"So is this going to become a regular thing?"
Lucas set his chair beside the rocking chair, and took a sip from his glass.
…..
Lucas had sent Mark to bed as usual, after he had thrown a silent glance into his own room – but Emery was still asleep. But finished with his books, he had found himself too uneasy to settle, and taken the whiskey and a cigar out onto the veranda. An indrawn breath had startled him from his brooding – Emery stood in the door, this time fully clothed. Her hair was pulled to one side and braided, and a blanket slung over her shoulders. The bowl of stew they had left out for her was in her hands.
They had stared at each other in the near darkness for a too-long moment.
"Mind if I join you?"
"Not at all," he had said, his throat dry. Automatically he got out of the rocking chair. "Sit." No way he'd let her settle on the floor again. The whiskey warm in his blood and misty in his head he ignored her efforts of protest. Had he always been this tall? She seemed so small and vulnerable in his chair. "I'll get the other chair."
…..
He glanced over. "Well?"
Emery hunched her shoulders a little higher. "Not for much longer, anyway."
Ah, that was unexpected. Lucas took a large swallow and almost choked. He let her spoon the stew in silence, until finally he formed slow, deliberate words:
"Is this as hard for you as it is for me?"
Her voice was very small and a little hoarse as she questioned in return: "What do you mean?"
"This… you, me, Eirik…. It's like there's three of us." The rifleman kept his tone dry, spoke mostly into the cool night air. When she did not answer for the longest time, he turned. Finding her glance fastened on his glass, he offered it to her somewhat bemusedly.
The light from the lamp hanging beside the door shone just enough to make her features visible. Emery reached for the glass with an unreadable expression.
When their fingers touched, both startled. Their eyes met.
Lucas refused to drown in the blood rushing in his ears and, grasping her empty bowl, stood up. He returned and sat down without a word, but much of his earlier calm.
A considerable amount of time passed, measured by the full centimetre of his cigar, and the refilling of the amber liquid. Emery pulled her knees up with slow movements and answered: "I can only guess how angry you must be. For me, the weirdest part is that I should feel relieved, and free, and I do, but… The awareness that I am female, to everybody, comes in spurts and waves. It's like Eirik was who I am, without all the memories and emotions and experiences that Emery has." She chuckled morosely. "I'm not schizophrenic, I promise."
"You're drinking whiskey. You're definitely not the farmhand I took on." He said it dryly. Lucas was fighting with himself again – she managed to defuse his previous anger, and make him want to alleviate the tension in her – in them both. It worked, the smile he could barely make out touched her eyes. He had not been making it easy for her, either, alternating between fury and normal conversation and protectiveness.
"This warms, without the burn. Why is it in all the books people drink Brandy? Swenson has it in his office, even Miss Hattie has her bottle behind the counter. But you drink whiskey…"
Lucas shrugged. "Brandy tastes cheap to me. Army memories…"
The glint in her eyes should have warned him. "Whiskey is more sophisticated? goes better with the refined rifleman?"
Ah, there she went again. He almost spat with the mixture of amusement and indignation. There was this beautiful young woman sitting on his porch, whom he knew only very little; and every time he had found a measure of equilibrium, she sputtered something that made him see Eirik, remember the warmth and closeness he had felt for the young man.
"This is exactly what I meant. We were good friends. But this… awareness…"
He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to dampen the anger he felt rising again.
The young woman moved until she sat crosslegged in the chair, facing him. "You feel I took advantage of you."
Damn, she put her finger right into the midst of it. Lucas had not quite formed the thought for himself. He had to say something. "Well, you put me at a disadvantage. How often did you laugh at me?"
"Laugh at you?" her voice rose with disbelieve and amusement. "Only when you were drunk."
Momentarily distracted, Lucas frowned. "So many things should have alerted me to your secret…"
"Lucas, I had a decade and more to perfect him."
"Did you never meet anybody who made you doubt your decision?"
She leaned back again into a more comfortable position. "Ah, I've asked myself this a few times over the last days."
