“How do, ma’am.” He moved as if to touch his hatbrim, his gaze roving everywhere but to her face. “Gabe said you’d be needing an escort to the schoolhouse.”
“So he thinks.” She adjusted her grip on the leather satchel and lifted her chin. “May I offer you some tea? Or coffee; I believe Li Ang knows how to make such an infusion.”
“No thank you, ma’am. Best get going, there’s work to be done today.”
Indeed there is. “Certainly.” She stepped forward, and at least he was polite—he opened her front door, sparing only a brief glance at the porch outside where the…thing…had been last night.
“I’ll be fetching you too,” he said over his shoulder as he stumped down the steps, his stride wide and aggressive. “Gabe left at dawn, business elsewhere.”
“I see.” Left? Where on earth would one go, here? To another town, perhaps? Why?
But she could not ask. The wind had died—which was a mercy. The blowing dust and moaning air all night had invaded Cat’s dreams, and she had dreamed of Robbie as well. Terrible dreams, full of dark cavernous dripping spaces and flashes of tearing, awful blue-white brilliance.
My nerves are not steady at all.
The sky was a bruise, and the dust had scoured everything to the same dun colors as Jack Gabriel’s coat. No wonder the garden looked so sad and dingy. She accepted Mr. Overton’s hand and climbed into the wagon, and the patient bay horse flicked his tail. He had a curious fan-shaped burlap thing affixed to his head, glowing with mancy. “What does that do?” she wondered aloud, then answered her own question. “Ah. The dust. Are such storms usual, Mr. Overton?”
“Simoun, they call ’em.” He hauled himself up on the other side with a sigh. He still did not look directly at her. “Poison wind. Sometimes it goes on for days. People can’t take it. They go back East.” He gave the last two words far more emphasis than they merited, and flicked the whip gently at the bay, who stepped to with a will.
“I found it rather soothing.” Cat set her chin and adjusted her veil. And why would you suggest I retreat to Boston, sir? This is our first real acquaintance; the difference in our station does not matter nearly so much here in the wilderness. Or does it?
“You’d be the only one. Can I ask you something, miss?”
You just did. “Certainly, sir.”
“You’re an educated lady, and you’ve got some mighty fine cloth. So fine, in fact, it’s got me wonderin’ what a genteel miss like you is doin’ all the way out here.” Now he cast her a small sidelong glance. “And it’s mighty odd you get things left on your porch, too. I just wonder.”
“I was engaged as a schoolmistress after sitting for my teacher’s certificate,” she replied, coolly enough. Mother had thought I would make a good marriage instead of needing an education. Father thought the governesses and tutors quite enough, and I did not need to attend the Brinmawr Academy, after all was said and done. A simple certificate-course after my brother sent me the oddest letter I have ever received, and I am heartily regretting my actions now, thank you, sir. “I rather thought my gentility was seen as a benefit.” I paid the Teacher Placement Society for this post, and handsomely, too. An independence is a wonderful thing.
“You could be in San Frances. Dodge City. A place with an opera house instead of some two-bit fancyhouse saloons. I’m just curious, miss.”
You, sir, are not merely curious but fishing. “Perhaps I wished for a purer life than can be found in some places.”
“Never thought I’d live to hear Damnation called pure.” His laugh came out sideways in the middle of the sentence, as if he found the very idea too amusing to wait. Cat agreed, but she had thought long and hard about what reason she might give for her presence in this place, if pressed, ever since Jack Gabriel had stood next to her outside the pawnshop window.
And Mr. Gabriel was gone today, on some mysterious errand.
“My parents fell victim to Spanish flu.” She sought just the right tone of bitter grief, found it without much difficulty. “I have no family now, and Boston was…a scene of such painful recollections with their passing, that I fled everything that reminded me of them. Perhaps I should not have.”
He was silent. Did he now feel a cad? Hopefully.
The wagon shuddered along the road, its wheels bumping through flour-fine dust. It was a wonder he could find the track in all this mess. The hills in the distance were purple, but not a lovely flowerlike shade. No, it was a fresh bruise; the sky’s glower was an older, fading, but still ugly contusion. The sun was a white disc above the haze, robbed of its glory, and the stifling heat was no longer dry but oddly clammy. Or perhaps it was merely the haze which made it seem so, since her lips were already cracked.
The rest of the ride passed in that thick obdurate silence, and the appearance of the schoolhouse, rising out of the haze, was extraordinarily welcome. Mr. Overton pulled the wagon to a stop, and when he helped her down she was surprised to find his fingers were cold even through her gloves.
He dropped her hand as if it had burned him. He mumbled something, and was in the wagon’s seat like a jack-in-the-box. The conveyance rattled away toward town, and Cat was left staring, her mouth agape in a most unladylike manner.
“Well. I never,” she muttered. Except it was precisely the manner of treatment she supposed she should expect from such a man. Chartermages were notoriously eccentric, he was not Quality, either, and he was no doubt unused to polite conversation with someone of Cat’s breeding.
Still, his manners were only one of a very long list of things that troubled her. Troubles were fast and thick these days. She opened the schoolhouse and waited for her students, attending the small tasks that had quickly become habitual, and as she did, a plan began to form.
If I give myself time to think, I will no doubt find a thousand reasons not to do this. She adjusted her veil once more. It was no use; she had plenty of time to lose her courage on the walk into town.
Dismissing the children at the lunch-hour was a risk. Yet she could legitimately claim that so few had shown up, and the return of the storm seemed so ominous, that she had done so for their safety. And the streets were oddly deserted—or perhaps not so oddly, as the lowering yellowgreen clouds were drawing ever closer.
She could even claim to have come into town to find a means of alerting her other students of the school’s closure for the day. That problem she would solve as soon as she had this other bit of business done.
The pawnshop’s door stuck a little, its hinges protesting. She stepped inside quickly, unwilling to be seen lingering, and glanced out through the plate-glass window. Perhaps no one had seen her.
She could always hope.
“Hello?” Her voice fell into an empty well of silence, and the walls seemed to draw closer.
It was dark, not even a lamp lit, and chill. Strangely prosaic for a chartershadow’s haunt—clothing in piles, some tied with twine and tagged with slips of yellowing paper, others merely flung onto leaning, rickety shelves. A vast heap of leather tack and metal implements, and two long counters—one at the back, one along the left side—with various items on ragged velvet and silk. Pistols, knives with dulled blades, pocketwatches, hair combs. Jewelry both cheap and fine, tangled together.