The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (2 page)

As she had done before, she thought, despite those at home who would have called her disgraced, dishonored. She had done what she had to do.
 

The society of her birth might consider her honor lost forever, but Cherry knew the haughty aristocrats of the
ton
were wrong. Sweet Little Edward was no stain upon her honor, no matter what society said. He was a gift, a rare jewel, a precious reminder of love lost, and she would regret nothing — nothing! — in her fight to give him a life and an inheritance as he deserved. The once-Lady Charlotte Beacham, now just Cherry, turned her back on her muddy crick and went back to the waiting mule, ready to send home the quiet little Jorgenson girl and see about supper.

***

The Jorgenson girl went home with a head-bob and a few unintelligible words of Swedish, delivered politely enough, and it wasn’t until her blonde braids had disappeared over the first imperceptible rise to the east that Cherry noticed the little tin of cookies, placed circumspectly in the sparsely populated larder. She pulled out the tin, cheap dented metal decorated with a pattern of pears and apples, the bittersweet reminder of both a beloved, more verdant homeland and the dimming hopes of new Eden, and plucked up the lid with blackened fingernails.

“Butter cookies,” Cherry sighed at the contents, crumbling and yellow and utterly enticing. “That sweet girl.” Cherry’s fledgling homestead as yet had no cow and so, no butter. She imagined that she would have to get a cow soon, and hire someone to teach her how to feed it and milk it and make butter and cheese. The Jorgenson girl would be ideal for a dairy-maid tutor, of course. The lack of a common tongue would make lessons hard, but spreading gossip about the know-nothing Englishwoman even harder. Cherry was sick to death of gossip. It had hounded her from England, and then from New York, and she had no intention of letting whispers and titters ruin her new life in the great sprawl of the American West.

There was a coo from behind her and she turned, setting down the cookie tin at once. “Edward darling!” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

The little boy stirred in his fine crib, one of Cherry’s few relics of her past life, and lifted his tiny hands. He cooed again. Edward was a sweet-tempered boy, more likely to ask for attention than to demand it like most babies.

“Let us sit together,” Cherry suggested to him, and she scooped the baby up and settled down into her rocking chair. The fading gilt scrollwork matched the arabesques and curls carved into the crib. There had been more to the nursery furniture set once; but Cherry would never have been able to carry all that fine old carpentry across an ocean and a continent. She had taken the few pieces she could afford to ship to New York, and raising Little Edward — she had felt certain, from the first quickening, that she carried a son for her lost love, and named him before he was born — in the Beechfields crib, and rocking him in the Beechfields rocking chair, had seemed indispensable.
 

She nuzzled the baby and smiled. “I feel certain you would like your tea,” she told him. She had grown used to speaking to the babe as she would another adult in the room. Living without company could do that to a woman, she supposed, but if she didn’t speak to Little Edward, who would? They were alone out here on the prairie, like castaways at sea.
 

She had seen such a different future for herself once, one with a husband who adored her, and children all around them. But she had been a different person then, with a different life, and a different name. Now there was only Little Edward. But she adored him; he was enough.
 

Cherry unbuttoned the blouse of her faded dress and let Edward make himself comfortable. Soothed by his suckling, worn out with her day spent in the Dakota sun, whipped by the Dakota wind, she slipped into sleep before the boy did, and as the shadows lengthened the two slumbered luxuriously in the rocking chair, the little boy’s hand splayed open upon his mother’s white-skinned breast.

Jared thought he was going home. Jared’s horse thought he was going home. They traipsed out of town, Jared’s mind on bitter lost love, the horse’s mind on oats. The horse’s thoughts were more urgent than Jared’s, and that’s why when Jared reined back at the little cottonwood patch that marked the easterly line of his claim, and sat looking around the empty prairie in an uncharacteristic agony of indecision, the frustrated horse flung his head up and down with exasperation and was rewarded with a heel in the ribs.

