Bride of Thunder (2 page)

Mercy turned back to her task, concealing hurt at the way he'd evaded her gesture of appeal. “Philip, your knee still pains you when you ride or walk a long time. You're not in any condition to ride hundreds of miles with Jo Shelby, much less fight.”

His well-shaped mouth curved downward. “You seem to think I'm in condition to plow!”

“I'd help. And you could take as long as you need and rest when you're tired.”

“I'm not a field hand, damn it!” She didn't answer, averting her face to hide tears that would only make him angrier. “I'm not cut out to farm,” he growled. “There's no use in trying to make me do it!”

“Well, what is it that you intend?”

His eyes narrowed. “Oh, so you're throwing it in my face that we're eating what you grub out of that ugly little garden and what people give you for sitting up with them all night—when they bother to pay at all. That new doctor in town gets cash, jewelry, or something worthwhile for his trouble.”

“It's worthwhile if I can help. People give what they can.”

“The way they paid your father? If he'd charged the way he should've, he'd have left you pretty well off.”

“He did. Remembering the kind of man he was is worth more than lots of money.”

Philip groaned. “My God! You're talking about his goodness—honor, wisdom, all that rot?”

Whirling, Mercy trembled. “Talk that way about Father,” she said in a shaking voice, “and I'll bar the door to you!”

He stared. This was the first time she'd lost her temper with him. When she met his eyes unflinchingly, he reddened and shrugged. “I'm sorry, honey. Uncle Elkanah was a saint, but it's too bad he didn't look after you a little better.”

“We always had enough. And I'm sure he didn't expect to be killed at forty-five.”

“It's still a shame”—Philip grinned ruefully, using the charm that could still twist her heart—“especially since you've got a husband who doesn't know how to do anything but soldier.”

“You planned once to go into law.”

“No money for that now, sugar.”

“If it's what you want, we'll manage. I can sell vegetables and …”

“You'd give them to people who don't eat right,” teased Philip, leaning against the side of the house, which needed painting. He started across the garden toward the pastures and the thickly wooded creek. “Darling, I can't just forget we lost a war, go back to where I was when it started. Even if we had the money, I don't think I could endure the grind of studying, hours in a classroom, when I'm used to wondering if each day will be my last.”

Coming to where she stood by a plank work table shaded by a big oak, he closed his arms around her from behind, his hands cupping her breasts.

She didn't know why exactly, but she hated that, to be grasped when she felt exposed and helpless, because her hands were busy with the smelly, wet feathers. Philip's moments of affection were few. If she complained of this unwelcome show, he'd sulk for days and would never turn to her in the night, as he did now only occasionally.

When they'd married, Mercy had been startled at the hurried brutal way he'd breached her, but she had believed his wound and nervousness made him rough. It wasn't much better now. When she wanted simple affection, or when she tried to prolong the kissing and caressing, he ignored her unspoken wishes, either moving away or taking her with neither delight nor tenderness.

Mercy had no woman to consult about this problem. Philip's parents had been dead for years, and his brother's wife, though pleasant, lived three days distant. Mercy hadn't seen her or her brother-in-law since the day she'd married Philip. From what she sensed about Madge Evans and the other married women she'd treated, Mercy concluded their lots were equally disappointing, if not worse, but their husbands weren't young and handsome like Philip; and Mercy, though not vain, knew she was infinitely more desirable than most of the women she'd seen partially unclothed.

When she glimpsed her slim figure in the mirror, firmly rounded breasts and thighs, flawless skin, she wondered what it would be like to have Philip watch her, admire her with his hands, tell her she was pretty.

Her father had never talked directly to her about physical love, but once she'd heard him chiding a man for “rolling on and rolling off.” “If you'd pleasure your woman in bed, she'd have fewer headaches, backaches, and doctor bills,” he'd growled. “You've got the medicine, she needs! Think about her and you'll both be a damned sight happier!”

