Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (42 page)

The maid had chosen a deep wine colored skirt and a contrasting pink waist. The swelling was all but gone from Anne’s face, and the colors only emphasized her vibrancy, the glow of her skin. Maybe some would argue she was not really beautiful. They might say the big gray eyes took up too much of her face or that her nose was a little long, her mouth a little wide, but men would turn in the street to look again. Only a very few women ever looked the way Anne looked now, and they had to be loved to achieve it - to be loved and to know they were loved.

Paul was seeing what Frank had on the rainy day when Anne lit up the kitchen as she worked over beans and peaches. Frank had refused to accept what his own eyes saw, but a slow understanding was replacing Paul’s initial amazement, helping him regain his composure and remember the manners of a lifetime.

This time Paul made it to his feet. “My dear, do sit down. It’s good to see you looking so much, so much….”

He faltered, and Anne gave a soft, throaty laugh.

“The very look on your face tells me how horrible I looked last night. You probably were wondering why Cord would go after such a dreadful piece of goods.”

Paul looked momentarily lost again, but then simply ignored her comment and said, “You must be famished. Dinner will be ready soon, but would you like breakfast instead?”

“Actually, we’re so hungry anything sounds wonderful.” She smiled sweetly, her face lighting up even more. “Thank you for helping us. We were so tired we might have passed out in the street.”

Once they were seated, Cord paid no further attention to Paul or Marie, just leaned back and watched his wife. There were still traces of the emotional ordeal of these last days, but she was herself again. Both the fire and sweetness were back. Their lives were going to be turned upside down over this, but nothing else mattered. She was whole again.

He realized Paul was addressing him. “The horse isn’t doing well. Burt seems to think it would be a kindness….”

Cord closed his eyes, feeling sadness wash through him. He had tried to stay on the right side of the line and thought he might have succeeded and Keeper might recover, but he had never ridden a horse like that before.

He opened his eyes and met Anne’s. “Keeper?”

“Afraid so.”

“They told me it was coming on a blizzard that night.”

“Never got that bad. Stopping snowing by dawn.”

“How long did it take you?”

He hedged. “Little longer than good weather. I was up here by one.”

She wasn’t letting him get away with it. “How long?”

“Sixteen hours.”

“Two to Mason and then sixteen here?”

“Mm.”

“We’d best go see him as soon as we’ve eaten.”

There would be no way to make her stay here and let him take care of it. He watched her take up the conversation with Paul and Marie again. She skillfully turned aside several inquiries about what exactly had happened. She wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, and no one was going to hurry her.

Keeper didn’t look any better than he had the morning Cord first walked into Denver. Burt, the stableman, automatically loathing anyone who would so use a horse, was unsympathetic over the couple’s concern now. “Best to shoot him. He don’t drink much and don’t eat at all. Just stands like that all the time.”

Armed with several lumps of sugar cadged from Marie’s cook, Anne was not listening and was already in the stall petting and hugging the big gelding, explaining to him as if he were human. “Poor Keeper, you don’t understand why this happened, do you, but I was in so much trouble, and I needed help right away, and because you got Cord through the storm everything’s all right again. All you have to do is forgive us and get better and you can come home with us. If you don’t start to eat, you’ll have to stay here, you know.”

The horse didn’t acknowledge her presence with so much as a flick of an ear, but Burt gave Cord a speculative look, stopped frowning at him, and disappeared. In the end they spent more than an hour in the barn, currying and brushing the horse until the rough and staring coat laid a bit, leaning against the manger and talking in low voices. Anne believed both a soft touch and reassuring presence helped and saw no reason not to spend some time here.

Cord said, “Could be nothing will work this time. I used him hard, and I knew I was doing it and went ahead.”

“I know. If I had to choose between our baby and a hundred horses, I’d choose the baby, but that doesn’t mean we can’t spare some time to comfort an old friend now.”

“So long as you can handle it if it’s no good. He doesn’t look any better than he did when I got here.”

“Well, look at it from his point of view. You did that to him for no reason he knows of and then left him in a strange place with strange people. Maybe he just needs a little loving.”

“Mm. Cure me of plague that way.”

An impish grin crossed Anne’s face. “You mean I should be waiting until you’re sick?”

“Hell no, I’m all for preventative medicine. Speaking of which, let’s ask Paul about a doctor….”

She interrupted, “No. I’ll see Dr. Craig when we get home if it will make you happy, but I’m not having somebody I don’t know touching me now.” Her jaw stuck out stubbornly.

Seeing Craig if the law was after him might take some doing, but they would manage it somehow. “No fuss about Craig when we get home?”

“I promise.”

After a dinner that Cord considered inferior to Anne’s cooking, in spite of the numbers of servants required to produce it, and after much fussing because Cord couldn’t be talked into brandy nor Anne into wine, everyone settled down in a wood-paneled book-lined room in deep leather chairs. Providing tea for Anne and coffee for Cord before dismissing servants for the night had finally satisfied Paul. He relaxed in his chair over brandy. Marie didn’t look any happier than she had all day.

Cord had decided to tell his sister they’d leave in the morning and let her at least go to bed with that much peace of mind when Paul spoke. “I can tell you two are reluctant to speak of what brought you here, and I want you to know I’ve put my curiosity aside. We won’t mention it again, but tell us, how are Frank and Ephraim and the rest of the family?”

Anne had abandoned any ladylike poses and curled up in the big chair like a contented kitten. She gazed at Paul solemnly, her eyes still looking large in her face. “You don’t have to contain your curiosity, Paul. I’m willing to tell the tale now. I just needed some time. To understand it you have to know how we got married first. Did Martha write you about that?”

