The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (10 page)

Anne nodded. That seemed fair. And if it would make Louise happy to have the baby, well, it had been a very pretty baby. It would really be a pity to let it grow up some ignorant farmer out west, or, more likely, since his mother was hardly likely to find a way to provide for him, a beggar in the gutter. “Very well, then, Mr. Whittier,” she announced, mind made up. “You may leave the matter with me. I shall make she sees the sense in sending the boy to England. It may be easier than we think. The girl hasn’t got a friend in the world, after all.”

***

Patty Mayfield was delighted with her new friend. And the party. She thought the party had just been splendid. Cherry had said that word,
splendid.
It was a lovely word. A splendid word. Patty giggled.

“It was a
splendid
party,” she told herself, trying out the word. It sounded perfect.

“Thank you for coming, it really was
splendid
of you,” she told Cherry when she saw her at the general store a few days later, in to buy some flour and a few boxes of nails, and Cherry smiled and thanked her in return. She even agreed that it had been splendid. Patty’s ears burned red with pleasure; she thought she’d never been so happy.

“It was a
splendid
party,” she told Matt, walking arm and arm across the grass towards her house. 

Matt, who was trying to figure out when exactly they had progressed to walking arm and arm, and if this was also the right time to slip behind the Mayfield barn, where the Mayfield Morgans lived in their own splendor, and lean over and kiss her, didn’t even laugh. He just nodded and said “Why yes, I believe so,” and so Patty decided to add the word to her vocabulary on a permanent basis.

***

Cherry drove home from her shopping excursion into Bradshaw alone, at her insistence, although several homesteaders, bachelors all, had offered to escort her when they happened upon her in the Mayfield’s store and at the post office. The party had been a sort of coming-out for her, and now the attention was rolling in as certain as if she had been a debutante all over again. It was charming, of course, but she didn’t want any of Bradshaw’s bachelors getting any ideas about her. She brushed away their cowboy chivalry with an easy smile and a few old phrases left over from her days in London.
 

Missing from the eager crew was one Jared Reese, who was apparently, if Hetty and her friend were to be believed, the most eligible bachelor of them all. Cherry recognized the speckled rump of his roan horse outside of the Professor’s saloon and tried not to feel a prickle of disappointment that he had not stepped outside with his compatriots when her accent attracted a crowd on the wide front porch. She was brushing off the gallant offers of Evie Moorehead and Monty Davids, laughing from the seat of her buckboard, when she thought she glimpsed his dark head inside the saloon. She could not help but crane her head a little to see over the swinging doors. But it was too dark within the building to satisfy her interest.

“Aw, come on, Mrs. Beacham,” Monty was cajoling in his funny southern accent, but she just smiled absently and shook her head, trying to shake away the odd let-down feeling that Jared did not think her worthy of his attention. Of course he didn’t! He was a horrid hateful rude man, wasn’t he?
 

Wasn’t he?

He might have been, but she couldn’t help wanting to look into his eyes again, to feel the air around them crackle and shimmer as it had that first time. There was something about his eyes, she had decided, that was downright uncanny. And made her feel, well, a little
trembly,
for lack of a better word.

Cherry shook the reins at the mule and went trotting away. She was being foolish, and it was past time to go home and fetch up Little Edward and get on with her chores. She didn’t have to turn her head to know that there was a knot of men, friends suddenly turned rivals, watching her ride away, and she sighed. Some things did not change, whether in London or the Dakotas, she supposed. But she didn’t want to be pursued here. This was not London, and she was not a starry-eyed maid of seventeen. Such romances were over for her. 

***

Jared slammed around the pots hanging above the cookstove for a little while, enjoying the satisfying clatter and pretending he was going to do something ambitious, like fry a steak. But in the end he didn’t have a taste for food, just a powerful thirst, and he took a bottle and a glass and settled into a chair near the door, propped open with a cornstraw broom, and looked out into the falling dusk. He hadn’t meant to come home at all tonight, planning to just stay in a room at Miss Rose’s, but something powerful had induced him to pay up his tab and get on the roan almost immediately after all the boys had come in from cat-calling after Mrs. Beacham. He didn’t think she’d ever once turned around. He didn’t think she had any idea he had escorted her home safe.

