During the first chorus of “Shall We Gather at the River,” there was a stir of sorts, but Emmeline straightened her shoulders resolutely and did not look back. She simply sang
with greater dedication, and then Gil appeared beside her, booming the words of the old song with amused enthusiasm. She felt heat pulsing at her nape and a peculiar, tumbling sensation in the pit of her stomach.
She looked at Gil out of the corner of her eye, and aligned her vertebrae one square above the next, all the way up her back. She felt jubilant, just because he was standing there, and at the same time she wanted to smack him over the head with her hymnal for the sideshow he’d made of her life.
After the song came a lengthy prayer offered by Reverend Bickham, a sincere if unimaginative man who probably would have gone right on preaching even if he stopped believing. Emmeline knew he relished the traditions and rituals of the faith, and agreed that such things had their place in a balanced life, whether one accepted every tenet of the philosophy or not. Beyond that, as Izannah had pointed out in the kitchen that morning, Emmeline generally minded her own business, with an eye to being kind, modest, honest, and patient, and expected the Lord to mind His.
She found herself wondering, as the prayer progressed, how Mr. Hartwell felt about God after his experience on the high seas. Assuming, of course, that he had indeed undertaken the voyage against his will, and not because he’d simply wished to avoid the responsibilities and constraints of marriage.
At long last, Reverend Bickham finished his earnest conversation with heaven and instructed the congregation to be seated. It was hot that morning, and the air was close inside the little church. There were muffled sighs of relief at the invitation to sit, especially from some of those for whom the Lord had provided especially well, and Emmeline, being light-headed and weak in the knees, shared in the sentiment.
The Reverend cleared his throat, then loosened his string tie with one hooked finger. His small eyes gleamed with
conviction and purpose beneath his great beetle brows, and he fixed his gaze on Emmeline.
“Today’s sermon,” he announced, seeming to address Emmeline and Emmeline alone, “is rooted in the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs.” He paused, a good man intent on his business, and then went on in a voice like thunder to demand, “Who can find a virtuous woman?
Who?”
He made the feat sound downright impossible.
At Emmeline’s elbow, Gil Hartwell chuckled, and there were whispers, shufflings, and shiftings in all the crowded pews.
Emmeline seethed in silence, engaged in a stare-down with the Reverend and determined, on pain of death, to prevail. The way the pastor and everyone else in town were behaving, Emmeline thought ruefully, any objective observer would have thought she had personally clipped Samson’s locks or asked for the Baptist’s head on a platter. Nobody had noticed, it seemed, that she had done nothing wrong.
Relentlessly, the sermon boomed on, like a runaway freight train on a downhill track. While Emmeline’s name was not mentioned, only an idiot could have failed to see that every word was said for her benefit, in the plain hope of steering her ship wide of the shoals of sin.
She was so indignant by the end that she had made up her mind not to stay after for fellowship, even though that was the part of Sunday services she enjoyed most. There were limits even to Emmeline’s strength, and after that sermon, she needed some time to herself.
Reverend Bickham said another prayer, and then there were more hymns. Emmeline sang by rote and stole occasional glances at Gil, of whom she was painfully aware. The heat intensified, but rolls of thunder could be heard now and then in the distance, and once in a while a flash of heat lightning
glowed at the windows. When rain began to patter lightly on the roof, the stifling air cooled a little, and so did Emmeline’s temper.
“There is one announcement before we close in prayer,” Reverend Bickham said. Emmeline had the whimsical thought that he might cap off his rousing discourse against carnal sin by condemning her to wear a scarlet letter from that day forward. “I have received word that there will be a traveling evangelist coming our way soon. I hope you will all attend.”
Emmeline sighed. Practically everyone for fifty miles around would turn out, simply because those gypsy preachers, with their tents and platforms and ringing voices, put on such a marvelous show. Folks took wagons and food, parlor chairs and blankets, and stayed for the duration of the spectacle, listening in spellbound delight to rancorous sermons about the wages of sin and the glories of salvation, singing along with the dearly familiar hymns, getting themselves saved and resaved, just for the sheer excitement of it all.
