“I didn’t. We were just planning to visit.”
She gave Gid on my opposite side a hard look.
He deserved it. Stupid, callous boy. “Never thought I’d find you in such a…” What to call that awfulness? I swallowed hard and finished gruffly, “Nightmare.”
“It was. God help me, it was.” Her hands shook. She clasped them in her lap, checking the tremor. “What are you doing, going by the name of Freddy?”
“Oh, Rachel, we have much to discuss.” First and foremost, her ordeal. I desperately wanted to help—be a support, a listener, if she wanted to talk. Would she? Would talking about what had happened make things better or worse?
She wearily shook her head and scanned my clothes. “Why are you dressed like that?”
I glanced at Phineas ahead of us. He was too near for detailed divulgences.
“He doesn’t know who you are?”
“No one does but you and Gid.” I squeezed her hand. “I’d like to keep it that way.”
She nodded and slipped her hand from under mine.
The withdrawal disturbed me. She wanted distance, and the implications of that desire saddened me, utterly overrode my concerns regarding Daniel. What had Rachel endured in that horrible household? The imaginings weighed heavily on my mind. Gid looked preoccupied, too. And Rachel sat silently beside me, her expression broken, like a shipwreck an ocean away from home. Even Phineas rode quietly in front of us without tossing his typical teasing comments over his shoulder.
Off and on until suppertime, I made a mess of comforting my friend. Caught up in a dismal reflection, I’d automatically reach for her folded hands. She’d freeze, then draw her fingers into the folds of her ragged skirt. An hour would pass. I’d get lost in depressing thoughts, forget myself again, and offer her back a pat. She’d jerk away. With a wince and an apology, I finally brought Fancy onto my lap, just to keep my hands busy, so I wouldn’t indulge my instinct to mother my friend.
Gid’s words proved just as ineffectual as my caresses: “Are you chilled, Miss Welds? Shall I dig out a blanket for you?” And later: “We’ll be stopping for supper soon, but we keep some nuts handy for munching. Would you, ah … like some?”
He earned mute headshakes for his efforts.
I couldn’t blame Rachel for shunning his advances. He’d treated her miserably.
As soon as we stopped to make camp for the evening, while Phineas tended to his horse and Rachel hurried to the stream to wash up, I found a moment to speak to Gid in private and took him to task for his behavior at the Lintons’, finishing with “and then, after never saying a word, you give her—her—the grimace of disgust. Why, I was never so amazed and so ashamed of you. Do you assume she asked for the mistreatments of that house? What were you thinking?”
He raked his hair. “I know, I know; I can’t say why. It was just a shock seeing her like that, mired in filthy sordidness, when I was so used to thinking of her…” He fluttered a hand over his head before resuming his hair gripping.
“Like a princess in a tower?”
He nodded glumly.
I crossed my arms. “Rachel was never a princess, Gid.” For a moment, I dwelled on the exuberant duets and the number of ribald ballads she and I had belted out together. The recollection made me wistful. What had happened to those carefree girls? “But she isn’t a slattern, either, no matter what came to pass in that awful house. To become that, she would have had to make some bad decisions. I doubt she was given the right to decide a damn thing.”
“I know. I feel awful. I didn’t mean it. And I’m really sorry.”
I was so disgusted, it was impossible to even listen to his apology. I threw up my hands, turned on my heel, and stomped back toward the wagon. My brother had his work cut out for him if he planned to make up for his despicable reaction.
Frankly, I didn’t think he could.
Gideon trudged behind me, and we joined the others. By the road, the oxen were browsing, Sweetheart was nosing her owner’s bowed head, and Rachel was sitting in the wagon. She absently scratched Fancy behind the ears and watched Phineas in bemusement.
He was worth watching. Seated on a supine log, slumped and swaying, he was moaning piteously and staring gravely at the ground. I’d never seen him look less like his sophisticated self. Water dripped to his shoulders; damp splotches bloomed across his coat and pantaloons. He must have dunked his whole head in the water, for his hair stuck up in wet points, like spines on a hedgehog. He was muttering, “A shame, a shame, such a crying shame.”
Gid rushed to his side. “What’s wrong?”
Phineas raised anguished eyes. “Where do I begin?” He made a helpless gesture toward the ground. After a lull, one he filled with awful groaning, he blurted out, “I have some grievances and feel compelled to air them. It’s about those horrible Lintons.”
Oh, heavens, Phineas wasn’t going to talk about the Lintons already, was he? It was too soon, the pain too fresh, for Rachel to be forced to discuss those people. I violently shook my head, but if Phineas noticed, he ignored me. Gid and I exchanged a horrified glance, then, in unison, turned to Rachel. She had paled and dropped her eyes.
“First of all: this.” Phineas thrust his hands toward the ground.
“What?” I impatiently scanned the place where he sat.
“My boots. My beautiful, expensive, nearly-as-fine-as-any-Bond-Street-beau’s polished, tasseled Hessian boots.” He shook his fist at the sky and, with the passion and fervency of a knight announcing a holy pledge, declared, “I will never forgive the Lintons for what they did to my boots. Never.”
My mouth dropped open. His boots did look bad; that was true enough. But soiled footwear? Seriously? That was what filled him with anguish? My breath left me in a growl. I wanted to whip off one of his silly boots and hit him in the head with it. How dare he reduce this debacle to such a frivolous complaint?
I was about to try to quell Phineas’s rant (he obviously, in his vanity, couldn’t conceive how anyone might have suffered worse than him) when he stopped me with another anguished groan and added, “Then there’s the recollection of those ghastly children: in particular, the nose picker.” He shuddered and added a few gagging noises to dramatize his sentiments. “Why, Miss Welds, you’d ever want to sally forth into the wilderness to become a support to a woman who clearly has no better sense than a hen—truly, how could she have even that much sense, marrying a brute, then decorating their entire parcel of land with disgusting children and all their filth? Well, I just don’t know. It’s got me questioning your sense. Can’t help but think you must be either a drunk, too, or completely unhinged.”
I gasped.
Eyes bulging, Gid slapped his forehead.
Rachel, sitting ramrod straight in the wagon and as white as a ghost, retorted with icy asperity, “Obviously, sir, the Lintons hadn’t yet succumbed to inebriated despair when I arrived; otherwise, my cousins never would have left me with them.”
“That gross deterioration happened in only two months?” He eyed her skeptically. “Sounds dashed smoky to me. Now don’t go flying onto your high ropes. Chances are your cousins, in their rush to start pioneering, didn’t poke around or linger long to assess the situation before bolting. Besides, we all know those boys aren’t precisely the investigative types.”