Softly Falling (45 page)

The roof was gone, leaving nothing but the trusses, and they creaked, as if trying to decide to go or stay. In her terror, she screamed and screamed, coming in a poor second to the wind. She might as well be standing outside her front door, waiting to die.

“No, you don’t,” she said. She leaped from her bed and slipped and slid into the front room, with its table and bench—her dear school. She knew Pierre had nailed his winter count to the wall this time, but fear gave her strength. She yanked twice and the robe enveloped her into its generous folds. As the wind roared inside now, both windows in the front room exploded outward.

Terrified, she towed the buffalo robe back to her bed and threw it on top of all her blankets. She pulled on the trousers and sweater and then crawled back into her blanket cocoon, certain now that death was going to be her extra special Christmas gift, but equally determined to fight as long as she could. Someone had to teach the children and read to Jack Sinclair.

She lay there in terror, nearly smothered by the combined weight of blankets and buffalo robe and snow. Pierre had told her how buffalo hunkered down in winter and turned their nose into the wind, rather than away from it. They faced the storm, unlike cows that drifted.

The wind screamed at her and the snow fell heavier and heavier on top of the already great weight. Claustrophobic, she wanted to throw everything off and stagger outside and let death come. It was going to get her anyway. Why prolong it?

In the end, she decided it would take too much effort to move. Her pillow was soft, and the bed saggy in all the right places, because she and its former occupant were nearly the same height. At least her death might be comfortable. Maybe they would dig out the house in a day or two and find her looking as though she slept.

“Oh, bother it,” she muttered and closed her eyes, weary of winter and trouble, sorry that she wouldn’t know what it was like to fall in love and marry, and have a child or two. There wouldn’t be any anniversaries to celebrate, or triumphs to share with anyone, or even just the simple comfort of sitting on a couch, reading out loud to someone who liked her accent.

She did have
that
memory, at least. Lily resigned herself to death and decided that on the whole, perhaps death wasn’t going to be all that bad. Death was going to require a massive reordering of her expectations, never high anyway. She could cope.

But that wasn’t fair to anyone—not her, not the children, not Jack Sinclair.
I have to stay alive
, she thought, and then she said it out loud to the wind and the storm and the cold. She said it louder until she could hear herself, then drew herself into as small a ball as she could manage. Pierre’s winter count had kept five people alive through one blizzard. Maybe its powers would extend to her alone. She closed her eyes and prayed.

“Lily, I know you’re in there.”

“Leave me alone. It’s cold and snowy.”

“I know! I’m not paid seventy-five dollars a month to leave you alone.”

Lily opened her eyes to total blackness, the same as before. She felt cold and wretched, with only the distant memory of toes. Surely death would have been more pleasant. Maybe she was alive. It was certainly a prospect to consider.

The blackness grew briefly lighter, and then a whoosh of cold air socked her as though the selfish wind wanted her winter count robe too. She fought for it, which brought her in contact with a flannel shirt that wasn’t hers. She patted it, felt arms with ropy muscles, and stopped struggling as relief poured over her, right down to those toes that did still have some blood flowing through them, because they hurt like blazes.

“Jack?”

“The very same. I know this is the height of impropriety, but I don’t really care. I’d hold you tight like this even if you were Mr. Wing Li. I’m going to pull you closer. You can slap me later. No, no. Keep your hands in front of you. I want them between us because, boy howdy, they’re cold.”

He reached down to her toes, sticking his hand inside the sock layers. “This little piggy?” he said.

“Ow!”

“Music to my ears. How about this pig?”

“Stop it.”

“You’ve got your parts, Miss Carteret.”

What he was telling her penetrated the fog of her mind. At least she wasn’t going to die alone, and if the two of them could warm each other, maybe she wouldn’t die at all. She wanted to say all this, but maybe he knew.

“Going to sleep,” she muttered. “Don’t stop me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. You can’t die, though, because we haven’t finished
Ivanhoe
.”

She woke up to faint snoring right in her ear. The air in their cocoon had been breathed in and out for far too long a time, so she raised one corner of the buffalo robe, letting in the cold, which woke up Jack too. He protested and tried to roll over, but she patted his face until he paid attention.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I’ve never felt it drop so cold, so fast,” he said. “You know that thermometer in the cookshack? It registers to forty below, but the mercury was crowded down in the bulb, last time I checked.”

“The others?”

He let out a lengthy sigh. “Bad news, Lily.”

“Please, not my children,” she said, struggling to sit up and failing.

He pulled her close again. “They’re alive, but, oh, Lily . . .”

She prepared herself for the worst, something she had been doing since the first blizzard, so it had no real meaning any more. “Better tell me.”

“The Buxtons’ roof caved in with all that snow on it.” Another sigh, but this one sounded frustrated. “We planned to rake off the snow tomorrow.” He fumbled for her hands, sandwiching them inside his own. “Mrs. Buxton and her maid are dead.”