Emmeline didn’t blame them, and in fact would have shared their enthusiasm at most any other time. Entertainments were few and far between on the plains of the Montana Territory, and most everywhere else in the West.
“Today’s fellowship will be held inside the church building,” the Reverend finished, “on account of that rain we’ve been praying for has finally arrived. Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!”
While the brothers and sisters were shouting hallelujah, Emmeline shoved past Gil Hartwell and marched herself down the aisle and the outside steps, paying no heed whatsoever to the soft, warm rain wetting her dress and spoiling her bonnet. Anger and humiliation propelled her across the yard, through the gate, and straight down the middle of the street,
puddles and the mud Montanans call “gumbo” notwithstanding.
Gil caught up to her just as she was turning in to the alley, and held his handsome new suit coat over her head like a canopy. His shirt was saturated, front and back, revealing the splendid masculine chest beneath, and Emmeline felt yet another surge of heat.
How on earth was a woman to keep to the straight and narrow, she asked herself, when she was faced with subtle temptations at every turn?
Perhaps, she reflected bitterly, Reverend Bickham had been right, after all, in aiming that blistering sermon of warning directly at her. She could not deny, to herself at least, that she harbored wanton thoughts.
Emmeline allowed Gil to escort her all the way to the mud porch of the judge’s house, where they stood under the slanting shingle roof, staring at each other, drenched and dripping. Gil had gotten the worst of it, of course, since he’d used his coat as an umbrella for Emmeline.
“You shouldn’t have followed me here,” she said, lamenting the muddy splotches lining the hem of her good brown dress. “I lost my temper and made a fool of myself by storming out that way, but there was no need for you to join in as well. The gossip will be even worse than before.”
A smile lurked in Gil’s blue eyes as he shook out his coat and hung it on the peg next to the one that supported Emmeline’s bathtub. Then he reached out, bold as you please, peeled the sodden bonnet off her head, and set it on the bench beside the back door. “Gossip has its season,” he said, “like everything else. Sooner or later, the good people of Plentiful will turn their busy tongues to some other subject.”
“You only say that because you’re a man,” Emmeline responded, wiping her shoes before proceeding into the kitchen to put a kettle on to boil. “Men don’t mind what folks
say about them. In fact, something like this can only improve
your
reputation. For a woman, things are quite different.”
Gil drew a chair from the kitchen table, turned it around, and sat astraddle of it, with his arms folded on the back. Even wet through to the skin, with his hair plastered to his head, he was at ease. He’d always had a gift for living in the moment, and it seemed he’d perfected that during his years of alleged captivity.
“What do you suppose folks are saying about us, right this minute?” he asked in a teasing voice.
Emmeline got the yellow crockery teapot down from a shelf, dumped in two scoops of loose-leaf orange pekoe, and leveled a frown at him. “It’s not what they’re
saying,”
she pointed out coolly. “After all, they wouldn’t dare speak of such things in Reverend Bickham’s presence, lest they get themselves a sermon of their very own. No, Mr. Hartwell, it’s what they’re
thinking
that mortifies me to the bone!”
“And what are they thinking?”
Emmeline flushed; it was a flaw she had often attempted to overcome, without significant success. “That by now you’ve ripped my clothes off—and your own, of course—and we’re rolling about on the kitchen floor, our two bodies entwined in passion.”
Gil’s eyes twinkled, and he grinned that slight, one-sided grin of his. “Miss Emmeline!” he scolded, and then made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “I’m surprised at you, crediting the townsfolk with an image like that when you so obviously conceived it all by yourself.”
Emmeline went crimson and whirled away to shove wadded newspaper and bits of kindling into the cookstove. The cast-iron lid clanked in a satisfying fashion when she slammed it into place. “Did you follow me home just so you could torment me?” she demanded, and it was only after several deep breaths that she trusted herself to turn and speak
to the man who was—and at the same time wasn’t—her husband.
Elbows resting on the table, fingers steepled under his chin, Gil regarded her with both amusement and something else, something that kindled a flame deep down inside Emmeline, even as the fire caught and then blazed, crackling and fragrant, inside the stove. “No, ma’am,” he said at long last, his voice low and smoky. “I came to remind you of the things we used to do on rainy Sunday afternoons. Like the picnics we had in the hayloft, just the two of us. And the times we played cards until the lanterns burned out . . .”
