“Yes. For you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might insist on sleeping in the other room.”
“It occurred to me.”
“But you decided against it.”
“Because I figured you wouldn’t let me sleep there alone, and if you were going to be wherever I was, what would have been the point? Was I right?”
“Yes. I am not worried that you’ll try to hurt me again.”
“I was never trying to hurt you.”
“I know.” She laid her hand on his chest. “Where is she, Morgan? Lander?”
Morgan sighed. “You got that from Mrs. Sterling. She told me that you were asking questions this afternoon.”
“She said you met her husband in Lander. Is that where you’re from?”
“I’m from New York City, same as you, Jane.” He chuckled when her head came up as quick and alert as a prairie gopher’s. He placed his hand on her crown and applied gentle pressure until she lowered it again. “Unexpected?”
“Yes.”
“I was born there. Do you know Five Points?”
“I do. I was not allowed to go there. It’s not safe, even now.”
“Well, that’s where I’m told I was born. My mother, whoever she was, and it’s reasonable to assume she was a whore, had the decency to hand me over to the nuns at St. Mary’s. I was raised in their orphan asylum. At six, about fifteen years after the social reformers sunk their teeth into the problem of homeless, impoverished, and unwanted children, I was put on an orphan train and sent west. I was so certain I was being punished, and perhaps I was. I had friends at the asylum. None of them made the journey with me. Do you know about the orphan trains, Jane?”
“Yes. When Cousin Frances once threatened to put me on one, I made it a point to learn about them. I did not think it was the worst idea she ever had. Perhaps it was that thought lingering in the back of my mind that prompted me to answer your personal notice. Isn’t it what I did, Morgan? Put myself on an orphan train? I think, though, that my experience has been quite different from yours. Is that how you met Zetta Lee Welling? Was she the one who plucked you from the train?”
CHAPTER 12
Zetta Lee Welling was the second wife of Hamilton Welling. Hamilton, or Ham as others knew him in the territory days, had used up his first wife putting eight babies in her. The first three were stillborn, and he grieved hard for the son but hardly gave the two daughters that followed an afterthought except to make certain Essie Clare knew she was not to present him with any more girls, dead or alive.
She did not. She gave him two boys, Gideon and Jackson, with another stillborn son in between. Essie Clare begged him not to touch her again, but Ham had it in his head that he required at least four sons to manage what he intended to make of the land, and he got Essie Clare with child two more times. She presented him with two more sons, both alive at birth and both dead within days. Her last baby outlived her by fourteen hours.
Still of a mind to add two sons, and needing a mother for the two little ones he had, Ham took his sons, ten head of cattle, and rode to the outpost at South Pass on the Oregon Trail to wait for a wagon train to pass through.
He found Zetta Lee right off, and because the wagon master was happy to send her packing, she only cost Ham six of the ten head he was prepared to settle on her family. Zetta Lee always maintained that the cows were her farewell gift to the wagon party, not a bride’s price. She had no family to formally accept what Ham Welling was offering, and besides that, she was as delighted to be gone from the wagon train as her fellow settlers were happy to see her go. Even before her husband died because he was too slow or too stupid to get out of the way of a runaway wagon, Zetta Lee was at the center of unrest in the group. The women were suspicious; the men were smitten. Zetta Lee was in her glory.
She was a widow at nineteen and beholden to no one, so when Ham Welling proposed to make her his wife, the mother of his two sons, and the mistress of Welling & Sons in the Eden Valley, she accepted. Hamilton was her senior by sixteen years and range work had kept him lean and hard. He did not have a kind face, but he had the kind of face that gave her a little thrill when she caught him looking at her. She was as much taken by the way his eyes ate her up as she was by the fact that he already had two sons. She did not want children of her own. The thought of being pregnant terrified her. There was no surer means of a woman becoming old before her time than producing a litter of brats.
Zetta Lee would later say that one of the things that attracted Ham to her was knowing that she was already broke in. She would also say that he never suspected how true that was. If he thought he was ever the master in their marriage, it was because she let him think it. He put his dead wife’s ring on her finger, but he may as well have put it through his own nose because Zetta Lee led him around by it in and out of bed.
Zetta Lee was a hard worker. She made sure Ham had no complaints with her there, and she did right by Gideon and Jack, raising them to benefit from what she had learned through the eighth grade. She never turned Ham away, but neither did she give him the children he wanted. She kept her figure trim, her breasts firm, and her ebony hair glossy, and when he was range riding for days, sometimes weeks, on end, she entertained his friends from nearby Lander who stopped by to see if she needed anything. Or anyone. She always did.
Ham Welling did not know about his wife’s interests outside of their marriage bed, and because she let it be known that Ham would kill her if he ever found out, none of her lovers betrayed her—or themselves. The one concession that Zetta Lee made came five years into their marriage. Ham got it in his head again that he wanted another child. He would accept a daughter, if that’s how it turned out, but he had an unnatural fear that one of his sons would be Cain to the other’s Abel. He did not understand how it was possible to plant eight babies in Essie Clare and not one in Zetta Lee. What he knew was that it was not for lack of trying.
Zetta Lee fell into a melancholy state. She was listless, quiet, and undemanding in bed. She rarely spoke except to apologize for her inadequacies as a wife. She cried a great deal when Ham was around. She ate very little. This went on for three weeks, and just when she thought she might become as mad as Lady Macbeth, Ham took it all back.
That was when she suggested an orphan. They would take on just one boy at first and see how it went. If it was a good fit for their family, they’d choose another later. Zetta Lee was not certain how Ham would take to the idea, but when he said yes, she figured she had bought herself another five years. Raising someone else’s child was less onerous to her than bearing one.
Ham had to travel a piece to meet the orphan train. The Union Pacific’s rails did not reach as far west back then, and most orphans ended their journey in Indiana. Ham set out from Eden Valley with three of his ranch hands and two hundred head of cattle destined for the eastern markets. He returned a month later with his men, a decent profit from the drive, and a skinny redheaded boy who sat better in a saddle when he was tied to the horn.
Ham liked him because he didn’t whine about it.
