Authors: Michelle Woodward
As the mare paced back and forth in her stall, he could feel her anxiety grow. As the hours marking her labor stretched deep into the night, a fine sheen of sweat began to take over her body, and her whinnies pierced the night air, as sharp and evocative as human cries. At around midnight, Betsy lay on her side, the bulbous, bright sac of amniotic fluid protruding from her nether regions. Her grunts grew tired, and often, the mare would just lay her entire head back on the hay, great shudders wracking her entire body. He could see the foal’s legs through the sac as Betsy pushed and shoved, and even though he had seen it before, he could help but be amazed at the strength of the female body in all its species.
Including, interestingly, that of Clara.
It was she who piled straw underneath the mare to make her more comfortable. When it seemed that Betsy was too tired to go on, it was Clara’s hand that stroked her brow gently and whispered words of encouragement in her long, pointed ear. Amazingly, when the foal finally broke through the sac, before he could even react, Clara was clearing fluid from its nostrils, and its first, hesitant whinny rang out into the night.
For the rest of his life, Kenneth would remember what his wife looked like in that moment.
Tendrils of hair snaked around her white neck and her apron was stained with blood. When the mare finally dropped the foal fully, large and new and wet and shining into the world, Clara’s blue eyes filled with a wonderment he had thought disappeared with the first flush of adulthood. He beheld the scene as she did, with a tenderness, and he was amazed at her simultaneous grace and stamina. She had weathered the long night with him and Betsy, and had, in that moment, become a more integral part of the farm than she had ever expected.
In the wee hours of the morning, the colt finally found enough strength to try and rise on the legs that gave it is namesake. He and Clara lay on the straw, watching Betsy attend to the baby horse, and the air around them was thick with the smell of birth and all the unspoken things that had no need to be said. He watched a smile, exhausted but happy, spread over her face and found himself thinking, quite suddenly, about what she would look like with a child of her own.
“Barbara and I,” he found himself saying, “We never had children.”
Clara glanced over at him, a tiny wrinkle of concern in her thick eyebrows. “Barbara, your first wife?”
He nodded.
“How many did you want to have?” she asked.
He thought back. “We always said we wanted seven, enough to ride each of the brand new horses I would bring in. One for each year we had been married.”
Her eyes filled with a new light of understanding. “Oh,” she said softly, and slowly, unconsciously, her hand found his through the hay. He thought the touch would be offensive to him somehow, but he felt, instead, like he was gaining great strength from the unbelievably small hand holding his.
“The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with her. She seemed so healthy and her mamma had had five boys besides her, so everything should have been fine. She was just a girl of seventeen when I met her, but such was her lot in life, and after seven years, we just had to accept it. I was almost at peace with it, I truly was, until that last year.”
“What happened?” Clara asked, her voice gentle.
It hurt to remember. He felt the groan in his voice as he answered her. “First, she started complaining that she was tired all the time. It was not so strange, because she was always so helpful with the hard things around the farm, but then came the days she couldn’t even rise up out of bed. Then came the coughs, and the nights she couldn’t breathe. And all I could do was stand and watch because there was no cure, there was nothing…” He trailed off, unable to continue.
For many hours, they again said nothing. Little by little, he let himself feel the grief of the year that had passed, the year of being alone, felt it ebb out of him into the hand that held him. And finally, there was a peace, a sense of being drained of built-up poison, as if someone had pricked him with a pin and it was all completely gone. When it was over, he was just Kenneth again, as new reborn as the colt. Day was breaking.
“Look,” said Clara. “It’s the sun.”
* * *
Clara twisted her head this way and that. She changed into her best gown, the blue silk Mrs. Wreight had said matched her eyes exactly. She pinned her only piece of jewelry, a phoenix brooch, onto the dress. And then she collapsed onto her bed, groaning in frustration.
The thing was was that ever since that night Betsy’s colt was born, everything had changed.
Suddenly, overnight, Kenneth Westeros had gone from being a gruff ranch man into somebody who was the center of the world. Clara did not know what to do with herself. Only a week had passed, but now, all she could think about was the warmth of Kenneth’s hand in hers as he told her about his wife. She had felt so incredibly honored that he had chosen her to share the gentle side of himself with. What she had felt as he told her about staying by his sick wife’s bedside was as familiar to her as the rain; it was what she herself had felt when she was told that she was to leave the children. She understood his helplessness and rage so well as if it were her own.
So how to get him to notice her?
She blushed at the thought. The formidable Mrs. Smythers did not offer any advice in her book about how to attract your husband; in fact, all of her tips seemed to be on how to best keep your husband at bay, whether it was by nagging or starting an argument in the evening, or feigning a headache. But perhaps there had been something she missed?
Time passed. The seconds on the clock dragged on into minutes, and the house was quiet. Slowly, lulled by the sleeplessness of previous nights, Clara’s chin drooped towards her chest. The mustard-colored cover of the raunchy yet prim little book slowly drifted shut, the pages fluttering with the rise and fall of her bosom. How much time passed, she did not know, but she awoke to the sound of a manly chuckle in the room.
Coming to was sweet, and she was refreshed. The feeling faded as quickly as it had come as she realized that the book was no longer in her lap. She got up and shook out her skirts, looking all around her for evidence of its fall. Confusion grew, and was swiftly replaced with horror as she realized that she was far from alone in the room.
