Seduced (12 page)

“That must have been difficult.”

“I don’t think it was for her. She never cared what he thought of her. What anyone thought of her. You should know, before you think to pity her, I was tempted to let your brother die. I knew what would happen if Jimmy found out that we had saved him and I wasn’t sure a stranger was worth . . . that. My sister, however, was undeterred.”

“I do not pity either of you.”

The stiff way she held her shoulders told him all too well that she didn’t believe him. She found herself pitiful.

“I wish you could see yourself as I see you,” he said. The words were so startling she looked up at him, her eyes wide. Her mouth agape.

Quickly, embarrassed, he bent his head back to his work.

A fool, drunk on hope.

THAT NIGHT IT was fish again, fried in bacon fat with some of the onions from behind the barn, and the last of the biscuits.

“A feast!” Cole proclaimed, pulling up the stump he usually sat on.

“You are easy to please,” Melody said, still not quite able to look him in the eye.

I wish you could see yourself as I see you.

The words would not stop rolling through her. A tide gone mad. She wanted to grab onto the implication of those words, that he saw her as something special. Something different, perhaps more than she was. And she wanted to be that person. Clear and clean of all she'd done, bright in his eyes.

“It's not beans and it's not hardtack. I am happy.”

And he was, everyone could see that. Something had happened to him over the last weeks, as he'd planted those seeds, and there was a lightness in him where there hadn't been before. And it was so . . . pleasing to see. So satisfying.

But at the same time it made her wary. It made her want to cry out a warning.

Be careful of your joy. It will not last.

Happiness didn’t come without a cost and the cost was always too high.

And it made her realize her own happiness the last two weeks was not yet paid for. She'd been unguarded and perhaps foolish.

The fire behind them was warm and crackling and the cabin was full of good smells and enough food for all of them. And it was rare enough that they all seemed to take note. They all seemed aware of how lean their souls had become.

Her sister, lovely and serious, was alight in the fire's warmth. And Melody tried to force herself not to worry about the cost of such moments. But she could feel the spectre of repayment in the shadows of the cabin.

These moments do not come free.

“My brother says you intend to stay in Denver,” Steven said as they all tucked into their fish. Piercing the crispy silvery skin and letting out all the steam.

“We do,” Annie said, “once you are well enough to take us.”

“And dig our garden,” Melody added, catching Cole's eye.

“Do you understand what Denver is?” Steven asked, and Melody and Annie shared startled looks. Steven was not asking casually. He seemed angry. Affronted by their plans to go.

“Steven,” Cole murmured, “this is not our business.”

Steven turned on his brother as best he could with his bandages still tight around his belly. “You would send them to Denver alone?”

“We will give them enough money—”

“Money!” Steven cried. “So they can buy an opium den? Or better yet a saloon?”

“No, a home. Steven, what has gotten into you? It's a start. Melody is a widow and Denver is full of widows.”

Steven gaped at him as if Cole had suggested they saddle Melody and Annie like horses. “You know what happens to widows when the money runs out.”

Whore houses. That was the work Steven referred to. Melody felt herself grow cold at the mention of what no one talked about. That was what awaited women who were not careful. Who did not secure their futures.

“There are women who do honest work there. Seamstresses, laundry, the hotel—” Cole said.

“Would you want our sister working herself to the bone at a laundry?” Steven asked.

“They are not our sisters. They are free to make up their own minds.”

“No. They are not. But they are undoubtedly someone’s sisters. A soldier, perhaps a boy one of us killed.”

Annie's fork dropped from her hand and she pressed her fingers to her lips.

“Forgive my brother,” Cole said, his dark eyes glittering in the firelight. “He forgets himself.”

No
, thought Melody, a strange fury building in her chest. A terrible desire to rattle all the chains that bound her.
It was me that forgot. That allowed myself to get swept up in my sister's talk of freedom. In the strange peace of this place that was never going to be mine. The world outside of this clearing is a cruel one for women and I had let myself forget.