Her hesitation made him guess at her thoughts. "Did you ever let yourself meet anybody who made you doubt?"
Now she was disconcerted at the precision with which he read her mind. "That's probably the truth of it. I was people-weary."
"Your days in the big cities… You thought the costume gave you freedom."
"When I faced that I had most certainly lost Benton's trail, I put Spirit with a kind man outside of town and went in… as a woman. I was considering joining the suffragette movement for good. But things happened that made me flee the city. Again. Freedom is just another word for nothing to loose…"
"Stop, youngster, that's despair talking." Lucas spoke swiftly. "Those are not your words. Am I right?"
She stared at him in abject misery. "Somebody said them to me once."
"What was in that letter?"
He had been right. There was a connection between her downcast mood and the page of writing. She glanced out over the moonlight landscape and answered: "My parents had taken quite some pride in the little valley we called home. They had not only traded it from the local tribe, but also made sure their claim was settled with the government. It was a peaceful place, gentle and wild and safe and dangerous… oh, if I could paint with words…" the longing in her voice made the rifleman ache for her. "After Benton's men burned it down, after my brother, my father were gone and buried, I went to the local judge, to ask for the written deed, to give to the tribe, so they could use the land, help me rebuild." She was unaware of the single silver tear running down her face. "The man… he said, after condemning me for being a girl, and a halfnative, there was no writ, that my father had been a fraud, that Benton's story…" she swallowed hard. "He broke my believe in white man's law. This letter now… this letter is the territorial court of the northwestern territories looking for the progeny of Siobhan O'Donnel and Aks'Yamoria of the Sturgeon Lake tribe. For the owner of said writ. For me. To put things right. Even Benton's name shows up… looking back now, I think they might have been working together somehow, Benton and Galvesen."
"But when Benton fled from the north, this Galvesen was not found out?"
"It does sound like he was found out only years later."
"What would he want with your land? Especially up there land can't be expensive."
"Ah. There was a rumour of a gold deposit."
Lucas let out his breath with a hiss. The story made sense now.
"There were no friends of the family to corroborate your claim?"
"None that would put up a fight large enough to rattle the court. It is a lonely country, settlements are sparse and spread far apart. I guess similar to hereabouts a few ten-years back."
"I understand. And yet…" It made him bitter to imagine a younger, heart-shaped face confronted with this harsh a reality. "That no one spoke up…"
"Lucas, you remember how your friends from your town reacted to the sick and injured mixed-blood family." Her voice was a deep, rough rumble full of dispirited anger. "Not only that, my mother had left her amish family for my father. We followed no obvious religion. The piano in the living room – a rich man's instrument. The local priest – a catholic – would have made our priest here in North Fork look like a moderate protestant. And my father was university trained, well spoken, my mother a classic stubborn irish girl… I thought… I thought I had no choice. It was just one man… Galvesen's successor is cleaning out his drawer, and trying to set things right. Everything could have been so different…"
Lucas reached out a broad paw, engulfing her wrist in his fingers. "Emery." He watched her fight against the desperation that threatened to overwhelm her, watched her bite down on her lower lip to stop its trembling. She pulled her hand back only to reach for his whiskey glass. He held on to it for a moment, holding her eyes too.
"None of what you just told me gives anybody an excuse. None of what happened to you as a child was in any way your fault."
A shiver ran over her, down to the tips of her fingers. Before her eyes spilled over – or the glass spilled over, he let go, but raised an eyebrow.
"You do realise you will regret this tomorrow?"
He more felt than heard her sarcastic sigh before she recklessly took a large gulp of the amber liquid. But she found some kind of equilibrium again. A long while later she said quietly into the empty air: "You do know that I will regret a lot of things for a lot longer than tomorrow."
Lucas emptied the glass, thoughts still with her story. A ten year old girl. And to be followed by an insidious priest with fat fingers and a foible for helpless girls. Of course the letter would reawaken all the horrors of her childhood.
"That makes two of us."
She stilled completely. But before the tall man could fully realise how she had taken his words, the young woman had squared her shoulders.
