One was heavy set and well-dressed, which was unusual enough out here to be meaningful. The other was younger, holding the horses. Gideon was in the yard. His posture told her everything without her being close enough to hear the set of his shoulders, the way his hands were at his sides, without quite making fists, like a man who was very angry and had a lot of practice not showing it. She went back to the fat, not her business.
She was the cook. Matteo came in through the back door 10 minutes later, stomping snow, and headed for the coffee pot with the air of a man who needed a moment. "Who were they? " she asked. He poured his coffee. Bellard, cattle buyer from Laramie, Gideon's biggest contract.
What did he want? Matteo held his cup in both hands. Told Gideon he'd heard about the situation at the ranch with you. Rosalie kept her eyes on the fat rendering in the pan. Said it was bad for business.
Mateo continued. Said some of the other buyers were talking that Gideon keeping a woman with your your history under his roof was making people question his judgment. Question his honesty. The fat crackled in the pan. What did Gideon say?
She asked. Matteo was was quiet for a moment. He told Bellard to take his contract and his opinions back to Laramie and that Blackthornne Ranch would find another buyer. She turned from the stove. Matteo met her eyes.
Bellard wasn't bluffing. Miss Hartwell. That contract was a third of the ranch's income. The weight of it settled into the room. He lost a third of his income, she said.
Today. She turned back to the stove. The fat was ready. She took it off the heat. She stood at the counter for a long moment, looking at the wall at the window with its mostly repaired draft.
At the kitchen she had spent 3 weeks making functional. Then she opened her mother's recipe book to the page she'd been considering for days and hadn't let herself attempt yet. A long recipe, time-conuming, expensive in ingredients she'd been saving. A roast beef with vegetables, dark gravy, and a crust pastry lid. supper. Her mother had signed the kind of when she wanted to tell someone something, she couldn't put in words.
She wasn't going to put it in words either. She was going to cook it. She started the pastry first because it needed time to rest. When supper was on the table that evening, Gideon came in and stopped the way he always did. But this time, what he was looking at was different.
Not just a hot meal, something she had clearly spent the afternoon building. He sat down. He served himself and the boys. He ate without talking, but differently than usual, like a man eating something that required his attention. Halfway through the meal, EMTT said very casually, looking at his plate, Matteo said the Bellard man came today.
Gideon looked at him. Did he? He said, "You told him off. " Mateo talks too much. EMTT kept his eyes on his plate. Was it because of Rosalie?
The kitchen was very quiet. Gideon looked across at Rosalie. Gideon looked across at Rosalie, and neither of them did anything in particular, but something passed between them in that look that she could not have named and wasn't going to try to. Eat your supper, Gideon said to Emmett. EMTT ate his supper.
Later, when the boys were upstairs and the kitchen was clean, and the house had settled into its nighttime quiet, Rosalie was at the counter covering the leftover pastry when she heard the front door and then Gideon's boots in the entry. She thought he was going upstairs. Instead, he stopped in the kitchen doorway. You heard about Bellard? He said, Matteo mentioned it.
It's not your problem, he said. I want to be clear about that. It was my decision, and it doesn't change your position here. She folded the cloth over the pastry. It changes things regardless of whether you want it to.
Not for you. For you, she said. She turned to face him. You lost a significant contract because of a rumor that was put in motion by a man who lied. That's not right.
No, he said. It's not. They looked at each other in the low light of the kitchen. I'm going to find another buyer, he said. Harker knows people in Casper.
I know, she said. I'm not worried about the ranch. Then what are you worried about? She almost said it. Most of its windows were dark.
She almost told him that what she was worried about was the particular way this house had started to feel different than it had in the first week, and that she wasn't sure she could afford to notice that, and that she had made herself a very clear set of rules about exactly this kind of thing. She didn't say any of that. Nothing, she said. Good night, Gideon. He stayed in the doorway another moment.
Then, good night, Rosily. She heard his boots on the stairs. She heard the house go quiet above her. She covered the kitchen lamp and stood in the dark for a moment, just breathing. Outside the snow had started again.
She could hear it working itself softly against the window corner and cold and persistent thin and persistent like certain things that won't stay out no matter how well you seal against them. She went to bed. She did not sleep for a long time. The snow that came the third week of December was not polite about it. It arrived without the usual warning signs.
No dropping barometric pressure that made the cattle restless. No particular quality to the sky the evening before. It simply began in the night, and by the time Rosalie came downstairs before dawn, the windows were buried to their lower sills, and the wind was making sounds in the eaves that she had not heard before and did not like. She built the fire up and stood at the window, looking at nothing, because there was nothing to see, just white pressing against glasses. and she thought about the pantry inventory she'd done 2 days ago, and the numbers that came from it, and the numbers were not comfortable. She had known winter was coming.