The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (14 page)

Cherry shook her head and went on braiding Patty’s nut-brown hair. The Beechfields coachman had taught her how to braid horse manes in six different patterns, and Patty’s pretty mane felt no different to her fingers. Perhaps a bit less coarse. “I’m not walking out with Jared or anyone,” she said firmly. 

“Well whyever not?” Patty had the easy complacency of a woman who has caught her man and thinks she can help everyone around her do the same. “He’s a fine man. A bit quiet and keeps to himself, but so do you. And you both looked pretty happy out there in the hall, making love like a pair of savages on my wedding veil.”

Her tone was a little aggrieved at the last. The satin trimming had a crease in it that could not be removed. Cherry had told her that no one would notice, but Patty knew about it, and that was enough. 

Cherry sighed. “I’m not looking for a husband, Patty. And neither is he. I haven’t even seen him in two months, you know. And then the first thing he does is fall on top of me and kiss me? I’m not sure that was a proposal of marriage.”

“I’m not sure what else it could be,” Patty observed thoughtfully. “Besides clumsy. But of course you need a husband!” She went on, voice aggrieved. “I thought that was why you came out here! That’s why
all
the women come out here!”

“I came to build a home for my son. I’m quite certain I told you that.”

“Well of course you wouldn’t have
said
… But Cherry, how will you farm a homestead alone? And winter will be coming on… You’ll be all alone out there for goodness knows how long if we have a very bad winter… Anything could happen!” She turned in the chair and looked up at Cherry beseechingly. “You really have to let Jared court you!”

Cherry’s lips tightened momentarily. She wasn’t sure why the words should upset her. It certainly wasn’t Patty’s understandable conviction that Cherry had come west in search of a man. It
certainly
wasn’t that she wanted Jared’s intentions to be… well, that she wanted him to
have
intentions at all! She wasn’t in love with him, after all. She had been in love with Edward. And Edward was dead. “It’s not a question of
letting.
He has never indicated that he wished to
court
me,” she said stiffly. “And I shall turn him down if he asks,” she added, because it felt honorable and right, despite the way her heart seemed to drop to her shoes at the very thought of turning him down.
 

“Oh, Cherry, why?” Patty fairly moaned the words, and Cherry felt horribly guilty that Patty should be so upset an hour before her wedding. She went to sit on the bed, and when Patty followed, she took the girl’s cold hands in her own.

“Listen to me,” she said gently. “In an hour’s time you are going to wed the man you love, and you shall be the happiest girl in the world.” She privately hoped this was not an exaggeration. Matt was a sweet man, and Patty a sweet girl. Surely that was all that was needed. “I know you would wish that for me, and you have a sweet heart and I love you for it. But you must understand: I have already had all of that. And now that he is gone, I cannot have it again. My turn has come and gone.”

She was certain it must be so, even though the words seemed to tear at her heart. There would be no courtship in her future. Not with Jared, or with anyone else.
 

But for all her resolutions, Cherry had not realized one very vital fact: courtship in London and courtship in Bradshaw were two very different things, and she would not have an opportunity to deny Jared the right to court her. Right from the beginning of the wedding ceremony, Cherry could feel Jared’s eyes burning upon her. She could not look at him — she would not look at him — but she knew what she would see: those storm-blue eyes fastened upon hers with a hunger that would set her body ablaze. And she could not risk the sort of weak-kneed trembling such desire would awaken in her, not standing there in the Mayfield parlor, watching her best friend say her wedding vows.

The wedding itself was a pretty little affair, not half as elegant as Mrs. Mayfield would have liked, since there were altogether too many cowboys in her parlor, and still more after the ceremony, carousing like savages in the beautiful tents she had ordered from back East and had raised up in the back garden. She had been quietly horrified when Miss Rose had arrived for the festivities, accompanied by Big Pete who was smiling up at her like a pug dog at his mistress (his nose had never really recovered its shape after Little Pete had thrown him through the Professor’s bar), and she was
vocally
horrified when Little Pete turned up three sheets to the wind and started plucking all of her late roses from the flower-beds and flinging them at Big Pete while shouting that Miss Rose loved him best.
 

