Sam squinted toward the far, all-but-invisible bushes. "I hit
something," he said, amazed. Then he rolled forward, getting his legs
under him till he was on the balls of his feet, and sprung up.
He bounded toward the bushes as the realization struck them both.
His rock had stopped an animal, something small. A rabbit or a fox. Dinner.
Food.
*
It
was a hare. A fat hare that Mr. Cody brought back with a hatful of berries he'd
noticed in the bushes, "as if God was suggesting the sauce." The
animal had been apparently hiding in a whortleberry bush – the berries being a
summer delicacy from
Devon
, usually served with cream
for breakfast.
Lydia
and Mr. Cody
snacked on them – a delight! – while he dressed the animal, devised a spit,
then proceeded to steal the tin from her hairpins, dumping the pins onto the
ground.
"Hey!" she complained. "You have to talk to me
before you throw me or my things wherever you happen to want them!"
She didn't protest very vigorously, though, when he explained he
wanted the tin to catch the juices and set it on a rock under their roasting
dinner. He seemed to know what he was doing, and once the rabbit was cooking,
Lydia
forgave him
completely. It smelled divine. She thought she would expire from anticipation.
She couldn't remember being so hungry and eager to eat.
Mr. Cody turned the spit by hand, proving he could not only find
them dinner but cook it as well. It seemed a small miracle that he could, since
she couldn't have: He knew how to prepare food.
"It's a bobby," he said. "Plus I drove the chuck
wagon at fourteen and worked in the mess house since I was eight."
"You worked so young?"
"I had chores when I was two, and my father would be after my
hide if I didn't do them right and timely. He believed there was a moral
benefit to work, that it built character."
"Do you think so?"
Lydia
asked with
wonder. She had always thought it just built calluses. Work was something you
did if your parents didn't have money.
The working man beside her, temporarily jobless, didn't answer. He
was more interested in basting his rabbit, muttering off and on about how it
was going to be tough, how he could make it tender if he only had the right
implements and ingredients. With the pins on the dark ground,
Lydia
gave up on her
hair. She sat leaning back on her arms, her knees up, and watched him. His hat
lay beside him full of berries. With it off, his hair flopped down in his eyes
when he bent over the fire. His dark hair – black as India ink in the night –
had a bend to it, not curl so much as curve. The firelight made an arching
shadow up his forehead from the way a piece hooked down over his brow into one
eye. It flopped there, gleaming in the firelight, swinging as he moved.
She wanted to comb it back with her fingers, put him aright. An
excuse to feel it. His hair had a texture so smooth that, even in disarray, it
didn't look as if it would tangle – the sort of hair that, if one tied it into
a knot, it would only slip right out.
Shadows flickered across his face. For a moment, the light – the
angle and shadows of his hair and the bridge of his nose – hid his puffy eye,
and she was brought up short again by how striking his face was. Or would be,
if he hadn't argued with it this morning to five bandits. An attractive man.
Moreover, his attractiveness went beyond his interesting looks. He had a way to
him, a way of moving, smiling, responding. A rugged, bronzed man, cantankerous,
but with a teasing smile and a … a what?
She wouldn't admit it immediately, but then, looking down into her
skirts, she let herself acknowledge it: charm. He was somehow charming. For all
his bluster and prickly disposition, she still wanted to talk to and look at
Sam Cody. Indeed, she was fairly sure he'd turn the heads of most women with
his hat-tipping and teasing and please - and - thank - you - ma'am - kindly. He
might not be like the English gentlemen flirts of her association, but he was
of the same species. A man who was confident, and successful, with the ladies.
Lydia
realized she
was holding her mouth tight, while scowling at a streak of dirt on her skirt so
large and dark she could see it clearly by firelight.
As the rabbit's cooking progressed, she began to joke to Mr. Cody
about knocking him down and stealing it from the fire. It smelled better and
better, heavenly. He mock-defended it but wouldn't hurry, no matter how hungry
she proclaimed herself to be. She was truly put out with him by the time he was
mashing berries into the juices with "a soupçon of gin." (
Soupçon?
She couldn't put the word with his slow-talking drawl and homey phrases.) He
also did something with the animal's liver at the end she decided not to ask
about.
The end result though was a sauced, roasted feast, so surprisingly
rich in flavor she ate till the bones were bare.
"Can you remember what you did?" she asked, wiping her
fingers on the edge of her hem – the dress was never going to be the same.
"I'd like you to write that down for – um, for the cook at Bleycott."
Our
cook, she almost said.
He laughed, sitting back. "I think the most important
ingredient is a woman who hasn't eaten but one cucumber sandwich in a dozen
hours."
The fire was down, low flames and red embers, enough to cast warm
shadows across his smiling face. His mouth and tongue when he talked, she
realized, were purplish from the berries. So must hers be. What messes. She
laughed, too. Then became selfconscious again.
A ladies' man, she told herself again. A cowboy cook of a ladies'
man.
Lydia
liked looking
at handsome men, but she certainly didn't take the handsome charmers of her own
circle seriously. Among other reasons, she wasn't their counterpart. She was
too earnest. Too thin. Not glamorous enough. Not meek enough of spirit – prone
to contradicting them. So was it sour grapes or did she simply not prefer them?
Might she rather that Boddington, who, bless him, liked her as she was, were
strikingly handsome and a little more confident in manner?
Stupid question. Yes.
Was she attracted to Sam Cody, then?
Yes. All right, yes, she told herself. In a kind of trivial way.
She couldn't decide if she liked him exactly, but he … he held her attention somehow.
