The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (5 page)

Cherry gripped the rough wooden table with both hands; her breath came fast and harsh; she pressed her legs tightly together and could not help but moan against the longing she felt blossoming there, hidden by the stained skirts of her faded dress. But there was no answering touch, there was no one to press hot kisses against her neck and turn her head to press his lips against hers, there was nothing at all but the everlasting winds rattling the loose boards of the shanty, and from outside, a low giggle from the Jorgenson girl as she played with Edward’s son.
 

They had been foolish children together, playing at being adults, and then she had been forced into true adulthood and he had died.
 

Cherry pursed her lips tightly and shook herself from top to bottom, like a horse after a roll, to cast away the goosebumps and the shivers left over from the memory of Edward, the phantom hands upon her skin and the phantom lips upon her mouth. Reality was the homestead, building the farm, raising up Little Edward to be a credit to his father. And — she smoothed her hands over the stained dress — reality was moving as gracefully as possible into Bradshaw society, such as it was. She was simply going to have to fashion herself a new dress before Patty Mayfield’s party.

And then she wondered if her neighbor would be there.

Her heart started to thud all over again.

Not that she cared, but… and Cherry went to her chest and started pulling out old gowns, looking for one that could pass for fashionable out here on the frontier.

Matt was standing proprietarily close to Patty Mayfield, enjoying the shade of a little clump of cottonwoods that had burst out of the prairie soil alongside a spring that bubbled up from some underground stream. He was trying to figure out what Patty was so upset about. The party looked like it was a success. He looked out at the citizens of Bradshaw, and an assortment of homesteaders and cowboys, who had turned an empty stretch of grassland behind the town’s ragged row of storefronts into a colorful event.

Most had brought along rugs or Indian blankets to spread out in the grass and sit upon. Some had gone a little further. Big Pete, with a great air of significance, was sitting bolt upright next to Miss Rose on a faded brocade couch that had been set upon an old Chinese rug, occasionally refilling her glass with lemonade or taking a turn swinging her paper fan at her pink cheeks. Matt couldn’t help but steal glances at the pair. Big Pete was still walking with a hell of a limp after the thrown-through-the-bar incident but he seemed like he was capable enough of moving around on his own, so why hadn’t he moved out of Miss Rose’s place yet? He nudged Patty Mayfield and nodded at the scene. She peeped over at the couple and giggled.

Nearby, Jared stood alone, back to a tree, tin cup in his hand. The cup was making frequent trips between waist-height and head-height, Matt noticed. Looked like Jared was planning on getting mighty drunk at this party. He’d been like a bear with a sore head for the past two weeks, anyway. Ever since he’d met that neighbor woman of his, the genuine lady. Who, come to think of it, still hadn’t arrived to her own party.

“Where do you reckon the lady is?” he asked Patty innocently.

“I don’t know, Matthew Barnsley!” Patty snapped, and shook her head in exasperation.
 
It was only the tenth or twelfth time he’d asked her. Didn’t he think she was wondering the same thing? “She didn’t send me a telegram to tell me when she was leaving her farm! I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Reckon she might not come?” Matt actually thought this was a pretty likely explanation. No one had really seen the genuine lady but Patty. She was somehow slipping in and out of Bradshaw for supplies without talking to anyone or really being noticed at all. Matt suspected she wasn’t very excited about meeting everyone in Bradshaw the way Patty Mayfield seemed to think she ought to be. Women were strange that way. You never could tell with a woman.

Patty’s face turned red. “Oh, she’ll come. She
promised.
Ladies have honor, you know. That’s very important to them over there in England, honor. Keeping promises and such, it’s like their
religion
.” Patty didn’t stop to consider that keeping promises was, strictly speaking, part of being a Congregationalist as well.
 

“She don’t live in England no more,” Matt observed helpfully. “Maybe she didn’t live like them over there. Maybe she got her own ideas.”

“Matt, just stop talking like a fool,” Patty said testily, and he subsided and went back to watching Big Pete gazing at the imperious Miss Rose like a moon-struck calf.

