The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (31 page)

“You’ll make fine horses out of them,” Mr. Morrison said with a smile. He looked over Percival with a knowing eye. “That horse didn’t know his head from his tail when you first got him. Look at him now! He’s the envy of the county, and it’s only been a month.”

“Well.” Cherry smiled with pleasure at the compliment. “He
is
a very clever horse, and he’s kind. That helps. You can do more with a kind horse than a stubborn one, you know. You’ll want to be very careful choosing the horses you bring into the stable.”

“Oh, I shan’t stir a step without consulting with you, Mrs. Beacham. It’s clear you know horseflesh. And we have plenty of time. It will be summer before we are ready to open for business. Will you come and meet with me this evening to discuss a timeframe?”

Cherry agreed to return to the lumber-yard office after tea and bid Mr. Morrison farewell. She let Percival trot, arching his neck and stepping out with his big, elegant stride, as they went riding on through town, too flush with happiness for a mere plodding walk. What had just been a simple canter along the railroad grade had turned into a very profitable meeting! Mr. Morrison had astonished her when he told her that he wanted her to train horses for Bradshaw’s new livery. “I am lucky to have such a lovely horse as you,” she told Percival, stroking his hot neck. “Goodness, but you’ve worked up a sweat! You have too much winter coat for this mild season we have been having, my dearest. We had better take it easy and walk for a while.”

At Patty’s house, just outside of town, she stopped and whistled, as shrill as a magpie and as boyish as a rooster. Patty burst out of the house with Eddie all bundled up in his coat and scarf and hat. “I suppose you want to put my darling boy up on that monster now?” Patty called, and Cherry laughed and nodded. Patty shook her head and took Eddie by the hand, helping him negotiate the front porch steps one by one.

What a big boy he was, to be walking and managing the stairs! Cherry watched him with a delight so great that she thought her heart would burst. Really, she could want for nothing in the world these days. Dear friends, a healthy, beautiful son, and now a partnership in a business that would let her hire help on the claim and keep her family clothed and fed not just meagerly, but
comfortably.
She didn’t know that she could take any more good news today! It was all just…
splendid,
as Patty would say.

Patty handed up Eddie with a grunt. “You’re getting heavy, darling boy,” she told him, and he laughed.

“Paddy stwong,” he announced. “Big guwl Paddy.”

“Patty
is
a big strong girl, isn’t she!” Cherry settled him in front of her and wrapped his fists around the saddle horn.
 

“Oh, you stop that… both of you,” Patty laughed. “And be home for tea. I’m making apple dumplings.” She patted Eddie’s knee lingeringly and then went marching back into the house, unbuttoning her coat as she went.
 

“Apple dumplings!” Cherry nudged Percival into a slow walk, keeping her reins quite short in case he took it into his head to spook at a jackrabbit, as he had done last week. The cold dry air they’d had for the past few weeks had the horse in high spirits. “We are quite spoilt, Eddie darling. Mother doesn’t even know how to
make
apple dumplings.”

“Apples,” Eddie purred in delight. “Pewcy likes apples.”

“He does like apples, but that’s our secret, remember? Mustn’t tell Aunt Patty we fed her apples to the horse. It was very naughty of us.” Cherry smiled, remembering sneaking several apples out of the barrel in the cellar and spoiling all the horses in the stable with treats. Eddie had loved feeling their whiskers prick his palms as they lipped the fruit from his hands. She watched him take one hand from its death-grip on the saddle-horn and take a fistful of Percival’s black mane, stroking the hairs back and forth between his fingers. It was Cherry’s fondest wish to have a son as talented and fond of horses as she was. And as his father had been. Edward had adored horses as much as Cherry did. It looked like Eddie would follow in their footsteps.
 

They rode out into the prairie, the dead grass crackling beneath Percival’s hooves, until the wind from the northwest simply grew too stiff for Cherry’s liking, and she turned the horse back towards Bradshaw. The little town was a gray huddle in the vast expanse of grasslands, but it made her smile. Bradshaw, however tiny, however ramshackle, however radically different from her English life it was, had welcomed her in ways she could never have expected.