“Now you cut that out,” Jared scolded, voice harsh, and the roan horse dipped his freckled head, pretending to be contrite, but really angling his nose towards a lush-looking tuft of summer grass. Jared did not reprimand the horse as he might have usually, but sat gazing up the imaginary line, still studded every so often with the surveyor’s stakes that demarcated his claim from the neighboring one, wondering what sort of greenhorn would have taken on that rough patch of land to his north and east. The roan horse grazed and grazed, contentment in his heart, and Jared puzzled.

It wasn’t just that there wasn’t much water on the land. Only about half the claim was any good at all. The south-half was just fine, sure. But the northern quarter of the tract was all badlands: just rocks and brush and snakes, no good for wheat. He’d ridden the entire section; hell he’d ridden the entire county, looking for the best possible claim to homestead, and this particular piece of land was about the worst bargain in the county.

Now, sure, it was probably all that was left: the trains from the East had dropped off a steady stream of new homesteaders all spring. As soon as the snowmelt let them, the land offices sent out their wagons and riders to show off the land to the immigrants and failures and assorted hard-luck cases who had been studying their pamphlets on the Great Opportunity and the Breadbasket of America for the whole of a long bleak winter in the eastern cities, and lately fewer and fewer had been getting off at Bradshaw’s weathered depot, and more and more pale faces had peered out through the grimy windows as they went further west, to newer, rawer prairie towns, or even further, into the foothills of far-away mountains.
 

Fact was, Bradshaw and its neighboring towns were all claimed up. This late-comer had just settled for the land no one had wanted, rather than head deeper into the frontier. Whoever claimed this piece wasn’t just a greenhorn, he was a coward and a fool, most likely. Not worth worrying about; he’d be back on the train east before the first snow fell, his wallet as empty as his belly and his pantry.
 

But still Jared wondered about it. About
him
: the poor fool that had taken on the section. His conscience was eating at him. Wouldn’t do to let a neighbor starve to death without at least talking to the fellow and seeing what he had in mind. Might be he could convince the fellow to sell off his tools and his horses and get back on the train, east or west didn’t matter, on to some more promising piece of prairie or back to another box in another city. That would be a good deed, Jared supposed. And he was short on those.
 

Mind made up, Jared swung the left rein against the roan’s skinny neck. The cowhorse resisted with all his mind and body, bulging his neck against the rein and pointing his nose to the left. Home was left. Oats were left. Jared gave him another boot in the ribs. “Git up,” he ordered grimly, and the roan decided that he wasn’t going to win this battle without the sort of energy he hadn’t expended since he was a half-feral two-year-old, newly roped and waiting in a high-walled corral for the strange two-legged creature to make his move. And there just wasn’t any reason for exercise like that. He turned his nose back to the right, as requested, and plodded up the much more overgrown trail along the dwindling creek-bed, heading resignedly away from oats.

***

Little Edward stirred. His mouth, slack and sticky with milk, had fallen away from his mother’s breast. Both hands still pressed against her chest possessively, but she did not awaken and so neither did he. Cherry’s chest rose slowly and rhythmically, her resolute strength finally felled from the exhaustion of dawn-to-dusk days trying to put together the pieces of a successful claim, trying to patch up the drafts of the shanty before autumn’s bite arrived, trying to build a chicken coop and a goat-pen without hammering her fingers too badly, trying to determine where her wheat fields should be plowed for next spring’s planting, and, of course, trying to take care of herself and an eight-month-old baby, as well. All of these things on her own, with only the help of the silent Jorgenson girl, who arrived in blond pigtails each morning just as the tarnished brass mantle clock chimed eight times and impassively took the baby into her arms so that Cherry could head on outside and get to work.
 

It had been three months of this, and Cherry could scarcely remember a time when she had not been bone-tired, chapped-fingered, and aching with bruises and crushed fingers. Her sleep was as deep as consciousness could sink; her little boy responded to her calm with an equally total relaxation.

And then a strange horse whinnied, and the mule in his lean-to against the shanty replied with a bray that could wake the dead. Cherry’s eyes flew open as fast as her baby’s did.
 

***

Jared scarcely knew what he was doing. His mind was spinning in circles. What in the — how in the —
who
in the — ?

