Woman of Three Worlds (6 page)

“You silly little fool! On an army post anyone's private life is everyone's business!” Regina took a step forward. “You're too impudent by half, my girl! What if I turn you out?”

This horrible threat was supposed to inspire contrition, but Brittany was already thinking she might not wait to be sent off. She considered for a moment, getting her temper under control, and looked her cousin straight in the eye.

“I'd go to Mrs. Shaw, explain that you and I cannot live together, and ask for the loan of passage money to someplace where I might find employment, or offer to work for her till I could save enough to leave.”

“You—you wouldn't disgrace us like that!”

Brittany shrugged. “It makes no difference to me whether I work for you or someone else.”

“It makes a great deal of difference to me!” Regina choked. “Everyone will blame Edward and me if you go whimpering to Mrs. Shaw! It would be unspeakably demeaning to have my cousin acting as a domestic!”

Again, Brittany swayed against the wall as Regina's face whirled before her. “You asked what I'd do and I've told you. I—I must lie down. Shall I do it here or go to Mrs. Shaw's?”

“Stay here!” Regina stalked to the door before she swung about. “But don't think that because I have a sense of family obligation and you're a sly minx that you can get away with flouting me!”

She slammed out. Brittany fumbled out of her dress and shoes, washed in the rose-sprigged basin, drank deeply of the tepid water in the ewer, and folded back the chintz coverlet of Angela's bed before she lay down.

As she came foggily awake, even before she realized where she was, she felt a presence. Slowly opening her eyes, she looked into a hostile green stare. For a moment, drugged with sleep, she thought Regina's face had shrunk, but she blinked and sat up.

“You must be Angela,” she smiled.

The girl, who looked to be eight or nine, had Regina's spun-gold ringlets and fair skin. Also, it would seem, her disposition. “I don't want you here,” she said flatly. “I don't like for you to be on my bed.”

Brittany got up and began to dress. “I'm beginning to think I don't want to be here either.”

“You have to be. Mama says Ned and I are too sensitive to be taught by Sergeant Meadows. He yells at officers' children same as he does at enlisted men's.” Dismissing education, Angela leaned forward excitedly. “Did the men bleed a lot when the Apaches killed them?”

“Enough.”

“Weren't you scared?”

“Yes.” Brittany thought she could probably engratiate herself with the child by giving a full and harrowing account of the attack, but it was all too horridly vivid in her mind, and she was chilled at Angela's eagerness for gore.

After a moment's pout, Angela jumped up and said, “Mama sent me to call you for supper. She gets cross if anyone's late.” The girl skipped out in a flurry of pale blue skirts, leaving Brittany to hastily tidy herself and follow.

Edward Graves had light brown eyes that darted nervously from Brittany to his wife, sandy hair, and a brushlike moustache. Of average height and weight, he gave an impression of pudginess.

Shaking Brittany's hand, he said with a nervous smile, “Glad you escaped that terrible business, cousin. We'd have pursued those savages as soon as Major Erskine made his report, but most of the men were off on a scout to the south.” His chest puffed out a bit. “We'll go after the Apaches at dawning.”

“You'll never catch them,” Regina said cuttingly.

“Tyrell's agreed to scout for us,” Graves said.

Regina shrugged. “I don't know what good that'll do when you can't keep up with him.”

The lieutenant gave his wife an unhappy look before he turned again to Brittany. “At least you're safe, my dear. I hope you'll be content at our little outpost.”

Brittany felt undilutedly sorry for him. “It's kind of you to have me,” she murmured and smiled down at a small boy, perhaps six years old, who was a miniature of his father except for the moustache.

He thrust out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Cousin Brittany.”

Amused and hopeful that she might be able to like at least one of her young relations, Brittany shook his hand and said she was delighted to meet him.

“Soup's getting cold, mum,” came a bellow from the kitchen.

“Bring it in, Stallings,” Regina called.

Her husband seated her and Brittany before taking his place at the head of the table. A huge bull-necked man with a fringe of dark hair and black eyes embedded in folds of sunburned flesh emerged from the kitchen with a tureen, which he placed before Regina.

