Page 3 of The Widow and the Wanted

I’m not here to find a husband, but to realize a dream.

Lula’s Apothecary.

That’s what I’ll call it. I’ve studied which herbs grow wild and which I’ll need to buy, the right soil and drying times. I’m not just Eli’s wife or widow⁠—

“Lula, look here,” Mary calls, from a few feet away. My pen stops and I close my leather notebook. The sun glints off the wide brim of her straw hat, pinned with a pressed cornflower. She’s kneeling beside a cluster of wild bergamot, its once-violet blossoms turned to seed pods for autumn.

“Shame we missed the summer bloom. She is so beautiful when she flowers,” I say.

Mary sighs, awed. “I might have spent all afternoon trying to match the perfect shade of purple.”

My notebook is full of names and descriptions, but my drawings are rough things. I may have oversold my illustration skills when applying for the expedition. I’m better with Latin than likeness.

“What have we here?” Dr. Bowering’s voice asks, too close.

He smells of clove and cologne, an assault to the nose in a place like this. Behind him, our samples hang drying on clotheslines. Each one I will gather, label, and press between notebook pages. The river hushes. Across the water, a white-tailed deer watches us, still as a statue.

“A patch of wild bergamot,” I say.

“Very good, Mrs. Clay.”

My face remains slack. I won’t smile for this man and his patronizing praise. I could identify a dandelion and he’d still tell me what a clever little botanist I am, as if one night of shared warmth entitled him to reduce my skill to novelty. It’s me they call upon when a woman is with child, to keep mother and baby well. When a fever takes, I’m the one they find to soothe it. A shepherd for new souls entering the world and for those quietly leaving it. But if you asked Dr. Bowering, I suspect he’d praise my tidy penmanship and call that the useful part.

I sit on a large rock, rest my notebook in my lap, and continue my entry:

On another note, I’ve accidentally bewitched a windbag: Dr. Bowering, our expedition leader, who I met just two weeks ago outside the depot. I fear I mistook spectacles and good manners for intelligence.

Dr. Bowering talks without pause and listens not at all. He fills every space, every silence.

In closer acquaintance, however, he proves even more disappointing. It was meant to be nothing, an evening’s amusement on my terms. We’d had a night of too much whiskey, fiddle, and planchette—a game played by lamplight, letters sketched on the back of a map, our fingers resting together on a copper penny while Mae asked questions meant to make us laugh. The coin wandered where it pleased, spelling nothing of consequence. No spirit spoke to us, but Dr. Bowering spoke enough for every man who’d ever died along the river.

Afterward, I believed that a man so taken with the sound of his own voice might at least possess a sense of rhythm. I was mistaken. He mistook my stillness for satisfaction and concluded matters without ever discovering whether I had arrived anywhere at all.

By morning, I decided it would not be repeated. He, however, seemed to wake with plans. A gleam in his eye that followed me from camp to camp.

Soon enough I’ll start anew and Dr. Bowering will be just an embarrassing memory.

Tomorrow is our last day along the riverside before returning south to Fort Smith. It is just a stop, I keep telling myself. A place to rest, to repack, to collect what’s mine before a destination unknown. That heavy feeling in my chest is just longing to stretch this journey on forever. A form of heartache easily mistaken for dread.

I close my book and find Mary lingering by the bee balm, brushing a finger beneath one of the blossoms, careful not to bruise the stamen.

“I wish we had more time,” she says softly.

Time has felt strange out here.

At night, we gather around a fire. Bobby, the handyman, plays a jaw harp—a most unpleasant sound—over the chorus of nocturnal creatures in the plains. The clouds clear, and the sky above us yawns wide, a sea of stars overhead. It’s colder than it has been, and I clutch my coat tighter, grateful the bitter cold held back until our final evening.

“Does the sky ever make you feel like you’re falling?” Mary asks.

“Like if you let go you’ll fall clean off the world?” I answer.

She smiles, leaning back on her elbows. “Makes me dizzy taking it all in.”

Dr. Bowering shifts closer. “Vertigo. A form of it,” he says. “Or perhaps astrophobia. Common in women, surprisingly.”

I glance at Mary, who meets my eyes with a flicker of dry amusement then feigns interest. “Well, I’ll be.”

Only a man like Dr. Bowering explains the sky to a woman like she’s never looked up before. “Fascinating,” I add.