That was just as well. Didn’t make no sense to him, wouldn’t make no sense to her neither. Better he just kept his own crazy to himself.

Jared left the cabin door open most nights he stayed on the claim, sometimes all night long, so that he could feel the soft breeze, see the stars. He hated feeling caged up in the darkness of a room, and he reckoned Blue, the Catahoula hound he’d brought back from one of his trips south, would warn him if anything dangerous and hungry came wandering up to the homestead in the night. The night sounds, the night air, the night sky, reminded him of nights out on the cattle drive. And he was suddenly missing those nights.

Fact was, he was seriously reconsidering his decision to hold a claim and be a farmer. It was a lonely life. Jared had thought he’d wanted to be left alone, thought he’d rather crawl away from the world and lick his wounds for the rest of his days. He’d gone on with the cattle, trying new trails, riding east and west and southwest, everywhere but the trail that would lead him straight down to Galveston. It had done nothing for him, the drives. He’d gone to Hope for so long. He’d ridden with her in his thoughts, seeing her face in the sky as he lay near the dying fire at night. He’d decided he’d needed a change.

The claim on the outside of Bradshaw was his change, and he’d decided to stick close to home, concentrate on his fences and his buildings and his plans for the farm, but after a few months, he’d emerged, gone back down to the Professor’s to have a drink with Matt, and before he knew it he was part of Bradshaw life, known by everyone, even making a few friends, getting used to being around people again.
 

And that was he noticed that the claim was a lonely place for a single man. And since there wasn’t going to be a woman to keep him company, well, it was time to make other plans before the winter set in and he went plumb crazy.

The drive and a ride down to Texas was the most likely solution. Back to cattle drives, back to wintering someplace where it didn’t snow and lock a man up in his cabin for months on end. Well, it was what a man knew. But now Matt was in love with that Patty Mayfield. He’d seen them when he was riding out of town, hand in hand while the Mayfield Morgans looked over their stall doors and begged for corn. He’d seen what was coming next.

And that left Jared to go to Texas alone. He wasn’t sure he could face that. He needed a buddy to keep him straight in Galveston, or he’d do something foolish, like go looking for Hope so he could gaze at her lovely face and ask her what he’d done wrong, why he wasn’t good enough for her. He knew what Matt would say, that he could never have had enough dollars or acres or head of cattle to keep Hope interested, but he’d never really believed that. Hope had loved him. He must have done something wrong, to drive her away like that, to a life with another man. It must have been him. Must have been.

The moon began sliding up from the prairie, a golden coin in the dark blue sky, and Jared watched it with detachment. It was rising over the Englishwoman’s claim, he thought, the liquor making him fanciful, it was rising over Miss High and Mighty, and would it meet her muster? Or would she shake her head, say not good enough, don’t come back around here, we had better moons in England, better men than you. . .

He’d changed moon to men, and never noticed the difference.

He’d seen her today, beautiful and flushed from the sun, her skin slowly growing more tan despite her bonnet. It was the first he’d seen her since Patty Mayfield’s party, two weeks gone. Since he’d insulted her pride, said she was weak. She didn’t like him, anyway, that Miss High and Mighty. Didn’t like no one but herself. And that baby. She loved that baby to distraction. He could tell in the way she had been curled around him, sleeping as close as a lover that first time he’d happened upon them, her breast bared from the cheap cotton of her dress, her lips slightly parted as she breathed, her lashes dark upon her cheeks…

He pushed the chair onto its back two legs and balanced it there, one leg against the doorframe, and tried to gather his thoughts, tried to push them away from the Englishwoman’s rich, round breast. But his mind was stubborn; it had locked on to the image and it just wouldn’t let go.