“Thank you, Stallings,” she said, ladling out bowls of thin soup and handing them around. “This is my cousin, Miss Laird, who'll be staying with us.”

He ducked his gleaming head. “Sorry you got such a welcome to Camp Bowie, miss,” he began. Regina cut in.

“Please have a care for the gravy, Stallings. You scorched it last night.”

“Wasn't enough grease, ma'am. I told you there ain't enough fat on a rabbit to—”

“Never mind, Stallings! Is that the roast burning?”

He grumbled off, wiping his large hairy hands on his uniform pants. At Brittany's puzzled expression, Regina explained. “On Edward's pay, we can't afford a real cook or servant but enlisted men who want to earn extra money work as strikers in their off-duty hours. Some are excellent.” She lowered her voice so it wouldn't carry beyond the table. “Stallings, unfortunately, is not.”

“I like Stallings,” Ned defended. “He's teaching me how to shoot, and he helped whip the Johnny Rebs at Shiloh.”

Brittany flinched. Her father had died at Shiloh. But no one noticed her reaction, for Regina had gone pale. Edward Graves miserably cleared his throat. “Son, you mustn't speak that way of the—the Confederates. You know it distresses your mother.”

She said in a trembling voice, “Let it go, Edward. The boy will never know his kinsmen who perished defending their homeland.” She sighed and glanced at Brittany. “Perhaps, cousin, you can teach him a modicum of respect.”

Brittany doubted that she could counterbalance Stallings's gusty reminiscences but was saved from the admission by a giggle from Angela. “Hattie Fenwick says Grandpa didn't die in a battle, Mama, and that he wasn't an aide to General Lee. Her father got someone to look it up and they said Grandpa was only a second lieutenant who got dysentery and died just about as soon as he joined the army.”

Stallings' bushy moustache couldn't quite conceal a grin as he placed a small overdone roast in front of Edward and hastily withdrew.

Red spots burned in Regina's cheeks. “It's too utterly hateful!” she sobbed, springing up. “Your—your friends, Edward, are teaching my children to despise their Southern heritage!”

“What's that?” inquired Edward.

Regina wailed and darted from the room. Edward followed with a sheepishly distressed glance at Brittany. Stallings brought in bread and butter, rice, and a bowl of evil-looking brown goo with black lumps. “Gravy burned again, miss,” he said cheerfully.

In spite of Brittany's misgivings at the chill tone of Regina's letter, she'd hoped deep down that she could become part of her cousin's family, love them, and be loved. It was all too painfully clear that such love as there was in this house came from poor, weak Edward.

Brittany sighed and began to dish up the rice.

The cot maneuvered into Angela's room by Stallings and a trooper had a thin mattress with batting stripped bare from parts to form hard lumps in others. In spite of it and a thin pillow appropriated from the settee, Brittany had no trouble going to sleep that night. She didn't wake till spirited music filtered insistently into her consciousness. The unfamiliar white ceiling puzzled her until a wad of batting in the small of her back reminded her that she was in her cousin's house.

That music! Bold and gay, it filled the beginning day with challenge. Brittany hurried to the small window. Cavalrymen were riding out as the band played and women and children waved. Gallant in high black boots, blue uniforms with yellow stripes down the trouser legs, and black broad-brimmed hats, each man, in addition to sidearms, wore a saber, and a carbine was fastened across each saddle.

Though this was the army that had defeated her father's and though the flag rippling in red-and-white streams from the flagpole was the one that had struck down the Bonnie Blue flag of the South, Brittany couldn't keep from thrilling to the sight. Craning her neck to try to see the head of the column winding out of the basin, she thought she glimpsed a gray hat.

Whatever else Zach Tyrell might be, he was no coward, but why had he chosen to make her a scandal? Less than that had fatally ruined a woman's reputation. And yet, though she was angry with him and remembered Regina's warnings with a stabbing pang, her mouth tingled at the memory of his.

In the bed behind her, Angela stretched and yawned. “That rackety old band! I declare, I don't know why they have to make all that commotion when the men ride out.”

“Your mother and Ned are out by the rectangle, waving good-bye to your father.”