"Anything else you want an answer for?"
That made the rifleman grin in the darkness. She sounded incredibly sweet, slurring her usually so crisply accentless pronunciation. "The waterwheel. How long has this been going on?"
She grimaced. "Maybe two weeks before the 'marriage debacle'. We used the dry weather, and worked on it every free minute. You remember Mark and I rode out often after homework and chores were done…"
"I remember." He was intoxicated himself, his thoughts working slower than usually. "When did you decide to tell me that your name is Emery, not Eirik."
Curled in his chair, her knees under her chin, the blanked wrapped around her she resembled more a miserable little owl than a human being. The owl spoke: "You know me well, Lucas McCain. I started working on it with the vague plan that I had to act. Your leg was fully healed. So I resolved that after it was finished, I would confront… you, myself…" she shrugged, the blanket gliding off her shoulders.
She had been tired those evenings. A thought came to the rifleman, one he would at another time have rejected. "Wait. I wasn't that drunk. One evening, you said… you said you had shared a woman's bed before." His tone made it an accusation.
The girl chuckled humourlessly. "Winters in the north are cold. Very cold. So of course we shared furs."
A sudden whiff of the gentle evening breeze brought the smell of her hair to him, and with it a cloud of memories. As he had done with her. Suddenly Lucas could not breathe for the reaction of his body. He was not a boy of sixteen any more, he had buried a wife. He had thought these feelings, the surprise of them, the intensity of them, buried with her.
He swallowed once, twice, the blood roaring in his ears. The silence seemed to fill the yard until one could have cut the air with a scythe.
"Lucas?" Her tone was matter of fact, but the waver in her voice gave lie to it.
To distract himself from his inner turmoil he interrupted her: "Do you need anything for your journey?"
She stiffened, still staring straight ahead. It took Emery a long time to summon a short answer. "No. Thank you." She squared her shoulders. "I can sleep in the barn. I've been imposing on you for long enough."
"Sam Buckhart's coming back. And you're not imposing." Just distracting, and confusing.
"I fear the whiskey is getting to my head. I will retire." Her words were formal and calm, but the hand she reached out to the railing was shaking.
Where had the conversation taken this turn? Would she have asked his forgiveness? Would he have given it?
"Emr'y…" Lucas stood with a frown. He reached out an arm, barring her way. His intentions were a muddle, but when his hand touched her waist, she froze. He could see the wetness on her cheeks. The young woman recoiled almost violently from his touch, and stumbling, bumped hard into the railing. With a surprised sound of pain she doubled over, pressing both hands to her side.
Lucas caught her up in his arms without hesitation.
Strange, how the lithe, warm body against his could make so much sense. He murmured against her hair, while she laboured to catch her breath.
"Shh, breathe, little one, breathe."
He'd known a fellow with a broken rib in the war. The guy had fainted twice from the pain of it. And Swenson, the smith, had taken a horse's hoof to the chest more than once - he'd been blue and black, and even a gentle pat to his back had had him groaning in pain.
He realised he was telling her all this aloud. "A broken rib needs time."
She slowly relaxed and straightened, his arms reluctantly loosening around her. She lifted her head slowly.
His back was to the light the lamp threw out of the window, but the moon's silvery rays reached her face. He could watch her wet her lips before she said:
"Thank you. I'm all right now." Something swung in her voice that rose goose-bumps on his arms.
"You're shivering." His hands still rested on her waist. She was so close, so warm...
She gently – reluctantly? – pulled out of his grasp. "I'm cold, and tired." She rallied against the wavering of her voice and even managed a shaky smile. "The night air seems not to become me. As well -"
She frowned, cocking her head slightly. Lucas too heard the muffled hoof-beats. They listened for a moment, still lightly clasping wrists.
Emery pulled away. "That's Sam Buckhart returning. Good night, Lucas McCain."
Lucas frowned at her retreating figure. When the door closed behind her, a fleeting thought passed through his mind: Could it be he liked the female version even better than the male one?