He let it wander around the rest of her body, let it unbutton her dress and start revealing the rest of those white curves. The baby had conveniently disappeared; if someone had asked he’d have guessed they put it in a crib somewhere, preferably in the barn, where it wouldn’t waken from their groans and moans.
 

Or squeals. He wondered what sort of noise a proper Englishwoman would make in bed. Would she
stay
prim and proper, or would she lose her stiff inhibitions and just go wild?
 

His hand strayed towards the buttons of his pants, started to fiddle with them.
 

And then Blue started barking wildly, somewhere just over the first round hillock to the east, his sharp barks shifting into baying howls.
 

Something was out there. He reached for his gun reflexively, letting the chair legs slam down to the floor again as he jumped up and went out the open door.

***

She was weeping by the time she had climbed the last hill, disgusted with herself even as the tears welled out of her eyes and down her dirty cheeks. She wasn’t a coward, she
wasn’t,
but this was too much, this was more than she could bear, and she wanted with all her heart to be back in Beechfields, the
real
Beechfields, not this dull dry stretch of grass and bad-land she was pretending was Beechfields. She wanted to be in her room, curled up under a feather coverlet with the beech trees tapping on her windows with their gentle fingers. She wanted to know that her father was down the hall in his study, nodding over another book, the candle guttering in that little draught from the crooked window they had never bothered to have sealed up. She wanted to feel safe again. And that was what sent her, on foot, Little Edward strapped to her back in a shawl like an Indian papoose, across the moonlit prairie towards Jared Reese.

She didn’t know who was in the barn, or what they had wanted. She was a light sleeper, or she might not have been warned of the trespassers at all. She had just heard the mule neigh, and heard an answering neigh, and then a hushed curse. She had gone to the window, instantly wide awake, and seen the shaded lantern casting pale light upon the grass across the yard, swinging a glowing path towards the lean-to barn where the mule and the cow were shut up.

She didn’t cry out a warning, or reach for the shot-gun she barely trusted herself to shoot. She didn’t wait to find out what they wanted, if they were friend or foe, if they were lost travelers or claim jumpers. She didn’t really need to, did she? The shaded lantern, the beeline for the barn — they were thieves, murderers, perhaps worse, and if the mule was lost to her, then she would slip away into the hills like a thief herself, and make for the nearest neighbor that she had.

Jared.

She hadn’t dared to hope that Little Edward would be silent; she had swaddled him like an infant and pressed the linen close against his lips, parted in sleep, half frantic that she would smother him but just as terrified he would awaken, cry out, and alert the villains to her presence. But Little Edward, ever like his father, was a heavy sleeper; he submitted to the wraps and the shawl sling without slipping from his dreams, and Cherry mouthed a silent prayer of thanks for the well-greased door hinges as she stole from the shanty and moved in the shadows of the little house, creeping in the scant darkness while the men, blinded to the darkness outside by their own lantern, went on with their nefarious activities in the barn. She supposed she’d never see her mule again. She wasn’t particularly attached to the cow, but Lancelot had been a darling mule, and she was sad to think of him being led away, lead-rope tied to the saddle of one of the thieves.
 

By the time she had reached Jared’s homestead, a twinkle of golden light upon the silver ocean of the moonlit prairie, she had ceased to mourn for her mule alone, and was lost in sorrow for her homestead. It would be set alight, she supposed, burned to the ground, after every small token she owned had been taken. They wouldn’t have found her little private bank of coins and notes unless they were
very
clever; the compartment in the iron cookstove’s underneath was immensely cunning, and she thought it unlikely that thieves on horseback would hitch up the wagon and attempt to steal a great weight like an iron stove. She imagined they would have to go back, kick around the ashes a bit to see what was left, dig out the stove from beneath the charred rubble that had been her shanty, her home, her Beechfields, and pry out the money-box. At least she would still have her savings. But for what? To start again?