12th of April 1882
She always seems sad. For someone as cheerful and kind as she is — and I believe it when I write that her cheer and good nature are not a facade — her eyes are often searching for something on the horizon or her gaze is turned inward. She genuinely likes people and does not condemn all of my sex for the ill treatment she has received at the hands of some. No woman works as she does without ending the day with bruises; either of the flesh or soul. And I have only ever seen her act cold and standoffish with a select number of people. Most of those are men barred from passing through the doors of the Garden.

He stopped writing and set down the fountain pen that the Earl, his employer, had gifted him for Christmas. The pull he took from the bottle was small and slow. A protracted sip really. He stretched into the ache in his lower back. There were splinters under two of his fingernails, big enough to hurt but fine enough to prove impossible to remove. He loved and hated this country in turns. The swelling and falling scope of it was magnificent, its peoples endlessly fascinating. He had never seen anything like the redwood trees. Taller than the Tower of London, higher than the face of Big Ben. They were awe-inspiring. He hadn't believed the descriptions, couldn't wrap his head around what a tree three hundred and fifty feet tall and over twenty feet in diameter at the base of its trunk would even look like. He and his Lordship were both struck dumb at their first sight of the quiet giants. He supposed he knew what ants felt like as the two of them had watched a hundred jacks swarm one of the felled redwood trees that first day.

He liked the Santa Cruz Mountains very much, but there was no real place for him here. After the first few weeks living in the hotel room next to Lord Grantham and following him about dutifully during the day and evening to keep an eye on him, they were labeled the Duke and the Dandy and taken for homosexuals. It became quickly obvious that valets were not a rural Western-American affectation. At that point he was banished to a cabin near the lime kilns and timberworks that the English Earl was helping to went into town three or four times during the week, sometimes more, typically in the early afternoon through the evenings. He tended to the mending and stains, laid out several suggested ensembles and did the shoe and button polishing. It was a strange half-existence.

The bulk of his duties stripped from him, he tried to make himself useful where he could. Fortunately the logging manager, Elijah Cooper, had in his own words, "Taken a shine to him." Coop — as the jacks called him — had hair the color of dirty straw, was ruddy-skinned from laboring out of doors his life-long, and was happy to put the foreigner to work where there was need. He immediately saw Bates' innate ability to quietly and fairly lead and mentor the younger men and assigned him to work overseeing tree-falls and helping to negotiate disputes between the jacks and the lime workers. He didn't technically make a salary beyond his valet's wages, but Coop, being one of the few men in the mountains who made money enough to bring his wife out, ensured that Bates returned to his bunk with extras of whatever Norah-Jane packed for dinner and leftovers from supper the day before besides. And from time to time Coop ensured that a bottle of whiskey appeared just inside the door of John's small cabin. It had been occupied by an assistant manager who had been crushed and killed in a tree-fall gone wrong - so it lay empty. John welcomed it all; the space, food, and whiskey. Any modicum of privacy or home-cooking was a treasured and rare commodity and as such, much appreciated. It was an agreeable exchange. The younger jacks saw him as relatively impartial and fair and respected him for it. The older jacks saw themselves in him, the fellow soldier, knew he understood their interests and motivations. More often then not he was called on to resolve disputes. Most tended to acquiesce to his judgement.

Though he appreciated the comforting familiarity of a needle and thread in his fingers, a boot brush in his hand, it felt good to fall asleep tired from proper labor. Still, as much as he enjoyed the feel of the sun dappling his skin he had to admit, he was getting old. His bad ankle throbbed, though it had held all day, which was a blessing. He turned it earlier in the week and it was skirting the edge of giving out entirely once again. He hated to hobble around with the damned cane so he wrapped it tightly and walked with intent and care over the uneven ground. Any more stress he would need the cane whether he liked it or not. He wondered if Coop had started assigning him more managerial duties out of respect or pity. One could never be sure. At least he had something to occupy him. He hated idleness, unless there was a library of books to be read, then he adjusted his opinion on the matter temporarily. Reading was educating oneself and therefor not an idle pursuit. Not that it mattered; there was no proper library for many miles.

At least his shoulder wasn't playing up from decking Sly Tom. The small-minded, younger man had stepped out of line again and needed to be taken down a peg. True he wasn't technically in charge of the lumberjack, but Sly Tom had been insulting the money behind the operation. The man who made sure he received his pay.