Then her gaze turned northward, and she tightened her jaw, swallowing at the little lump that rose in her throat. Was he up there? She didn’t know anymore. Part of her thought that if Jared had been honest, he’d have come back to town, at least to visit her, just once in the past weeks. In her heart, however angry she was with him for leaving her without a mention of their engagement, she couldn’t believe he’d decided to hole up at his claim instead of facing up to the promise he’d made her. Even if was only to break things off. It didn’t seem like him to run away like that.
 

For a moment, her hands tightened on the left rein, then relaxed again. Even if she had thought it would be a good idea to ride out to the claim, she had Eddie with her, and it was far too long and cold a ride to take him all the way out there and back again. And she had her meeting with Mr. Morrison this afternoon. Back to Bradshaw, then. Whatever happened with Jared, she had a future there that was independent of her failed relationship with him.

“Home for apple dumplings!” she told Eddie.

“Huwwy!” he cried. “Giddup, Pewcy!”

Cherry laughed and kissed his hatted little head. Everything, at last, was going to be just fine.

***

Cherry came tripping out of the lumber-yard office with a spring in her step. It was getting dark already, and there was a sharpness to the air that she thought she recognized. “Is it going to snow?” she asked Mr. Morrison, who was walking her home in deference to the early nightfall.

“I believe so,” he said thoughtfully, looking up the street and towards the northern horizon. “There’s a cloudbank to the north, see there?” He pointed; just visible in the gloom was a dark ridge of cloud, far off over the prairie. “That’s where all our nasty weather comes from. Hope we aren’t getting a blizzard. Lord knows we’re due for one.”

“A blizzard…” Cherry had never seen a blizzard. Her winter in New York had seen a few snowfalls; and a gentle snowfall was the most she had ever known at home in England. But she’d
heard
all sorts of frightening stories, about twelve-foot snowdrifts, and people making tunnels to get from house to house, or to the store. “I hope not,” she said at last.
 

“We’ll get one sooner or later,” Mr. Morrison said, not very helpfully. He glanced at her face and changed his tone. “It won’t be so very bad. You have provisions enough, and company, and firewood! That’s all you need.”

Cherry nodded. That was true. Here in Bradshaw, she was safe; it was out on the claim where she might have really had to worry about a snowstorm. Her mind, as always, wandered to Jared. Was he out there in his cabin, alone with his hired boy? Would he be safe if they were all snowed-in?

They walked briskly up the road, Cherry’s eyes and thoughts firmly on the cabin she knew lay beyond the horizon. Then, below the frightful cloud that was slowly growing closer, she saw a little movement. A swirl of dust. “What is that?” She pointed to the new cloud. “A dust devil?”
 

Mr. Morrison squinted. “I believe that’s a horse,” he said after a moment. “Someone’s comin’ in to town at a fair clip.”
 

They stood at the end of the street, where Bradshaw met the emptiness of the prairie, and watched the horse grow larger. Cherry’s heart was thudding. If it was Jared, if it was Jared… oh, what would she say? Should she be dismissive? Even curt? Or should she forgive him, forget the past month?

“Who is that?” Mr. Morrison mused. “Looks like just a boy.”

And as the horse grew closer, Cherry could see that he was right. Her heart sank to her boots. It wasn’t Jared galloping into town.
 

“Why… Wilbur!”
 

It
was
Wilbur, Jared’s little hired boy, come galloping into town on the wooly lop-eared mule Jared kept for pulling the wagon and the plow. He pulled up as the mule came close to Cherry and Mr. Morrison, his cheeks red and his eyes bright.

“Wilbur, what’s happening? Is the cabin afire? Is Jared hurt?”
 

He looked at Cherry curiously. “Nah, miss. Jared ain’t here; he’s been over to Opportunity for at least a month. I came in because I saw that blizzard cloud rollin’ in and I don’t want to be alone out there in a blizzard.”

“What about the livestock?” Mr. Morrison asked sternly, while Cherry still stood with her mouth open, trying to deal with the shock of Jared’s whereabouts. “You haven’t just abandoned Mr. Reese’s animals, have you?”

“No sir!” Wilbur shook his head vehemently. “I shut up the cow with enough hay for a week. The chickens and the goats are all set, too. And the cattle at pasture, they worry about themselves. I was ridin’ up, checkin’ on them, and that’s when I knew a bad storm was comin’. They’s all gone to shelter in the bluffs at the north end of the claim.”

“Jared’s in Opportunity?” Cherry asked, in a small, foolish voice, but the men didn’t notice her.