***

Jared was also watching Big Pete attend to Miss Rose hand and foot, feeling vaguely disgusted by the scene of a man prostrating himself before a woman like that. Women were just too fond of feeling powerful over men,
he
thought. He’d like to see a woman have to beg for it, just once, instead of always getting their own way in everything, instead of taking and taking and taking and never,
ever
giving in return.

Take that neighbor of his, for example. Genuine lady, huh! Genuine
bi—
he stopped the word, mid-thought, he really did. But still! The way she had addressed him, as if he were dirt beneath her feet! When all he had done was check up to make sure she hadn’t been dead! He’d been looking out for her best interests, gone out of
his
way to make sure that the person who hadn’t bothered to introduce himself to his closest neighbor like a
normal
person would have done was alive and well, and he’d felt enough genuine concern and fear over the well-being of his
unknown
neighbor that he’d dismounted from his horse and peered inside the window… all of that and she’d repaid him with threats and physical violence! It was all really too much. He ought to lump that beautiful lunatic in with Hope Sullivan — no, Hope
Townsend —
after all. He’d been crazy, thinking that she was more pleasant than old Hope. She was just as bad. Look at the way she wasn’t even showing up for the party being thrown in her honor! All of Bradshaw here, except the hoity-toity stuck-up guest of honor…

His thoughts might have carried on in a similar vein for the remainder of the afternoon, until he’d put back so much of Patty Mayfield’s potent punch that his thoughts ended abruptly and he woke up the next day with a swollen tongue and a pounding headache, but then the hostess herself was standing before him, an apprehensive looking Matt hanging off her arm. “Jared?” she was asking. “Jared?”

“Miss Mayfield,” Jared replied cordially. He was always a sight more polite when he had knocked back a few. Until he wasn’t.
 

She shook her head. “You and your Misses! I have a favor to ask of you, Jared. The English lady hasn’t come and I’m worried about her. She
promised.
Something must have happened to way-lay her. Matt says you know just where her homestead is. Says you’ve been there. Go and find her and make sure she’s not in some sort of trouble, will you please?”

Jared glared at Matt. Matt smiled back and then glanced quickly down at Patty, as if to make sure she hadn’t seen. And that was when Jared had a thought that surprised him.
Huh
. How long had Matt been sweet on Patty Mayfield?
 

They’d been close as brothers for far too long for Jared to tell him no, even if it was nothing but a useless errand for one more love-struck fool. “I’ll go,” he agreed, twisting his mouth ruefully. “But I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to bring her back with me. She’s a woman knows her own mind, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s what I like about her,” Patty Mayfield declared, although Jared was of the opinion that Patty was more interested in the accent and the aristocracy than the attitude. “She just doesn’t know we all want to be her friends yet, that’s all. Bring her back if you can, tell her the whole town is waiting to welcome her to the county. Tell her it just wouldn’t be…
honorable…
if she kept everyone waiting for no reason.”

Patty, Patty, Patty, Jared thought. Doesn’t know what
honorable
means, either. He doffed his Stetson. “I’ll be going, then.”

The roan was tied up back in town, at a hitching post in front of the general store, and to get there he had to weave his way through the strange assortment of old carpets and Indian blankets and scarred chairs that had been brought out to the open prairie behind the straggling little town to accommodate the revelers. He passed a trio of young boys plucking at guitars and singing cattle drive songs, and for a moment his heart lurched, remembering nights beneath the stars, huddled close to the dwindling fire before it was time to wriggle into the warmth of the bedroll for the night, back before he’d met Hope and had his simple world turned upside down by all her ambition and aspirations and vanity. Back when life was simple and a woman was for warming a boarding-house bed at the end of a long drive, not a distracting upsetting force in his life, keeping him awake at night with his want and his worry and his
what-ifs.
Hope had taken all that away. Hope. He chuckled at the simple irony. He was just tipsy enough to find it funny.
 

