HT02 - Sing: A Novel of Colorado (20 page)

Gavin grinned at them and then at Moira. “Do you trust me?”

She nodded and looked into his bright eyes. “I do, Gavin,” she said.

Gavin handed a stack of posters to each of the boys. “Now I don’t want any merchants angry with us for putting posters on their storefronts. Keep ’em to the alleyways, understood? But then I want at least one on every wall from one end of town to the other. Put two on the alley walls near the saloons and cathouses.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. “Here’s a nickel for a bucket of paste and a brush, and a nickel for each of you. Come find me at the Worthington Hotel when you’re done. If I look around and see that you boys have done a good job, there’ll be another dime for each.”

The boys stared with wide eyes and then broke out into grins, nudging each other. In seconds they were running down the street, leaping in the air, whooping at their good fortune. Gavin was smiling as he turned to look at her again. “They understand how it works. They can provide something I need, and if they do it well, I will pay more for it.” He reached for her hands. “And you, my dear, will take the stage and be the best thing any man or woman has ever seen on this side of the country. And they will pay handsomely. You’ll see.” He waved one hand in the air, and at that moment, Moira wondered if he were more magician than man. They resumed walking. “You’ll begin with these camp songs you’ve been learning, taking them high and then low and then high again, building, building. And at the end, I want you to sing an aria.”

“An aria?” she asked in confusion, pulling him to a stop.

“An aria. Something in Spanish or French so it sounds all the more exotic and sophisticated. Your audience will leave feeling cultured solely from having heard it. For some it will be the first fine music they’ve ever heard. For others it will hearken back to their best theatrical memories, if not surpass them. But you will have become their friend through the course of the evening, almost one of them with the more simple songs, so you won’t be such a distant star that they can’t think of reaching out and touching you. We want them to reach, darling. Long for you. Hunger for you.”

Moira looked up into his eyes and saw the familiar desire in them. She sensed that he no longer spoke of the audience to come, but of his own wanting. They had checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Knapp, so they could share a room without scrutiny as well as save on the expense. It was foolish, really, to book a second room when they spent every night together. Gavin had even bought her a gorgeous yellow diamond and slipped it on her finger with the whispered words, “Our little, delicious secret.” And it was delicious. Moira loved the shiver of excitement she got passing by the hotel manager at the front desk. Did they really fool the man? It mattered little, only that she, Moira St. Clair, chose how she ordered her days and nights and with whom she spent them. For the first time since she found out Max had stolen all her money, Moira felt masterful. In control.

But as they moved inside the sumptuous hotel lobby, her eyes caught a familiar figure and face. She paused, watching the woman until she turned.

Gavin looked down at her and then over to the woman in curiosity. “Moira?”

Moira stared at her for a moment, even after the older woman fully faced her. It was not her mother. But she looked hauntingly like her.

“Do you know her?”

“N-no,” she said, turning at once to resume their climb up the stairs. But the thought of her mother here, watching her, knowing what she was doing immediately robbed her of any glory she had felt. In its place was a sense of foreboding. Her stomach pitched.

“Are you all right, Moira?” Gavin asked. “You’re suddenly flushed.”

“I’m only a bit weary. Do you think you might leave me for a bit, allow me to rest? I have a sudden headache.”

“Certainly,” he said. “I’ll go and fetch some ice from the barkeep, so you might have a cool cloth upon your forehead. It is a bit warm for the end of April. More like summer, I’d say. Perhaps you got a bit overheated?” They moved into the room and he threw back the covers, then moved to help her undress, slowly unlacing her corset. “Mmm. Are you certain you have a headache, darling?” he asked, kissing her shoulder and then her neck.

“I’m afraid so,” she lied. “Forgive me.” Moira knew Gavin would respond to her complaint of a headache, since he so often suffered from them himself. She moved away from him and slid underneath the covers. “That cool cloth? It would be divine,” she said, raising the back of one hand to her forehead.

“Of course,” he said slowly, giving her the impression he did not believe her act. But as he slipped out the door, quietly closing it behind him, she had difficulty caring whether he believed her or not. Because all she could see was that woman in the lobby, the cut of her nose, the hollow of her eye, all so hauntingly familiar.
Mama, I miss you.

She shoved away the thought of her mother seeing her here, in this hotel room shared by a man who was not her husband but masqueraded as such. Her mother and father were long gone. Her family—Odessa, Nic—were far away. This was her life now. Hers to make of it as she wished. She grasped for the fleeting glory she’d felt that morning, the brief respite of power, but failed to find it again. All she could feel was a burning in her chest, a burning that took her a while to name.

Shame.

Shame? She let out an unladylike snort through her nose and threw back the covers, just as Gavin arrived with his small towel and chunk of ice. “Thank you,” she said, lifting a hand to her forehead again. “Honestly, I can’t tell if I need to rest with the curtains closed and that atop my head, or to get out again under the bright sun. I’m so antsy, and yet weary too.”

He sat next to her on the bed and handed her the towel and ice. “That woman downstairs … did she remind you of someone?”

Moira paused and glanced nervously his way. “She … she reminded me of my mother.”

“Ahh.” He lifted his chin and then dropped it. “I see. How long ago did your mother die, Moira?”

“Five, almost six years ago now.”

“And your father?”

She pushed back the covers and rose, striding to the window to peek out the narrow slit to the street below. “I’d really rather not talk about it.”