But Patty had not been at all dismayed; she had slipped over to Little Pete and said a few words in his ear, and easily accomplished what all of Mrs. Mayfield’s harsh braying could not, and Little Pete had blushed and apologized and gone on his way. And then Big Pete had run after him and apologized as well for being such a terrible friend since he had fallen in love with Miss Rose. The whole scene had been very touching. Cherry herself had been impressed by the skill with which Patty managed the most rough-and-tumble of all the rough-and-tumble men of Bradshaw. She was a prairie girl, through and through, even if she’d been born in Minnesota, and even if her mother had never gotten over leaving the civilized environs of Philadelphia. Cherry had secretly wished that she could do the same as Patty, and not fall into the same traps as her mother, ever longing for the comforts of an old home.

But there was so much in Bradshaw and the prairie to love, after all, her son was part of this life, not of England, and so was her darling spotted horse and her friendship with Patty and… and… and Jared. She admitted it then and there, watching him from across the grass of the Mayfield’s big back garden. He was standing next to Matt, clapping him on the back, congratulating him on his wedding, and then… he looked across the garden, through the throng of well-wishers and merry-makers, and his eyes locked with hers for the first time since their kiss in the upstairs hall.

Cherry stood rigid, but her mind was ablaze and her body — well, there were parts of her body that were equally ablaze. They stood that way for a long moment, while the sounds of the party and Mrs. Mayfield’s protests and Patty’s laughter faded away to nothing, utterly absorbed with one another, and then Cherry felt a tug on her skirt, and she bent down to see the flower that Little Edward had brought her, thinking as she did so that if it were not for this darling little boy, she might have made the mistake of going over to talk to him. “It’s lovely, darling,” she breathed into his ear. “You’re lovely, too.”

But she was trembling, and her heart was racing. And she could not help but wonder if Jared’s heart was as troubled as hers. When she lifted her eyes again, there he was still watching her, and she thought she knew.
 

And so the fuse was lit, and they could neither of them deny it, though they would not have said anything aloud. Two broken hearts do not speak their secrets easily. But things crept along in their own time. If courtship in London was a brazen thing, done in front of God and Men, Mothers and Fathers, Peers and Chaperones, with a carefully choreographed dance of reels and drives, waltzes and flowers, and a few words with the lady’s father in the latter gentleman’s library to settle the arrangement, the courtship of Jared Reese, bachelor, and Charlotte Beacham, widow, was a slow, secretive thing, a blossom peeking shyly out of a dark crevice in an early uncertain spring, and Patty Mayfield Barnsley did not say a word, despite being simply bursting with the gossip, not even to her darling Matt. And darling Matt was so delightfully unobservant about that sort of thing, he didn’t even realize it was going on right before his very eyes, in his very house.

***

It happened like this: after the wedding, Patty was set on the tradition of having Cherry over for tea once a week. She was madly in love with her English friend, with her accent, and her dresses, and her mysterious history back in that land of fairy tales and castles that Patty’s grandparents had so foolishly forsworn, coming to a country with no princes to fall in love with her and make her into royalty. Patty had often, growing up, read her books of fairy tales and lamented that she would never kiss a frog that was secretly a prince; there were scarcely any frogs in these dry parts, anyhow, and the ones that were here would surely not have emigrated from their royal ponds and come all the way to the desolate prairies in search of their true love’s kiss. These things were reserved for the lucky girls who had stayed home, in their rightful place, as milkmaids and goose-girls in an indistinct land of frequent rains and green hills. Patty was certain of it.

She had never lost her anglophilia, and she was endlessly fascinated that Charlotte Beacham had abandoned her own chances at a prince and come to America. Oh, sure, she had already been married, and widowed, and was clearly deeply affected by her husband’s death. But all that had surely gone out the window when she had been lying under Jared on Patty’s upstairs landing, wrapped in Patty’s wedding veil, kissing him so passionately. Patty was immediately struck with an Idea, and Patty’s tenacious mind was not going to let go of that Idea, no matter how unlikely it might seem to everyone else in Bradshaw. She was going to see that the English princess kissed her American frog, again and again, and if he turned into a prince, so much the better… but Patty had grown old enough, and wise enough, in her own love affair to know that sometimes love makes up the difference between a frog and a prince.