There was no getting away from the memories of her, though, and they were no laughing matter, nagging at him as he stuck a boot in the stirrup of his saddle and swung onto the roan’s back, gnawing at him as he rode out of town, out of ear-shot of the music and the laughter and the hum of conversation from the party, up the prairie track that would lead him past his homestead and on to hers, on to that witch with the very credible arm and the very luscious body. Fact was, Hope had sure done a number on him. It had been two years, and the boy she’d once told him was his would be running around that big house outside of Galveston while her cattle baron husband counted his coins by day and climbed on top of her by night. And what if the boy
was
his?
 

He wasn’t. That was all. The boy was the cattle baron’s, Mr. Howard Townsend’s, Esq., and since that was whose house the boy was growing up in, that was as it should be. But
what if,
Jared tormented himself with the question, as he so loved to do.
What if?
 

And he’d never do it again, dammit. Never wonder again, about the fleeting nature of love or the lies of women or the identities of children he might or might not have fathered. They’d laughed together in bed, plotting and planning, how he’d use his savings to buy a hacienda down near the Rio Grande and run their own herds and grow rich, how they’d have a dozen children, starting with this one, this one
right here…
he’d run his hand over her smooth stomach and smiled, thinking that it was all beginning, this grand new life, husband and father and rancher and upstanding citizen, and then suddenly it was all taken away. She’d said it wasn’t true, any of it.
 

And she’d married someone else.

He looked up, and saw that the roan had taken the turning towards the woman’s homestead of his own accord.
 

Damn horse.

***

Cherry flung back the crooked lace curtains with a little groan. He’d come for her, had he? She couldn’t just be left alone out here to sit in her ragged dress and milk her skinny cow? Oh, no, that girl in town had sent an escort to drag her into town, and of course it was
him.

She wasn’t sure why she cared so much. After all, he was nothing but a sneak and a peeping-Tom and a… and a… and a man. That was all Cherry could think of. She had been awake all the night before, and rushed through all her chores that morning in the prospect of riding into town for the party, and then found that once she had pulled her crookedly mended old gown on, she just couldn’t bear the thought of going into Bradshaw and being ogled and stared at by everyone in the county. Her, the guest of honor of a party! In this old dress, that had possibly fit her once before she’d had little Edward! Even without the fuss of a bustle, the fabric strained against her hips. She had been whip-slim, as narrow as a boy, back in England. Having a baby had given her curves; perhaps they were not the worst thing in the world, her hips, but that didn’t mean that a pre-baby dress was going to fit over them and look decent.

And so she looked a fright and here was that cowboy with the roving eye and the smoldering eyes riding up to fetch her, and there was nothing to be done. She simply had the worst luck in the world, that was all.

And more bad luck — that was no more than what she should have expected, of course. Cousin Anne had told her as much, the day that she dragged her trunk downstairs, all alone because Sampson would not help her, finding that his post as Mrs. George Braithwhite’s butler did not extend to helping disgraced English cousins who
would
turn up on doorsteps in… delicate conditions… and expecting to be accorded room and board as if their station still demanded such niceties. Cherry had looked up, red-faced, from the rumpled Persian rug where she had let the trunk sit, in the center of the entrance hall and right in the way of Cousin Anne, who had been making her grand and imperial processional from the breakfast room to the morning room, where she would be able to write her letters and consider her menu and examine the
Lady’s Book
without the bothersome smells of eggs and sausages which had doubtlessly fumigated the other side of the house during her morning repast.
 

Little Edward had been an infant, sleeping angelically in an ancient pram which had been begrudgingly unearthed and carelessly oiled by the coachman’s boy when the child’s arrival in the Braithwhite household appeared at last to be imminent and impossible to avoid. He could not have been a more blameless and perfect babe, pink-cheeked and golden-curled. Cherry, on the other hand, had been disheveled, unkempt,
sweaty,
even, after her travails from the third floor to the first with the great leather-banded steamer trunk. Mrs. Braithwhite,
dear
Cousin Anne as Cherry’s father had been wont to name her, a remnant, Cherry supposed with wonder, of some foggy other time before the older woman’s temper had dissolved into something more like a weasel’s than a doe’s, had gazed upon her dead cousin’s daughter and grandson as if they were something unpleasant dragged onto the rug from a careless visitor’s shoe.