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The long night's stormy howling left behind a waist-deep cover of snow.
Rose stares out of her bedroom window at the morning sun, glowing over a perfect white field.
She plucks anxiously at the fine teeth of her ivory comb. A gift, pulled from the usual delivery to Hux's tiny prairie general store, located inside of a lean-to against the wall of the good wooden house he lives in.
Worries crowd her busy mind as she braids her hair tightly.
Will Pastor Solo be willing to brave the bitter cold, bundling his wife and their sledge full of freckled children for a drive across the miles that separate their homesteads?
Perhaps tomorrow's rushed winter wedding may not happen, after all.
Her short fingers are schoolhouse soft now — owing to two year's pause from the hard labor of her girlhood, when there was only Paige, away earning $2 a week as a laundress, and Rose, who plowed the fields and tended house while her widowed Papa chased his every failing whim.
She had counted on returning to Papa's struggling wheat plot this summer, when school's closed for the term. Surely it's looking sorry now that she hasn't been around to tend to all the broken machinery; to make sure Mama's cook stove is kept clean and polished.
In a few short months, working the fields will be unthinkable, anyhow.
It’s a miracle Hux even lets her knead dough with any amount of enthusiasm.
When she first came to board with Hux, principal of the tiny school and manager of the tiny town general store, she'd been shocked by the amount of work he shouldered alone.
His dependability was the second shock; his level headedness, and his careful way of doing business.
After Papa, and the stream of off-kilter farm hands he tended to hire, she had little faith in men.
It wasn’t that Mr. Hux gave her any more faith in them, really. More that he had few ineptitudes that she needed to make up for, and when she helped him out he was begrudgingly grateful, and that in itself was a revelation.
Rose and the infamous Armitage Hux quarrel and scoff at each other as much as they have since their first meeting. He's full of the same old vinegar; still known about town for being an English snob, a fastidious pursuer of debts, and a spendthrift whenever possible.
He hadn’t allowed the schoolteacher to board with a rotating schedule of her students' families, in the usual way. He had met her once, passed her over with a cold glance, and took up the idea that she would need to be kept close to the schoolhouse, which was about a quarter of a mile away from his own home.
“Lest you don’t get lost in the grass or the snow,” he’d sniffed. “It is very hard to find a schoolteacher, you know.”
And that, as the poets say, was that.
There were ten pupils assigned to her, ranging in age from six to fifteen years. The eldest student was only three years her junior. All obedient, most literate, and largely young girls. The boys could not be spared past puberty, but there were a seven and a ten year old who both didn’t cause too much trouble.
Rose had taken quickly to teaching. Learning had been one of her only solaces growing up, although sitting perfectly still on the hard benches while the other children recited their lessons was a great pain to her as a girl.
She loved the children, their faces ruddy and spirits cheerful; loved standing with them to warm at the stove before beginning school. The little ones coveted being allowed to toss corn husks in to fuel it.
She loved the long lines of penmanship across slates, and rapping her ruler on the desk to call class to order, and walking there each day in winter on the arm of her irritated host, who would see her to the schoolhouse door in the morning and appear there punctually in the afternoon.
Sometimes he arrived early, in time to observe the last of the afternoon’s lesson, which was always about something off the primer — lectures on history or meteorology or geology or whatever Rose could think up that she’d read about.
Mr. Hux sat at the empty desk in the back of the room, rapt at attention, like the rest of her pupils.
For the first months, she was convinced her host hated her. She was a burden he had forced upon himself, but he did everything he could to make her feel unwelcome and unwieldy in his home.
He gave her his mattress and slept on a straw-filled tick nearer the fire, making sure to complain at all opportunities about it.
She assisted him with house chores, and helped in the general store, and he never failed to find some small thing to fault.
Despite the frosty relationship, not speaking would be an unforgivable breach of propriety which not even the tempestuous Mr. Hux could tolerate.
Rose eventually teased out the man’s life story, and he began asking her how she managed to graduate school while living so far out. Then he graduated to asking her to read those passages which the children were memorizing out of their primer books — it was good practice for a school president to know what his students were learning, of course.
