Elizabeth had Allie's hand in hers as she and Abigail walked toward the Mercantile. Elizabeth felt she really should say something.
"We ran into each other by accident, Abigail," Elizabeth said, looking over.
Abigail smiled kindly and nodded. "As I said before, it's a small town. And since I hope you'll stay with me until you get settled, you'll both be living in the row houses, so you might as well get used to it."
A strange combination of happiness and horror flashed across Elizabeth's face for a moment before she collected herself, but Abigail saw it. "He lives in one of the row houses?" Elizabeth said thinly.
Smiling, Abigail said, "The one on the far end." She raised an eyebrow slyly. "As far away from mine as possible."
Elizabeth laughed. "Well, that's a blessing." Shaking her head, Elizabeth said, "Oh, Abigail. How can I have been here such a short time and have already gotten myself into so much trouble?"
Abigail laughed too and put her arm around Elizabeth. "Well, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that trouble will find you no matter where you go. It's how you deal with it that matters." She squeezed Elizabeth's shoulder gently. "And if I'm reading things correctly, you're not the only one in trouble," Abigail said softly.
Elizabeth turned quickly, her eyes wide. She started to shake her head slowly, and then stopped and looked down at Allie. Allie felt her looking and turned to gaze adoringly up at her. Elizabeth made a face and Allie giggled.
"Oh, dear," Abigail said, both eyebrows going up this time. "It's all three of you." She let out a big sigh. They were almost to the Mercantile. "Ned Yost is in there, and he'll take care of your wire. I need to go to the bank, and I may see you on the way home. If not, the door is always unlocked."
Abigail leaned down and touched Allie's cheek tenderly. "Bye, Allie. I hope to see you again soon." Abigail hadn't missed the fact that Allie hadn't let go of Elizabeth's hand for a second, and she didn't now. That little girl wants a mother, Abigail thought. She looked back at Elizabeth and grinned. "Stay out of trouble?"
Elizabeth laughed. "Oh, I'll try," she said.
Elizabeth glossed over the stagecoach robbery in the wire to her father, and he was so glad to hear she was safe that he wired her more money immediately. All she had to do was go to the bank and get it. All the while she was handling her business, Allie was absolutely content to simply hold her hand and go with her anywhere.
After picking up her money, Elizabeth went back to the Mercantile and found a plain hat, and she let Allie choose the ribbons and notions to dress it up. She loved that Allie's favorite color seemed to be blue, which was also hers. Of course, Allie wanted to decorate the hat right away, but Elizabeth said that it would be better if they could find a special time when they could do that and nothing else. Maybe after church tomorrow.
Elizabeth had learned early in her teaching that she should never make promises to children if she wasn't completely sure that she could keep them. So when Allie said, "Promise?" to her suggestion, Elizabeth said, "We'll have to ask your Uncle Nathan," at which point, Allie simply took Elizabeth's hand and began leading her around the corner to the Mountie office.
Laughing, Elizabeth said, "I don't think he's there, Allie." She didn't want to say she'd been watching for the red serge to ride by.
Allie pointed. "Newton," she said simply, and yes, there was Nathan's horse, tethered outside the office of the Coal Valley North West Mounted Police.
"He is fast," Elizabeth said softly.
When they came to the office door, Elizabeth felt a shyness coming on, but Allie was full-steam ahead. "Uncle Nathan, I want to make a hat."
Nathan looked up from his seat at the desk and smiled. "You want to make a hat?" He gazed up at Elizabeth, and she laughed. She brought her basket over to his desk and showed him the ribbons and lace they'd found, and then she pulled out the straw hat she had in a paper bag.
"We thought after services tomorrow?" Elizabeth said. "I'm sure Abigail wouldn't mind if Allie and I spent some time at her dining room table."
Nathan looked at Allie's face, seeing how bright it was. "I think that would be fine," Nathan said. As soon as he had given his okay, Allie happily went over to the corner of the office that had a veritable zoo of her carved animals and some of her toys.
Nathan looked up at Elizabeth and said, "Hat making after church it is," as he smiled a little awkwardly. What he was realizing was that he really wanted to ask Elizabeth if they could all walk together out to the grove tomorrow, and perhaps sit together, but he knew she would say what she should say – it would only keep people talking.
When they'd looked at each other a little too long, Elizabeth turned away. And then she saw the bookshelf.
She stopped and tilted her head to the side so that she could read the titles on the bindings. She smiled, seeing that it was an eclectic mix that included Moby Dick, The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Scarlet Letter and Pride and Prejudice. She turned and looked at Nathan, her eyes narrowed slightly. "This is quite a library for a Mountie's office," she said with no small amount of admiration in her voice.
Nathan laughed softly. "And what would you expect? Nothing but Sherlock Holmes, or Crime and Punishment, perhaps?"