“I worked with my father in field hospitals during the war,” said Annie, once she had recovered herself. The rim of her glasses reflected gold in the ever-darkening room. “There are doctors in Denver, and doctors are always in need of competent assistants. We have three horses that will fetch a handsome price. And as you have said, you intend to pay us. We are far from destitute.”

“You don't want a family? A husband?”

“I want to be of use,” Annie said. Melody wondered what Annie meant by that. Was being a wife and mother not of use? While Melody held no illusions about the role of wife, the dream of mother still held beauty and purpose to her. That stubborn dream of home and family still clung to her.

“And you, Melody?” Steven asked, shaking Melody from her thoughts. “What will you do?”

“You mean until I am to be a whore?” she asked. It was satisfying when everyone reacted with shock. What was the point of being shocking if no one reacted? “I think I will strap on guns,” she said, looking at Cole. “And if you are to be a farmer, I will take your place as a killer.”

Sap popped in the fire, the only sound in the room besides the harsh saw of Annie’s breathing.

“I have lost my appetite,” Melody said into the stillness, and stood. “I am for bed.”

Privacy was a sham in this cottage and in the darkness of the bedroom, her hands in fists pressed to her lips, Melody heard Annie say, “Excuse her. I fear the last few weeks have taken a toll on my sister.”

A toll, yes. Quite. A goddamned toll.

“It's the war,” Steven muttered. “It's ruined all of us. Cole, help me to bed.”

Melody lay down on her bedroll and imagined her lovely supper going to waste and wished Steven was wrong.

Rolling off the bedroll the next morning was not as painful as it had been. Melody’s muscles ached from the work she'd been doing, but she felt her body getting stronger. The bones always so visible beneath her skin were slowly being buried by flesh from the plentiful food.

Her bruises from Jimmy's fist were fading.

She'd let her lack of fear make her complacent, that much was clear after last night. She'd been lulled by this safety she felt, this contentment, into believing that they would be all right. That they had survived the worst the world could offer them.

But Steven had reminded her there were more horrors out there.

She changed into her cleanest dress, Mother’s bombazine. Before heading west, Melody and Annie had spent days tailoring their dresses to fit without crinolines, but still the skirts on this old mourning gown dragged.

And halfway through the war she and Annie had given up on corsets, having lost so much weight as to make them ridiculous.

So, the gloomy black dress fell like a sack around her body.

To seduce Christopher she’d had new gowns from Atlanta, and Maisey’s milk baths twice a week. Rose water she and Annie had made themselves. Now she had a black eye, turning yellow, and a tattered, second-hand mourning gown.

And she decidedly did not smell of roses.

The thought was very nearly funny.

Why am I thinking of Christopher?
she wondered. Though she knew. In her heart she knew. The decision was being made deep in her belly where all her fears lived.

“Where are the men?” Melody asked, stepping into the main room of the cabin. Wincing, she attempted to pull up her hair.

“Cole wanted to share his plans for building a corral, and Steven felt up for the exercise.” Annie wiped her hands on her apron. “Let me.”

Melody sat on a stool and allowed her sister to fuss over her. It was familiar and lovely, her sister’s deft fingers combing through her hair.

“I am sorry about last night,” Melody said. “I'm afraid I don't know what got into me.”

“You have been through so much.”

“I think we all have. All of us in this cabin.” It had felt last night like the pain all of them carried was pushing against the logs, attempting to lift the roof as if that was the only way the ghosts could get free.

“All the more reason for us to be shut of this place.”

Melody sighed with pleasure at her sister's touch. The tabletop was cluttered with bottles and bits of linen. Surgical tools and pieces of buckskin pierced with needles. Annie had been going through Father’s bag and sorting out the empty bottles. Melody picked up a blue bottle, twirling it in the sunlight streaming through the door.

Pretty, but empty.

“Do you really not want children?” Melody asked, wincing when Annie's brush hit a tangle.