He took another sip and let his mind wander where it shouldn't - to a woman young enough to be his daughter. A woman who looked to him with affection, but certainly not the same nature of affection he felt when he looked at her. A woman of the sort wholly inappropriate for him to bring home to meet his mother, as it were, even if his mother wasn't halfway around the world. A woman whose sweetness was noticed and commented on the camp over. She wasn't called Alyssum Annie for nothing. The joke was that she was as tiny and sweet and pale as the small fragrant white-flowered garden plant, alyssum. She grinned at him when he asked her about it. "When every other plant in the garden is dead, the alyssum is still kicking, still sowing seeds for the next season. Up here it doesn't die in the winters. It's sturdy as dried shit. I reckon there are worse flowers to be likened to, even if it is dirt common."

She made him smile. She was beautiful to be sure; he would never deny the pull of her eyes, the delicate curve of her mouth, the plumpness of her upper arms. She was beautiful to be sure, but she was such a quick wit, so clever, and so kind. These were the things he found himself hopelessly taken with. She told it how it was with the vocabulary of a fairly well read lumberjack. This pleased him, almost more than any of her other attributes. He found it refreshing after all of the games and restraint and prescribed movements of his life.

He met her a short while after he and Lord Grantham had arrived, after they had been given their moniker and it was determined that the "Dandy" would live away from the hotel. They had taken the transcontinental railroad across the middle of the massive country to see where and how His Lordship's American wife's brother was spending his money. The entirety of the family had traveled via first class steamer to Lady Grantham's ancestral home, in part to avoid the London Season this year. Relations between Lord Grantham and his wife had been strained at the best of times since the unfortunate death of their youngest daughter. She had been a vivacious girl. A gust of fresh air through the entirety of the familial house. Dead in childbirth. Lady Grantham and the two older girls were staying for the season with her mother. No one could bear the silent questioning and pitying looks they would have had to endure in London.

Lord Grantham left toward the beginning of summer, shortly before the family was to return to England and made no commitment as to his return date. John wasn't sure His Lordship had plans to return at all. All the man talked about these days was the lure of the American west and the untapped resources therein. So, after months of touring the wildest reaches of the country, they had ended up in the mountains along the upper reaches of the central coast of California in early November. Fortunately the winters there were mild. No snow fell, rarely did the mercury drop to freezing, and the rain took the chill out of the air when it fell.

He liked working alongside the jacks. It was hard, honest work and they were hard and (typically) honest men. Or bold boisterous boys set out to prove their hardness. They were weathered down quickly, as quickly as the logs they downed for the lime kilns. With redwood that was a specialty operation the likes of which he had never before seen. Teams of men pried thick bark loose with long metal levers and sawed the huge logs into shorter chunks. Each chunk was split further, with hammers and wedges and great resounding cracks. Team of mules dragged the still enormous wedges of wood to the massive stone kilns. There, the giant hunks of wood were sawn and split, and split again - until they were small enough to be kindled.

The Earl himself was happy enough to let them alone and receive reports about the logging operation from afar, without leaving the throes of his usual card or dice games. He quickly made a name for himself despite Bates' best efforts to keep him from the saloons and dance halls. An easy target, John had saved his skin from more than one ridiculous situation. Most of the loggers and lime kiln workers meant no ill. But when men are tired, homesick, drunk, and crowded together, things tended to happen.

He hadn't frequented the Garden when he was in town living in the hotel. He did his drinking primarily in his own room. But when he wasn't chasing after His Lordship to ensure the Earl's safety, he enjoyed playing cards himself. The first saloon he had encountered that boasted a quality card table and skilled dealer had been the watering-hole he'd chosen.

It was possessed of a window that looked out onto the thoroughfare that cut through the middle of the town of Felton. From his seat he watched the men flow in and out of the doors of three saloons that were sat in a row to receive the lime kiln workers as they trudged down from Bennett Street (or Felton-Bonny Doon Road as some called it) to where it intersected Main. The Garden perched in the middle of the trio, perfectly situated to welcome the men as they stumbled off the mountainside for respite. Some of the girls came out to call for tricks. Whenever he saw her on the street — and that was rarely those first few weeks — it was usually during lulls in the evening, when the first batch of jacks had been sated and unleashed upon the gaming tables and the next round had yet to finish their drinking and gambling. It had been at night the first few times he had seen her, a pale shade, graceful and ghostly in the dark as she swept or leaned against a wall, silent. Then he took note of her by daylight. She'd raise an eyebrow or nod her head as certain men passed, but she didn't actively fish. He noticed it and thought it odd.