Paul exchanged a quick glance with Marie. “A little. Somehow I think there’s more to it than what she wrote.”

“Let me tell you about that first then.”

Through half-closed eyes Cord watched them, Marie stiff and unhappy, Paul eagerly listening, and Anne with expressions flitting across her face as she talked, hands fluttering, voice rising and falling in what seemed to him a musical lilt. She told it well. Leaving out a lot of the ugliest details, she still gave them a feel of what it had been like, the seeming inevitably of death, the worse pain of not dying but living.

There were occasional exclamations from Paul, but Marie said nothing until Anne got to Frank and Ephraim’s first visit. Suddenly Marie was upright in the chair, wide-eyed, unbelieving. “
You
ran
Frank
out of the house?”

“Frank and Ephraim. They made me so angry. You should have heard them. I was trying to explain, and they told me to shut up I was too stupid to listen to. They’re probably lucky I didn’t shoot them. I was that mad.”

Marie started to laugh then, no polite titter, but a real laugh that soon had her holding her sides. “Oh, my, I’d give anything in the world to have seen that. Frank….” She dissolved into more paroxysms of laughter.

Cord had never expected to see Marie again, much less hear her laugh. It sounded good, very good.

Anne finished that part of her story with the first trip to town, and then mentioned the fight in the spring. She looked at Cord, “Did you know my father paid those men? They were supposed to take me and kill you or leave you in no condition to do anything about it.”

He shook his head. “He admit that to you?”

“Boasted about it. About how it made him realize he had to do it differently. He was so, so
smug
, so sure of himself.”

“Mm. She who laughs last.”

She smiled for an instant but then said, “We’re not going to be laughing are we? They’ll have filed charges against you before we were out of Chicago. We’re going to have to run, aren’t we?”

He’d hoped it would take her a while to come to that, but should have known she’d figure it out pretty quickly. “We’d have to go anyway. It’s either kill your father or go, and if I didn’t kill him over this I’m not going to.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and began telling Paul and Marie the story. When she got to where they were all in the library in Chicago, she stopped.

Without urging, Cord told of returning from town with Frank, getting Frank to agree to send Riley, and then realizing the note had to be a forgery. He told of his talk with Rob over the whiskey bottle and of the decision to ride to Denver. The ride itself he glossed over in a sentence.

In Chicago it had been easy to find a cab driver to help for enough money. In fact the man entered into the spirit of things and advised Cord to enter the house from the back. He said the windows and doors the servants used might not be secured, and sure enough, there had been an unlocked window off the kitchen. Cord had expected Anne to be confined in a bedroom, attic, or basement, but heard voices in the library as he stole through the house.

He stopped there, giving Anne a nod that told her to finish the story, which she did in a few sentences.

Marie was no longer looking withdrawn and angry. Paul was plainly indignant on their behalf. “And you think now they’ll try to have you arrested? They won’t be able to make charges stick.”

Cord drawled, “Don’t have to. Probably wouldn’t be too safe in prison waiting for trial if Mrs. Wainwright and Wells put me there.”

Paul sat frowning. “What were the papers the judge didn’t want you to have?”

Cord shrugged. “Never looked at them. I only took them because he seemed so fond of them. They’re still in my coat.”

“Do you mind if I look at them?”

After Cord fetched the papers, Paul read them all before looking up. “Small wonder he was frightened. You aren’t going to have to worry about arrest or anything else from these people. If you want to, you can have the lot of them in prison for the rest of their natural lives.”

Anne uncurled and sat on the edge of her chair. “Explain please.”

“Gladly. First, there’s a letter from Mrs. Wainwright’s lawyer, a Bruce Abbott. It sets forth exactly what she directed him to do and advises her of exactly how it’s illegal and what the consequences would be if they were caught.”

“She’ll say she never saw the letter.”

“Yes, but
he’ll
have to testify to the truth to save himself. Then they have all the documents - to have you committed, to have the marriage annulled. The most damning thing is they signed these documents. There has to be a court hearing, Anne, and there wasn’t, and the judge signed these papers already. Your father signed an annulment petition as your guardian, but there hadn’t been a hearing appointing him yet.”

“Can’t they just say there was a court hearing?”

“No. There are too many people involved - court clerks, secretaries. These papers are pretty clear evidence that they were conspiring. And if your mother, your brother, or Abbott would tell the truth - they kidnapped you, and what they were going to do to you…. There isn’t a judge or jury in the country that wouldn’t want to hang them and end up throwing the book at them.”

Paul looked from one to the other. “My suggestion is that you allow me to put these in my safe and that tomorrow morning we send some telegrams. If they were worried about Ephraim, it would be good for them to hear from another lawyer, and we might as well let them know as soon as possible that you know what these papers represent and what you can do with them.”

Cord exchanged a long look with Anne. Then he turned to Paul, “We aren’t going back to Chicago for a trial, so it isn’t a matter of getting them jailed. Can you use those papers to get any charges against me dropped?”

Paul nodded grimly. “You bet I can.”

Standing then and stretching, Cord said to Marie, “I know you don’t want us here. We’ll see about a hotel tomorrow and take a train home as soon as we can.”

She gave him a genuine smile. “If I had a gun, I’d have shot you that first day, but it seems the servants are accepting you’re the son of an old friend of Paul’s. I’d like you to stay a while - really.”

She surprised him, but even after all the years he knew her well enough to see she meant it.

Before they went to bed, Anne insisted on visiting Keeper once more, holding the sugar in the horse’s unwilling mouth until it dissolved. As they left the barn Cord looked back and saw the horse’s haggard, drooping outline in the moonlight. Tomorrow he would have to find a way to visit the barn by himself - with a gun.