Rosalind stood looking at the trunk for a long time. She had not expected to find her husband's name waiting for her in a depot storeroom, and she had not expected the anger that came with it, hot and immediate, like a hand closing around her throat. Elias Carmichael had been dead for eighteen years, and she had made her peace with him, or so she had told herself, by building an empire on the ground where he had fallen and by hating, with a clean and simple hatred, the story of what he had been. She had told herself that she owed him nothing more. And now here was his name, in faded ink, asking her to open a box she had not known existed.
"Open it here," she said, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears, thinner than the voice she used with cattlemen. "If there is anything in it that belongs to the ranch, I want to see it now."
Edith knelt and worked the latches. They were stiff with rust and disuse, and they gave with a small, protesting shriek. The lid rose.
The first thing Rosalind saw was yellow.
Not the yellow of autumn grass or of the brass fittings on a saddle, but a soft, particular yellow, the color of late light on a kitchen wall. It was a baby's outfit, knitted in wool, laid carefully on top of everything else in the trunk as if whoever had packed it had wanted it to be found first. A tiny jacket with wooden buttons, and beneath it a pair of knitted breeches no longer than a man's hand, and a cap with a small, knotted tassel at its crown. The wool was fine and even, the stitches small and patient, the work of someone who had known exactly how small a newborn is and how much warmth such a small creature needs. Rosalind reached out, and then stopped, her hand hovering above the little jacket, because she could not remember the last time she had touched anything so small and so carefully made.
Beneath the outfit lay a folded paper, sealed with wax that had cracked along one edge. Beneath the paper lay a tintype in a leather case, the kind of photograph that soldiers and travelers carried. And beneath that, wrapped in a length of undyed linen, lay a small bundle of letters tied with twine.
Rosalind lifted the outfit first. It weighed almost nothing. She held it up to the thin light from the window, and the yellow wool seemed to glow against the dark of the storeroom, as if it had kept some of the sun of the summer it was made in. She had never had a child. She and Elias had spoken of children in the early years, in the way young couples do, as if children were a room in a house they would build one day. Then the years had gone on, and the ranch had grown, and the talk had stopped, and she had told herself that Bar Seven was child enough for any woman. She had believed it. Standing in the depot storeroom with a dead stranger's baby clothes in her hands, she was not sure what she believed anymore.
"Whose is it?" she asked, and her voice came out low.
Edith shook her head. "There is no sender on the manifest. Only your husband's name, as the party it was to be delivered to. I thought perhaps he had ordered it. For the ranch, perhaps. For a hand's family."
But Rosalind knew, with the cold certainty that had made her a successful cattlewoman, that Elias Carmichael had never ordered baby clothes for anyone. Elias had not been that kind of man — or so she had believed for eighteen years. The man she had buried in her memory was a hard man, a man who had burned a shepherd camp to clear the waterhole for his cattle, a man whose ambition had outrun his mercy and who had died as he had lived, in violence, trampled in a stampede of his own making. That was the story Duncan Pryce had told her in the days after the fire, when she was twenty-four and widowed and drowning, and she had clung to it because it gave her something simple to hate in place of something complicated to grieve.