Of course he shouldn’t have been looking in the window of the shanty at all, except that he was worried no one was around, on account of the mule and the wagon put away neatly in the little shed that was meant to pass for a barn, which implied that the master of the homestead was in residence. But there was no one to be seen, not in the half-built chicken run, nor in the tumble-down goat-pen, not to mention the lack of both chickens and goats. And the young vegetable garden was looking pretty dead as well. Jared had a sudden vision of some boiled-collar city slicker lying dead at his kitchen table, a thief’s bullet through his forehead, or in disheveled repose upon rumpled bed-sheets, dead of diphtheria or some common fever, and he couldn’t help but hop off the roan, drop his reins with a stern admonition to “stand,” and go to peer in the open little window-hole of the shanty.

When he’d seen what was really inside, his jaw dropped.

Of course she was beautiful; even Jared, hard-shelled and cold towards all women, had to admit that. Her hair, in a loose braid over one shoulder, was gilt-colored, like ripened wheat, like the sun-bleached prairie in autumn. Her features, though taut and red with sunburn, were perfectly proportioned: a slim nose, high cheekbones, plump rose-colored lips, arching eyebrows one shade darker than the tantalizing gold of her braid. And that calico dress, so plain with its dark blue background and simple pattern of little red flowers, might not
ordinarily
have enhanced the round curves of her body… but since it was lying open in the front, with that white globe of a breast exposed for all the world (for just Jared) to see, the pattern and cut was certainly not a factor.
 

He had not seen a woman’s body in a very long time. He hadn’t thought he wanted to. But the fabric of his trousers, suddenly painfully tight, suggested otherwise. Jared’s body and Jared’s mind were not in agreement on the question of sex. He clenched his fists at his side and tried not to think about the other breast, the one he couldn’t see, the rest of the woman, the bits he couldn’t see, outlined all too clearly by the clinging folds of fabric.

And did the sleeping babe make the woman all the more luscious? Jared tried not to think so. But he couldn’t help but look at the scene with another kind of longing, removed from a young man’s hot sexual desire: he was no young pup, out to sew his wild oats; he was a man feeling himself aging without children, a man who had once dreamed of a family and a ranch and a riot of sons and daughters pouring out of his front door to meet him of an evening, a man who had once seen a belly rounding and thought it was of his own seed and his own love and his own desire, and found himself sadly mistaken. The sleeping baby pressed against this woman’s chest only served to tighten the constriction in his chest, the hard knot of desire and longing in his throat.
We’ll call him Andrew, for your father,
he’d said, and she’d laughed and said “You’re his father, you can choose his name.”

The memory hammered away his desire; he scarcely saw the slumbering woman and child anymore, consumed instead with the woman who had laughed and turned away from him. He squared his jaw, creased his forehead, clenched his eyebrows, looked generally like a person in a fit of rage, perhaps inclined to go insane with an ax, and then that damned roan whinnied, like a fool, and the mule in the lean-to brayed back.
 

Her eyes flew open, and when she saw the shadow in the shanty window, she screamed.
 

***

Red Indians. That was her first thought, once she got over the initial moment of shrieking terror, hands clutching Little Edward against her chest, heart nearly bursting with rapid-fire thuds. The Red Indians had come to scalp her.

Then the face moved, jumped away from the window, and she saw the wide tan brim of the Stetson, that funny hat cowboys liked to swagger about in. Red Indians didn’t wear Stetsons. She was certain of that. She had never seen one in person, thank heavens, but all the magazine illustrations assured her that Red Indians wore eagle-feather headdresses. 

This was a white man. A cowboy? Another homesteader? A claim-jumper? The last thought gave her pause. A claim-jumper was surely just as dangerous as a Red Indian. There had been stories… she had heard them during her few trips into Bradshaw, buying beans and pickles at the general store, lurking behind the shelves of dusty iron tools while she listened to the gossip at the counter. Women alone were the most at risk from these thieving murderers, and there were some men who sent their wives back east, or into Bradshaw to stay together in a house, huddled together for safety in numbers, while the men labored alone on the claims.