"Ah," Elizabeth said, even more impressed, "A literary Mountie." She turned back to the bookshelf. "Oh, Emily Dickenson." She pulled the book from the shelf and held it tenderly, opening it to a random page. "Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."
Elizabeth sighed and looked over at Nathan. "I don't really care that I lost all my dresses and shoes..." she said softly. She peeked past him to the corner of the office to be sure Allie wasn't listening, "...even my hats," and Nathan smiled back at her. Elizabeth's face went suddenly sad. "But my books... all gone," she said. "I looked in the Mercantile, and Ned only seems to have Farmer's Almanacs and books on how to do things, like build a chicken coop," she said sadly.
She looked back at Nathan. "So you must have brought all these with you. I've already looked and Coal Valley doesn't have a library..." Elizabeth trailed her fingers lovingly across the spines of the books on the second shelf. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Oliver Twist, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Journey to the Center of the Earth..." She gazed back over at Nathan, her eyebrows raised, "Jules Verne. So you enjoy fantasy stories?"
"It's all fantasy unless it's non-fiction, isn't it?" Nathan asked. "Even Melville's story of the whale, and... Emily Dickinson's poems." Talking about books had Nathan feeling more on solid ground than he felt trying to make conversation with a woman as beautiful and kind as Elizabeth. He knew books. Women were the mystery.
Nathan saw the look in her eyes and recognized a longing there for something lost. It was a look he knew well because he had seen it so often in his own mirror. Elizabeth's books were much more easily replaced than Colleen or his father, so Nathan stood and went to the bookshelf.
"Close your eyes," he said.
Elizabeth's forehead creased, just between her eyebrows. "Why?" she said, tilting her head.
"Just do it, please," Nathan said gently.
Elizabeth smiled and did as he asked.
"Now keep them closed, and choose five books," Nathan said. He put his hand very lightly on hers and guided it up to the bookshelf. "No looking," he warned her. "The ones you choose, you can borrow. From the Mountie Library."
Elizabeth couldn't see him, and yet she somehow knew that he was wearing the crooked smile. "But how will I know which books I'm getting?" she asked.
"You won't... and you will," Nathan said. "You just saw all the titles, and where they were." He turned and looked at her, and since her eyes were closed, he could gaze at her as long as he wanted while he talked to her. "Do you believe in fate, Elizabeth?" he asked. "That certain things are meant to be and that we'll make choices that lead us there, whether we know it or not?"
Elizabeth was running her hands across the spines of the books on the second shelf. There was a particular book she wanted more than any other. "Well, I had a choice to come to Coal Valley or to stay in Hamilton. But you were assigned here, weren't you? That wasn't your choice." She thought the book was one of the three she had her hand on.
Nathan smiled again. "That's where you're wrong. Not ten days ago I was sitting in an office with another Mountie and he and I got to choose where we wanted to be. I chose Coal Valley. Jack decided to go to Cape Fullerton and live a much more exciting life."
Now Elizabeth was trying to measure the width of each book with her fingers to see if it matched her memory of how the book had looked just moments ago. "And if you'd chosen differently, then it would be Mountie Jack who would be standing here torturing me with blind man's bluff," she said laughing.
"Ah, no, that's not how things work," Nathan said, watching her hands as they measured each book and moved on. She had beautiful hands with slender, graceful fingers. "Each moment leads to the next, and it's possible Jack wouldn't have come out to get you at the stagecoach. Perhaps you would have met him later. He's a single man and doesn't have a child to care for, so it's likely you wouldn't be in this office right now at all," Nathan said. "Everything would be different."
Elizabeth laughed softly. "Maybe if Mountie Jack had shown up in Coal Valley, I wouldn't have burned down the teacherage," she said.
Nathan laughed too. "Possibly. But another possibility is that burning down the teacherage was necessary for you to live with Abigail for a while and become the friends that you wouldn't have become if you were living out there by yourself. And if it hadn't burned, then we... " Nathan suddenly felt himself on dangerous ground and stopped.
But Elizabeth's eyes were still closed, and for some reason that made it easier to tell the truth. Maybe it was because she wasn't distracted by his eyes. "If it hadn't burned, then I wouldn't have shamelessly thrown myself into your arms and cried on your fine red serge jacket..."
She couldn't know that Nathan's eyes were closed now too, as he remembered. He spoke very softly. "I didn't mind," he said.
Elizabeth couldn't describe what she was feeling right now, and she hoped that once she got upstairs and into the privacy of her room at Abigail's, that she would be able to write it on the lined pages of the blank book she'd purchased at the Mercantile. She'd lost her journal in the fire as well, and though it was a great loss, it didn't yet have any of her impressions of Coal Valley, and that was the part she needed so badly to process right now.