And so the afternoon tea became a weekly ritual, with the forced addition of Matt
and
Jared.

“I don’t want to sit to tea like some sort of dandy,” Matt had groused. They had been married all of seven days and already she had instituted a number of rules he had not expected, like taking off his boots when he came into their fresh, sawdust-smelling little house on the outskirt of town, and taking his shirt clean off to wash all over himself before supper. Tea parties was really taking it too far. “I have work to do.”

That was a fib. Matt, officially retired from the cowboy life, was laboring gently at being a carpenter, but he mainly sat and admired pieces of wood, and thought about what he was going to do with them. Patty had kept an allowance from her father that was more than generous, and the money Matt had saved from cattle driving and few investments Jared had steered him into — since he had never paid any mind to earthly possessions, he had an impressive bank balance that he simply never thought about — was plenty for them to live on while he day-dreamed. One of these days, Patty supposed, he would get around to building a nice cabinet or a set of chairs and they could send them back east on the train to be sold. She wasn’t going to rush them. She liked her Matt to be a dreamer. But she wasn’t going to let him off the hook with the Wednesday afternoon tea party.

“You’ll be there, Matthew Barnsley, because Jared is your good friend and Mrs. Beacham is mine,” she announced fiercely, and slammed a few pots around in the washtub for good measure, to show that she was deadly in earnest.

“I don’t see what the two things have to do with each other,” Matt complained. He picked at a toenail with a pocketknife, then stopped abruptly, presumably remembering a recently wifely edict against such behavior. He pocketed the knife and sighed deeply, eyeing the offending toenail. Patty was unperturbed by his disappointment. She knew the toenail would keep until he was safely alone in his workshop tomorrow morning. She had no laws governing the workshop. Matt continued in an aggrieved tone: “Why on earth should Jared come to tea? That’s not like him.”

“Well, he’s accepted the invitation, so I guess you can just ask him when he gets here.” Patty had especially enjoyed Jared’s fumbling thanks when she had way-laid him in the Central Emporium, as he fished through a drawer full of nails, and pointedly invited him to tea with herself and Mrs. Beacham. “Mrs. Beacham?” he’d asked, as if he’d never heard of such a personage before. “Oh! Oh… I see… well… well yes, thank you, Miss Mayfield. Mrs. Barnsley.” The whole thing had been too much fun. Patty was enjoying being a match-maker; Matt would just have to sacrifice his happiness for an hour on a Wednesday afternoon so that she could pursue her own line of work, that was all. Everyone would be happier for it in the end.

“I don’t know what to do at a tea party,” Matt grumbled.

“That’s ridiculous.” Patty was unsympathetic. She opened the kitchen door and flung out the greasy dish-water. “I’ll make you a cup of tea right now, and you can practice drinking it. That’s about all you have to do.”
 

***

Two weeks after the wedding, and the kiss, and the smoldering silence that had followed it, Cherry was setting her bonnet on the bed in Patty’s spare room and placing her light woolen coat next to it. The day was gray and the clouds were swollen; the coldness of fall rains seemed to be inevitable, and Cherry had shivered when she looked out the shanty’s meagre little panes of glass, glass she had scrimped for because she could not bear boarding up her window for winter. She could scarcely stand to look at the brown prairie and the leaden sky. Winter was coming, and she had not made arrangements to stay in town. There were rooms at the boarding-house, or she could have stayed with Patty, making do with their spare room, while the winter storms she had heard so much about raged outside the snug little house.
 

But she could not quite come to terms with living amongst other people yet. She and Little Edward made such a cozy couple, alone on the homestead. The Jorgenson girl, so silent, was hardly a real presence to her, although she supposed Little Edward might have thought differently of his playmate. Alone with her memories, she could keep her love for Edward alive and present in her thoughts at all times, something she was newly resolved to do. And that was all she had left of him; was it any wonder that she wasn’t willing to give it up? Was it any wonder that she tried to tamp down those dangerous feelings for Jared? The very kisses that they had shared were disrespectful to Edward.