The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (24 page)

Patty looked around the parlor rather wildly. Cherry put her out of her misery right away, regretting her little joke. Really, her mind was in no fit state to attempt humor right now. “He’s asleep upstairs, darling, it’s his nap-time. I was only funning with you.”

“Oh, Cherry, of course!” Patty tried to laugh, but she had been through too many emotions in the past day to even know where to begin. “There’s just been such a lot happening in the past day. You’re very strong, aren’t you? Making plans and all. What are you going to do?”

“Write to my bankers and find out just how much money I have, for a start. And then I shall just find a way to spin that out until I can make the claim pay a living. I think Edward and I shall be eating a lot of vegetables next summer. Think how healthful a diet that shall be! Our figures would be the envy of the
ton.
” When Cherry laughed this time, it was nearly the real thing.

“Of course we’ll help you,” Patty vowed. “Not that Matt has found much get-up-and-go to be a carpenter after all, but we have enough and some to help you and Little Edward.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Cherry’s voice had true emotion in it now. She had been making her plans with the hopes of Patty’s help all along. With an occasional contribution from her friend, she thought they could actually manage if her allowance was indeed cut off. That had been what she had really been doing when she forced herself to rise from the chair and her eye fell upon the feather duster: making math calculations in her head. Cherry had been trained in estate accounts, after all, and managing the accounts of the claim was an embarrassingly smaller task than sorting out the jumbles of columns and towers of figures in the Beechfields accounting-book. “I do not think we will starve, then. I have been thinking over a few different ways to earn money, besides.” She didn’t mention that she had been thinking on all of her knowledge of horse training. Even in America, women did not break horses for a living. But of everything that Cherry had ever learned in her old life, horse-training was the one thing she knew best — and the one talent she thought Bradshaw might truly value and pay her for.

“And what will you tell the uncle?” Patty wanted to know.

Cherry sighed. The thought of her darling uncle coming after her son in such a horrible fashion was still difficult for her to countenance. But it had happened, and she must deal with it — no one else would, now that Jared had written his letter and disappeared, like a coward, without so much as farewell. Jared — she swallowed her sudden rage and took a deep breath before she spoke, voice low to keep it steady. “I shall simply write back to him and keep him in knowledge of my plans. That if he chooses to stop my funds I shall be very sorry, but that I have always been aware I am not in possession of any fortune and I shall endeavor to do my very best as an independent woman while I am proving-up my claim. No matter the personal cost or sacrifice, I do not intend to give up my son to strangers, however tight the bonds of blood.”

“That’s impressive!” Patty said admiringly. “You write something as grand as that, it sounds like a preacher wrote it. He’ll have to pay attention to you then.”

“Well,” Cherry began, sitting down again and fiddling with the feather duster in her hands. She felt very downcast about the prospect of writing such a letter, even if it sounded as though a preacher had written it. “I suppose he shall.”

And then she would have to figure out some way of making all her proud arguments become the truth.

Jared rode through the icy downpour with his shoulders hunched and his hat tipped forward, but the cold drops were pouring from his hat-brim onto his saddle horn and from there cascading in a freezing little waterfall that splashed merrily into a little pool on the saddle’s seat. It made him feel as though the rain was coming from every direction, even up from the horse beneath him, and when the roan stumbled through a particularly deep puddle and the muddy water splashed up to his cheeks, he was even more certain that this was no common rain, this was some sort of otherworldly, hellish curse sent after him by the woman he’d left behind in Bradshaw.

Just yesterday, could it have been only a day and a half since he’d left her?

He hadn’t admitted anything to her. He had sworn Matt to secrecy: don’t tell her about the woman, don’t tell her about the telegram. He would get the whole mess sorted out and come back within a week; there was no reason to get Cherry all out of sorts about some old woman from Jared’s past.
 