“Luella? Fothering?”

“Hey, hey, steady, Lily. Fothering has a broken arm, but Luella is fine.” He turned onto his back, pulling her close so her head rested on his chest. “Do you know she’s been sleeping
under
her bed? That probably saved her life.”

“Good heavens.”

“It must have been a scary, grim house. Not even Fothering knew. A joist fell on his arm and broke it, but he managed to get Luella out and make it to the horse barn. Pierre was there, and he carried Luella the rest of the way. We never heard anything above the storm.”

Lily digested his words, thinking of Mr. Buxton, probably stuck in Cheyenne now. There wouldn’t be any Christmas doll, only sad news for him, one more layer of misery in a winter unlike any other. “Poor, poor man,” she said.

She listened to the wind, trying to fool herself into thinking it was subsiding, and failing. “How . . . why did you think to look for me?”

“Dumb luck, my specialty,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. He moved restlessly. “When I think—I was helping Fothering to the cookshack when I tripped on the very end of the roof to my humble home. The very end, Lily! One half step in another direction, and I never would have known.” He tightened his arms around her.

“How on earth did you know it was your roof?”

“I felt along the roofline and ran into your Temple of Education sign. Yeah, part of the front of the house came off too. So close, Lily.”

It didn’t bear thinking on, she decided. Too much
what if
already filled their winter. “D’ye think we’ll dream about this winter?”

“Probably. I already see cows on bloody stumps when I close my eyes,” he told her.

“And I still pat around that woodpile next to the school, trying to find that ax. Jack?”

“Hmm?”

“Merry Christmas.”

They spent one day in the house with no roof and three and a half walls. The trusses fell outward, to Jack’s relief. All they could do was reach out now and then for handfuls of snow to swish around until it melted and swallow. Calls of nature were problematic, but easier for him, naturally—leap out of the blanket nest and let fly. She cried with humiliation when she couldn’t get out in time, but he told her not to be a goose.

He told her about his life in Georgia, chopping cotton, chills and fever, early death for three of his sisters, and then the excitement of war that quickly settled into more chills and fever and early death, this time for comrades. He told her of battles fought and won, and then the losses that mounted higher and higher until all they could do was leave the breastworks before Petersburg and stagger south, starving and depleted. Surrender was a relief.

Her life was infinitely more interesting to him. As the cold deepened, he found himself envying her memories of blue water and warm sand, and that peculiar feeling of walking through seawater as it rushes away from shore and undermines footprints. She hadn’t enjoyed England because it was damp and cold, and there weren’t any tan people. She had been treated well enough, but without anyone taking a genuine interest in her as her mother had done.

He held her close when she cried about her father and his betrayal. Her tearful, “He said he had a plan, and we were going to San Francisco in the spring!” wrenched his heart around.

When her tears subsided, he asked her to tell him how
Ivanhoe
ended. She refused, and he understood what a fighter she really was. “Not on your life, John James Sinclair,” she declared. “That would be bad luck. You’ll just have to wait until we’re in the cookshack and I am reading it to you.”

“Do you even know where the book is?” he asked.

“I’ll find it,” she assured him, her voice almost fierce. “If I have to dig through your whole house, I’ll find it.”

Their ordeal ended on the second day, to the welcome sound of Pierre and Will hollering for them. Feeling like a mole too long underground, Jack pulled back the lifesaving winter count robe and peeled away the blankets. The bright sunlight made him wince and turn away, but he hollered back, for one irrational moment afraid that they would walk by and never find them. For another irrational moment, he wanted to stay just with Lily. Funny how wind and cold can work on a man’s mind.

Soon, Preacher held him upright while Pierre reached for Lily, who protested the sunlight, but then just rested her head against the Indian’s shoulder like a child when he picked her up.

The first thing Jack wanted in the cookshack was a warm drink of water and then another. Lily sat beside him, drinking water too. She didn’t protest when Madeleine and Amelie took her arms and gently tugged her into the kitchen. When Jack was certain she was in good hands, he let his men guide him back to the bunkhouse for his own cleanup.

Fothering lay in the bunk that used to be Stretch’s, his eyes deep pools of pain. “I couldn’t save them.”

“You saved Luella,” Jack reminded the butler. “I couldn’t ask for more.”

He looked around the crowded bunkhouse, which smelled like the bottom of a dirty clothes hamper. They were all rank and foul, and praise the Almighty, alive.

They were looking at him, expecting some wisdom. He reminded himself that he was in charge of this train wreck and looked each man in the eye.

“Gentlemen,” he said finally, which brought faint smiles. “I’ve been thinking . . .”

He hadn’t, really, but they expected him to be the thinker. They expected him to save them all, so he had better get to it. “I have a plan.”

That was all they needed to hear. He watched the relief grow in their eyes and smiled to himself, knowing, as never before, that the Cheyenne Land and Cattle Company didn’t pay him enough for such a winter. Come to think of it, could anyone?