“I’ve never seen yellow silkflowers.”
“Noey-no, me neither, but Mr. Arthur Heath says they have them in Gilead.” He looked at Susan solemnly, the shovel held in his hands as a soldier would hold a gun or spear at port arms. “Mr. Arthur Heath saved my life. I’d do anything for him.”
“Would you, Sheemie?” she asked, touched.
“Also, he has a lookout! It’s a bird’s head! And when he talks to it, tendy-pretend, do I laugh? Aye, fit to split!”
She looked around again to make sure no one was watching (save for the carved totems across the street), then removed her note, folded small, from her jeans pocket.
“Would you give this to Mr. Dearborn for me? He’s also your friend, is he not?”
“Will? Aye!” He took the note and put it carefully into his own pocket.
“And tell no one.”
“Shhhhh!” he agreed, and put a finger to his lips. His eyes had been amusingly round beneath the ridiculous pink lady’s straw he wore. “Like when I brought you the flowers. Hushaboo!”
“That’s right, hushaboo. Fare ye well, Sheemie.”
“And you, Susan Delgado.”
He went back to his cleanup operations. Susan had stood watching him for a moment, feeling uneasy and out of sorts with herself. Now that the note was successfully passed, she felt an urge to ask Sheemie to give it back, to scratch out what she had written, and promise to meet him. If only to see his steady blue eyes again, looking into her face.
Then Jonas’s other friend, the one with the cloak, came sauntering out of the mercantile. She was sure he didn’t see her-his head was down and he was rolling a cigarette-but she had no intention of pressing her luck. Reynolds talked to Jonas, and Jonas talked-all too much!-to Aunt Cord. If Aunt Cord heard she had been passing the time of day with the boy who had brought her the flowers, there were apt to be questions. Ones she didn’t want to answer.
6
All that’s history now, Susan-water under the bridge. Best to get your thoughts out of the past.
She brought Pylon to a stop and looked down the length of the Drop at the horses that moved and grazed there. Quite a surprising number of them this morning.
It wasn’t working. Her mind kept turning back to Will Dearborn.
What bad luck meeting him had been! If not for that chance encounter on her way back down from the Coos, she might well have made peace with her situation by now-she was a practical girl, after all, and a promise was a promise. She certainly never would have expected herself to get all goosy-gushy over losing her maidenhead, and the prospect of carrying and bearing a child actually excited her.
But Will Dearborn had changed things; had gotten into her head and now lodged there, a tenant who defied eviction. His remark to her as they danced stayed with her like a song you can’t stop humming, even though you hate it. It had been cruel and stupidly self-righteous, that remark… but was there not also a grain of truth in it? Rhea had been right about Hart Thorin, of that much Susan no longer had any doubt. She supposed that witches were right about men’s lusts even when they were wrong about everything else. Not a happy thought, but likely a true one.
It was Will Be Damned to You Dearborn who had made it difficult for her to accept what needed accepting, who had goaded her into arguments in which she could hardly recognize her own shrill and desperate voice, who came to her in her dreams-dreams where he put his arms around her waist and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.
She dismounted and walked downhill a little way with the reins looped in her fist. Pylon followed willingly enough, and when she stopped to look off into the blue haze to the southwest, he lowered his head and began to crop again.
She thought she needed to see Will Dearborn once more, if only to give her innate practicality a chance to reassert itself. She needed to see him at his right size, instead of the one her mind had created for him in her warm thoughts and warmer dreams. Once that was done, she could get on with her life and do what needed doing. Perhaps that was why she had taken this path-the same one she’d ridden yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that. He rode this part of the Drop; that much she had heard in the lower market.
She turned away from the Drop, suddenly knowing he would be there, as if her thought had called him-or her ka.
She saw only blue sky and low ridgeline hills that curved gently like the line of a woman’s thigh and hip and waist as she lies on her side in bed. Susan felt a bitter disappointment fill her. She could almost taste it in her mouth, like wet tea leaves.
She started back to Pylon, meaning to return to the house and take care of the apology she reckoned she must make. The sooner she did it, the sooner it would be done. She reached for her left stirrup, which was twisted a little, and as she did, a rider came over the horizon, breaking against the sky at the place which looked to her like a woman’s hip. He sat there, only a silhouette on horseback, but she knew who it was at once.
Run! she told herself in a sudden panic. Mount and gallop! Get out of here! Quickly! Before something terrible happens… before it really is ka, come like a wind to take you and all your plans over the sky and far away!