From time to time in years past, primarily in the years leading up to the Ashanti War, he'd sought solace with a prostitute. Sought it, but never found it. He always felt so ashamed afterwards that by the time he was on a ship to the Dutch Gold Coast, learning the rigors of the sea, he had lost his taste for it. Then the atrocities he witnessed during his year in Africa, kidnappings and rapes and murders, only served to cement his opinion on the matter. More often than not these atrocities were at the hands of the men he served alongside. It had been nearly a decade and while he wished he didn't, he couldn't help but remember. No, he had long since given up any desire to find his release between the legs of a stranger.

She was outside, sweeping down the boardwalk in front of the Garden as he tried not to limp on his walk home from putting his employer to bed. That particular night he had been grateful that he had dragged himself down, Lord Grantham had lost a fair amount of money (a pittance to him, really, but a fortune to those around him) playing poker drunk, and had knocked the poker table over and begun hurtling accusations at the saloon's owner just as John had walked in from laying out His Lordship's clothes for the following day. Bates had bodily dragged him from the saloon and back toward the hotel. Ten paces from the establishment the peer began blubbering about his poor sweet baby girl, and how he was ruining things with Cora and was a fool to think he was any good at running an estate or managing his investments. Bates had shaken his head and sighed to himself. He called him milord and had rested a firm, reassuring hand on the peer's shoulder. This brought the Earl back to a sort of somber inebriation that had made the rest of the stumbled journey easier.

He began his walk up to the dark mountainside a half an hour later. The Lord of Grantham had vomited heartily into his chamber pot and then passed out on the floor in his clothes. Undressing him was harder without cooperation, but removing the sick and shit from his clothes later would be decidedly worse. John folded a sheet and rolled his employer over onto it, then covered him with a blanket and tucked a pillow under his head.

Her hair was a bit mussed and the strap of her chemise was slipping from her shoulder to where her shawl rested halfway down her upper arm. And he thought he had never seen anything as lovely as the smile she directed at him as he passed.

"Evening." The lilt of her soft soprano rang through the night air, invitation clear as the stars in the sky, even before she continued to speak. "Care to come slake your thirst?"

He smiled back at her, despite his foul mood at the earlier part of his evening, recognizing the Yorkshire accent. He responded, letting his voice drop the western American intonation, matching her inflection, "I find I'm not thirsty at the moment, thank you."

She laughed and clapped her hands together. "It's always a treat to hear a familiar voice! I was born north of York, in Pickering. I overhead you and the Duke talking while you took him home and even though he sounds like gentry, I thought I heard Yorkshire muddled somewhere in there. Where did you grow up?"

He took one step toward the flickering glow of lamplight and stopped. "Bit of everywhere really, me da was a merchant, so when I was very young we moved a bit. But we settled in London and me mum makes lace from her house for the shops to this day. I've been working for the Earl at Downton Abbey, near..."

"Between Thirsk and Harrogate, near Ripon?" It tickled him how alive she became when she spoke to him, even though she kept her tone quiet. "I grew up three towns over in Easingwold! Well, doesn't that just beat all, an ocean away and we were neighbors. Funny, when I was young, I fancied being a maid in a big house. I thought it would be nice to work amongst such lovely things. But then I imagine they wouldn't much appreciate someone as prone to running her mouth as I am. Are you sure I can't tempt you inside?" She stepped forward and put her hand on the rail of the boardwalk, her smile a beacon. "There is more than one sort of thirst."

He almost believed her. Almost believed that it wasn't his money she wanted. She was obviously skilled at putting people at ease. He thanked her again, tipped his hat and continued on. She was gracious, not vulgar and insistent like some might be. She crowded his thoughts that night.

