Teresa Medeiros (23 page)

Drew recognized Esmerelda immediately. Her solemn eyes still held that poignant hint of wistfulness that gave her perfectly ordinary features the promise of extraordinary beauty.

He also recognized the plump, dark-eyed child in her arms. A child who had grown into a man who called himself Black Bart and, according to Thaddeus Winstead, U.S. Marshal, had traded playing with toy trains for robbing real ones. Drew leaned back in his chair to stroke his mustache. So Bartholomew Fine had a sister after all. What would Billy make of that? He stole a brief look at Anne Hastings. The one thing Billy never could tolerate, aside from a weeping woman, was a woman meddling in his business. And Winstead’s offer had made both Bartholomew and Esmerelda Fine his business.

Until Drew lifted his gaze to Anne’s hopeful eyes, he hadn’t realized how much he would hate lying to her. He sensed that she was not a woman to forgive easily. Or ever. Snapping the locket shut, he shoved it back across the desk at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, and this time he meant it. “I’ve never seen your niece before.”

“Oh.” That single syllable was more a sigh than an exclamation. It took Anne Hastings a moment to gather both her composure and her belongings. She finally rose from the chair, giving him a rueful smile that was a weary echo of Esmerelda’s. “I’m quite sorry to have troubled you, Sheriff McGuire. Thank you for your time.”

Thinking only to be polite, Drew took the hand she offered. It was surprisingly soft, surprisingly white—a lady’s hand. As their eyes met—his troubled, hers startled—he couldn’t help but linger over it, tenderly caressing her knuckles with his thumb.

The door to his office flew open. Anne snatched her
hand back, flushing like a fifteen-year-old caught allowing an indiscreet suitor to steal a kiss.

Oblivious to her discomfiture, Reginald came storming in, his bald pate pink with excitement. He was waving a sealed envelope as if it were a battle flag.

“We’re not too late, Anne. She was here! Our girl was here only three days ago!” He clutched the envelope to his chest. “Such a bold girl! Such a brave girl! It seems she fired a pistol at that dastardly outlaw and spent the afternoon confined in this very jail.”

Anne slowly swiveled her head to give the man seated behind the desk a look that should have melted the set of iron keys hanging on a peg behind the desk. Drew suddenly took it into his head to examine his well-manicured fingernails.

Reginald was beaming like an idiot. “She left me a letter at the hotel desk. Can you imagine that? A letter for me! A cold and unforgiving ogre of a man if ever there was one!”

He tried to open the missive, but his hands were trembling with fear and eagerness, just as they always did at the arrival of one of his granddaughter’s letters.

Growing impatient with his fumbling, Anne snapped, “For God’s sake, Reggie, give it here.”

He meekly obeyed, unaccustomed to being told what to do by his dutiful sister. Anne broke the seal with her fingernail and unfolded the letter.

“ ‘Lord Wyndham,’ ” she read, already alarmed by the untidy scrawl that was so out of character for her painstaking niece. “ ‘It is with great trepidation and no little regret that I am writing to inform you that due to your enduring neglect and indifference, I have been forced to barter my virtue to a ruthless desperado.’ “

The sheriff made a noise that sounded suspiciously like
a laugh, but when Anne whipped her head around to give him another one of those basilisk’s glares, he choked it into a cough.

She returned her attention to the letter. “ ‘I trust you will suffer no distress on my behalf since you never have before. Ever your devoted granddaughter … Esmerelda Fine.’ ”

Anne stood in stunned silence, trying to absorb her niece’s message. Reginald gently took the letter from her hand and pressed it to his lips, closing his eyes.

Touched by the rare display of emotion, Anne squeezed his shoulder. “What is it, Reggie? Does she remind you of Lisbeth?”

“No.” He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and sniffled into it with fastidious care. When he opened his eyes, they were bright with unshed tears and brimming with tender affection. “She reminds me of me.”

Zoe Darling was as good as her word. During the week that her son hovered in that misty netherworld between life and death, she never lifted a finger to nurse him.

