Blaze (21 page)

She looked startled.

"The lily-white hands," he explained.

"She can wipe," Jimmy interjected, at last finding something he understood in this adult conversation.

"Good. It's settled then." Hazard smiled and left.

WHEN Jimmy went down mountain an hour later, the list he carried in his head was extensive and his instructions were explicit: he was to say nothing to anyone about the woman in the cabin. As though the whole town weren't buzzing with the story already. But he knew even at his very young age how to be discreet, his loyalty to Hazard being second only to his family. So he was careful making his purchases; one of the young stockboys at Klein's General Store, happy for a twenty-dollar gold piece to sell him a large crated item after the store closed for the night. And if anyone asked, Jimmy knew he wouldn't mention who'd bought it.

The stockboy and Jimmy loaded Hazard's horses early the following morning—the horses Hazard kept in Pernell's pasture for a monthly boarding fee. And long before Diamond City was awake, Jimmy was halfway up the trail to Hazard's cabin, rechecking his list mentally to make sure he'd forgotten nothing.

"I TELL you, Millicent"—Yancy had taken to addressing his employer's wife by her Christian name since the Colonel had disappeared into the mountains—with her tacit consent, he had noted—"there's no sense in waiting for the Colonel to return. One damn Injun. It's ridiculous to wait. Hell, we can blow him out of there in a minute."

Millicent Braddock reflected. Her husband had left precise orders—ones which left no doubt of what he wanted done in his absence—nothing. He knew Yancy had a reputation for violence not always in proportion to need.

"The Colonel won't allow any chances taken with his precious daughter," she reminded him. "It's all well and good to talk about blowing him up, but the Colonel would have both our heads if our actions endangered his darling."

Yancy and Millicent understood each other per-fectly. Both had been obliged, due to the declining fortunes of their old Virginia families, to look afield for ways to mend their dynasties. But they'd never fully accepted this necessity. At least not with any graciousness. A burning resentment always smoldered under the surface, for neither of them had ever expected to have to work for a living. In Millicent's case, being married to the Braddock money certainly was work. For Yancy the humiliation was more overt. He'd actually had to find a job after the Civil War had dispossessed him of even the family's heavily mortgaged plantation.

"And you?" Yancy inquired with the barest suggestion of irony.

Millicent had spent a lifetime cultivating the nuances of a southern lady's conduct. "Why, Mr. Strahan," she admonished, just the proper degree of affront in her voice, "I am her mother. Need I remind you?"

"Begging your pardon, ma'am," Yancy replied, his eyes as devoid of feeling as hers, "I'm only concerned with the Colonel's property. It made me forget myself for a moment." His tone was as properly contrite as hers was properly affronted. They were like two actors playing excessively polite roles while their minds went over the evening's social engagements. It came as second nature to them both—the intricate set of insincere behavioral formulas. Each knew how the other felt about the Colonel, his daughter, and his money, but the game required certain politic rules.

Eventually they'd come to an agreement. It was simply a matter of the negotiations being couched in accepted propriety. The unacknowledged accomplices went in to dinner, something the Braddock servants were finding an increasing, if distasteful, occurrence.

AFTER a second restless night, Hazard woke on his bed of buffalo robes and forced his tired body up. He stretched lazily, every muscle responding a millisecond late. Today, he thought, would not be a good day to face a crisis, with his brain and body sluggish from fatigue and Blaze's presence filling his thoughts with an exclusivity detrimental to concise thinking.

Quietly, he slipped from the cabin without waking Blaze and strolled down to the pool. The morning reminded him of so many from his youth: fresh, sunny, a whisper of a breeze rippling through the aspen. And he wished, in a fleeting moment, for that innocence again. A time of only his tribe on these lands, only the anticipation of some childhood pleasure—a horse race or a game of hoop and pole, nothing more pressing in the course of a day than the normal competition between boyish companions.

Standing on the mossy stream bank, he sighed and the nostalgia dissipated. The sun still came up vivid and limitless over the same rugged crest of mountain landscape, but nothing else was the same. His people had moved north of these mountains, where white men hadn't come looking for gold yet or tried their plows in the mountain valleys. His innocence had vanished even before the yellow eyes had come into his life. And now he labored like the slave Blaze accused him of making her, labored inside the dim earth day after day, in hopes of saving his people from the fate of other tribes dispossessed by the white man's expansion. Gold was the answer. The ultimate answer for every problem. Well, almost every problem, he ironically noted. Gold wasn't going to solve this overpowering need he felt for his willful companion. He knew, of course, what would solve the problem… Abruptly, he dove into the pool, hoping the chill water would briefly assuage the carnal direction of his thoughts.