Matt was trustworthy. Matt would have taken care of both messages: Cherry and his letter to her, Hope and his telegram to her. The telegram telling her to get off the train in Opportunity, not Bradshaw. To not, by any accounts or chance, come to Bradshaw. He didn’t know if she’d take it as a warning or a challenge. He only hoped he could get to Opportunity and wait there on the train siding as the engine came steaming into the station, so that she could look out of the window and see him there. If she saw him waiting, she’d get off the train. He was certain of that.

They could talk this whole thing out.
 

What the hell would he say to her?

He asked himself that now, as he steadied the roan against the muddied ground, helping the horse balance himself down a little slope. The seemingly flat prairie was anything but; it was a series of hills and valleys, so undulating in places that the path was a treacherous series of slippery climbs and sloppy slides down again. He had been riding these cattle tracks since he was just a boy, and the constant attention it took to keep to the track and help the horse find the best footing was second nature to him.

It gave him plenty of time to think about Hope.

Jared had courted Hope for four years, with faithful, unflagging attention and what gentlemanly manners he could dig up out of an indifferent education and a life spent out on the frontier. One winter in Galveston, spent there by chance, had turned into four, returning for the allure of seeing Miss Hope dance, of buying Miss Hope a drink and sitting by her while she drank it, so that he could hear Miss Hope speak in her thrilling, husky voice. Matt used to laugh at him; Matt who took a different girl upstairs every Thursday night, as regular as clockwork, because he said a man’s constitution thrived equally on a schedule and on varying diversions. He’d read that in a book once when he was sick in bed. It was about the only way you could get Matt to open a book, trapping him in his bed with a high fever or a tooth-chattering chill.

While Matt was upstairs with one of the other dancers, Miss Hope sat at a little round table below the stage and talked to Jared. By this time the red velvet curtain had been dropped for the evening, its gold fringes touching the creaky old floorboards of the stage where the girls did their routines. All of the dancers had spread out and were displaying their wares in a more intimate, one-on-one fashion than just the spectacle of the can-can could offer a man. There were throaty chuckles and peals of laughter floating through the room, and the occasional shouts of encouragement when one dancer would wager she could kick a man’s hat off his head and everyone nearby would start calling out odds and waving greenbacks. There was always a tinkling of broken glass as the night wore on; too much liquor led to slippery fingers and stumbling over knotholes and even all-out fist-fights.
 

But Jared and Hope simply sat at a table and talked, lingering over their drinks while the rest of the dance-hall grew loud and raucous and drunk.

Hope wasn’t like the others, he had thought. She was a beautiful woman who could dance the can-can like no other, sure, and that in itself made her a sought-after commodity at the dance-hall. She was a famous figure on the streets of Galveston, even if nice women crossed the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk with her, and even if there were a few “select” modistes and milliners who would not open their door to her. She told all this to Jared, many months into their slow courtship, with downcast eyes and a hurt little tone in her low voice, and he had felt a quick burst of rage for the shopkeepers and fine ladies who would hurt his Hope like that.

“What can I do?” she would say, when he was fully outraged and ready to go out and burn the shops to the ground, or at least to say something cutting to the proprietors. “I’m just a dancer, and the high-and-mighty set in this town don’t like dancers.”

“Well,
I
like dancers,” Jared would say earnestly. “I think you’re just lovely.”

“Well thank you!” Hope would tap her ornate black-and-red fan on his fingers, drawing it back just slowly enough that the lace tips would tickle his skin. “You’re a nice man, Jared Reese. You never ask a girl to do anything she shouldn’t.”

And indeed, he didn’t. He never would have dreamed of it. Hope had told him that she never went upstairs, and that only served to set her apart more for him. She was a beautiful pearl, he would tell her, in a room full of common pebbles.
 

He showered her with every gift that he had: with his attention, with his adoration, even with his own beloved horse. Hope need only ask for something, and if it was in his power to deliver it, he would give it to her. He was a man dizzy in love, utterly enchanted, and he spent his summers in an agony to get back to Galveston, to get back to the dance-hall, to get back to Hope. He waited for the day she would accept an invitation to walk out with him, acknowledge his courtship, let them progress beyond conversation and a drink after her performance.