Angela sniffed. “That's the parade ground. Mama has to, or people would know she and Daddy had a row. Ned's still little enough to like uniforms and horses. He even wants to join the cavalry when he grows up.”

Both appalled and amused at the girl's bored voice, Brittany tried to tease a bit. “Don't you want to marry an officer?”

“Not unless he's at least a colonel so we can be sure of nice quarters even when he's not the commander.” She spoke with a promptness that showed she'd either worked it out for herself or been thus admonished by her mother.

Unnerved at such calculating shrewdness in a child, Brittany listened to the last flourish of music. “Does that tune have a name?”

“It's ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.' The band always plays it when the troops go on an expedition.”

There was a rap on the door. “Angela, love,” came Regina's voice. “You and Cousin Brittany must hurry and have breakfast. We have to move today!”

“Today?” wailed Angela.

“Yes,” returned her mother peevishly. “Major Erskine's lost no time in ranking the Fenwicks out of quarters, so naturally they're taking ours. The Tattersalls are packed to leave on the stage, so the sooner we start carrying things over, the sooner we'll be through.”

Regina's steps moved away as Brittany hurried into her clothes.

Since the Graves owned none of their quarters' furniture, moving consisted of countless trips to carry mirrors, pictures, curtains, rugs, cooking equipment, dishes, bedding, and clothing to the dwelling next door.

“Only two bedrooms!” Regina fumed as Brittany helped her make the big bed in the larger sleeping chamber. “Stallings promised to rig a partition between Ned's and Angela's cots, but what I'm to do with you is beyond me!”

These quarters had no settee, but a long broad bench against the parlor wall was covered with a long flowered cushion that the Tattersalls hadn't been able to take with them.

“I can sleep there,” suggested Brittany with a nod.

“There certainly isn't an alternative. But what about your clothes and things?”

In spite of wry sadness over the things she'd had to leave at Tristesse, Brittany was startled into laughter. “Two books, toilet articles, a little jewelry, and three dresses,” she enumerated. “They won't take much room.”

It was late afternoon by then and Stallings was helping, having evidently finished his military duties. “How about the washroom, mum?” he offered as he hung a mirror over a scarred chest of drawers. “I could put up a rack for Miss Laird's clothes and make her a nice little dresser out of a couple of packing crates.”

Regina looked almost grateful. “Thank you, Stallings. That's a good idea. But get supper first, won't you?”

Stallings stayed late to prepare Brittany's little dressing niche. He had even scrounged a veined mirror to hang above the packing crates so that she could see to do her hair. She thanked him warmly, suspecting that except for his ingenuity her things would have remained in her valise indefinitely.

“My pleasure, miss,” he grinned, showing chipped, tobacco-stained teeth through the heavy moustache. He drooped one eyelid in a confidential wink. “Zach Tyrell asked me to do anything I could to make you comfy. Just let me know if you need something. Zach saved my hide when a bunch of Apaches jumped the wood detail I was with, so I owe him plenty.”

The big soldier went whistling out the back door. As Brittany put away her belongings, she didn't know whether to be grateful to Zach or annoyed with him for acting as if he had some right to be concerned in her affairs.

Still, she prayed he'd come back safely, with all the men who'd ridden out that day.

V

They were barely settled when Mrs. Shaw gave a tea, as much, Brittany suspected, to keep the wives' spirits up while their men were away as to welcome the newcomer. Mrs. Shaw had the only maid on the post, Marie, a woman so flat, plain, and colorless that even women-starved soldiers had left her spinsterhood unassailed.

While Mrs. Shaw poured tea into almost transparent china cups, Marie offered plates of scones, little jam tarts, and tiny sandwiches made with cucumbers from the post garden and cress from a stream.

It was a small gathering. Alice Taunton, the chaplain's wife, was a tiny woman with alert dark eyes and waving white hair drawn into a loose knot with tortoiseshell combs. She obviously felt that if Colonel Shaw commanded the men's temporal life, her husband, Major Taunton, was in charge of their morals.

“That bar in the post trader's!” she began as soon as Brittany had been introduced and a few polite words exchanged. “It encourages the men to dissipate themselves and brawl. Most of them don't have a dime left after payday.”