They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived
Chapter 7
They pay what they owe. She kept her voice even. Not sharp — she didn’t want a fight, she wanted him to hear her. You work this forge twelve hours a day. You have broken your body doing it. You will not be cheated out of the value of your labor. She looked at the ledger. I shall handle the billing from now on.
He looked at her for a long moment. In the forge light, with her hair coming loose from its pins and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, she had the expression of a woman who has made up her mind about something and is informing him rather than asking.
He went back to the iron.
All right, he said.
From that point forward, the people of Oak Haven who came to collect their repaired plow blades and horseshoes and wagon wheels were received by Josephine Mercer. She sat on a reinforced stool Gideon had built for her — solid, wide, low to the ground, built with the specific attention he brought to anything he made for her use — with the account ledger open and her voice polite and her prices correct.
The mockery began to shift.
It shifted slowly, in the way that grudging respect always shifts — first in silence, then in the absence of the worst comments, then in small acknowledgements. People realized that the woman they had laughed at possessed a sharper head for figures than half the town council, an iron composure under provocation, and a blacksmith husband who had demonstrated, in the mercantile, exactly what the consequences of provoking either of them might be.
Clara Jenkins stopped calling her the Bennett behemoth. She did not apologize, but she stopped, and in the economy of small-town social cruelty that was its own form of concession.
The threat came in a legal notice.
Josiah Dalton owned most of the grazing land north of Oak Haven. He was the kind of man who had acquired wealth primarily through understanding which men could be pressured and which could not, and then pressuring the first category exclusively.
He arrived at the forge on a Wednesday morning with Jeb Stone at his side — Jeb, who had been avoiding Gideon’s vicinity since the mercantile incident with the focused determination of a man who has learned something important about his own limits.
Dalton tossed a rolled legal document into the dirt in front of Gideon’s forge.
I’m expanding my grazing pastures, Mercer. He looked down from his horse with the particular ease of a man who has never been required to look up at anyone. Your property sits right on the only unfrozen tributary of Red Creek. I’m buying this land. The offer is two hundred dollars. You and your oversized bride have until the end of the week to pack up.
Gideon didn’t pick up the document. He looked at Dalton with the same flat, assessing expression he brought to a piece of iron he was deciding how to work.
The land isn’t for sale, Dalton.
You’re a scarred freak, Mercer. You don’t have the standing to fight me. Dalton’s voice went harder. If I don’t own this land by Sunday, I’ll take it by force. Men have disappeared in these mountains for less.
Gideon picked up his hammer and turned back to his anvil.
Then you’d better bring an army.
Friday night came in behind a blizzard.
The snow started at dusk and by ten o’clock it had buried the street under a foot of white and the wind was screaming off the Rockies in a way that masked most other sounds.
Josie was awake, reading by the wood stove. She had developed the habit of sitting up later than Gideon, who rose before first light, and she had grown to love the particular quality of a winter night in the cabin — the complete enclosure of it, the wind trying to get in and failing, Buster’s steady breathing from his spot by the fire.
She smelled it before she heard anything.
Not the familiar metallic tang of the coal forge — she knew that smell now, had known it for two months, had come to find it reassuring. This was different. Acrid, choking, the smell of pine burning fast and wrong.