Mercy came back to the flustering reality of Philip's hands slipping inside her dress. “If I go with Shelby and fight for the emperor, the least he'll do is reward volunteers with magnificent holdings. Native labor's cheap. There are fortunes in coffee, sugar, and cotton.” He laughed boyishly, brushing her ear with his lips. “We'd be rich, Mercy! Landed gentry! No truckling to Yankees or scraping to make a start!”

Mercy didn't want to go to Mexico, or farther west or anywhere. It was ridiculous for Philip to act as if he'd lost a great plantation, seen an aristocratic heritage laid to waste. His older brother was ready to share with him the profits—and labor—of several hundred acres of rich black loam, and the huge, old-fashioned farmhouse would accommodate both families.

Or there was Mercy's own small farm. Father, though a doctor, had enjoyed keeping cows, having good horses, and keeping fresh vegetables and fruit on the table. Jeb, a taciturn old steamboat man Father had patched up after a stabbing, tended the cows and garden, but he had gone off to war when her father left to serve as a regimental surgeon. Jeb had died with him, aiding the wounded.

Mercy had kept a garden, but tending the sick made her hours too irregular to take care of the milking. She sold the cows, and soon the carriage horses followed, since she couldn't keep them in grain. But the farm had thirty acres of good bottom land and could support them if Philip would try.

Only it seemed he wouldn't.

“What if Maximilian loses?” she asked him.

“He can't lose!” Philip's fingers bit into the tender, secret flesh of her breasts. “He has France behind him!”

“For how long, now that the United States is pressing for the recall of French troops?”

“That won't matter if enough Confederates replace them!”

“I should think you'd have had enough war. I have.” Mercy turned toward him. “Please, Philip! Help your brother, or let's do what we can with this place!”

He jerked his hands from her, tearing the worn cloth, and he stormed out of the yard without a word, striding toward the dainty little blaze-faced mare he'd left by the fence.

“Philip!” Mercy cried, running after him. “Don't ride Star back to town. You're too heavy for her, and she doesn't get grain anymore.”

But he was swinging up on the bay mare, Elkanah's gift to Mercy on her sixteenth birthday, eight years ago. It was twenty miles to town, and Star had been there and back already today.

“Star can rest in Marshall, dear wife.” Hauling on the reins till the soft-mouthed, gently handled animal danced nervously, Philip seemed to enjoy Mercy's distress. “I won't be home tonight. Your preachments would madden any man with an ounce of spirit. I can't support any more of them just now.”

Spinning the mare, he touched his spurs to her, to Star, always responding sensitively to pressure or a word. In that moment, if Mercy could have shot or roped her husband from the saddle, she would have, and gladly.

I won't let him mistreat her like that,
Mercy thought, moving back to the house after a long, bitter time of staring after him in outrage.
He won't ride her again
.

He didn't, but not through any action of her own. A neighbor's wagon had rattled by at dawn and Philip staggered in, smelling of whiskey and tobacco. He fell into bed fully clothed.

“Where's Star?” asked Mercy, wide awake.

Philip opened one blurry eye and grinned foolishly. “Where she'll get lots of grain. Sold her to a man who wants a nice, quiet mare for his ten-year-old daughter.”

“You
sold
Star?”

“Well, not exactly.” He yawned, burrowing into the pillows. “Cards, my love. Debt of honor.”

“You … you gambled away my mare?”

“
My
mare, wife. What's yours is mine. Anyway, fussy as you were about her, you should be glad. The old nag was wearing out. Now she'll be pampered and fed oats with nothing to do but give some doting child a canter now and then.”

His eyes were shut and he was snoring almost before he drawled the last words. Gazing at him for a few minutes. Mercy sprang out of bed barefoot and ran outside to weep against the oak tree. Star was gone! She had been her father's gift, the last link with past, happier days. But if Star had a kind owner who could care for her, it was probably best. A ten-year-old would dote on the pretty mare, groom her lovingly, and bring her oats and apples. And it would have been hard to keep Philip from abusing her.

This was great luck for Star. And yet … and yet …

Mercy dried her eyes at last, slipped into a dress, and got a pail from the smokehouse. She couldn't bear being close to Philip right now, and there were lots of mayhaws down by the creek where her father had taught her to swim.