Elizabeth could hear Allie in the corner with her dolls talking to them. She heard people chatting outside and horses walking by, and she could feel Nathan next to her. She could still feel the place on her hand where his fingers had been, guiding her to the bookshelf. And she could feel a book in her hands that she knew was the one she wanted. She had been drawn to it. She pulled it out, and still with her eyes closed, she held it up. "This one," she said.
Nathan opened his eyes and grinned. "Hope is the thing with feathers," he said softly. "Now four more." Elizabeth would have felt grateful to borrow any one of the other books on the shelves, so now that she'd gotten the one she really wanted, it didn't matter so much. In fact, she enjoyed just letting her fingers roam and pick whatever fate chose for her.
Nathan called them out to her. "Captains Courageous. Kipling is never a mistake. A Christmas Carol. You'll find that one a little dog-eared from Christmases past. Pride and Prejudice. Always a good choice. Last one. Oh, The Fall of the House of Usher. Don't read that one in the dark," Nathan said, laughing.
"May I open my eyes now?" Elizabeth said, laughing too.
"Yes," Nathan said, finally peering into her eyes again. "You did very well."
"And I can really borrow these?" Elizabeth said as she stacked them one on top of the other. "I don't think I realized how much I missed my books until I saw yours." She frowned slightly. "And I'll ask you again. What is a library like this doing in a Mountie office?"
Nathan smiled his crooked smile. "You seem to have a very narrow view of me, Miss Thatcher."
Elizabeth laughed. "Oh, I did say that to you yesterday morning, didn't I?" She looked at him from under her lashes. "I am sorry I was so rude to you, but I was upset about the fact that my father thinks so little of me."
Nathan raised an eyebrow. "Or perhaps he thinks so much of you that he wants you to be safe?"
"Perhaps," Elizabeth said softly. She looked seriously into Nathan's eyes. "But I can't prove myself here if I have a Mountie constantly coming to my rescue, Nathan. I need to do this on my own."
"I know," he said. "Though I already have no doubt about how strong you are."
They both simply looked at each other, breathing a little more quickly. That was just about as much straightforward honesty as the two of them could handle at this point, and they both looked back at the bookshelf.
"Do you think Mountie Jack would have a library like this?" Elizabeth said, hoping to move the conversation onto a less perilous path.
Nathan nodded slowly. "He seemed like a pretty smart guy, but if he had one, they would be different books."
Elizabeth looked directly at Nathan and said softly, "I like these books."
Suddenly Emily Montgomery ran through the open door and went straight over to Allie in the corner and sat down to play. Cat wasn't far behind and by the time she arrived at the doorway, Elizabeth had moved back to her basket and was making a show of arranging its contents.
Cat looked at Nathan and then at Elizabeth and raised an eyebrow. "Miss Thatcher. Good to see you again. I trust you're settled in at Abigail's?"
Elizabeth turned. "Oh, please, call me Elizabeth, and yes..." She felt a blush coming on, "I'm very comfortable there. And Mrs. Montgomery..."
"Call me Cat," she said, nodding.
"Cat... as I told Abigail, I will pay the town back every penny for the teacherage. I am so sorry..."
"It was a very old building," Cat said, and Nathan laughed.
"That seems to be the consensus," he said. "I saw it up close, and I'm not sure it would have made it through the week even without a fire."
Cat laughed, and then, so did Elizabeth. "Thank you both," she said gratefully. "Everyone has been so kind."
"We'll see you at Sunday services tomorrow, Elizabeth?" Cat asked. "We're holding the meetings outside in the grove since we have no church. And I've been giving the sermon, since Reverend Anderson is owned by the mining company and we choose not to have him tell us about the Lord."
Elizabeth heard Cat's voice go uncharacteristically cold, and she looked at Nathan. Elizabeth could see that he was hearing the same thing, but if he was opting not to address it, she wouldn't either.
"Of course. I wouldn't miss it," Elizabeth said. She walked around to where Allie was playing, to say goodbye, and Allie looked up and said, "This is Emily." Emily stood up and said formally, "Hello, Miss Thatcher. You're our new teacher." She smiled at Elizabeth and said, "I like school. I'm glad you're here."
Touched, Elizabeth said, "Thank you, Emily. I'm glad to be here." She smiled and said, "I will see you in class on Monday." Elizabeth looked at Allie. "See you tomorrow, Allie?" Before she knew it, Allie had stood and put her arms around Elizabeth's legs, hugging her. She looked up and said, "We make a pretty hat," and then ran back over to Emily.
Elizabeth laughed and walked over to Nathan's desk to get her basket. As she was walking by him, he handed her the five books she'd chosen. "Miss Thatcher," he said, affecting a casual tone.
"Thank you, Constable," Elizabeth said, doing the same.
As Elizabeth went out the door, Cat looked from one to the other and took a deep breath.
She was not fooled. Not for a moment.