Gavin came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her torso, kissing her head. “Then we shall not discuss it. I could take your mind off of—”

She squirmed out of his arms and turned to face him. “Gavin, perhaps I do need that nap. Forgive me for being so discombobulated. Could you do me a favor and give me an hour alone?”

Gavin straightened his shoulders and jacket. “But of course, darling.” His words were smooth, but his tone was sharp. She had hurt his feelings, the first time she could remember doing so. But before she could make amends, he strode over to the door and snapped it open, then closed it behind him with exaggerated care.

Chapter 12

Robert climbed up the fence of the corral to sit beside Bryce. They remained in companionable silence for a while, watching the men work a few of the mares. Bryce was considering his stock, which mares to breed with which stallion. But now that his brother was here, he could think of nothing more than the day before, when he pored over the ranch ledgers. And then said nothing.

“You’re in some serious trouble,” Robert said at last.

“That and then some,” Bryce returned, his eyes still on the mares before them.

“I don’t see how you’ll make it, Bryce,” Robert said. He turned and stared at him, but Bryce stubbornly refused to meet his gaze.

“I’m still thinkin’ on it.”

“You have to go to Spain. Pick up new stock, enough to sell some for profit upon return, and enough to replenish the herd. Even then, it’ll be lean for a few—”

“You think I haven’t thought of that myself?” Bryce cut in, looking at his brother then, eye to eye. “You don’t know anything about ranching. What makes you think you should come in here, tell me how to run the Circle M?”

Robert stared at him a moment, then turned back to the corral and licked his lips. He tucked his head and glanced at his hands, then back to Bryce. “My business is shipping. Yours is ranching. It’s been the way of it for years. But the family still has a stake in the Circle M, just as the family has a stake in my shipping yard.”

“And you don’t see me out there in Maine questioning you about your next keel, right?”

Robert sighed. “If you had only listened to me last fall, Bryce. Built the snowbreaks, the extra stables. Given up the added water rights …”

Bryce shook his head. He pulled off his hat and looked over at him again. “I don’t see a way out. I go to Spain, I’m bound to get sick again. And I can’t leave, not now. Not after all that’s happened, not with Bannock anywhere near Colorado, let alone stateside. I won’t leave Dess, Samuel alone. I can’t.” He shoved his hat on his head and looked to the mountains, a brilliant blue line in the near distance, capped with receding white snows. “And yet if I don’t …”

“Sell some land.”

“Sell it? At a loss? That makes no sense.”

Robert eyed him. “You have to do something. You’re not going to make it through winter.”

Bryce let out a scoffing laugh. “I lose if I do, I lose if I don’t … I didn’t need you here, brother, to tell me what I already knew.”

23 April 1887

I know Bryce longs for the sea; he has longed for the spray upon his face, the rhythm of the waves as long as I have known him. And yet his paintings have become more monochromatic over the last year, as if he’s forgotten the stormy gray azure of the Atlantic, the unique green of the Caribbean, the same green that he claims he remembers every time he looks in my eyes.… In the last months he’s not painted at all. We’ve had the storm and the losses with which we’ve had to negotiate, and it’s also been foaling season and then breeding season, keeping him busy, but we have fewer horses than at any time in our marriage. So I can only think that it is the longing for the sea that dampens his spirit, mutes his palette.

Might it be a good risk for him to take, to go to Spain to replenish our stock? It would give him the plan he needs to assure his brother he has things in order despite our current troubles, as well as give him a dose of the ocean he so loves. And yet it would leave him exposed to the consumption and me exposed to an attack from Reid. Try as I might, I cannot find the answer. I only know that something must be decided soon, for we are like three dancers, all without a partner.

When they reached Westcliffe the next day Bryce accompanied her into the General Mercantile, and Robert went off to explore the town. He was intent on finding a pram for Samuel, regardless of Odessa’s protest against the unneeded expense and the fact that the mercantile didn’t have one. “Do you really see me pushing your nephew around the ranch in a pram?” she asked wryly.

But he was adamant. “Mother would want to know Samuel was in a proper carriage,” he said. “Indulge an uncle, would you? And his grandmother from afar?”

“Oh, all right,” Odessa said, throwing up her hands and letting out an airy laugh. “Do what an uncle must.”

They purchased flour and sugar and several flats of canned beans and carrots and berries. “Oh, I cannot wait to add these to our normal fare,” she said to her husband. “I’m sick to death of roast and potatoes!”

He smiled at her and loaded in three crates of chickens to supplement their own flock. “Summer’s around the corner, darlin’. And with it will come a harvest from our own garden!” He dropped a sack full of seed packets for that garden—rhubarb, cabbage, carrots, peas, beans, potatoes, corn, and even some flowers like hollyhock and larkspur. Most crops only did modestly well in the Colorado extremes, but they’d take what they could get. The men took turns aiding her in the garden, weeding, watering, harvesting. It was one of the things Odessa liked best on the ranch. And after running out of canned vegetables in April, she was anxious to expand it this year.

“We should plant a few fruit trees too, Bryce,” she said, eyeing the tender young saplings at the corner of the mercantile. “A few peach, apple, and plum.”

He cast a doubtful glance in the trees’ direction.

“Just to see,” she added. “You never know.”

He moved around the corner of the wagon and edged near her. “You never know.” He reached up to touch her cheek and then bent to kiss Samuel’s back. He was asleep on her shoulder. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Odessa McAllan,” he said, “you’re always so full of hope.”