But year after year, nothing changed. And his yearning reached a fever-pitch. Matt began to avoid mentioning Hope’s name, or any woman’s name, or the entire female sex, for fear of setting Jared into depressions that lasted for days on end.

And then, the fourth winter, something changed in Hope. Soon after he and Matt had arrived and taken their rooms in the boarding-house, she asked Jared to come around
 
one afternoon and take her for a drive. Jared dutifully rented a horse and cart from McMann’s Livery and took her out into the countryside.
 

On
 
a lonesome path through the salt marshes, looking for alligators like a pair of children, Hope suddenly leaned into Jared and pressed her lips against his.
 

It was an innocent, naïve kiss, or so Jared had thought. It was a virgin’s kiss. She was his own darling, talented little Hope, the dancer who never took a man upstairs, and he very gently kissed her back, pulling up the amiable horse even as he opened his lips and took her lower lip softly, softly, asking her to open herself up to him, and she sighed as she did, tentatively letting him push her lips apart and accept his kiss. Then he was dropping the reins altogether and slipping his hands around her shoulders, sliding his fingers along her round cheeks, cupping her face in his hands so that he could feel that stir of possession he’d been longing for since the first time he’d laid eyes on her, kicking out a can-can on that rattle-trap stage in the dance-hall.

It was the first of many drives.

It was nearly time for Jared to pack up for the spring drive when she told him. Again, he stopped the horse and kissed her. They had talked of marriage before, and a ranch down near the Rio Grande, where Jared had heard talk of land for sale cheap. They could run their own cattle, and build up a little empire in the sun.

An empire for their children.
 

Who were already on the way, it would seem.

“Hope, honey, what could be better?” he burst out between kisses. “We’ll get married right away, and I’ll tell the Colonel that I won’t be joining the drive after all… I’ll ride right down to the valley and put down all the cash I’ve got on land. I’ll build you a house. A house for you and all our children.”

Hope had smiled, and if it was a wan smile, he thought that could be excused. She was in a delicate condition. That reminded him… “You better stop dancing, honey. That’s too much hard work for a woman in your condition.”

She frowned a little at that. “I don’t know that I want to stop dancing, Jared. At least not yet. Wouldn’t it be better to earn as much money as I can, anyway? Before I can’t do it anymore. We’ll want to save as much as we can.”

Jared nearly expired with the ecstasy of the word “we” rolling off her tongue so easily. At last, at last, at last, Hope was his, glorious red-haired Hope was choosing him! Four years that had dragged on now disappeared behind him like a flash. All he saw now was his future, and it was so brilliant he could not believe his luck.

And if she thought she could dance a little while longer, that was certainly her business. “All right, honey,” he conceded. “But not too much, or I’ll worry.”

“Wouldn’t want you to worry,” she smirked. “Now why don’t you stop talking and kiss me some more?”

He kissed her in an explosion of excitement and joy, but it was the last day he felt so elated. Hope refused to let him tell anyone of their engagement. “My boss won’t like it, and neither will my customers,” she told him. “Married women don’t get tips. And don’t start coming in every night, Jared. It will just set people off. Tongues wagging. Two nights is fine. We can go driving same as usual.”

He was unhappy about the restrictions, but he gave in without a peep. Hope liked to run things, he knew. She was a born manager. She’d probably run the ranch for the both of them. And so Jared busied himself getting addresses and writing letters, looking for information about the land he’d heard so much about, preparing to ride down to the Rio Grande and follow its sluggish crawl until he found the spot where he would build their own little ranch-house.

Finally a response came, and he saddled up his horse and rode off. He came back four weeks later, tired and disappointed. He had put down money on the land he had wanted, but there had been some mix-up; the owner of the land swore no land-agent had brought him any sort of deal. The land-agent had disappeared; his office was padlocked. Jared’s money was gone. He held no deed. He went into the dance-hall on a Tuesday night, not his usual night at all, because he needed to talk to Hope.