remington?”
“Probably trying to scare up Johnny Sutton. Could be anywhere.”
“You gave him the photograph I gave you. Why did you do that?”
“The way I remember it, he asked for it. Turns out it was a good thing because he might not have spotted you without it. You don’t mind that I wanted to provide you with an escort, do you?”
“It’s hard to mind when it turned out to be a good thing as well.”
Nodding, Thaddeus steered her around the back of the house, past where the chickens were scratching the ground and the rooster was strutting, past the smokehouse, the woodshed, the pump and troughs, and the pigpen, past the large rectangle of overturned earth and the furrows where tiny green shoots would rise soon and reveal the promise of a garden.
He led her past the bunkhouse to the corral. The three horses inside wandered aimlessly until the smallest one spied them at the rail.
“That’s the mare I rode,” Phoebe said. “At least I think it is.”
“It is.”
“Do you think she recognizes me?”
“Maybe your smell.”
Phoebe was quite sure that between Fiona’s bath salts and Ellie’s balm, she smelled nothing at all like she did when the mare was forced to accept her as a rider. She did not explain any of that. “You’re probably right,” she said.
Thaddeus folded his forearms and placed them on the top rail of the corral and told her about the homestead, some of which she knew from conversations in New York, but had a better appreciation for now. He pointed out the distant grazing pastures in a pocket formed by verdant hillsides. The cattle were already beginning to move there, he told her, andby summer those that weren’t clustered around watering holes would spread like the wildflowers she’d been admiring earlier.
Phoebe was loath to interrupt, but in good conscience, she could not allow him to go on as if there was nothing else they needed to discuss. She laid her hand on his forearm and squeezed gently. “Why am I here, Thaddeus? May I still call you that?”