Although she tended his mare without complaint, her only concession to Billy’s presence in her house came the very first night. After Esmerelda had gotten him settled in the wooden bedstead in the back bedroom with an anxious Sadie draped across his feet, she went to drag her trunk and violin case back to the house. When she returned, she found a worn nightshirt neatly folded on the floor outside Billy’s door. Esmerelda had fingered the faded cotton, wondering if it had once belonged to Billy’s father.

While Billy battled the twin demons of blood loss and fever, the two women shared the small house, never speaking and rarely exchanging so much as a glance. Loath to ask for help, Esmerelda soon learned to pump her own water
from the well so she could wash out Billy’s sweat-soaked sheets and nightshirt. After only a few days of wringing them out with her bare hands before dragging them outside to dry, she began to understand how Zoe had developed the ropes of sinew in her mammoth arms.

Desperation made Esmerelda cunning. One afternoon she watched from the window of the timber-framed room that served as both kitchen and parlor while Zoe stalked a hapless chicken around the weed-choked yard. Several minutes later, the woman strode into the house and slapped the freshly plucked and dressed bird on the table.

While once she might have grimaced at such a spectacle, Esmerelda waited until Billy’s mother had lumbered back out the door, then swiped the naked bird and plopped it into a pot of water she’d already set to boiling. When Zoe’s shadow again darkened the stoop, Esmerelda was ladling steaming broth into a bowl for Billy and glibly humming beneath her breath. Snorting like an enraged bull, Zoe swung around and stomped back out to the yard to strangle another chicken for her own supper. Esmerelda suspected the woman would have rather crushed her own scrawny neck between those powerful fingers.

Twice, in the still, dark hours between midnight and dawn, while Esmerelda napped in the slat-backed rocker she’d drawn next to Billy’s bed, she drifted out of a fitful sleep to glimpse a shadow at the bedroom door. From her place at Billy’s feet, Sadie would lift her head to gaze solemnly at the door. Before Esmerelda could blink the fog of sleep from her eyes, the shadow was gone, convincing her that she must have been dreaming. Surely it would be impossible for a woman of Zoe’s size to move so quietly.

After six days of unconsciousness, Billy took a turn for the worse.

As darkness fell on that humid August night, his fever
began to climb. Although the heat in the room was stifling, his teeth chattered as if he were buried in a snowdrift. He couldn’t even unclench them long enough to swallow the drops of water Esmerelda struggled to spoon down his throat. As his shivering worsened, she piled all the quilts she could find on him, but his long limbs soon began to thrash and hurl them away.

He finally settled into an unnatural stillness more terrifying than anything that had gone before. Fighting despair, Esmerelda smoothed his damp hair from his brow. His skin was so hot it seemed to scorch her palm.

Esmerelda knew what death looked like. She knew the waxen cast of its skin and the arduous rhythm of its breath. She knew the bitter taste it left in your mouth when it had passed by, taking those you loved against their will and yours.

A fragile thread of hope wound through her despair. She had sent death begging once before when God had answered her tearful pleas by sparing Bartholomew’s life. Perhaps she could do it again. Clutching Billy’s limp hand in hers, she sank to her knees beside the bed and buried her brow against the bedclothes.

Prayers had always flowed easily from Esmerelda’s lips, but this time eloquence deserted her. She would have gladly bargained with God, but wasn’t sure she had anything of worth left to offer him. After several moments of agonizing silence, she could manage nothing more than a clumsy, whispered, “Please, God … oh, please …”

A hand fell on her shoulder. She slowly turned her head, believing for a dazed moment that her prayer had been answered. But the fingers curled around her collarbone weren’t lean and tanned, but broad and spatulate, the nails cracked and seamed with dirt.

In Zoe Darling’s other hand was a Bible, its black binding
creased with age. “Go on and take it,” the woman said, nodding toward the bed. “It’s his.”

Esmerelda reluctantly untangled her fingers from Billy’s and took the book. To her surprise, his mother sank into the rocking chair. The floor creaked beneath her weight as she began to rock. Esmerelda gazed up at her through a blur of unshed tears.