He found, after he met her, that he played cards in town a bit more often and walked or rode back and forth to town whenever he had opportunity. His employer's horses needed exercising after all. The Garden was situated on the path from his cabin to the Earl's rooms at the hotel. Lord knew the man almost never rode them himself, despite having insisted on purchasing them in San Francisco. He learned from casual inquiry that her name was Annie Lark. She had worked at the Garden for a long time, as long as the man he had asked remembered. No one had a bad word to say about her. She was not prone to opium or heavy drink. She sang like an angel. She was attentive. A few had too many things to say about her and her natural talents. With those men it was all he could do to nod, unclench his fist and walk away.

If she was beautiful in the torchlight, she was radiant in the sun. But in the sun he could see how her smile didn't quite reach her eyes. Still her voice and laughter were lovely and full, and floated out from behind the Garden's doors. She was sweet, but she was not meek. He watched her, in awe one day, as she stood down a mule train driver a solid two heads taller than her. She gave him an earful for cursing and striking at the boy with him, presumably his son. She shamed him in such a way that everyone stood still for a few seconds in disbelief as she turned and stormed off. She could sing a bawdy song with the best of them and knock back a shot of whiskey without batting an eye. And she was rumored to have unbelievable aim with a knife.

He watched her from his window table at the Queen of Hearts, where the girls had learned to leave him alone, as he ate salt pork and corn bread and drained several glasses of milk. He was grateful for the nearly two mile walk back up the mountain on the nights he tended the Earl, because it meant he might glimpse her through the windows or the open door. It meant she might even be outside and he might talk to her and be comforted by the sounds of his country.

Sometimes he saw her and held his breath and sometimes she saw him and nodded and smiled. Those times his heart would take off beating in his chest like a horse running flat out. He avoided talking directly to her, because he was afraid of what fool words would trip from his lips. But he loved listening to her converse with others. He rarely saw her outside when it was earlier and the streets were choked with jacks and lime workers. Later, when the saloons were full and the torches and lanterns outside were lit, he often found her sweeping or just sitting quietly in the shadows. Those were the times he longed for and dreaded. Because she remembered him after the first night, he wasn't sure how with as many men passing through the camps as there were. Perhaps it was his accent. If it was calm on the street she would call to him softly, at first it was in the same playful flirty tone. After a handful of times seeing him, and being refused by him, (He could never bed her. Not ever. Even if he was able, after their first meeting he was too far gone to use her like that.) her tone changed. Not the sweetness, that was a constant in her. He couldn't put his finger on it exactly; what was different, but it was. She seemed more genuine somehow, less forced.

They talked about England and Ireland, Scotland, her Scottish ancestry on her mother's side. The details of her life floated to the surface of the river of her words slowly, parceled out tidbit by tidbit over the course of their meetings. Her father died when she still lived in Easingwold. She missed her uncle and aunt, and her sister. (He didn't ask if they were still alive.) Her mother had a beautiful singing voice, long light brown hair, and tried to do what was right for them. Things hadn't worked out as planned. The tides of your life do that.

Some nights she was cheerful and talkative. Other nights he could see through her smile like it was glass. The nights he didn't see her, she haunted his thoughts. They weren't enough, these stolen, one-sided moments. They were only long enough to leave him wishing for her. He had never been so ridiculously sentimental. Had he? His thoughts made him feel guilty, for she probably enjoyed his company because he asked nothing more than to know her. Problem was, the more he knew her, the more he wanted her. Not in a possessive way. Not in the way he had wanted Vera. It wasn't that he wanted to bed her (though he wanted that, too); he wanted to make her smile, and touch the hard angle of her jaw, and show her gentleness, because there was so little gentleness in this valley. There was stone and wood and bone and metal and fire and too many men and much too much whiskey.

He saw her through the window as he was walking one day and she was laughing and carousing through the nearly empty saloon with another of the girls. It made him happy that she found joy in corners and beams of filtered sunlight where she could. It was a rare gift. It surprised him that it didn't bother him more, what she did, all the men she had lain with. It didn't. Not much. She had a job. She was doing it; he hoped she found at least some pleasure in it.