He was nothing like any man she knew.
"Thirsty?" he asked. She looked across the fire at him.
He sat not quite halfway around from her, close though not within arm's reach.
She smiled ruefully. "Yes. I'd give quite a bit for a cup of
tea right now."
He held up something, a bottle.
Oh, the gin. She shook her head. "Water would be nice."
"Well, there's a swamp back there not too far, if we could
count on stumbling onto it, without stumbling into it. That's the only water I
know of." He continued to hold the bottle in the air, an open offer.
"It's all we have," he said.
She frowned. No, she thought.
"I'm going to drink it."
She thrust her jaw slightly forward, pondering. She'd only ever
had a glass of port now and then, though to no ill effect. "Well, just a
little maybe," she decided. "Do you think it's
thirst-quenching?"
"Without a doubt." He took the neck of a bottle into one
hand and twisted the cork out with the other, then, leaning onto his elbow, he
stretched to offer the bottle of gin. "Ladies first."
She took it, stared at the light wavering through the clear
liquor, sniffed it – not too bad, rather sweet smelling – then tilted the
bottle back to her lips.
It burned the second it hit the back of her throat. She drew in a
breath to cool the sensation, but took air too quickly; the gin went down
wrong. She ended up coughing and sputtering like a bad imitation of a character
in one of Clive's absurd cowboy books, the greenhorn in the saloon.
"Just sips," he told her, leaning the full length of his
body while stretching his long arm out. He patted her back.
She nodded. Once her eyes stopped watering, she tried another sip.
It was merely warm going down the second time – she remembered not to breathe
while she swallowed – and not too bad in small quantities.
As she handed the bottle back, she felt a little frisson, a ping,
of wonder at herself: a sense of being free – inventive, good – yet frightened
by the unpredictedness of the moment. How had this happened? Gin to quench her
thirst. A dinner of rabbit eaten with her hands. An open fire for warmth. No
roof. And a stranger who wore his hat day and night – he'd put it back on now
that the berries were out of it – to pat her back when she coughed.
Looking over at him, she asked, "So what kind of work does a
cowboy" – she corrected – "a cowboy's son do on this side of the
ocean?" She tried to imagine why either should be sitting here on a moor
in the middle of
England
.
"Nothin'." He took a drink of gin, then, leaning across
on an elbow again, offered the bottle. "Like I said, the job in
London
for September
was real clear about wanting a dependable married man. Jilting my fiancée
pretty much cinches my ticket home."
"What were you going to be here, before your were
fired?" She drank a bit more gin. It was pleasantly warm this time, not
bad at all. Then handed it back.
As he took the bottle and sat back, he sent her a dubious look,
one eyebrow raised, an expression that became one of his tormenting, crooked
smiles. "A hired gun," he told her. His eyes brightened, devilish
delight, when she looked alarmed. "Sort of," he added, then became
more straightforward. "I was supposed to talk some sense into some folks
here, scare 'em into bein' more reasonable."
"Ugh," she said.
He laughed. "Yep. It doesn't make me popular. But I'm good at
it, what can I say? More?" He held up the bottle.
She shook her head.
"In a minute.
So
will you miss it, this scaring people? Do you like doing it?"
"No," he said immediately. Then amended, "Though
that's like asking if I liked pulling you out of that coach before it went
down. I liked the result. But did I like doing it, no." He shook his head.
"I'd rather have been in a hammock in the shade taking a little Mexican
siesta with a tequila-and-lime in one hand—"
"What's tequila?"
"Like gin, only out of cactus juice." He continued,
"And a dime novel open on my chest."
"So you can read," she teased him back, laughing. Then
said, "My brother likes cheap novels, too."
A mistake. He twisted his mouth till he had to touch the corner –
he'd made such a severe expression, it apparently hurt. With his mouth twisted
to the side and his finger on it, he said, "By
cheap
you mean
proletarian
to your
highbrow
aesthetic?"
She was beginning to think it was impossible for them to be civil to
each other. She had streaks of prejudice and pride that kept rearing their ugly
heads, while he was a tetchy fool. Then the words,
proletarian
,
highbrow
aesthetic
, registered. Where did an American ruffian get words like these?
She held out her hand, asking for the bottle. On receiving it, she
took a larger drink before she asked, "So what's so blessed wrong with
being a cowboy?"
"You think they're stupid and foolish."
She considered the possibility he was right. Then said, "I
don't think
you're
either one."
He was momentarily disarmed. "I guess I just don't like bein'
misjudged then, not for even a minute."
She nodded and grew silent. He took the bottle, and she wrapped
her arms about her knees, setting her chin on them to stare into the fire. She
didn't intend to say anything further. Perhaps it was the silence or the night,
maybe the gin. A cozy intimacy for confidences. She murmured, "Everyone is
misjudged for a minute, sometimes longer. It's difficult to take a person's
measure, unless you know him well." She shrugged, wistful. "I don't
think a handful of people know me. Not who I truly am. Maybe not even
that."
When she slid a glance at him, he was staring at her, serious,
contemplative.
He broke the protracted silence with, "You know, for a
snobby, complainin' woman, you sure have a streak of wisdom in you, Mrs.
Brown."
Lydia
had to couch
her face to hide the pleasure the silly backhanded comment caused her. Foolish.
She put her mouth and chin behind her knees with just her eyes watching the
fire over her kneetops. Its flames lapped at the log. The thickest piece, an
old stump he'd found, glowed neatly now. It was covered in little shrunken
rectangles of ash, the wood burning so that it glowed red from inside, from its
core.