She didn’t run. She stood with Pylon’s reins in one hand, and murmured to him when the rosillo looked up and nickered a greeting to the big bay-colored gelding coming down the hill.
Then Will was there, first above her and looking down, then dismounted in an easy, liquid motion she didn’t think she could have matched, for all her years of horsemanship. This time there was no kicked-out leg and planted heel, no hat swept over a comically solemn bow; this time the gaze he gave her was steady and serious and disquietingly adult.
They looked at each other in the Drop’s big silence, Roland of Gilead and Susan of Mejis, and in her heart she felt a wind begin to blow. She feared it and welcomed it in equal measure.
7
“Goodmorn, Susan,” he said. “I’m glad to see you again.”
She said nothing, waiting and watching. Could he hear her heart beating as clearly as she could? Of course not; that was so much romantic twaddle. Yet it still seemed to her that everything within a fifty-yard radius should be able to hear that thumping.
Will took a step forward. She took a step back, looking at him mistrustfully. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up again, his lips set.
“I cry your pardon,” he said.
“Do you?” Her voice was cool.
“What I said that night was unwarranted.”
At that she felt a spark of real anger. “I care not that it was unwarranted; I care that it was unfair. That it hurt me.”
A tear overbrimmed her left eye and slipped down her cheek. She wasn’t all cried out after all, it seemed.
She thought what she said would perhaps shame him, but although faint color came into his cheeks, his eyes remained firmly on hers.
“I fell in love with you,” he said. “That’s why I said it. It happened even before you kissed me, I think.”
She laughed at that… but the simplicity with which he had spoken made her laughter sound false in her own ears. Tinny. “Mr. Dearborn-”
“Will. Please.”
“Mr. Dearborn,” she said, patiently as a teacher working with a dull student, “the idea is ridiculous. On the basis of one single meeting? One single kiss? A sister’s kiss?” Now she was the one who was blushing, but she hurried on. “Such things happen in stories, but in real life? I think not.”
But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.
“I cry your pardon,” he repeated. There was a kind of brute stubbornness in him. It exasperated her, amused her, and appalled her, all at the same time. “I don’t ask you to return my love, that’s not why I spoke. You told me your affairs were complicated…” Now his eyes did leave hers, and he looked off toward the Drop. He even laughed a little. “I called him a bit of a fool, didn’t I? To your face. So who’s the fool, after all?”
She smiled; couldn’t help it. “Ye also said ye’d heard he was fond of strong drink and berry-girls.”
Roland hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. If his friend Arthur Heath had done that, she would have taken it as a deliberate, comic gesture. Not with Will. She had an idea he wasn’t much for comedy.
Silence between them again, this time not so uncomfortable. The two horses, Rusher and Pylon, cropping contentedly, side by side. If we were horses, all this would be much easier, she thought, and almost giggled.
“Mr. Dearborn, ye understand that I have agreed to an arrangement?”
“Aye.” He smiled when she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “It’s not mockery but the dialect. It just… seeps in.”
“Who told ye of my business?”
“The Mayor’s sister.”
“Coral.” She wrinkled her nose and decided she wasn’t surprised. And she supposed there were others who could have explained her situation even more crudely. Eldred Jonas, for one. Rhea of the Coos, for another. Best to leave it. “So if ye understand, and if ye don’t ask me to return your… whatever it is ye think ye feel… why are we talking? Why do ye seek me out? I think it makes ye passing uncomfortable-”
“Yes,” he said, and then, as if stating a simple fact: “It makes me uncomfortable, all right. I can barely look at you and keep my head.”
“Then mayhap it’d be best not to look, not to speak, not to think!” Her voice was both sharp and a little shaky. How could he have the courage to say such things, to just state them straight out and starey-eyed like that? “Why did ye send me the bouquet and that note? Are ye not aware of the trouble ye could’ve gotten me into? If y'knew my aunt…! She’s already spoken to me about ye, and if she knew about the note… or saw us together out here…”
She looked around, verifying that they were still unobserved. They were, at least as best she could tell. He reached out, touched her shoulder. She looked at him, and he pulled his fingers back as if he had put them on something hot.
“I said what I did so you’d understand,” he said. “That’s all. I feel how I feel, and you’re not responsible for that.”
But I am, she thought. I kissed you. I think I’m more than a little responsible for how we both feel. Will.
“What I said while we were dancing I regret with all my heart. Won’t you give me your pardon?”
“Aye,” she said, and if he had taken her in his arms at that moment, she would have let him, and damn the consequences. But he only took off his hat and made her a charming little bow, and the
