Comanche Woman (28 page)

For a few seconds, Rip’s face was blank. Bay swallowed hard as she realized Rip didn’t believe what his eyes told him he was seeing. Had she changed so much? Wasn’t he glad she was home? Hadn’t he missed her? She tried to imagine herself as they must see her—in soot-darkened buckskins, her feet covered in moccasins, travel-weary, trail-stained, her hair braided and held in place with bear grease, her skin tanned and her face freckled, her violet eyes wide and dark with fear.

“My God,” Sloan breathed. “Is that you, Bay?”

“Yes.”

Both Sloan and Cricket remained frozen in place, jaws agape, eyes wide. Their gazes settled on Rip, ceding to him the privilege of being first to greet his long-lost daughter.

Bay’s eyes were on Rip, hadn’t left him, in fact, since her discovery by Cricket. She searched his features, and it seemed the two of them carried on an entire conversation with their eyes.

I’m back, Father.

Where have you been? How have you been? What happened to you? How did you get here? Are you all right?

Did you miss me?

Is it really you, Bay? How I’ve missed you! You’ve grown. You’re a woman now.

I’ve changed. Can you see I’m different than I was?

I can hardly believe you’re alive, and here. Was your life hard? Did it change you much? Yes, I can see you’re not the same. Where is my fragile Bay? Where did she go?

I’m here, Father. Please, can’t you show me how much you missed me? Can’t you hold me and comfort me as you did when I was very small?

I want to hold you as I did when you were a child. But it’s been so long, Bay, since I have. I had to make you strong so you could carry on when I’m not here to help anymore. Did I keep myself too much from you? Is it too late to show you how very special you are?

Did you ever love me? Do you love me now?

I could never bear to be close to you; you reminded me so much of your mother. So gentle, so tender of heart that you couldn’t bear to see any living thing suffer.

Please, please let me know I’m welcome here.

I know what you want from me, Bay. I’m just not sure I can give it to you.

I love you. I missed you.

It had taken only seconds for them to say with their eyes what was in their hearts. It took a moment longer before Rip said in a voice husky with emotion, “Welcome home, Bay.” He took the few steps necessary to put his hand on her shoulder, as he might do with a son. “Welcome home.”

Rip’s words released Cricket from the trance in which she’d been held, so just as Rip was reaching for Bay to draw her into his arms, Cricket’s engulfing embrace cut them off from one another, and the opportunity to reach across the immense chasm that lay between them was lost.

Sloan had followed Cricket, quickly embracing Bay and then stepping back again, uncomfortable with this overt expression of love, uncommon as it was in this household.

“Goodness!” Cricket said with a laugh as she caught a whiff of Bay’s hair. “We need to get you into a tub! But since we have dinner on the table, maybe you’d like to eat first.”

Cricket grabbed Bay’s hand and tugged her away from Rip and around to her chair at the table. “Sit here, Bay, and I’ll fix you a plate of food. What would you like?”

“It all looks good.” But Bay’s eyes remained on Rip. She wondered if her father would have embraced her if Cricket hadn’t interfered.

“Tell us everything,” Cricket said as she set a plate piled high with ham and sweet potatoes in front of Bay. “How did you get here? Where did you come from? What was it like?”

Bay stared at the fork in her hand that felt so foreign, looked with confusion at the food she’d once loved, and tried to get comfortable in the straight-backed chair that forced her feet flat on the ground. “I . . . I hardly know where to begin. Why don’t you talk while I eat? Why are you here, Cricket, instead of with Creed at Lion’s Dare?”

“I’m here so my daughter, Jesse, can be christened at Three Oaks,” Cricket announced.

“So you had a daughter,” Bay said, smiling with pleasure. “Long Quiet said—”

“Long Quiet? Long Quiet found you? Is that how you got here? Did he bring you? Where is he?”

Cricket didn’t leave time for Bay to get a word in edgewise, but Bay was grateful for the respite. Speaking English was a chore. She was glad she’d had the chance to practice with Long Quiet, for she still occasionally had to stop and say a word in her head before it would come out in English.

What should she say to them about her relationship with the half-breed Comanche? What could she say? She couldn’t bear to tell them that she’d been married to Long Quiet and he’d abandoned her. It was hard enough for her to accept that he hadn’t loved her enough to leave
Comanchería
and live in Texas. How could she hope to explain their relationship to her family?

“You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to,” Sloan said.

Bay glanced quickly at Sloan, grateful for her understanding. But she had to say something, and it would be easier if she just got it over with now. So she explained, “Long Quiet found me among the
Quohadi
Comanches. I was owned by a war chief named Many Horses. Long Quiet convinced him to let me come home.”

“Where is Long Quiet now?” Rip asked. “I want to thank him.”

“He’s gone to Laredo. He . . .” Bay couldn’t speak over the lump in her throat. Was this going to happen every time she mentioned Long Quiet’s name?

Cricket jumped in to fill the silence. “He’s meeting Creed in Laredo. He promised to help out the Mier prisoners who are trying to escape from Castle San Carlos in Perote.

“Go on with your story,” Cricket urged.

“I . . . I had a child named Little Deer. But I couldn’t bring her with me. I . . .”

The stillness of the others brought Bay’s speech to a halt. Of course, she realized, they thought the child was hers, and that would mean she’d lain with some Comanche buck. Well, that was the truth, even if they would never know the Comanche she’d lain with was Long Quiet. And she would not deny her relationship to Little Deer.