Emmeline remembered those times with bittersweet clarity. She had been so happy then, so impossibly happy. Perhaps, she reflected, turning away again to add wood to the fire, they’d tempted fate, taking such joy from so little. “We’re not the same people now,” she said shakily. “So much has happened since we were together.”
She heard him push back his chair and rise, and her body went as taut as the strings on a violin when she realized he was moving toward her, then went slack again when he laid his hands on her shoulders.
“Emmeline,” he whispered, and as she felt the warmth of his breath on her nape a shiver went through her that had nothing whatever to do with the clammy wetness of her dress. He turned her into his embrace, his arms lying loosely around her waist. “Whatever else you’re thinking, you mustn’t believe for a moment that I ever meant to leave you.”
She blinked, and sniffled once, inelegantly. “You said you wrote letters, but I never got any,” she said, and felt silly for the way she’d framed the words.
Gil sighed. “I sent half a dozen, Emmeline, but the circumstances weren’t exactly ideal.”
Emmeline simply looked at him for a long time. She wanted to believe, wanted to trust, but she knew the pain
would be terrible beyond bearing if that trust turned out to be misplaced. She felt tired, used up, and very confused, for while her mind warned her to be cautious, her body yearned to submit to his in the old, uninhibited way. “You said you’d make love to me when I asked,” she said, as thunder crashed directly over the roof of the house, like a reprimand from God, rattling the dishes in the cupboards and causing the unlighted lamp over the table to sway a little. “Will you do it now?”
“No,” Gil said, his expression solemn, his thumbs making light circles on the indentations beneath Miss Emmeline’s collarbone.
She felt her eyes widen. “Why not?”
“Because it’s comforting you want, not lovemaking.”
“They’re not the same?”
“Not the way I intend to have you, they’re not.”
Emmeline knew a delicious shiver of anticipation, followed by a surge of profound irritation. “You are taunting me, sir, and I do not appreciate it.”
He took her chin into his hand, and although his grasp was not hurtful, neither was it gentle. “When I have you, Emmeline,” Gil said clearly, “there will be no petting and stroking and no pretty words. I’ve waited a long time, and when you offer yourself to me, and mean it, I’m likely to pull down your drawers and have you over a table or a sawhorse instead of a bed. And make no mistake, my love—practically everything I say and everything I do is calculated to make you want me as desperately as I want you.”
She swallowed, overwhelmed. “You say shocking things, Mr. Hartwell,” she gasped. She did not add that she liked hearing them, though she hadn’t any modesty left. He’d made short work of that, just as he always had.
“Yes,” Gil answered, so close to kissing her that she was already responding, already straining forward for his touch.
Instead, he clasped her hand and pulled her out of the kitchen, away from the rear stairway, through the dining room, and onto the screened porch where she sometimes slept when the heat was unbearable. It was a private place, sheltered by trellises of climbing flowers and by the gray gloom of the rain.
Dimly, through the darkened screens, Emmeline glimpsed the colorful ghosts of her Chinese lanterns, dangling sodden and bright over the backyard like the stars of some strange planet.
Between the two cots she and Izannah used, Gil pulled Emmeline into his arms and kissed her so deeply, so thoroughly, that she gave a little whimper and sagged against him.
“You wanted comfort,” he whispered hoarsely when the kiss was over, “and you shall have it. But my restraint has a price, Emmeline. Don’t forget that.” With that, remarkably, he began unbuttoning her dress, and she allowed it, standing still and docile while Gil Hartwell stripped her naked.
When he had done that, he removed his own clothes, and Emmeline saw plainly that he was ready for lovemaking and wondered how she could convince him that she desired to be taken, not just teased.
“I want you,” she said tremulously. “I’m asking, like you said I’d have to do.”
Gil pressed her gently onto one of the cots and lay down with her, partly covering her body with the solid, heated weight of his own. “No,” he said, though it was clear that the word had cost him dearly. “Not yet, Emmeline. Not yet.”