I know that, he said. I haven't always. He stopped. I forget sometimes. When I'm in the middle of the work, I forget to look.
She glanced at his profile. What is it? He said, feeling the look. Nothing, she said. I was just thinking that's a very honest thing to admit.
He looked at her. Something in his face shifted. Not quite a smile, but the shape of one. The same adjacency she had noticed at the cabin, only closer now. I'm working on honesty, he said.
I noticed, she said. The valley stretched below them. Duchess dropped her head and blew through her nose in a pleased sort of way. Mr. Carter, Clara said.
You could call me William. She considered that. I'm not ready for that yet. All right, but I wanted to say. She looked at the valley.
I don't know what comes next between you and me or between me and this place. I don't know if I'm going to stay past the summer or what any of this is going to turn into. I'm not going to pretend I know. I understand. But I want you to know, she said, that I am choosing to be here today on this ridge.
She glanced at him. That's not nothing. He looked at her for a moment with something in his eyes she couldn't quite name. Something careful and open and quietly desperate all at once. No, he said that's not nothing at all.
The wind moved through the grass below them, a long slow wave moving south. Clara looked at the valley. She thought, I don't know this man yet, she thought. But I think I am going to. She did not say either of those things out loud.
She just sat on the ridge in the Montana summer and breathed and let herself be for the first time in a very long time. Exactly where she was. The weeks that followed the ridge had a particular texture to them. Not easy exactly, but honest in a way that Clara had not expected. William came to Cedar Falls three times a week, sometimes four.
He never announced himself. He would appear at the schoolhouse with a practical reason, a supply delivery for Mr. Anders, a message for the bank, some errand that Clara was fairly certain he had invented specifically to justify the ride into town. She did not call him on it. She was learning to recognize the difference between his deceptions and his efforts.
And this particular habit sat firmly in the second category. He fixed the schoolhouse window that had been rattling in its frame since July. He had two new benches built for the back row without being asked after Clara mentioned off-handedly that three children had been sharing one. He found Thomas Henderson's mother on the ranch one afternoon and spoke to her not to Mr. Henderson, but to the mother, which Clara thought showed a degree of perception she hadn't fully credited him with.
And whatever he said resulted in Thomas arriving at the schoolhouse the following Monday with a new pencil and a look on his face that was somewhere between terrified and determined. Clara watched Thomas write his name for the first time on a Thursday morning. Letters large and uneven and achingly careful. She did not cry. She was a professional, but it was a near thing.
She told William about it that afternoon when he came by and something happened to his face. Not a smile exactly, but a deep quiet satisfaction that looked better on him than she expected. "You did that," he said. "Thomas did that," she said for the second time. "It's both," he said for the second time as well.
She looked at him. He looked back at her. Neither of them said the thing that was becoming increasingly obvious to both of them. They had developed a careful fluency in not saying it a language of proximity and attention and small deliberate acts that accumulated the way water accumulates in a dry basin slowly and then all at once. She called him William on the 1st of August.
Not formally, not with any announcement, just the way it came out when she turned from the blackboard to find him in the doorway. He didn't remark on it, but she saw what it did to his expression. It was Roy who first warned her. Roy was William's foreman. She had met him twice by then, a man somewhere in his 50s with a bad knee that he refused to acknowledge and a way of watching everything without appearing to watch anything.
He had come into town on a supply run and found Clara at the dry goods counter, and he had stood beside her while Mrs. Patterson measured out flour and he had said very quietly, "You're good for him, Miss Bennett. " She had looked up. "I'm not trying to be forward," he said. "I'm stating a fact. I've worked for that man 8 years.
I know what he looked like before, and I know what he looks like now. " "Roy, someone's been asking around about you," he said. Same quiet tone like he was talking about the weather. She went still. Who? Don't know yet.
He watched Mrs. Patterson at the scales. A man came through two days ago asking questions at the saloon. How long you'd been here, where you'd come from, what your arrangement was with Mr. Carter.
Clara kept her face neutral. What did people tell him? Truth, mostly. You're a teacher from Boston who came west on a correspondence arrangement and is staying at the Gilmore House. He paused.
What they don't know, they made up. Some of it wasn't flattering. She breathed in out. Do you know what he wanted? No, Roy said.
But in my experience, when strangers start asking questions about a wealthy man's personal arrangements, they're not doing it out of curiosity. He picked up his order, tipped his hat to Mrs. Patterson, and walked out. Clara stood at the counter for a moment with her hands very still on the wood. She did not tell William that day or the next.
She told herself she was waiting until she had more information. She told herself there was nothing concrete to report. She told herself with less conviction each time that it was probably nothing. She found out what it was on a Wednesday. She was coming out of the schoolhouse after the afternoon session when she saw a man she didn't recognize sitting on a horse in the middle of the main street looking at the Gilmore house with the particular attention of someone who knows what they're looking for.
He was well-dressed for Cedar Falls. Two well-dressed, eastern clothes, good cloth, recent cut, dark hair, clean shaven, somewhere around 40, with the kind of face that arranged itself into pleasantness easily and probably without much involvement from the person behind it. He saw her looking. He touched his hat. "Miss Bennett," he said.
She stopped. "My name is Gerald Alcott," he said. "I believe you may have heard of my sister. " The world did something brief and strange. Margaret, Clara said. That's right.
He swung down from his horse with the ease of a man accustomed to being received. I was hoping we might have a word. About what? About William Carter. He smiled.
It was a practiced smile. And about what you've walked into? She did not invite him to the Gilmore house. She took him instead to a bench outside the church in full view of the street because she had enough sense to know that a private conversation with this man was not something she wanted. He sat beside her with his hat on his knee and told her a story.
The story, as Gerald Alcott told it, was this. Margaret had not deceived William Carter. Margaret had been deceived by him. She had come west in good faith after the death of her fianceé, and William Carter had taken advantage of her grief. Had made her promises, had used her, and then when it became inconvenient, had destroyed her reputation, and forced her out of the valley.