He wanted to hold her, loosely and with care; the way one holds a bird or some other sort of wild creature that nestles into the warmth of a hand or body, that chooses to allow itself to be cradled and cared for. He felt protective over her, though she obviously did not need his protection. He wondered sometimes what it would be like to have her softness and fire murmuring to him in bed at night. He wondered what it would be like to be good to someone and have them be good to him in return. He wondered what she had lived through, if her family had been kind to her or cruel. What events pulled her into this life, in which she didn't quite seem to fit? He wanted to know her. When it came down to it, he was a coward and couldn't bring himself to ask.

Instead he smiled with closed-lipped bashfulness and let himself be drawn into her jokes and laughter. Sometimes they talked quietly and sighed. She was the only one he told of his irrational longing for the wide-open, rolling moors of north Yorkshire and the deep bone-cold of the winters there.

There were nights when he didn't know what the hell he was doing there, a continent and an ocean away from his aging mother and his home, dragging his sore ass three-and-a-half miles round-trip, to help a grown man change out of his clothes, when there was whiskey in his cabin and a card game in the barracks. He hated that the closest bookstore was in Santa Cruz and even that wasn't a proper bookstore. The nearest proper bookstore was in San Jose, and it was not a journey he enjoyed. Those were the nights where his tells were easier to read and his limp more pronounced. When his mood was foul. But those nights all it took was a glimpse of her through the windows to settle him.

When she was working she was all charm and smiles and flash. She flirted and enticed. He watched her once — could only bear a close viewing the once — as she hung from the waist of a gangly jack he half knew. Watching her convince him with a squeeze of his hip and the tipping of hers made John ill. She angled her smile up at the tall young man with her usual sweetness, but even from his seat at the Queen of Hearts, he could see the falseness in it. Everything about her looked posed and forced, with practiced ease to be sure, but still. The man had tried to kiss her; she turned her cheek to him and said something. He grin and fondled her breast through her clothes. She swatted his hand away and bade him follow her inside. He did. After that John Bates had paid his bill and rode darkly up the mountain. Saying he was surprised that it didn't bother him more was not the same as saying it did not bother him at all.

It was late March before he went into the Garden for the first time. He hadn't seen or talked to her for a week. Not since he saw her as she walked out of the house and purposefully up Bennett Street on a Tuesday afternoon. By the following Wednesday he was not worried, not exactly; curious and concerned, perhaps.

When he sat at the bar a fat older woman with an obscene amount of bosom spilling out of her corset, slopped some whiskey into a shot glass for him. "Tokens for a bath are a half dollar, tokens for a girl are two."

He shook his head. "Just the drink."

She cocked her head, sized him up in two blinks.

"You're Annie's gentleman caller," she stated bluntly and chuffed. "I ought to charge you a token a week for all that girl's time you waste. You're definitly paying double for that whiskey. What the hell you doing, muddling her head?"

"I assume you are Vi?"

She nodded and raised an eyebrow.

He looked at her, held his voice and expression as even as he was able. "You seem to be turning a fair business, despite any head-muddling you seem to think me guilty of. Regardless, Annie isn't interested in me like that."

Her laughter split the air, interrupting him. "You want to pique that girl's interest, buy a token."

"Seems to me, a young woman such as Miss Lark is quite a draw, place like this. We never talk for more than a few minutes at a time, and if we do, it is when she doesn't have any jacks occupying her."

Vi snorted, "She ain't being occupied by any jacks, because she's out talking to you."

A retort was swallowed down, like so much gristle. He kept his face smooth. It wouldn't do to anger Vi, who would only take it out on Annie. "You said a token is two dollars?" He asked, already knowing the answer. "A token a week since we met, by my reckoning is thirty dollars give or take a few. Here's thirty-five. That enough for you to let her be regarding what little time she spends talking to me?" It was nearly his entire month's wages. But he had plenty set by for a rainy day, and Norah-Jane's cooking, and a bottle of whiskey besides. He would be fine until the next time he was paid.

Vi eyed the bank notes on the bar. "For a few weeks, long as she isn't shirking her other customers."

He felt his ears burn. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell her I paid you."

"What, so she won't find out that you are the same as all her other johns? Only, they are smart enough to pay for her pussy and not just her time."

Again he bit his tongue. He stood on his bad ankle and breathed into the pain. Let it eclipse his anger and draw his focus. The drops of laudnam were waiting for him. He had been cutting back. Which meant he was drinking more whiskey. Not much more. Maybe only half again what he usually drank. It was how the scales balanced. He decided then and there to stop walking the trip entirely and consistently make use of His Lordship's horse. It was ridiculous to walk the whole way and lay waste to his leg when His Lordship had two horses just stood in their stalls at Johnston's Livery.

