Twin of Ice (22 page)

Houston sat through the dinner feeling as if her skin had turned as icy as the diamonds around her neck. She moved and spoke as if in a dream. Only her years of training helped her as she led the conversation and directed the servants in serving the meal.

On the surface, nothing seemed to go wrong. Pam seemed aware of the tension and helped as best she could. Ian and Zach talked of sports, Jacob looked at the food on his plate, and Kane watched it all with a look of pride on his face.

What had he planned to do with me after I’d served my usefulness, she kept wondering. Did he plan to go somewhere else, now that he’d done what he wanted to in Chandler? She remembered every complaint he’d made about trying to do business in this boring little town. Why hadn’t she ever wondered
why
he’d built this house? Everyone in town had asked that question while it was being built, but after Houston had been swept away by him, she’d stopped asking questions.

He’d marched into town and gone straight up to Jacob Fenton and announced his arrival, asking the older man how he liked his house. Why hadn’t Houston realized that everything in Kane’s life was ruled by his feelings for the Fentons?

And Houston had only been a part of the revenge.

That’s all she was to the man she’d given her heart to, a tool to be used in the game he wanted—had—to win.

And the man she’d chosen to love was the sort of man who could dedicate his life to an unholy emotion such as revenge.

The food she ate stuck in her throat, and she had to force herself to swallow. How could she have been so wrong about a man?

When at last the long meal was finally over, Houston rose, preparing to lead Pam into the small drawing room, leaving the men to their cigars.

The two women talked about ordinary matters—clothing, where to buy the best trims, the best dressmakers in town—and did not say anything about the meal they’d just been subjected to. But twice, Houston caught Pam looking at her in a speculative way.

Kane led Jacob Fenton into his office, where he offered the man one of the cigars that Houston had given him and hundred-year-old brandy in a glass of Irish crystal.

“Not bad for a stableboy, huh?” Kane began, looking at Fenton through a haze of cigar smoke.

“All right, you’ve shown me your big house. Now what do you want?”

“Nothin’. Just the satisfaction of seeing you here.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to believe that. A man who would go to so much trouble to show me what he’s done in life isn’t going to stop with a dinner party. But I warn you that if you try to take away what’s mine, I’ll—.”

“You’ll what? Bribe more lawyers? All three of those bastards are still alive, and if I wanted to, I could pay them more than you own just to tell the truth.”

“That’s just like a Taggert. You always take what you don’t own. Your father took Charity, a sweet, pretty little thing, and subjected her to horrors that caused her to hang herself.”

Kane’s face turned red with his rage. “Horace Fenton caused my mother’s death, and you stole everything I owned from me.”

“You owned nothing. It was all mine. I’d been running the business for years, and if you think I was going to stand back and see it all turned over to a squalling baby, I’d have seen it dead first. And then you, a Taggert, wanted to take my daughter away from me. You think I was going to peacefully let you do to my daughter what your father did to my sister?”

Kane advanced on the smaller, older man. “Take a good look at this place.
This
is what I would have done to your precious daughter.
This
is how I would have treated her.”

Jacob stubbed out his cigar. “Like hell you would have. Did you ever think that maybe I did you a favor? It’s your hatred of me that’s made you rich. If you’d won Pamela, and received the money from
my
father, you probably would never have worked a day in your life.”

He started for the door. “And, Taggert, you try to take back from me what you think you own and I’ll prosecute that pretty wife of yours for illegal entry into the coal camps.”

“What?” Kane gasped.

“I wondered if you knew,” Jacob smiled. “Welcome to the world of the rich. You never can be sure whether people want you or your money. That sweet little lady you married is up to her ears in sedition. And she’s using every connection you have, including yours to me, to start what may develop into a bloody war. You’d better warn her that if she doesn’t slow down, I’ll stop honoring her relationship to the Taggerts. Now, good night, Taggert.” He left the room.

Kane sat alone for a long time in the room. No one bothered him as he drank most of a bottle of whiskey.

“Miss Houston!” Susan said as she burst into the drawing room where Houston was pacing the floor. “Mr. Kane wants you to come to his office right away. And he looks awful mad.”

