Her silent question was answered immediately when a house, stables, a barn, and several outbuildings lay before them.
“It’s lovely,” Hazel finally allowed herself to say when she felt him looking at her again.
He said nothing—didn’t even give her a nod!—as he drove the wagon toward the house. The irritated fire licked Hazel’s insides, and she twisted her hands together to keep from telling Mr. Wade Pierce precisely what she thought of him at the moment.
Not a soul was around as he stopped the wagon in front of the house. Hazel imagined his ranch hands were all off doing whatever sort of work ranch hands did. A cow lowed from the pasture near the barn, and a few chickens scratched at the ground near a coop. Hazel’s mouth nearly watered at the thought of fresh eggs and milk.
As Mr. Pierce helped her down from the wagon, she supposed she was grateful that he at least had some manners. He retrieved her carpetbag from the wagonbox, and she followed him up the stairs to the wide front porch. The door opened directly into a room, much as the apartment she’d lived in with her family in Boston had.
Hazel stepped into the parlor, her eyes drinking in the simple comfort laid out before her. She wanted to ask if Mr. Pierce had built this house and furnished it, but somehow she thought she’d be lucky to get a grunt for an answer. So instead, she ran a hand over the arm of a dark red upholstered wing chair and imagined sitting here on a winter’s night with a roaring fire in the hearth across the room. The room was dusty and specks of dirt littered the floor. It certainly needed a good cleaning.
“Kitchen’s in the back,” Mr. Pierce said, causing Hazel to startle at his sudden words. “Dining room is through that door over there. Bedrooms are upstairs. I keep a small office off the kitchen.”
Hazel nodded. It was probably the most he’d said to her since they’d met. Perhaps he’d simply been shy, and now he had grown more comfortable around her. With that charitable thought in mind, and feeling badly about her earlier annoyance at him, Hazel fixed a smile upon her face. “Might you show me around the outbuildings? I’d love to see—”
“No time for that,” he interrupted as he pointed his hat toward the doorway Hazel presumed led to the kitchen. “The kitchen is fully stocked. Spring house is down at the creek. Root cellar’s out back. We eat at six o’clock. The men are used to that time.”
And with that, he slapped his hat onto his head and left.
Hazel stood stunned for a moment. Then her hands curled into fists and she glared at the front door. “We eat at six o’clock,” she mimicked, just as she’d done to her sister when they were children.
Wade Pierce had some nerve, dropping her here without even showing her around the house, barely making conversation, and then demanding she fix supper! He didn’t even tell her how many men she was expected to feed, much less his likes or dislikes when it came to food.
Not that she particularly cared what he liked or didn’t at this moment. She had half a mind to go dig up worms from the earth and serve those for supper.
The image of Mr. Pierce’s lip curling in disgust made Hazel smile. Supper could wait. Right now, all she wanted was to unpack, change her dress, and lie down for a moment.
The second floor of the house presented two bedrooms, identical in size and fixed directly across the landing from one another. One room held only furniture—a bedstead, an empty wardrobe, a bedside table, and a washstand with a basin and pitcher. The other bedroom contained more pieces of furniture, and when Hazel ventured inside and opened the wardrobe, she found men’s clothing.
She shut the door quickly and scurried out of the room, ignoring the bizarre desire she had to snoop some more. Mr. Pierce was clearly a miserable man, mean instead of shy, and Hazel feared that if she stood in his room a second longer, his clipped words and distracted manner would rub off on her.
Married or not, she had no intentions of sharing a bedroom with that man. She opened her carpetbag on the bed in the unoccupied room and made quick work of placing her few items of clothing in the wardrobe. Her more precious mementos she put in the drawer of the bedside table, and then she stowed the empty carpetbag under the bed.
After she removed her dusty travel clothes and put on a clean bodice and skirt, Hazel let herself sink on to the bed. And all the thoughts she’d tried to keep down came rushing to the front of her mind.
What had she done?
Hazel squeezed her eyes shut. She married a horrible man, and now what? Mrs. Canton had asked her if she was certain she wished to marry Mr. Pierce, and Hazel had said yes. But she hadn’t known him yet. A few minutes was hardly enough time to determine whether someone was marriageable. But she’d still felt confident about the decision. After all, his letter had been kind and almost sweet—night and day from the man she was now married to. It was almost as if they’d been written by another man entirely.
A few hot tears scalded the sides of her face, and Hazel turned over, burying her face into the feather pillow. What would she do now? If she requested an annulment, would he grant her one? If she ran away, where would she go? Her sister was happily married now and removed to her husband’s parents’ small home. There was no room for Hazel there.
She had no one else.
She could go to Crest Stone, she supposed, and find work. But what if she angered Mr. Pierce? How would he take if she did that?
The worries spun around and around Hazel’s mind until she drifted off. She awoke with a start some time later, with the sun clearly lower in the sky than it had been earlier.
Sitting up quickly, she rubbed her eyes. The house seemed quiet, so it wasn’t yet time for supper—thankfully. She climbed off the bed and straightened her dress. She would go downstairs and make supper. Perhaps with some food in her stomach, she could think more clearly tonight.
The clock on the mantle in the parlor indicated that it was going on five o’clock. With little time to spare, Hazel quickly put together a soup of salty ham and beans. There wasn’t enough time to bake bread, but she found some blackberries and raspberries and sugared them for a dessert.
As the soup simmered, Hazel explored the house. The dining room was large and filled with a table long enough to seat ten. The parlor looked as cozy and inviting as it had when she arrived, despite the dust and dirty floor. She stood there a moment, a hand on the back of a chair, wondering again how a man like Mr. Pierce could have such a welcoming room in his home.
After giving the soup a good stir, she found herself standing in the doorway of Mr. Pierce’s office. “Office” was a generous word for the small, windowless room. Mr. Pierce’s desk barely fit into the space, and papers sat haphazardly strewn across its surface.
Hazel chewed her lip, trying to ignore the mess as she studied the rest of the room. Surely Mr. Pierce wouldn’t mind if she stacked those papers for him. Then he could sit down to a tidy desk—if he even noticed her efforts, that was. She smiled wryly at the papers as she shuffled them into a neat stack. She could rearrange his entire house and he’d likely not say a word to her about it.
As she picked up the last set of papers, her fingers brushed against something thicker. Setting the pages down, Hazel lifted what looked like an upside down photograph without a frame.