Kenneth was sitting on the edge of her bed, thumbing through a book with a familiar yellow cover. Her horror intensified as he turned page after page, shaking with silent laughter and shaking his head. He had found her book. And now he found her ridiculous. She shook out of her daze and took a step forward, and at that moment, the brooch that had been pinned rather loosely to her dress decided to make its clattering way to the floor, startling Kenneth out of his quiet reprieve and highlighting for her the sheet idiocy of the situation.
He put the book down and took a step towards her, amusement lighting his features. “Good morning, sunshine,” he said, and she felt her face redden impossibly. How dare he? How dare he intrude on her private chambers, on her—her private time?
“Why did you take my book?”
He wrinkled his brow in confusion, eyes still alight. “Does a husband not have the right to visit his wife and take an interest in what it is she occupies herself with?” He paused, waiting for a beat or two, and then asked the inevitable question. “Why is it that you’re reading this book, Clara?”
She clammed up. She felt caught, trapped in a cage of her own making, unable to undo the damage done and likewise unable to take a step forward out of it. How to explain, how to put the vague stirrings into words without abandoning decency? How to allow yourself to express the vulnerability that would put you on an uncharted map where you were neither the captain of the ship or able to direct the rudder?
So she did what she had always done, ever since her arrival in the states all those months ago. She jammed her lips tight together, allowed her face to flush scarlet, and ran.
* * *
He never had been able to understand women.
The fact was was that he thought he had her all figured out, this prim and proper miss with a true sense of purpose no matter what she put her mind to. He had not truly thought before entering her room, but he knew now that he had offended her sensibilities. Things were different across the ocean, he heard. You were not supposed to enter a lady’s bedchamber without knocking, even if she was your spouse.
Something inside of him had changed character, for lack of a better word, when he saw her, asleep in that chair. He had noticed that ever since that night in the barn, she had not been able to sleep like before, always pacing late into the night in her room, her soft little footsteps thunderously loud in the still of the night. And so he had been glad to see her finally at rest, poor thing.
A yellow book had fallen from her hands and was laying by her feet on the ground. He picked it up, and the title,
Sex Tips
, caught his eye. Kenneth felt stunned right into the ground. What was Clara doing with a book about such intimate acts? Who would even write a book on such a topic? Furthermore, the course of his reasoning led him to ask the one question he was most curious about—what had prompted his reserved, resilient little bride to pick up such a book in the first place?
Without even thinking much about it, he had begun turning the pages. And the laugh that had eventually roused Clara from her sleep had begun. This woman, Ruth Smythers, was a loony, a basket case. She featured the bride as an innocent young creature whose time to shine came on the wedding day—why he felt a pang of guilt, he could not say—and that afterwards, she should be wary of giving in to her “sensual and lusty husband.” Why was Clara reading such nonsense? And was that truly how she saw him now—as a man who would go back on his word to her and touch her without her permission?
He had barely begun to ponder this when the advice tips began to spill out, one after ridiculous one. “What could have been a proper marriage will become an orgy of sensual lust.”
“By their tenth anniversary many wives have managed to complete their child bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contacts with the husband. By this time she can depend upon his love for the children and social pressures to hold the husband in the home. “ That one hurt a bit as he recalled Barbara, but the next,
“If he lifts her gown and attempts to kiss her anyplace else she should quickly pull the gown back in place, spring from the bed, and announce that nature calls her to the toilet,”
Caused him to break out in laughter that was so helpless that he finally woke her.
He would never forget the look on her face from that moment either. She had, at first, looked as innocent as a child, and then, when her gaze fell upon the book in his hands, it transformed into one where he felt as if he had physically laid harm to her body. She looked betrayed.
Kenneth had no idea where she had fled to, but assumed that she would come back for lunch. When the hour came and past, he felt a vague nagging in his head, asking questions without forming words. When two more hours went by, the nagging notions had formulated into complete thoughts, and he began to worry. A storm was brewing, and Clara knew almost none of their neighbors; the nearest ones were only accessible by horse, anyway. What was she going to do out there—what if she got lost in a field or ditch or—or—
He could not understand how he had not gone after her when she left. It had not been, after all, his desire to embarrass her. How could he have let hours go by without looking for her? Not daring to ask himself why the sense of panic was rising high in his throat, he pushed aside all the thoughts he had of not being able to come home to her snapping blue eyes anymore and thundered down the stairs outside into the barn to saddle a horse. Perhaps he would have a chance to find her before the full fury of the storm hit. And, he hardly dared to think this, what if he did not?
Something in him, without quite knowing why, said he would look for her until he found her either way. And that shocked him damn near senseless.
But not so much as the realization that there was someone in the barn besides himself and the horses. He tread softly, hardly daring to disturb the low murmur of a voice coming from Betsy’s stall. He crept silently, unseen, until he could just make out a woman’s voice whispering softly. He peeked into the crack between the door and its hinge on the stall door and he could just make out Clara’s small form, pressed against the warmth of the new colt. She was stroking its head gently with her tiny hand, and tears stained the top of her silk dress.
He sagged with relief at having found her, wanted to rush in and shake her for causing him to worry. Instinct told him, however, to bide his time, to hear her words. For she was whispering to the colt, its brand-new mane satin against her fingers.
“You don’t know Edward and Sara, Ponyboy, but they were my whole world back in England. I did not think it possible to love two people like I did them, but it was because I felt so needed back there. I knew what my role was, what my purpose in that household was. And now I am living with a man, a man who is foreign and strange and does not truly seem to need me at all.”