Briggs as it happened. No relation to the boarding house owner in Cheyenne. just the universe being clumsy with names. They made their objections known to Gideon directly, which Rosalie found out about thirdhand through Roy, who had no particular loyalty to anyone, but liked talking. According to Roy, the conversation had been short. Gideon had told Coats and Briggs they could eat what Rosalie prepared, or they could cook for themselves.
When Briggs pressed him, apparently suggesting that Gideon was not considering his reputation carefully enough, that people in Red Hollow were watching Gideon, told him that he had not hired Rosalie Hartwell on the basis of other people's opinions, and he was not going to dismissers on that basis either, and that anyone who wanted to argue further about it was welcome to collect his wages at the end of the week. Neither Coats nor Briggs collected their wages. They also stopped making noise about Rosalie's past, at least with an earshot of the house. She heard all of this from Roy, who delivered the information with the particular relish of an older man who has lived long enough to enjoy watching other people's pride lose arguments. She received it with more than she showed because she had learned early in life not to show too much.
What she allowed herself privately was this. Gideon Rusk was a more complicated man than he appeared in his own kitchen doorway. She had suspected it. It was becoming difficult to keep noticing it. December hard turn turned hard and committed.
She had started the big sourdough loaves on Tuesday, and by Thursday they had a bread situation that was dramatically improved from the week before. The starter had come through. She made four large loaves, kept two in the house, sent two to the bunk house with Matteo, and spent the afternoon making a double batch of her mother's biscuit recipe from the handwritten page she'd long since memorized. The biscuits were where Jaime truly lost his composure for the first time. He had been watching her cut them from the rolled dough, quick and clean, with the rim of a tin cup.
And when she slid the pan into the oven, he positioned himself in front of the stove door with an intent that would alarming alarm if it weren't so transparent. They take 20 minutes, she said. I know you're not going to make them go faster by standing there. I know. She left him standing there and went to check on something in the pantry.
When she came back 12 minutes later, he had not moved. He had, however, been joined by EMTT, who was pretending to be interested in something on the far side of the kitchen, but had oriented himself subtly toward the oven. She didn't say anything. She just got the butter from the cold box. When the biscuits came out, and they came out well, golden and high, and pulling apart into layers at the seam, Jaime made a sound that was not quite a word, but conveyed everything necessary.
She put three on a plate and handed it to him and told him not to burn his mouth, which he immediately did, and he didn't care even a little. EMTT took a biscuit without being offered one, which was progress of a specific and significant kind, and ate it standing at the counter like someone who had decided not to make it mean anything, but couldn't hide that it did. Gideon came in for supper, and found the biscuit pan already half empty. He picked one up, broke it open, and looked at the interior the way a carpenter looks at a good joint. Not with softness exactly, but with the kind of appreciation that comes from understanding how hard the thing is to get right.
These are good, he said. Butter's on the counter. He buttered the biscuit and ate it and didn't say anything else, but he took a second one before he sat down and a third one after supper when he thought she wasn't looking. She was looking. She was always paying attention in kitchens.
It was how she survived. The snow in the second week came in harder and the temperature dropped to the kind of cold that got into the walls and the floors and made the house feel like a container rather than a shelter. She started thinking seriously about the wood supply, about whether the cellar was going to stay cold enough to be to be useful as cold storage, about the ice that was building up on the north side of the kitchen window in a way that told her the insulation there was failing. She mentioned the window to Gideon. He came and looked at it.
He fixed it that afternoon. Not perfectly, there was still a draft from one corner, but considerably better. She noticed him noticing the kitchen in general in the days that followed. Not intrusively. The way someone moves through a space they're recalibrating their relationship to.
He started coming in for lunch instead of eating in the bunk house with the men. She didn't remark on it. She just made sure there was enough. The afternoon it all changed for the first time. Not the big change, not the kind that comes in a blizzard, but the first small one that everything else would eventually build on, was a Tuesday in the third week of December, when the snow had given them a temporary reprieve, and the sky had gone a pale washed blue that made everything look colder and cleaner than it was.
She was rendering fat from a split bone. A slow process that needed watching, but not constant attention when she heard raised voices from the yard. Not the ordinary noise of working men, something sharper. She wiped her hands and went to the window. Two men she didn't know, not ranch hands, had ridden in through the gate.