"If you want to keep getting your money," he growled his irritation at the woman. "You won't tell her." He decided he didn't like Vi. And then he decided he wasn't proud and asked his next question anyway, "Where's she been these last few days, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I do mind your asking, but it's a free country. She been up at Miss Minnie's place. Nursing a doxy cunt as used to work here over t'other side. Now you don't mind I have a slew of jacks and johns as need a bit of tenderness. I assume, as stupid as you are, you can find the door when you're done sipping that whiskey like it's fucking tea?"

He glared at her in silence as she ambled away laughing to herself.

He hadn't been to Miss Minnie's before, but he had bought fruit preserves and pickles from her along with some cream for His Lordship's arthritis that seemed to work far better than the rub the town doctor prescribed. As strange as she was, he very much liked the woman. She was roughly his age and trundled her wares into town and up to the lime works on a regular basis. She was very nearly a general store on wheels. She was as hard and weather-beaten as most of the jacks, and ornery besides. She had a somewhat disgruntled old draft horse that pulled her cart up and down the same mountain road he walked.

He knew the road that led to her family property as he passed it every time he came down the mountainside from his cabin near the lumber and lime works barracks. It wasn't a cabin so much as it was a glorified lean-to. At least it afforded him a touch of solitude in the night. He was less at Lord Grantham's beck and call this far from the peer, who favored it beyond discouraging their undeserved reputation, for his servant's proximity to his investments. He would see to tacking on a proper a stall for whichever horse he rode home at night. Mountain Mike claimed to have shot the last grizzly bear a few years before, but that didn't mean it was true.

He caught sight of her when he rounded a curve in the narrow road. She was born to be amongst the green, he thought. Outside, in the open air. He smoothed the smile that threatened to betray his joy at happening upon her.

Her hair was tied up neatly under a smart, simple hat. The dress she wore was blue. It was plain and sensible. She looked at bit like a farmer's wife. A very somber, sorrowful farmer's wife. Her face brightened a bit when she looked up at the sound of hoof-falls and saw him, "Mr. Bates, what a lovely surprise. I was..." She gave a sort of yelp and arms flew out instinctively (hers and his) as she stumbled. Her baskets fell, scattering greens and beets and carrots over the ground.

She somehow managed to remain upright. He was grateful for that, and quickly slid off of Isis. Stooping, he snatched a basket and began to fill it.

"No! What are you doing?" She took the basket from his hands, flustered. He ignored her and continued gathering her fallen produce. "I mean to say, thank you. But, please, there's no need Mr. Bates, I'm fine. What if someone happened upon us? What would people say? I won't have anyone think ill of you, not on my account."

"Anyone who would think ill of me for helping you is no concern of mine," he said warmly, snatching a carrot. "It only shows their own lack of character if they don't know how to treat a lady."

She laughed out loud, her smile lingering, "Be that as it may, Mr. Bates, there is a flaw in your logic; I'm not a lady and never claimed to be."

There were times when he forgot to hide his expression, to guard his glances, when he forgot she didn't love him back, didn't desire him for more than his kindness or company, when he forgot to censor his words. They slipped out now, laden, humming in the air between them, "You're a lady to me. And I never knew a finer one."

She looked at him opaquely, her smile gone, and he knew he had crossed a line. He closed his eyes and reached blindly for the last beet, depositing it in her basket before giving her an awkwardly-garnered smile and catching up Isis' reins.

"Mr. Bates," her voice was small, her footfalls on the packed dirt behind him. He turned to her with the kindest face he could muster. Jumped a little, surprised by the touch of her fingers when she pressed a coin into his palm. The clasp of her hand made his breath catch. She held his eyes and the yearning he thought he saw in them shocked him.

It wasn't a proper coin, but a token. Like the ones for which he had just paid her madam. How the saloons got around the law. His brow furrowed when he settled all the pieces together and realized her intent.

"I don't ... I don't want this from you." He stumbled over his words, flushed and hot with embarrassment at being caught out in his more-than-brotherly affection for her. She frowned and looked away - he hated for her to frown.

