“No,” Caroline answered.
He crossed the room and put his hand on the latch, but he did not open the door. Caroline did not know him well enough to make out what he was thinking now. By his outward appearance alone she would never have suspected what kind of a man Edwards was. Tobacco stained the corners of his lips. His hair looked as though he’d been cutting at it with his razor rather than a pair of shears. It was long and fine and inclined to snarl, a lustrous golden brown halfway between Mary’s and Laura’s. He had been towheaded as a boy, Caroline reckoned, and not so terribly long ago. She rubbed her finger and thumb together, imagining the feel of it.
“Mr. Edwards?” She paused, sure of her intentions, yet unable to gauge how he would receive such an invitation.
“Ma’am?”
“Mr. Edwards, I know it is quite some time off, but I wonder if you would consider having your Christmas dinner with us. Our family would be proud to have you.”
She saw how the words touched him, how he wanted to smile but could not trust himself to do it. He swallowed once before speaking. “Yes, ma’am,” Edwards said. Solemn. The muscles at the corners of his mouth jerked, once. “I should like that very much.”
Caroline shut the door behind him and pulled in the latch string.
It was too late for Charles to come home. There was no sense in sitting up, no call for him to drive so late, in the dark and the wind. By now he would be camping somewhere, surely. But Caroline was every bit as reluctant as the girls had been to go to bed—more so, even.
The latch clattered in the wind, and she forbade herself from turning to check the latch string again. It was pulled in. She had not laid a finger on it since letting Edwards out. No one had. The shutters were bolted. Jack lay between the lintels, his belly against the threshold. There was nothing to fear.
There was only the wind, which was certainly nothing to be afraid of. If Mary or Laura woke, frightened, Caroline would tell them so, and it would be true. The wind itself was no threat. Yet two facts remained: the wind was blowing, and Caroline was discomfited.
The way it touched the house—slapping the walls, snatching at the latch and rattling the shutters, like something trying to get inside—Caroline could not help thinking it was punishing them for standing in its way. And the sound. If anything living had shrieked that way, she would have rushed outside to assuage it. Or inside for the gun, Caroline thought as another gust crashed against the shutters. It did not matter how many times she assured herself that the sounds signified nothing. Every nerve in her body reacted to them, insistent that something was amiss.
Caroline rocked in her chair, thankful for its movement, and trained her eyes on the fire. One by one, she conjured up images of the things Charles would bring back with him: salt meat, linseed oil, sacks of flour and oats and beans, a keg of nails to repay Mr. Edwards, perhaps a jar of pickles for herself. Of course, there would be a treat for Mary and Laura to squeal over. She pictured Eliza, and Ma, and Martha, and Henry and Polly reading the letter she had sent, and felt her face soften momentarily.
But the pictures were no more than a haze; Caroline could not hold them before her for even a minute without the thing she did not want to think of showing through. Her eyes strayed to the shelf that held the pistol, and she closed them. There is no need, she told herself, rocking deeply. Only stop thinking about Indians. But her mind would not obey. It rubbed and rubbed at that thought until it shone too brightly to ignore.
Caroline went to the bed. For a moment she stood, watching Carrie sleep. Her little fists lay flung open on either side of her head. Anyone with sense would stop fretting and climb into bed beside that baby girl, she thought. But the baby was not what Caroline wanted. She put one hand on the mantel shelf, stepped onto the bed rail, and reached up over Carrie’s sleeping form. Her fingers touched the cold metal barrel first. Then the stock, polished smooth with use. Her thumb found a scratch in the wood she had not noticed before.
Caroline did not look at the gun. She did not need to. She went back to her rocker and laid it in her lap, half-cocked. Its barrel she pointed toward the fire. The weight of it seemed to draw her shoulders down where they belonged. At the same time her eyes lifted, found their way to the china shepherdess, and settled.
The fear was not gone. She had only made a place for it, invited it to sit alongside her. That was less wearying than refusing to acknowledge its presence. For a time she was aware of nothing but the gun in her lap and the shepherdess on the shelf. Both of them cool, still, and shining. Both of them a kind of assurance.
The wind wailed long and high, and Caroline rocked, letting the sound pass through her as though she were an instrument. She thought of how the fiddle screeched on those rare occasions when Charles struck a wrong note and wondered if it felt the way she did now.
Something gasped, something inside the house, and Caroline’s fingers were around the pistol’s stock, her thumb poised over the hammer.
It was Laura, sitting straight up in bed. Mary lay beside her, eyes wide open. Caroline froze. She had not meant for the children to see her with the gun in her lap. It would not be at all like the familiar sight of Charles with his rifle. She could see Laura’s eyes following the firelight up and down the pistol’s silver barrel. It was then that Caroline realized she had not frozen at all. The chair still rocked, as though it rocked itself.
Don’t be afraid.
Caroline could not say it, not when her only comfort had been to subsume her own fear.
“Lie down, Laura, and go to sleep,” she managed instead, with only a hint of a quaver.
“What’s that howling?”