“Mother made it very clear that my leg and my shyness would not win me a husband. Children were never going to be for me.”

“But you have much to offer a man—”

Annie put down the brush with a clatter. “Is this a joke?”

“No . . . I think Steven—”

“Do you think after watching what you suffered in the name of marriage that I would raise my hand to be next?”

“Not all marriages were like mine. Our parents—”

“Stop, Melody. We are going to Denver. We will make our own way.”

Once, when they were kids, Annie convinced herself that they had a baby brother who had been lost. She convinced Melody too, Melody who believed everything her older sister said, who would follow her sister into fire if Annie had suggested it. And they’d spent the summer searching the property for that baby. Mama finally put a stop to it when their brother found Annie and Melody trying to get a boat into the river behind the house.

Your sister has different ideas
, Mama had said.
And they can be dangerous; you have to have more sense. Keep her safe from following these ideas of hers.

In every city they traveled through, the soul-dead eyes of whores and laundry girls, of widows with dirty hungry children pulling at their skirts, watched them from the balconies and doorways of saloons and shacks.

A warning for women to trust wisely. To take care.

Did those women think they would make their own way?

Were they now paying the price for past happiness?

“I seduced Christopher into marriage,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Did you know that?”

“The town of Savannah knew that.”

Christopher had been engaged to Rebecca Townsley, and because Melody had wanted Christopher, because she liked the future she imagined with him on his family’s grand plantation, she stole him away like a trinket she was fond of. At the beginning of October, on her birthday, Melody had batted her eyelashes, danced too close. On Thanksgiving she kissed him in a dark corner. Allowed him shocking liberties at Christmas, and then orchestrated her father walking in on them at the New Year’s party.

Seducing a man into marriage had been surprisingly easy. Christopher had been a simple man, really. And as a girl she'd thought they could make each other happy by just being young and pretty and wealthy. Older now, with a terrible marriage behind her, she knew they would not have been happy. They would have been hateful within a few years. Bitter and sighing. She imagined the girl she'd been growing up to be the kind of woman who threw things.

She did not dream in colors as vibrant as happiness for her future. But contentment did not seem out of the question. And contentment only required reason.

And bravery.

“We are not the girls we were,” Annie said. “And this is not Savannah.”

“No, it's not.” Melody laughed, wondering how her sister did not see the danger. “It's far more dangerous.”

“We will be fine,” Annie said. “As long as we're together, we will be fine.”

What if those words don't work anymore?

And in the face of what Annie was proposing, they were ludicrous. Like trying to keep out a hurricane with greased paper. She could laugh at Annie's idea of the two of them safe and allowed to do what they liked. Perhaps at one time she would have been cruel enough to do that. To kill this dream in her sister’s lovely brown eyes. But today she could not do it. She would let her sister have her dream.

And she would set out for a husband.

HONESTLY, NEVER HAD she imagined that getting herself married again would require so much dirt. But the world was a different place, and if she meant to stay in this clearing and secure her future, and that of her sister, it meant seducing Cole.

And Cole farmed.

As they worked side by side in the garden, she had to put away all her sympathy for him. All her curiosity. She was going to manipulate him and she found she could not think of his will. Those nightmares that kept him working all night. The darkness behind his eyes. The way he'd grabbed on to planting this garden as if it were a rope he could use to climb out of hell.

She had to view him as she'd once viewed Christopher, a prize to be won.

This too was who she'd been before the war.

After they'd planted the seeds that were ready, Cole carefully folded up the linen, carrying it inside as if it were a babe in danger of catching a chill. She sat down on one of the stumps and let her muscles and bones slump. Mama wasn’t here to tell her to sit up.

Mama wasn’t here to see anything. And for that Melody was grateful. She’d shocked Mama plenty, but what she was planning now would have sent her into hysterics.

Cole came back out, rolling down his shirt sleeves, as the sun had set behind the western pines and the cold was settling in. She barely noticed.