Houston took a deep breath, smoothed the front of her gown and started down the hall. Jacob had bid her a pleasant good evening and left two hours ago with his daughter. Houston had done nothing but think since the Fentons had left. Never before had she thought about where her life was leading her. Always before, it had seemed that she’d taken what life had handed her. Now, it was time to make some of her own decisions.

He sat at his desk, his jacket off, his shirt open halfway down his chest, a nearly empty bottle of whiskey in his hand.

“I thought you were working,” she said.

“You ruined it all, you and your lying ruined it all.”

“I…I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, sitting down in one of the leather chairs across the desk from him.

“You not only wanted my money, you wanted my connections to the Taggerts. You knew that Fenton would let you do your illegal work because of your relationship to me. Tell me, did you and your sister think up this whole scheme? How were you plannin’ to use Westfield in all this?”

Houston stood, her back rigid. “You’re making no sense to me. I only learned of your mother’s name the day of our marriage. I couldn’t have used something I knew nothing about.”

“I told Edan once that you were a good actress, but I had no idea how good a one. You almost had me believin’ what you were sayin’ about marryin’ me for love, but all the time you were usin’ my name to get into the coal camps.”

Involuntarily, Houston gasped.

Kane stood and leaned across the desk toward her. “I worked all my life for this night and you destroyed it. Fenton threatened to prosecute my lovin’ wife and tell the world about how you’ve been usin’ me. I can see the headlines now.”

Houston did not back down from his stare. “Yes,” she said softly, “I do go into the coal camps, but it has nothing to do with you, since I was doing it long before I met you. You are so obsessed with your money that you think everyone wants it.” She moved away from the desk.

“In the last few months,” she continued, “because of you, I’ve learned a great deal about myself. My sister said that I’m the unhappiest person she’s ever known, and she’s been afraid that I might take my own life. I never realized that she was telling me the truth, because until I met you I’d never experienced happiness. Until I began to spend days with you, I never questioned why I didn’t, as you said, ‘Tell ’em all to go to hell’ and dance in my red dress. But with you, I’ve learned how good it feels to do things for myself, to not always be trying to please other people.

“And now, I feel I can make some of my own decisions. I don’t want to live with a man who’d build a house like this and marry a woman he didn’t want to marry, all in an attempt to repay some old man who was trying to protect what was rightfully his. I can understand, and almost forgive, Mr. Fenton’s actions, but I can’t understand yours. You may think I married you for your money, but I married you because I fell in love with you. I guess I loved a man who lived only in my imagination. You aren’t that man. You’re a stranger to me, and I don’t want to live with a stranger.”

Kane glared at her for a moment, then stepped back. “If you think I’m gonna beg you to stay, you’re wrong. You been a lot of fun, baby, more than I expected you to be, but I don’t need you.”

“Yes, you do,” Houston said quietly, trying to control the tears gathering in her eyes. “You need me more than you could possibly know, but I can only give my love to a man who is worthy of my respect. You’re not the man I thought you were.”

Kane walked to the closed door and opened it, making a sweeping gesture with his arm to let her pass.

Houston, somehow, managed to walk past him and out into the night. She never once thought of packing clothes or taking anything with her.

A carriage stood outside in the drive.

“You’re walking out, aren’t you?” Pamela Fenton asked from inside the carriage.

Houston looked up at the woman with such a ravaged face that Pam gasped.

“I knew something awful had happened. My father has the doctor with him now. He was shaking as if his bones would break. Houston, get in. I have a house here now, and you can stay with Zach and me until you have things settled.”

Houston only stared at the woman, until Pam climbed down from the carriage and half pushed her, half pulled her into the vehicle. Houston had no idea where she was. All she thought of was that now everything was over, that all she’d had was gone.

Kane burst into the large upstairs sitting room that Ian and Edan shared. Edan was alone, reading.

“I want you to find out anything you can about Houston goin’ into the coal camps.”

“What do you want to know?” Edan said, slowly putting his book down.

“When? How? Why? Anything you can find out.”

“She dresses up as an old woman every Wednesday afternoon, calls herself Sadie, and drives a wagonload of vegetables into the camp. Inside the food she hides medicines, shoes, soap, tea, anything she can get in there and gives it to the miners’ wives. Later, Jean Taggert returns the scrip the women pay Houston.”

