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She felt Miriam’s hand on her arm, very gently, and at last she looked up at her.
Miriam had tears in her eyes and her face was pale with anger.
“I’m so sorry.”
Beata sat motionless, hardly breathing. All she could feel was her heart thundering in her chest. Miriam understood. She did not know how or why, but she understood!
“Thank you,” she said very quietly. “Actually, justice caught up with him eventually, but it was not my doing. Less than a year ago, he had a seizure and was paralyzed, in and out of coma and, I think, nightmare. He couldn’t move, and could only speak a little. He suffered a great deal. It would have been more merciful if the first seizure could have taken him.”
“How hard for you…waiting,” Miriam said softly. Then the anger was gone from her eyes and there was only a tenderness. “Piers died very quickly, I was told. He was shot in some stupid kind of brawl, in a saloon up in the gold country to the north, where he was looking after Aaron’s affairs. That was what he did. He was trying to stop a fight, and got in the way.” She stopped, her voice gravelly in her throat.
“And you were just…told about it?” Beata tried to picture hearing such news about a man you had truly loved, not one whose death was your release.
“It must have been like a stab in the back from an assassin you did not even know was following you,” Beata whispered. “I can’t imagine it.”
Tears filled Miriam’s eyes. “They buried him out there. I rode out a few days after. The hills are beautiful, spring flowers everywhere. People in dusty clothes on the sides of every river and stream, panning for gold. You can see it in your mind. Women scraping at the earth to dig it up enough to plant greens and vegetables. Shacks with nothing over their beds and a stove of some sort, or even an open fire outside.” She gave a short, jerky laugh. “They don’t call it gold fever for nothing. But those wild days had their advantages, too.”
Beata knew that very well. Her own father had been one of the wise ones, who did not look for gold themselves but made their way by providing for those who did. They lost a little on the failures, but made enormously on the successes, until he started to gamble. But she would not speak of that now; she had torn open enough wounds for the day.
“You didn’t go alone?” she asked, really just to show her attention to Miriam’s story.
“Yes I did, except for one of the men from Aaron’s homestead. I don’t even remember who he was. A friend of Zack’s, I think.” Miriam smiled ruefully. “A nice man. He was very kind to me, patient. I feel guilty that I can’t even think what he was called, or even exactly what he looked like. I was…stunned. The whole world changed for me in a few days.” She was looking into the past herself now, in turn acknowledging pain that would never entirely leave her.
“It wasn’t Zack himself?” Beata asked it for something to say, not because it mattered. It was all so many years ago.
Miriam shook her head. “No, poor Zack was dead by then. Over a year before. That was a bit before you and I really knew each other.
“Zachary was the most totally honest man I ever knew. He and Aaron were closer than brothers. He was the only person whose opinion of him Aaron even cared about. Zachary’s father took a huge area of land over from the Indians and that’s where Aaron’s success began. He was better at defending it than Zachary.” Her words were perfectly plain, but there were conflicting emotions in her face, respect and doubt mixed.
Beata knew something of the history of the West. This would not have been a purchase; it was plainly land-grabbing.
“Zack didn’t agree with what his father had done,” Miriam went on. “He felt he shouldn’t have taken it, gold or not. His father gave Aaron command of it, and when the old man was killed, Aaron inherited it.”
Beata was startled. “Not Zack?”
“No. But Zack didn’t mind. He would have given it back; we all knew that. And the big gold stakes made it certain. There’d have been an Indian war, which the Indians would have lost, if they’d fought.”
“And Zack?” Beata asked.
“He yielded to the inevitable,” Miriam replied. “But he spent more and more time up in the Indian parts, trying to see they got something out of it. When he was killed, Aaron grieved for him terribly. That’s how he understood my grief over Piers, I think. The world changed for him when Zack died. He lost something of himself that day, something good inside him.” She remained silent for several minutes, seemingly imprisoned in memory.
That was all about Aaron and Zachary. What of her first husband?
Had Piers Astley not been anything like the man Miriam had allowed people to suppose? Beata thought that if Miriam meant her to know she would have told her now. Beata herself had led people to think that Ingram was a clever, subtle, cultivated man, interesting in public and quietly decent at home. Why should Miriam be any different? She was a beautiful woman fighting for acceptance within her own society. London, just as much as the frontier town of San Francisco, was a place where to be outcast was a kind of death. Perhaps it was the same everywhere.
Had Aaron, who was clearly still in love with her, rescued her from a man who had abused her, and she dared not admit it? Why was a woman afraid to acknowledge that she had been beaten, or intimately used by a man who, at least in part, hated her?
Aaron obviously still found Miriam beautiful, whole, and lovely, even after nearly twenty years of marriage. Would Oliver Rathbone ever see Beata in such a way? Perhaps, if she never let him know the truth! Could he possibly understand as Miriam seemed to? There was the gulf between empathy and pity that Beata could not bear that he should cross.
But if she did tell him, wouldn’t he always have the question in his mind, whether he gave it words or not—“Why did you let him?”
“You are very fortunate to have met Aaron,” she said quietly.
Miriam looked at her for a long, steady moment, then turned her head away and stared out of the window.
“It was a marvelous ride today,” she said softly. “Almost a gallop. Who would have thought you could do that in the middle of London, and all dressed up as if to meet the cream of the aristocracy…?”
“We did meet some of them,” Beata said, allowing herself to embrace the complete change of subject. “We spoke to at least one marchioness, a duchess, and two viscounts.”
