Robert had won the land in a poker game. Forty acres and a gold mine in the new Oklahoma Territory had seemed like a dream come true. Elizabeth should have known better. In the past seven years Robert had been a clerk, a teller in a bank, a merchant’s bookkeeper, an apprentice wheelwright and a tinker. He never stuck with anything for long and there had been spells between jobs when he had done nothing and she had supported them by taking in washing and ironing. As fast as she could save money, Robert found it and gambled it away. She had buried the last dream when she first saw the mud hut and the hole in the ground that was supposed to be a gold mine.
The storm winds shifted and her shutters rattled alarmingly. Elizabeth put the straight-backed chair in front of them and sat in it, hoping to keep the shutters closed and the storm out. She had always feared storms and was struggling not to become terrified of this one. Robert had ridden into town for supplies but had been gone for a week on a chore that should have taken two days, three at the most.
As always he had put the journey off until they were almost entirely out of food and Elizabeth was eating as little as possible in order to survive until he returned. The nights were the worst. She lay awake for hours at a time worrying that he might have been killed or that he had simply grown tired of a wife, a sod hut and a worthless gold mine, and had left them all behind.
Robert had believed in the gold mine and had been glad there were no greedy neighbors he would have to fend off once he struck it rich. To Elizabeth, who was accustomed to living in town, the absence of people close by had been frightening. They were all alone on the side of a rocky hill, thirty miles from the nearest town and five miles from another living person.
The gold mine had never yielded a thimbleful of gold, even though Robert had worked it steadily—or at least at a pace that was steady for him. Every day, once she had finished the other chores on the place, Elizabeth helped him chip away at the rock and haul out buckets of worthless rubble. All for nothing. Even Robert finally admitted that.
The land was no good for farming and too small to raise cattle, even the longhorn kind that were said to be able to exist on practically no grass at all.
The only level piece of ground was beneath the hut. The roof was of the lean-to variety and was covered with dirt and grass. While it had provided a measure of coolness that first summer, it was always damp, and downright wet when it rained. As a further inconvenience, bugs nesting in the roof frequently burrowed through and dropped onto whatever or whoever was below. The floor was dirt interspersed with rock, as were the walls. Not one single thing was pretty about it, and the constant dampness was already rotting the treasured quilts and linens Elizabeth had brought with them.
The shutters trembled and shoved against the back of her chair, forcing a wider entrance for the icy wind that seemed determined to rob her of what little heat she had left. Fortunately the gust was of short duration and the weight of the chair closed the gap again. Elizabeth had never been so afraid. At least, she told herself, she didn’t have to worry about the hut being blown down since it was built into the hill itself. Assuming, of course, the heavy snow didn’t make the roof collapse.
She refused to cry. Ever since she could remember, Elizabeth had hated to cry. It solved nothing and only made her feel vulnerable. Instead, she tried to work up a sustaining anger against Robert. It wasn’t hard to do. He had had ample time to ride to the town of Glory, buy provisions, get drunk, gamble away the rest of their money and ride home. A man could easily travel thirty miles on horseback in a day.
So where was he? She tried to blame it on the storm. It wasn’t likely that Robert had started for home and been overtaken by the storm. She had seen it building for an entire day before it actually arrived. Robert was good at self-preservation and would not risk being caught in a blizzard just because she was alone and running out of food.
The direction of the storm’s onslaught shifted again and Elizabeth got out of the chair to pace in the small room. There was little furniture to impede her steps. The bed stood against one wall, made bright by her quilts. The table was on the opposite wall, along with the only other chair they owned. A shelf held her meager provisions. In a few short months, the rag rug that once covered most of the wet stone and dirt floor had rotted and had been relegated to the barn for use as rags. She saw no sense in making another.
Her father had been a well-to-do man. Looking back on his house with its clutter of furniture, knickknacks, fringed rugs, pictures on every surface and silently efficient servants, she thought it seemed like a palace. She didn’t miss her tyrannical father but she longed for his dry, comfortable house and her mother, who had been dead since shortly before Elizabeth married Robert.
She knew her mother would have insisted that she stay with Robert. The sanctity of marriage had been drilled into her head since infancy. Divorce was an ugly word, and those who were touched by it were no longer entirely decent people. The wives had failed at the one task God had intended for them, according to her parents, and the men were never blamed. It was always said, or at least implied, that the wife had turned despot or slattern and that the husband had been more or less forced to rid himself of her. But surely, if her mother had known what Elizabeth’s marriage was like, might she not have encouraged her to leave?
There was no use speculating. Her mother was dead and buried in Hannibal. Elizabeth had no place to go. Her father had never loved her and he would be unwilling to take her in. Besides, she didn’t want to go back to the life she had married Robert to get away from. Furthermore, striking out on her own was impossible without money, and Robert had taken all that was left to buy the supplies they would need to get through this winter.
With her lantern in hand, she went to the door and drew the bolt. Cautiously she opened the door a few inches and peered out. The frigid air was thick with wind-driven snowflakes that bit at her face and hands. The snowdrift packed against the door was already two feet deep and more was piling on top of that by the minute. Within a few inches of the door, the dim light from her lantern was swallowed by the blackness of the night and the density of the falling snow.
Elizabeth closed the door again before the rapidly accumulating snow could block it. At this rate, she would be snowed in by morning. How would she get out to the barn to tend to the mule? At least the chickens were long since eaten, so she didn’t have to worry about them being buried under snow in their makeshift chicken coop.
What would she do if Robert never came back? The answer was too horrifying to consider.
Knowing she had to get her mind on something else to save her sanity, she fetched the one book she still owned from the tiny table beside the bed. She had read her copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho so many times that the pages felt soft and fragile. It was the only thing she had taken from her father’s house other than her clothing. This had always been her favorite book and she couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Although it was ponderously long, she had memorized pages of it. On nights like this, it was her only friend and companion.
Trying to ignore the howling wind shearing over her low roof, Elizabeth sat at the table, propped up the book in the yellow glow of the lantern and began to read.
Down in the valley Celia Graham glared at her husband and nervously tapped her foot against the floor. “I hate this place!” she said for the fifth time that hour. “It’s just like you to drag me away from everyone I love and expect me to live on this godforsaken ranch.”
Brice gave her a long look. “At the time you were eager to come here and get away from your mother’s interference. And I was under the impression that I was a ‘loved one.’”
“That’s right! Twist my words about. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything.” Her lower lip protruded petulantly. She hated being stuck here on this ranch, away from her family and the stores she had taken for granted when they were accessible. She particularly cared that she was eight months pregnant; she was tired of being fat and awkward. “No matter what you say, I’m never having another child,” she snapped.
He glanced up from the ranch records he was completing. “What does that have to do with it? We would have had children if we stayed in Saxon. I miss Texas,