“You’ve known all this and haven’t bothered to tell me?” Kane bellowed.

“You sent me out to watch her, but you never bothered to ask me what I found out.”

“I’ve been betrayed on all sides! First, that lying little bitch, and now you. And Fenton knew everything that was goin’ on.”

“Where’s Houston, and what have you said to her?”

Kane’s face hardened. “She just walked out my front door. She couldn’t face the truth. As soon as she knew I was onto her little scheme of usin’ me and my money to get what she wanted, she ran out. Good riddance. I don’t need the money-grubbin’—.”

Edan grabbed Kane by the shoulder. “You stupid son of a bitch. That woman’s the best thing that ever happened to you, and you’re too goddamn stupid to see it. You have to find her!”

Kane shrugged away. “Like hell I will. She was just like all them others; she was just a higher-priced whore.”

Kane never even saw the right that plowed into his face and sent him sprawling. Edan stood over the big dark man as Kane rubbed his jaw.

“You know something?” Edan said. “I’ve about had it, too. I’m tired of hiding away from the world. I spent my twenties closeted inside ugly rooms with you, doing nothing but working to make money. And for what? The only thing you ever bought was this house, and you did that because you wanted revenge. Houston told me once that I was as bad as you, hiding away, staying at your beck and call, and I’ve come to think she’s right.”

Edan stepped away and rubbed the knuckles of his hand. “I think it’s time I found my own life. Thanks to you, I’ve been paid for the years I’ve dedicated to your goals, and I have a few million stashed away. I’m going to take them and do something with my life.”

He put out his hand to shake, but Kane ignored him.

Later, Kane saw Ian, Jean and Sherwin get into the wagon with Edan, which meant that only the servants were left, and he didn’t wait until morning before he fired them.

Houston wasn’t even aware of her surroundings as she stood in the middle of Pam’s bedroom.

“First, we’ll put you in a tub of hot water, then you can tell me what’s going on.”

Houston stood completely still as Pam left to fill the tub. She wasn’t sure she was fully aware yet of what had happened tonight. She’d fallen in love with a man who was using her.

“It’s ready now,” Pam said, pushing Houston into the pink tiled bathroom. “You get undressed while I call and see how my father is. And Houston! don’t just stand there looking as if the world were about to end.”

Through years of training, Houston obeyed as well as any trained animal, and when Pam returned, she was lying in the big tub, up to her neck in suds.

“Dr. Westfield finally calmed my father down,” Pam said. “He’s too old to go through nights like this one. Whatever did Kane say to him? The only thing that I know of that could upset him so badly would be something about Zachary. If Kane thinks that he’s going to take my son away from me, he’d better be prepared to fight—.”

“No,” Houston said tiredly. “He’s not after his son. Nothing so noble.”

“I think you should tell me.”

Houston looked up at this woman whom she really didn’t know, a woman who was once the love of her husband’s life. “Why are you helping me? I know you still love him.”

Pam narrowed her eyes for a moment. “So he told you, did he?”

“I know he…refused your invitation.”

Pam laughed. “That’s tactful of you. I guess he didn’t bother to also tell you that I, too, realized we’d never make it together? We came to a mutual understanding that if we married we’d probably kill each other within three months. Now, tell me what happened between you and Kane. It’s all family, if that’s what you’re thinking, and it’s going to come out sooner or later.”

If Kane decided to take the Fenton money that was legally his, it would indeed all come out, Houston thought. “Do you know who Kane’s mother was?” she asked softly.

“I have no idea. I don’t think I ever considered that he had a mother, probably because he seemed too self-sufficient to need something as simple as a mother. I guess I assumed he’d arrived on earth all by himself.”

Houston sat in the hot water and told the story of Charity Taggert slowly, trying not to color the tale with her own viewpoint.

Pam had pulled up a pink upholstered brass wire chair. “I had no idea,” Pam said at the end of the story. “You’re saying that everything my father owns is legally Kane’s. No wonder he’s so angry at my father, and no wonder my father is shaking with fear. But, Houston, you didn’t walk out on Kane tonight because he wasn’t born a pauper. What else happened?”

