Jillian Hart - The Horseman

2004

Montana Territory, 1882

Ishouldbe holding my baby now. Katelyn Green sat up in bed and buried her face in her hands, unable to hide from the grief. Pain filled her up, cold and dark as the night. She didnt want to feel it; the loss was overwhelming. She was empty, her stomach strangely quiet.

By all rights, she ought to be cradling her daughter, safe and warm in her arms.

But instead she had this horrible sorrow, deep like a well and as dark. With a groan she shifted carefully, ignoring the physical pain the early birth had brought her. She climbed from the bed as if she could escape her sadness, but it followed her like the gloom to the window where she leaned her forehead against the frosty glass.

If only the baby hadnt come early. If only she had lived.

Try not to think of it and maybe youll be all right. She willed her heart to be as cold as the glass at her brow. As icy as the frigid world outside her window. As quiet as the hard frost that painted the black reaching limbs of the leafless trees a solid snowy white and coated the vast Montana prairie with a frozen hush.

The moon was out, a bright round disk that warmed the ice-cold light from a thousand stars scattered across the void of night. The silvered light glinted across the prairie, as if more stars had tumbled to earth and still shone where they had fallen in the rises and draws of the high plains.

Like a lure, the night beckoned her, as if in those deep shadows where the moonlight and stardust did not reach, Katelyn could hide forever in the cold and night. Surely the grief could not follow her there.

What are we gonna do with her? a mans deep voice demanded from the kitchen down the hall.

A voice hard and violent with anger. Katelyn shivered, her insides coiling up into a hard knot. She feared her stepfather, Cal Willman, but not as much as the husband whod cast her out.

Shes not staying with us much longer. Cal sounded adamant and forceful, the way he always did when hed been drinking.

Shes my daughter. I guess I have to help her. Her mothers voice answered, perplexed and put-upon, sounding thin and torn.

Katelyn could picture her mother in the parlor, hands to her stomach, helpless to know what to do. Katherine Lyn Willman was not good at decisions or seeing past her own needs. It was a weakness of character and one of heart.

Katelyn knew what her mother would say next. Shed learned from the hard experience of growing up in this house. And from similar conversations her parents had had about her since shed arrived five weeks ago.

But we must consider our reputation. Mothers words vibrated with the worry of it. Ive had plenty of sympathy from my friends. They say its terrible how her husband set her aside.

Terrible? Its scandalous. Its ruining my business, thats what its doing, and I cant have much more of it.

Yes, but if we cast her out, think of how that would make us look.

But shes useless, nothing but a burden-

Useless. Thats what Brett had called her, the man whod vowed in front of God to honor and cherish her. Katelyn squeezed her eyes shut, soaking in the cold draft seeping through the single-paned glass.

If only shed had someplace else to go. It hadnt been easy coming back. Walking the mile from town after a difficult birth and surgery three days after losing her baby, a girl child and not a son. Youre useless to me, Brett had told her. Worthless and replaceable.

He was a judge, and hed found a way to dissolve the legal ties of their marriage.

No decent man will have her. Her stepfather sounded deeply disgusted. Its not as if we can find someone to marry her. Shes barren.

When shes well, she could help with the housework. Wed be able to get by without a second housemaid.

Did you hear me, woman? Cals disdain rang bitter and cold as the night outside. I dont want to cast my eyes on that daughter of yours. Shes a disgrace, and I have my business to think of.

Katelyn covered her ears, refusing to listen to her mothers answer, for it would be filled with her own selfish worries, as always. This was no home, no refuge, the way it had always been. This place was only another form of hell that shed married to escape.

And the joke was on her. Marriage had been worse than this place, and now she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and her future was gone, vanished like a puff of smoke in midair, evaporating as if it never had been.

Her stepfather had said it. No decent man would want her. And she had to wonder if there were any decent men, husbands who treated their wives with tenderness and honor.

Maybe there were no men like that, like the princes in the fables shed read about as a child, or heroes in the novels she so loved to read. Heroes of heart and courage and integrity were fiction, and nothing more.

What am I going to do? She couldnt stay here, and she wasnt yet strong enough to leave. Hopelessness lashed through her, smarting like the tip of a bullwhip against the inside of her rib cage.

I cant stay here a moment longer. She had to escape, even if only for a few minutes. Her fingers glided over the glass panes. She unlatched the lock with a flick of her thumb.

There is another course. Her mothers voice sounded again. We send her away. Find a situation for her and wash our hands of her. All anyone needs to know is that shes gone to stay with relatives.

The night breeze was blessedly cold and as welcome as a wish come true. Katelyn sucked in the cool scent of winter and held it deep in her lungs before she tugged her quilted housecoat from the closet and pulled it on over her nightgown.

It was the darkness and not the starlight that drew her as she climbed through the window. The bitterness of her parents voices dulled to a mumble, their words becoming indistinguishable and then nothing at all as her feet hit the ground beneath her bedroom window.

She hated the weakness that shivered like water through her limbs. The weakness that made her feet heavy as she shuffled through the dormant rose garden. The shrubs were bundled in cloth with straw tucked around their shadowed bases. Hibernating. Envious, she kept on going.

The last of the fallen leaves crunched beneath her slippers as she ambled toward the open prairie. Pain sliced from her stomach down to her knee with each step. The doctor had said it would take a long while to heal. Shed lost a dangerous amount of blood during the birth and after.

She limped across the yard, the grass crisp and dead beneath her slippers. She could feel the night around her, somehow alive and magical, as if the moonlight laid down a path of silver for her feet and the white ice of the stars glittered like hope in the velvet sky.

The last time shed felt hopeful was for the one moment in her bleak marriage when shed first felt her baby quicken in her womb, that faint, incredible flutter of new life. Gone.

Her hands covered her stomach, empty and hollow. She should have died with the child, she thought, turning her back on the moon and stars, closing her eyes so hard the tears of sorrow could not escape. She was dead in all the ways that counted.

It did not matter what her mother and stepfather decided to do with her. Whatever situation they would find could not be worse than this pain she was in. A pain so deep it was a perfect darkness, like a night without moon or stars or end.