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 wind died.
“Thankee-sai.”
“Don’t call me that. I hate it. My name is Susan.”
“Will you call me Will?”
‘
She nodded.
“Good. Susan, I want to ask you something—not as the fellow who insulted you and hurt you because he was jealous. This is something else entirely. May I?”
“Aye, I suppose,” she said warily.
“Are you for the Affiliation?”
She looked at him, flabbergasted. It was the last question in the world she had expected . . . but he was looking at her seriously.
“I’d expected ye and yer friends to count cows and guns and spears and boats and who knows what else,” she said, “but I didn’t think thee would also count Affiliation supporters.”
She saw his look of surprise, and a little smile at the comers of his mouth. This time the smile made him look older than he could possibly be. Susan thought back across what she’d just said, realized what must have struck him, and gave a small, embarrassed laugh. “My aunt has a way of lapsing into thee and thou. My father did, too. It’s from a sect of the Old People who called themselves Friends.”
“I know. We have the Friendly Folk in my part of the world still.”
“Do you?”
“Yes … or aye, if you like the sound of that better; I’m coming to. And I like the
way the Friends talk. It has a lovely sound.”
“Not when my aunt uses it,” Susan said, thinking back to the argument over the shirt. “To answer your question, aye—I’m for the Affiliation, I suppose. Because my da was. If ye ask am I strong for the Affiliation, I suppose not. We see and hear little enough of them, these days. Mostly rumors and stories carried by drifters and far-travelling drummers. Now that there’s no railway …” She shrugged.
“Most of the ordinary day-to-day folk I’ve spoken to seem to feel the same. And yet your Mayor Thorin—”
“He’s not my Mayor Thorin,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.
“And yet the Barony’s Mayor Thorin has given us every help we’ve asked for, and some we haven’t. I have only to snap my fingers, and Kimba Rimer stands before me.”
“Then don’t snap them,” she said, looking around in spite of herself. She tried to smile and show it was a joke, but didn’t make much success of it.
” The townsfolk, the fisherfolk, the farmers, the cowboys . . . they all speak well of the Affiliation, but distantly. Yet the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the members of the Horsemen’s Association, Lengyll and Garber and that lot—”
“I know them,” she said shortly.
“They’re absolutely enthusiastic in their support. Mention the Affiliation to Sheriff Avery and he all but dances. In every ranch parlor we’re offered a drink from an Eld commemorative cup, it seems.”
“A drink of what?” she asked, a trifle roguishly. “Beer? Ale? Graf?”
“Also wine, whiskey, and pettibone,” he said, not responding to her smile. “It’s almost as if they wish us to break our vow. Does that strike you as strange?”
“Aye, a little; or just as Hambry hospitality. In these parts, when someone—especially a young man—says he’s taken the pledge, folks tend to think him coy, not serious.”
“And this joyful support of the Affiliation amongst the movers and the shakers?
How does that strike you?”
“Queer.”
And it did. Pat Delgado’s work had brought him in almost daily contact with these landowners and horsebreeders, and so she, who had tagged after her da any time he would let her, had seen plenty of them. She thought them a cold bunch, by and
large. She couldn’t imagine John Croydon or Jake White waving an Arthur Eld stein in a sentimental toast… especially not in the middle of the day, when there was stock to be run and sold.
Will’s eyes were full upon her, as if he were reading these thoughts.
“But you probably don’t see as much of the big fellas as you once did,” he said.
“Before your father passed, I mean.”
“Perhaps not. . . but do bumblers learn to speak backward?”
No cautious smile this time; this time he outright grinned. It lit his whole face.
Gods, how handsome he was! “I suppose not. No more than cats change their spots, as we say. And Mayor Thorin doesn’t speak of such as us—me and my friends—to you when you two are alone? Or is that question beyond what I have a right to ask? I suppose it is.”
“I care not about that,” she said, tossing her head pertly enough to make her long braid swing. “I understand little of propriety, as some have been good enough to point out.” But she didn’t care as much for his downcast look and flush of embarrassment as she had expected. She knew girls who liked to tease as well as flirt and to tease hard, some of them- but it seemed she had no taste for it.
Certainly she had no desire to set her claws in him, and when she went on, she spoke gently. “I’m not alone with him, in any case.”
And oh how ye do lie, she thought mournfully, remembering how Thorin had embraced her in the hall on the night of the party, groping at her breasts like a child trying to get his hand into a candy-jar; telling her that he burned for her. Oh ye great liar.