"I'm sorry." The pure bell of her words rang soft and hollow. "I thought... I didn't mean to..."

Did she look embarrassed? No. She couldn't be. And she certainly couldn't be disappointed. It wouldn't have been yearning that he saw. She glanced at him. He had misread things before in his life, so many times. It wouldn't be the first time he thought he saw something that wasn't there. He could never let her think this was what he wanted. Yes, he wanted to make love to her, (he could not lie to himself about that,) but not like this. Never to just use her for his own desires. He reached out and caught her wrist. Her hand was so delicate and small, he turned it over and placed the token back into her palm, gently closing her fingers over it. She took a sharp breath in through her nose, frowned, kept looking away, not meeting his eye.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I meant no offense. I only wanted to ... I wanted to show you my gratitude, is all. It's all I have to ..."

"Miss Lark," he interrupted, panicked. His mouth went dry. "Miss Lark ... I ... Please. You mustn't ever think that you need to... That I expect ... That you ever owe me anything ... I want nothing more from you than your friendship."

"Everyone wants something, Mr. Bates, even you." She looked at him for a long time. And with a start he realized he had been moving his thumb slowly back and forth across her wrist.

Abruptly, he let go of her. "I treat you as I do because I am fond of you and it pleases me; not ever so you'll please me."

Annie blinked rapidly and looked at the packed dirt of the road, "I am ever so sorry, Mr. Bates. I hope you will overlook my indiscretion."

"Lord, Annie! Please don't apologize - not to me. You've done nothing wrong. I just ... couldn't." The air felt like breathing in limestone dust after the dynamite blew apart the mountainside. "Not like this," he whispered, his voice gone rough. Then he realized what he had said. Abruptly, he lifted one of the baskets from her arms and turned to carry it for her. He couldn't meet her eye. She fell into step next to him. They walked together back to Felton, the horse following behind.

"Weren't you headed the other way?" she asked after a time, glancing sidelong at him.

"Yes, but it pleases me to walk with you," he answered truthfully, feeling his ears and cheeks go hot.

"My friend died," she blurted, suddenly. "Eunice. She worked for Vi too, until she got sores. Vi will tolerate a bit of itching, but you're out of a job when you have the sores. After Vi turned her out, she worked holding up the alley wall. Ms. Minnie was letting her stay on, do some sewing in exchange for room and board when she couldn't find enough jacks as willing to pay. Last week, she was beaten. No one knows who's done it. She was bleeding somewhere inside and her body was already weak."

She sighed deeply. When he looked at her, the muscles in her jaw stood out. "We aren't wicked, you know. Well, some are, but no more than anyone is wicked. We aren't. It's just that a woman's only worth in a man's eyes is between her legs. Especially out here. And if she hasn't great wealth she does what she must. Eunice was a kind woman. And so funny; she was always good for a lark or a laugh. She was my friend." Her words sounded strange - hard and tight. When she stopped speaking tears rolled from her eyes.

Before he could stop himself he caught her up in his arms and stood still in the road, cradling her weeping form to his chest. She was slight, but more solid than he expected and he held her more tightly than was his intention. "I'm so sorry Miss Lark." They were empty words, as he had no real idea of what to say, though he blundered on, "She was lucky to have such a friend in you."

She made no move to extricate herself from his arms, if anything she settled further into them.

"It does no good hating," she murmured, caught up in her thoughts. "It doesn't alter anything but your own heart. I know that. Doesn't fix anything. This is my life. There is no changing what I am. But when things like this happen... It's hard not to be angry. We are more than a hole to fuck or a body to beat." Her words pulled her out of herself. She pushed away from him and dried her eyes. "I'm ever so sorry, Mr. Bates, look at me gone weepy and sentimental, and vulgar to boot." She gripped his hand and forearm briefly. "I hope you'll find it in your heart to forgive me for all of my transgressions today. I am more than a bit out of sorts. It has been a long, sorrowful week. If I am being honest, I am rather poorly."

He shook his head. "You need never apologize, Miss Lark. Not to me. You could never offend me. Not ever."

She looked at him with a guarded expression before sighing and nodding, and resuming their walk.

"I cannot tell you how much it means to me to hear you say that, Mr. Bates."