It was more difficult for Houston to tell about herself, to admit that she was second choice to Pam and that, now that she’d fulfilled what Kane needed her for, she was useless to him.

“Damn him!” Pam said, standing and pacing the floor. “He would feel completely justified in telling you that he’d married you for what he thinks he needs. He is the most spoiled man I ever met in my life.”

Houston, showing the first signs of life, rolled her head upward to look at Pam.

“He likes to imagine that his life was one of great misery, but I can tell you that
he
was the real ruler of our household when he lived there. People look down on me for having fallen in love with the stable lad, but that’s only because they never had someone in their stables like Kane Taggert.”

She sat down in the seat again, leaning forward, her face angry. “You know him. You’ve seen his temper and the way he orders everyone about. Do you think he was ever any different, merely because he was supposed to be someone’s servant?”

“I don’t guess I really thought about it,” Houston said. “Marc did say that Kane was a tyrant.”

“Tyrant!” Pam gasped, getting up again. “Kane ran everything. More than once, my father had to miss business appointments because Kane said he couldn’t have a carriage or a horse, that the animals weren’t ready to travel. At dinner, we ate what Kane liked because the cook thought his tastes were more important than Father’s.”

Houston remembered the way Mrs. Murchison had succumbed to Kane’s teasing and how the woman adored him.

“He was always a handsome boy and knew how to get whatever he wanted out of women. The maids cleaned his rooms, they did his laundry, they took meals to him. He didn’t run Fenton Coal and Iron, but he ran our household. I can’t imagine what he would have been like if he’d known that all the money was legally his. Perhaps my father did him a favor. Maybe living in the stables taught him some humility, because he certainly wasn’t born with it.”

Pam fell to her knees by the tub. “You have my permission to stay here as long as you want. If you want my two cents, I think you were right to leave him. He can’t marry a person in order to enact some plan of revenge. Now, get out of that tub while I fix you a toddy that will help you sleep.”

Again, Houston did as she was told, drying herself with one of Pam’s pink towels and slipping into Pam’s chaste night gown.

Pam returned with a steaming mug in her hand. “If this doesn’t make you sleep, it’ll make you not care that you’re awake. Now, get into bed. Tomorrow has to be better than today.”

Houston drank most of the concoction and was asleep very soon. In the morning, when she woke, the sun was already high in the sky and she had a headache. Draped over the end of the bed was her underwear and a dressing gown. A note from Pam said that she had to go out and for Houston to help herself to breakfast downstairs and to tell the maid if she needed anything.

“Edan,” Jean Taggert was saying, “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done tonight. There was no need for you to stay up with me.”

They were standing in the corridor of the Chandler Hotel. Both of them looked tired. After they’d left Kane’s house, they’d come to the hotel. Ian had gone to bed immediately, but Sherwin had been extremely upset by the night’s happenings and, in his weakened state, he’d begun coughing and couldn’t catch his breath. He gasped that he was afraid that Jean and Ian would have to return to the coal fields.

Edan called Dr. Westfield, and Lee was there in minutes, already dressed from having just seen to Jacob Fenton. Edan also roused the hotel staff and had hot water bottles and extra blankets brought. He sent a bellboy to get the druggist out of bed to fill a prescription for Sherwin.

Jean was able to stay by her father throughout the night and try to reassure him that she and Ian would not return to the mines, while Edan tended to all the necessary details.

Now, with the sun just coming up, Sherwin asleep at last, they stood outside his door.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Jean said for the thousandth time.

“Then stop trying. Would you like some breakfast?”

“Do you think the dining room is open at this hour?”

Edan grinned at her as he pushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “After last night, this hotel is so afraid of me that they’ll do anything for me.”

He was right. A weary-looking clerk escorted them into the dining room, removed two chairs from a table by the window and went to drag the cook out of bed. Unfortunately, the cook lived four miles out of town and it took him a while to get there. Neither Jean nor Edan noticed that breakfast took over two hours to arrive.

They talked about when they’d grown up, Jean telling about taking care of all the men in her life, of her mother dying when Jean was eleven. Edan told of his family, of their deaths in the fire and of how Kane had taken him in.