He’d give her a look sweet as molasses while she read aloud.
He was a handsome man, and severe, and unlike any other she’d ever met.
He compelled her. He was interesting, when most of what she had ever known to be interesting had been in her own head or lifted from the pages of a book.
Most absurdly of all, he was interested in her.
It had almost driven her mad, living so close to him and not being able to sate her desire to stomp on his foot, or kiss him, or both.
Now, Rose can't imagine life without Hux, his dry wit and steadiness and the prairie roses he puts in his buttonhole to bring home to her. The possessive way his hands roam over her skin when they’re in bed together, warming her on cold nights and baring her on hot ones.
She had never been able to imagine anything but him, once he came into her life.
The sod henhouse is only a few steps out the back door, and she'd like to be the one checking it, but her fiance's lantern-lit red hair appears from the trampled path of snow. She opens the door for him and takes his coat, his scarf; flutters around to give him chicory root coffee with a kiss on the flushed tip of his nose.
"I told you to let me build the fire," he grumbles, taking the coffee and the kiss with stooping, haughty grace. One more kiss as distraction, and Rose steals the eggs, still warm, from his pocket. She scoffs at his fussing, and sets about making breakfast before he can order her to sit.
Popping bacon. Orange yolks whipped with a tin fork. Hux, at the table, making plans about the wood stack, thinking he’ll be able to sell off quite a bit, at a good price. He bought a timber patch and has a few men logging it. His idea is it’ll make up for the high corn prices he paid in the autumn, which he’s been dour about.
She hums sympathetically when necessary, then has a genuine question about crop sales. Her cheeks burn when she feeds the cook fire.
Paige is due to be brought along in the Pastor’s sledge. Rose dearly wishes her sister were here already, making pound cake and teasing her about her waistline. She wants Rey, too, with her quick laugh and her cheeky advice about dealing with the unpleasantries of pregnancy.
The expanse between each squat home out here feels so vast, especially when the warmth of company, when gathered, is so dear.
Her childhood cabin is some twenty miles off, and she wanted terribly for such times as a child. Papa never liked having neighbors.
She's stirring cream and into oatmeal before she has the nerve to ask: "do you suppose the Pastor will make it in time? And Papa?"
The previous night was long, with Rose's fears needing to be quelled every other hour, as the weather raged and with it her anxieties: about the golden velvet wedding dress she’d barely finished trimming, her kerchiefs, his suit, the menu for the small roomful of guests they expected.
"Missus Solo is quite enamored of weddings," Hux sighs. Over the last day he’s tried assuring her from every possible angle. "Your father, too, was quite fixed on being here, was he not? They will come. It’s only snow. We all know how to drive on the snow."
"Do you think?" She frets, laying an unconscious hand on her belly. Hux smirks, patience slowly rising back into his tone, his face.
"Rose, it's already going to be the largest seven-month baby this state's ever seen. Surely a day or two's delay wouldn't make a difference."
"Do you hear your father?" She mumbles down at the barely-there rise under her loosened stays. "Because he's surly as a badly shoed pony, but he's right. You'll be big and healthy when you come."
His eyes brighten when she pointedly ignores Hux, right in front of him. He secretly loves it.
Bacon fat dissolving on her tongue, ivory comb tucked into her hair, Rose is uninterested by the matter of the wood cordage that so fascinates Hux.
"I wish I had one last summer working for Papa," she says wistfully, when Hux breaks from speaking. "He needs so much help over the winter."
"If he can't manage such acreage without his own daughter —" Hux begins, before remembering the respect he owes his father-in-law, and hushes. But the frustration merely mentioning her father brings him is clear on Hux's pink face. She dips her head, hiding the small smile that blooms there.
"They sent away a little sister. By the time I see them again, I'll be a wife, with my own family. How strange that is." Rose muses, over their mugs of coffee. The emptied plates. The stuffed canary, forever chirping on the mantle — the same little bird that witnessed the first time she launched onto tiptoes and kissed him. His coat lapels in her fists, and all of her courage too.
"Don't you think, my love?"
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