WHEN Blaze woke an hour later, the cabin was still, trilling birdsong outside the only sound. Tossing aside the covers, she sat up, her glance sweeping the small room. He was gone already, his wet footprints, a reminder of his daily bath, still visible on the cool plank floor, the butter crock and remnants of sandwich-making left out on the table. It warmed her suddenly—the vestiges of his presence—and it unnerved her briefly that she should feel such tenderness for him. Until now, she'd considered her feelings for Jon Hazard Black blatantly and uncomplicatedry sensual. As one would enjoy a new bauble or toy or pleasurable taste—wholeheartedly and openly, but without the peripheral complexities that rushed in on her thoughts now. Brushing aside the unruly intricacies, she reminded herself that he was using her and she was using him, a fair exchange in her mind—• hostage for teacher—until her father ransomed her. These days were an adventure she'd remember with a spiking rush of excitement all her life, for Hazard had given her her first exquisite sensual pleasure and she impatiently wanted more. Undaunted that her teacher had withdrawn his services, Blaze now contemplated some more amenable form of bribery, since her first forays had failed. Undeterred and motivated by an assumed prerogative, Miss Venetia Braddock of Beacon Hill set her mind on finding the key to overcoming Hazard's exceptional discipline.

JlMMY was there when Hazard came in for lunch, the food was prepared, the floor newly swept, and Blaze sported a spray of wild roses tucked becomingly in the top buttonhole of her blouse. It brought his mind instantly to the petal-soft feel of her breasts and, distracted by the memory, he didn't hear Jimmy's question until it was repeated.

"Didya start drifting south today?"

"Ah…" he said vaguely, as if waking from a nap. "Drifting. Yes. Made thirty feet this morning."

"Thirty feet!" Blaze remarked, amazed. She knew mining almost as well as her father did. "That must be some kind of a record."

He looked at her and thought roses suited her. "Black powder did most of it," he modestly replied.

"How do you haul it out?"

"A small dump car. I put in a few rails when I started working this claim."

"You are expecting the mine to produce."

"I wouldn't have invested so much time and effort if I didn't."

"Hazard went to Columbia School of Mines and he knows everything about mining," Jimmy interposed, pleased to illuminate yet another brilliant facet of his hero.

"Thanks, Jimmy, for the compliment," Hazard said with a smile at his small champion, "but I know far from everything. I took a couple of classes on gold mining, that's all. It wasn't so far from Boston."

Wide-eyed, Blaze accused, "You never said you'd lived in Boston."

"You never asked."

"What were you doing in Boston?" she asked, suspicion grievous in her tone.

"Going to Harvard." And then she recalled

Turledge Taylor's remark about talk he might have gone to Harvard.

"I never saw you."

"I don't think we frequented the same playrooms," he replied, an ingenuous smile playing across his face.

"I'm not that young."

"Young enough," he tranquilly observed.

"Meaning?" Her voice was verging on snappish and she was building herself into some kind of unwarranted temper.

"Nothing provocative, I assure you, Miss Brad-dock," Hazard temperately remarked, hoping to mollify whatever was goading her. "Only that, taking into account upper-class fixed notions of etiquette, my sojourn in Boston society preceded your debut, that's all."

Jimmy, watching the adults like a spectator at a tennis match, suddenly knew without a doubt who had broken the crockery. The lady living here with Hazard tempered up faster than a fox pouncing on a plump chicken. "Food's getting cold," he intervened, loath to be in the middle of a full-scale fight, although, he decided, casting a sidelong glance at Hazard, there was more of a smile on his face than anything else.

"Come, Miss Braddock, let's eat," Hazard invited. "It's a shame to waste all this effort." He seated himself at the small table. "Tell me," he went on, in a sincere, generous tone, as though the recent exchange hadn't occurred, "are these your muffins today?"

Blaze colored as pink as the roses at her neckline. How, she thought, could he infuse so much warmth in his voice? It was like being stroked with velvet. She decided then that Boston society must have been rather interesting the years Hazard practiced his charm on the ladies.

"She sure did," Jimmy answered, anxious to please Hazard, knowing he was supposed to be teaching the Miss to cook.

Smiling suddenly at the handsome face turned up to her, Blaze truthfully explained, "Jimmy allows me to stir. And I'm marvelous at throwing in the raisins. If Papa doesn't intervene, I may graduate to more intricate details… in the kitchen."

Hazard, waving Jimmy and Blaze to their seats, had already begun buttering a muffin. "Maybe we could hire you to live in, Jimmy. I've forgotten how good food tastes."