When she spoke again, she told them everything she thought they would want to hear about her life among the Comanches and kept from them what she thought they wouldn’t understand. She told them how Many Horses had been her protector and how she’d been accused of being a sorceress, which was why Long Quiet had been able to take her so easily from the village.

She didn’t tell them she’d married Long Quiet. The pain and humiliation of being left by him was too great. Thus abbreviated, her story did little to satisfy the three curious minds at the table.

“So Long Quiet brought you home after all,” Cricket said when Bay had finished. “He always said he’d find you. And he kept his word. I think we should have a party to celebrate your homecoming.”

Bay turned pale. “You can’t . . . I mean, I don’t want anyone to know . . . people will think . . .”

“People will think it’s about time you came home from gallivanting around England and the Continent,” Rip said.

“What?”

“That’s the story we told when you were captured,” Sloan explained. “First that you’d gone back to Boston for more schooling, and later, when you still hadn’t gotten back, we simply said you’d gone for an extended trip to the Continent with an acquaintance of Rip’s who factors our cotton in England. Otherwise, we knew that when you did come home, it would be difficult for you to return. . . .”

Sloan stopped and bit her lip. All it would take to make Bay a social pariah was the knowledge that she’d been captured by Comanches. That fact alone would label her a fallen woman, unfit for the company of the local planters’ wives and daughters. For it was a well-known fact that the Comanches raped their women captives. The question was there so clearly in Sloan’s eyes that Bay actually answered it.

“I was never raped.”

Sloan looked at Bay for the first time with her heart instead of her head. There was a sadness about Bay that made Sloan wonder whether she hadn’t suffered more than she’d admitted. How strange her sister looked. Not like her sister at all, but like . . . like some Comanche woman.

“I don’t want to meet anyone,” Bay said. “Especially not—”

“Damnation, Bay,” Rip interrupted his daughter. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. We’re having the christening for Jesse in a couple of weeks, and we’ll just use that opportunity to let all the neighbors see you’re back home safe and sound and none the worse for wear after spending a few years away . . . on the Continent,” Rip finished.

“But I haven’t been on the Continent.”

“I know one particular young man,” Rip said, too caught up in his hopes and plans to realize Bay had contradicted him, “who’ll be delighted to know you’re back. I’ve been putting him off for almost six months now, telling him you’d be home any day. He’ll make a fine husband for—”

“I don’t want a husband,” Bay said, rising abruptly. “And I don’t want to meet the neighbors or anyone else. I just want . . . I just want to be left alone!”

Three years ago, Bay would have turned and run. Now she just walked away and on up the stairs to the room that had been hers. She closed the door behind her in relief, then turned and realized that nothing in the room was familiar. All the things that had meant anything to her had burned with the house. Everything that tied her to the past was gone. She walked slowly to the window and looked out over the empty cotton fields. She didn’t belong here.

She hugged herself with her arms, trying to get a grip on emotions that threatened to fly free. Long Quiet was lost to her. She would have to learn to survive without him. But if there was one thing she’d learned over the past three years, it was how to survive.

She whirled when she heard the knock at the door. Perhaps if she didn’t answer, whoever it was would go away. The knock became more insistent. Bay sighed and crossed to the door. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me and Sloan,” Cricket answered. “Let us in.”

Bay knew she couldn’t keep them out forever, and her sisters were both stubborn enough to stand at the door all afternoon if need be. She opened the door and stepped back. Cricket had come prepared. She carried a handful of clothes, brushes, a comb, and a pair of slippers. Sloan carried a large wooden tub.

“I figured you’d want to bathe off some of that trail dust,” Cricket said.

Even as Cricket spoke, Stephen, the Negro servant who managed Rip’s household, arrived with the first buckets of hot water. “It’s a good thing you finally come home, young lady,” Stephen said warmly. “I ain’t tole nobody else where you really been gone to all this time, and I ain’t gonna tell,” he said as he emptied the buckets into the tub. “Wouldn’t be right folks holdin’ up their noses at you. Ain’t your fault what happened. Shore ’nuf ain’t.”

“Thank you, Stephen,” Bay replied. She stood aloof while Cricket made all the preparations for the bath. She was more than ready to exchange a warm tub for cold river water, and soap for the sand she’d used to wash herself during the past three years. Except she knew that when she stripped off her clothes, the scars she’d gotten among the Comanches would be visible, and she didn’t feel like explaining anything else today.

If the roles had been reversed, Bay felt sure she would have been sensitive enough to offer Sloan or Cricket some privacy. But neither Sloan nor Cricket offered to leave, and they were trying so hard to do and say the right things that she would have felt callous asking them to leave the room.

When Cricket had finally shooed Stephen out the door for the last time, she turned to Bay and said, “Now, let’s get you out of those filthy clothes. What is that smell in your hair, anyway?”

“Bear grease.” Bay’s voice was muffled because Cricket was busy pulling the poncho up over her head.

“Damn, Bay! Your back is a mess of scars,” Sloan said.

“Oh, my God!” Cricket exclaimed. “You’ve been tortured!”

Bay grabbed the deerskin poncho that Cricket had removed and protectively covered her breasts with it. She backed up against the wall so her sisters wouldn’t be able to see the horrible scars. “Surely you didn’t think being a Comanche captive was all honey and roses,” Bay replied bitterly. “What did you expect?”

Cricket said nothing. The tears in her eyes spoke for her. But Sloan admitted, “Frankly, I expected worse.”

Bay snorted derisively. “I could always count on you to be honest.”

“You don’t seem to have been starved,” Sloan continued, eyeing Bay’s full figure, “and except for those scars you’re hiding and a few more freckles and calluses, you don’t seem to have changed much.”