“Billy was the first Darlin’ who ever learnt himself to read.” Although the woman’s voice was matter-of-fact, Esmerelda would have almost sworn she glimpsed a trace of tenderness on those rough-hewn features. “When we lived in Missoura, he used to carve whistles and trade them to passing peddlers for books. But his brothers always laughed at him. They said readin’ was for girls. They used to steal his books when he weren’t around and burn ’em in the old cistern behind the house.”

A bittersweet pang tightened Esmerelda’s throat. She remembered Billy’s peculiar behavior when she had discovered his stash of books back at the brothel, books painstakingly inscribed with his name. He had even gone so far as to deny owning them, as if a love of reading were something to be ashamed of.

Zoe nodded. “It was my idea to give him the family Bible. My Jasper was always mean as a baby cottonmouth, but even he knew better than to burn the Good Book.”

Esmerelda opened the Bible and gently ruffled through the pages. They were so thin and fragile as to be almost transparent. She could see Billy as a boy, the burnished gold of his hair gleaming in the candlelight as he inclined his head and patiently sounded out the words on these pages. Stricken by the image, she let the book fall shut in her lap.

Zoe Darling rose from the rocking chair, towering over her. “I thought it might give him comfort to hear some of those old stories again. He was always partial to Daniel in
the den of them mountain lions and that King David feller who shot that giant right betwixt the eyes.”

As Zoe moved toward the bed, Esmerelda held her breath. The woman stretched out her hand, leaving it hovering over her son’s cheek. Her fingers slowly unfurled like the petals of some homely wildflower that hadn’t felt the touch of the sun for a very long time. But before her calloused fingertips could brush his burning skin, she closed them into a rigid fist.

“When he left here,” she said softly, “I knew there was a grave out there somewhere with his name already on it.” She swung around to give Esmerelda a probing look. “Do you know what they used to carve on the crosses durin’ the war if a boy’s face had been blown clean off by a cannonball or there just weren’t no one left alive after a battle who knew his name?”

Esmerelda shook her head.

Zoe’s eyes were dark and bitter. “ ‘Somebody’s Darlin’.’ ”

Somebody’s Darling
. Esmerelda shivered to imagine Billy lying there in one of those shallow graves—nameless and mourned only by those who would never know how, when, or where he fell.

“But he didn’t end up in that grave,” she said fiercely. “And he’s not going to now.”

Zoe gazed at her with blunt pity. “You his wife?”

Fighting an absurd longing to nod, Esmerelda whispered, “No. I’m …”
His friend? His employer? The bane of his existence?
Since only the latter seemed appropriate, Esmerelda simply trailed off into silence.

Zoe Darling shook a finger at her. “Then don’t be lookin’ on his nakedness, gal. It ain’t fittin’.”

An incredulous sob of laughter escaped Esmerelda. Then, moving as soundlessly as she’d come, the woman was gone, leaving Esmerelda alone with her son.

She sat there on the floor for a long time, hugging the tattered book to her breast and listening to the labored sighs of Billy’s breathing. Despite her bold words, her pious and practical nature urged her to return to her knees and pray that God would forgive the sins of William Darling and give his restless soul a gentle passage into heaven.

Esmerelda rose to her knees. She hesitated for a moment, then crawled into the bed next to Billy, dislodging a disgruntled Sadie. Gingerly resting her head on his shoulder, she opened the Bible to the Book of Daniel and began to read.

When Esmerelda opened her eyes the next morning to find Billy gazing into them, it startled her so badly she shrieked and rolled right out of the bed, landing on an equally startled Sadie.

She was still lying on her back and clutching her pounding heart when Billy’s head appeared over the side of the bed. A lock of hair dangled in his narrowed eyes. “Did you really call my ma a spiteful old hag?”

Esmerelda winced at the memory. “I’m afraid so,” she croaked, hoarse from reading aloud to him until she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber near dawn. “I’ve always been afflicted with a sharp temper. That’s precisely why I struggle to guard it with such care.”