"I'd like to, but I can't," Jimmy replied quickly, his mouth full of muffin.

"Your mother needs you, I suppose," Hazard replied, savoring the flavor of new young carrots boiled with a touch of sugar.

Jimmy's eyes dropped evasively. "Yeah." He busily pushed his carrots into a pile.

"You'll be able to come up and help though, won't you?"

The fork stirred the carrot pile fiat. Eyes downcast, Jimmy muttered, "Think so."

Noting the uncharacteristic nervousness in a normally ebullient young boy, Hazard put down his fork, swallowed the tender morsel of beef in his mouth, and softly inquired, "Think so?"

Jimmy's eyes came up fast, locked with Hazard's for one flashing moment, and then fell before the perplexed scrutiny. "Is something wrong, Jimmy?"

"No sir."

"Is the money all right?"

"Yes sir, it's not that."

"What is it, then?"

"Well, Ma saw—you know—what I brought up this morning, and—" His downcast eyes regained some of their usual sparkle. "It don't seem so odd to me, but Ma sort of pursed her lips, and, well…"

Amusement replaced perplexity in Hazard's dark eyes. "And?" he prompted, one finger lazily smoothing a nonexistent tablecloth.

"Ma says Mrs. Gordon was right all along."

"Right about what?" Hazard asked, a knowing smile beginning to curl the edges of his mouth.

"I don't rightly know, sir. Something about a thing called a tawdry hussy." Blaze choked on her food, but Jimmy didn't seem to notice. "Damned, oops, sorry, sir," he apologized, "if I know what that is. But Ma was right indignant and told me not to stay after sunset. How come, sir?" Jimmy innocently asked.

"I expect she's worried about you up in the mountains at night," Hazard calmly replied, his glance straying to Blaze's flushed face.

"But I stay here lots of times after dark."

"Maybe some grizzlies have been sighted lately." Hazard resumed eating.

"She didn't mention no grizzlies. What's a taw-dryhussy?" Jimmy said the unfamiliar words in one unbroken breath.

It was Hazard's turn to choke. The small boy's face staring at him was plainly bewildered, while Blaze's heated blue eyes were burning into him. "Ah—actually— it's a matter of definition," he equivocated, "one of those things women take issue with. I wouldn't give it another thought. And do what your mother wants. Come up if you can."

"I sure will. It don't seem like she minds so much if n it's daylight, so I'll come same as usual with your supplies, OK?" Jimmy had been afraid he'd lose Hazard's friendship when his mother had harangued him that morning about the large crate being loaded on the pack saddle. He wanted reassurance that all would remain the same between himself and the man who treated him with a gentleness he'd never known, even from his own father.

"Fine, Jimmy, and tell your mother how much I appreciate your work. Now, would you run down to the stream and get a fresh bucket of water?" Hazard asked, knowing the woman across the table from him was about to explode.

"Right, sir. Right away," Jimmy exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "I'll be back in a jiffy."

He'd no more than crossed the threshold when Blaze blurted out, "The nerve of that woman! The unmitigated nerve! Who the hell does she think she is?"

"I wouldn't worry about it," Hazard said placatingly.

"I'm not worried about it. Why should I worry about what some washerwoman says about me?"

"Your snobbery is showing, Boston," Hazard observed wryly.

"My snobbery?" she sneered, the emphasis drawl-ingly apparent.

One dark brow raised fractionally. "Point taken," he said.

"I should hope so!" she snapped, rounding on him with a rush of movement. "You were about to take her side!"

He put both palms up in defense. "I wouldn't think of it. 'Hussy' isn't in my vocabulary at all."

"Knowing you, as long as they wear a skirt, right?"

"Or black slacks," he added, casting an admiring glance at her.

"Hazard, I'm not interested in compliments at the moment. Can you believe it?" she rushed on, hotly berating what she considered a gross injustice. "Of all the galll-Hazard's deep voice was tolerantly soothing. "Gossip is like that. Ignore it."

"I intend to! Damn her—Hussy?" she repeated incredulously, her fingernails drumming the tabletop.

"It's a small mining camp."

"Too damn small."

"Everyone knows everyone else's business."

"Why the hell would she call me that?" Blaze questioned, more bewildered now than resentful. "I'm a hostage, for God's sake." Immune to the world's opinion in general, Blaze took issue with the pettiness of the remark. The point wasn't what she did or didn't do with Hazard. That was her own business—she'd always done what she pleased with her life. It just astonished her that some laundress would comment on respectability in a rough, wild mining camp like Diamond City where vice itself was a business—a major business. "She probably wants you for herself," Blaze scathingly commented.