She guessed swimming was an unusual accomplishment for a girl, but Elkanah thought everyone should know how to do as many things as possible. She'd never heard him say girls shouldn't do this and that, and ladies didn't say this or that. “We're to do the work of a human being,” he'd said, paraphrasing his favorite hero, Marcus Aurelius. “That's a high-enough aim for anyone without hankering to be ladies and gentlemen.”

But he had been a very gentle man.

What would he say to her now? What would he say about Philip? Mercy couldn't guess. But remembering him in this place they'd often wandered together made her feel better. She ate a few of the tart, juicy red fruits, washed her swollen eyes in the creek, and dabbled her feet in the sparkling stream. It was late morning when she returned to the house with a pail of mayhaws and a calmer spirit.

Philip sat at the dining room table eating the rooster she'd cooked the night before. The meat was stringy, but it flavored the noodles tastily enough.

“Would you make some coffee?” Philip asked plaintively as she put a few pieces of small wood in the stove and put on the mixture of roasted dandelion roots and ground acorns that she'd used through the war and seemed likely to brew a good deal longer. At least there was honey, brought by old Hughie in return for the syrups she concocted for his catarrh, and milk. Uncle Billy, freed long before the war by a grateful master whose life he'd saved, left a big crock of milk every other day on account of his wife, for Mercy had visited Aunt Hester almost every day of the wasting illness that had sent her to bed for a year before she died.

Even though Mercy had reconciled herself to losing Star to people who could treat her well, she was still not able to sit down peaceably with her husband. She got the water buckets and went to the spring at the bottom of the slope on which the rambling L-shaped frame house had been built among magnolias and loblolly pines when her mother and father moved here from Kentucky right after their marriage. Father never mentioned Kentucky kin, so Mercy dimly supposed that there'd been some family disagreement. She'd wished sometimes for a mother, but, except for that, she'd never needed more family than Elkanah.

Mercy paused before she filled the buckets from the stream that sparkled from a cleft in the rock to flow through halved, hallowed-out logs to the tank where cows and horses had watered. Now even Star was gone.

A slab of oak was fastened between two hickory trees and a stone-and-mortar fireplace with an iron grate was close by, the copper-bottomed wash boiler upside down on it. After scrubbing the white clothes and sheets on the washboard in one of the two large, round tubs by the bench, Mercy rinsed them in the other and then boiled them snowy bright in the boiler before wringing them out and hanging them up to bleach in the sun.

Ever since she was big enough, Mercy had helped Jennie, their housekeeper, with the laundry and other work, but shortly after Elkanah went to war, Jennie's aged mother had broken a hip and Jennie had to move into town to care for the permanently lamed, old woman. She'd been troubled about leaving Mercy alone and had suggested she live with them, but Mercy preferred to stay on the farm. She missed Jennie, who'd worked more for love than money, but she was glad when the plump, motherly maiden lady's life had taken a romantic turn. Jennie had caught the eye of a well-to-do cabinetmaker and had married him last spring. Life was so dreary or sad for most people that it was a relief to know that at least someone was happy.

Sighing, Mercy filled the buckets and went back to the house, putting the water on the stand that held the enameled washbasin. The “acorn brew” was bubbling on the stove. Pouring in a little cold water to settle the grounds, Mercy put the pot on the table along with honey and milk. She was leaving to pick fresh mustard greens for dinner when Philip got up and pulled out a chair.

“Come sit with me, honey,” he coaxed. “I'm sorry, really sorry, about your horse … sorry as hell that I'm not much good for you.”

Hope stirred in her. Maybe he had learned a lesson. Besides, he was her husband, and, from long ago, her adored older cousin. It wasn't reasonable to expect him to come home from more than four years of fighting and immediately settle down to a kind of life he'd never dreamed of leading. If they were to have any sort of life together, she must encourage him, be patient.

“If Star can have grain, I should be glad,” Mercy said, sitting down. “Maybe someday I can even buy her back. Does the man who bought her live in Marshall?”