“Good enough,” Mr. Morrison told Wilbur. “Do you have a place to stay?”

Wilbur shook his head. “I was goin’ to Miss Rose’s.”

Cherry found her voice. “Come and stay with us,” she said firmly. He was entirely too young for Miss Rose’s, she thought. Really, Bradshaw needed a hotel that wasn’t a faintly-disguised brothel. And she had a lot more she wanted to discuss with Wilbur. “There’s room in the stables for the mule.”
 

Mr. Morrison was gazing north. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Beacham, I’m just going to hurry home and get my own stock taken care of.”
 

“Of course.” Cherry nodded. “Good night to you, Mr. Morrison. Thank you again for… everything.”
 

He smiled and went hurrying down the dark road towards the lumber-yard, where his own horse and cart waited. Cherry turned to the hired boy, who had slithered down from the tall mule’s back and was watching her expectantly. “Now, Wilbur, let’s get this mule taken care of and you safe and warm inside.” She’d feel better, she thought, when her hands were busy. And she could ask Wilbur a few questions in private.

“What’s that?” Wilbur had turned around and was gazing east, towards the open prairie beyond town. “Another horse?”

Cherry whirled. Not so very far away, a horse was trotting wearily in their direction. She could see his head bobbing hard with every step. “The poor thing is lame. And coming across-country at this time of night… whoever could it be?”

Wilbur frowned. “Sure looks like the roan.”

She looked at him incredulously. “Jared’s roan?”

“Who else has a roan?”

He was right, Cherry realized. That
was
the roan tripping painfully towards them in the dusk. But that wasn’t Jared on his back.

“Snow’s gonna hold off until tomorrow,” the man from the livery was saying sagely, and everyone in the saloon was nodding in agreement.
 

“What’s his story?” Jared asked the bar-man, sliding his glass across the counter for a refill. “First he won’t let me take a horse outta town, now he’s prophesyin’ the weather like a goddamn Messiah and everyone’s eating it up.”

Michael, the bar-man, chuckled at Jared’s bad temper. “He’s a weather genius. He’s like a scientist. Or an Indian. Knows the meaning of every cloud in the sky.” He refilled Jared’s glass and pushed it back to him. “You want out of this town real bad all of a sudden.”

“Everyone knows my girl took my horse,” Jared shrugged, as if it wasn’t eating him up inside. He was remembering Prince, and all the stories, people jostling to come up to him on his first night back in Galveston:
“You know that horse you gave her? She ran him into the ground. Broke his leg in the street. It was horrible.”
He hadn’t believed them then, choosing to believe Hope’s sad story that he’d broken his leg kicking his stall wall during a storm, but now he knew it was true. Why else would have of Galveston have wanted to tell him the same sad story?

Such a fool. Poor Roan. He didn’t even bother with the “the” in his name. He was Roan. He was a good horse, and if Jared ever got him back he was going to call him by his name, not just his color.

“That was some ridin’ she did on the way outta here.” Michael didn’t even try to deny he’d been talking about the Hope incident. The out-of-towners’ public lover’s quarrel and the maybe-a-whore’s mad dash out of town while her fella stood in the street and shouted like a madman was the talk of Opportunity. Even the folks who hadn’t seen it were talking about how they’d felt when they’d seen it. It was the social event of the year. “Where you figure she went?”

“I have no idea,” Jared said, and he tossed back the whiskey, savoring the burn in his throat. He did have an idea, he just hoped like hell he was wrong. “I just aim to get back to Bradshaw tomorrow before this damned snow starts falling, put all this behind me once and for all.”

“She looks like a handful,” Michael agreed, shaking his head sympathetically. “Shame about the horse.”

Jared just nodded.
 

***

By the time the roan and his nameless rider had come stumbling up to Wilbur and Cherry, Patty had come out on the porch to see what all the fuss was. “What’s goin’ on out here?” she called, pulling her coat close about her. “Cherry, who’s that coming?”

“I don’t know,” Cherry replied, her voice deceptively calm. Inside her coat pockets, her hands were shaking. Something must have happened to Jared. Why else would someone just show up on his horse?
 

“Hello!” cried a woman’s voice, and they all jumped. A
woman
had come clattering into town on Jared Reese’s horse? Cherry bit down on her lip until the dry skin cracked.