“Kane was good for me. I didn’t want to love anyone again. I was afraid that they’d die, too, and I didn’t think I could bear being left alone again.”

He put down his napkin. “Are you ready to go? I think the business offices should be open by now.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, rising. “I didn’t mean to keep you from your work.”

He caught her by her elbow. “I didn’t mean me, I meant us. You and I are going to a realtor to buy a house today. It’ll have to be something large to have room for all of us.”

She moved out of his grasp and turned to look at him. “All of us? I don’t know what you mean, but Ian, Father and I couldn’t possibly live with you. I’ll get a job in town, perhaps Houston can help me, and Ian can go to school and work afterwards, and Father—.”

“Your father would hate himself for being a burden to you both, and Ian is too big to go to school with the others and he’d be better off with his tutor. And you couldn’t earn enough to support them. Now, come with me and help me find a big house, and you can be my housekeeper.”

“I couldn’t possibly do that,” she said, aghast. “I can’t be a housekeeper to an unmarried man.”

“Your father and cousin will be there as chaperones in case I try to molest you and, then again, from what I’ve seen of married life in the last few months, I rather like the idea. Come on, Jean, close your mouth and let’s go shopping. We’ll probably have to buy furniture and food and all sorts of things before we can get out of this hotel. Do you think the staff will volunteer to help us if they know their help will get rid of us faster?”

Jean was too stunned to say another word as Edan led her upstairs to her father’s room to tell him where they were going, In the end, Ian, Jean and Edan went to the realtor’s.

Houston sat at Pam’s dining table, listlessly poking at a bowl of oatmeal.

Pam burst into the room, pulling off long, white chamois gloves. “Houston, the entire town is on fire with gossip about last night,” she said without a greeting. “First of all, after you left, it seems that Kane and Edan had a brawl in an upstairs bedroom. One of the maids said that the fight went on for hours and, when it was over, Edan left the house in a storm.”

“Edan left, too?” Houston asked, wide-eyed.

“Not only Edan, but also the other Taggerts: Jean, Ian and Sherwin. And when they were gone, Kane marched downstairs and fired all the servants.”

Houston leaned back in her chair and gave a great sigh. “He said he was tired of all of us taking so much of his time. I guess he can work all he wants now…or go back to New York and work there.”

Pam unpinned her Strada hat, fluffing the ostrich plumes atop the white Italian straw. “I haven’t told you the half of it. Edan and Jean took up residence at the Chandler Hotel and kept the staff up all night, waiting on Sherwin who was, as far as I could find out, near death’s door, and this morning they bought a house together.”

“Edan and Jean? Is Sherwin all right?”

“Gossip says he’s fine and, yes, Edan and Jean bought that enormous Stroud place at the end of Archer Avenue, across from Blair’s hospital. And after they signed the papers—Edan paid cash for the house—Jean went back to the hotel and Edan went to The Famous and bought, I hope I get this right, three ladies’ blouses, two skirts, a hat, two pairs of gloves, and assorted underwear. That nasty little Nathan girl waited on him, and she kept after the poor man until he admitted that the secret woman he was buying the clothes for was approximately the exact same size as Miss Jean Taggert. If Edan doesn’t marry her after this, her name won’t be worth much in this town.”

She paused for a moment. “And, Houston, you might as well know that the Chandler Chronicle is hinting that there’s another woman involved in everything that happened last night.”

Houston picked up her coffee cup. The local paper didn’t faze her. Mr. Gates had complained for years that the paper was nothing but a gossip rag consisting of reports on the most bizarre deaths from around the world and inane articles about where each English duke’s family was wintering. He stopped delivery of the paper after it carried a half-page story in which an Italian man declared Anglo-Saxon women to be the best kissers in the world.

“Wherever did you hear all this?” Houston asked.

“Where else but Miss Emily’s Tea Shop?”

Houston almost choked on her coffee. The Sisterhood! she thought. She had to call an emergency meeting to let them know that Jacob Fenton knew about the women disguising themselves and illegally entering the coal camps. All the man had to do was get angry enough at Kane and he could have the women arrested. “May I use your telephone?” Houston asked. “I have some calls to make.”