The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (8 page)

“Jared!” Patty exclaimed, and put out one tan hand to pull him closer. She plucked at his plaid shirt. “Where have you been? Mrs. Beacham had to come wandering over here alone! What sort of escort are you, now?”

Jared’s smile hung on grimly. Cherry thought him a very rude man. What was he thinking of? She had made it quite clear she was not interested in conversing with him any further. He had been
insufferable
on the ride in, telling her she was going to have to toughen up! The nerve! She’d show him
tough
, so she would. A Beacham lady was just as tough as any old cowboy. And the day would come when he would look at her farm and he would
eat
his words. Until then, though, she wasn’t much interested in his company. He could just drop that silly smile and mosey right along.
 

Mosey.
Heh. She wondered how that word had insinuated itself into her vocabulary, and how many more silly western words would find themselves falling from her lips? Would it be wiser to avoid local slang, or work to use it? Would it make her seem foolish to say something like ‘
mosey’
? Possibly she would have to just give it a little time. But it was such a fun word. It was going to be interesting, to see what happened to the way that she spoke, and the way that Little Edward grew up speaking, out here amongst these plain people. She would make a study of it. That was what Edward would have done, looked at it scientifically. She was not much of a scientist herself, but there was every chance that Little Edward would take after his father, and regard everything as a potential experiment.

“Mrs. Beacham, I am sorry to hear of your loss.”
 

Cherry blinked and looked down; a small woman, wizened like a plum, hunched like a shepherd’s crook, was turning her head awkwardly to look up at Cherry. The woman smiled, her lips but another fold in a sea of wrinkles, and her dark eyes glistened. Cherry wet her lips. “My loss, madam?”

“You’re a new widow, ain’t ye? Got the new babe at the homestead, they tell me. Left him there, smart, smart…”

There was
nothing
these people didn’t know about her…
nothing.
And she hadn’t told them a thing! “My son, yes, is at home with the Jorgensons’ younger daughter. I am sorry; I have had so many losses that I try to put them out of my mind. Thank you for your sympathy. You are too kind.” Her voice stretched thinly at this last; she knew this kind of woman. There was no question of being
kind.

“Do the grand mucketies not wear widow’s weeds in England no more?” The woman’s smile seemed faintly mocking now.

“My father, who passed just before my husband, requested that I did not,” Cherry lied, letting the slur on her aristocratic heritage slide. “He was not fond of seeing me in black. I was his only child, you see, and we were very close.” And
that
was no lie, at least.

The old woman nodded, an odd sight to see when her head was twisted sideways, more like a shaking of the whole head and body, and Cherry could see that she was unconvinced.
Wonderful,
she thought, biting the inside of her cheek to prevent a grimace.
A suspicious old grannie to turn everyone against me. Is my life to turn into a pantomime?

“Mrs. Beacham was quite right to come to the west and start over again!” Patty Mayfield declared. “We’re going to take real good care of her out here! Bradshaw people takes care of their own!”

Cherry smiled gratefully. “I am sure that I am going to be very happy here, myself and my son,” she agreed. “Everyone has been so kind.”
Excepting you, old woman, and you, cowboy.
She looked pointedly away from Jared, who was standing near Matt, watching her with moody eyes.
 

***

Jared kicked Matt.

“Ow!” Matt complained, and clutched at his shin. “Whaddya do that for? A nice party and you’re comin’ along to kick a fella.”

“Wanted to see if you were still tough enough,” Jared muttered. He had actually just thought that kicking Matt might do something to relieve his feelings, but it really hadn’t done a thing. He still felt mean as a snake and mad as hell, and he didn’t quite know why… but he
thought
it had something to do with his uppity English neighbor, who seemed to be going out of her way to ignore him. And why should he care? Sure, she was pretty… beautiful, even. But she was nasty as a mustang filly. Unbroke. Mean. Free-spirited. Damn. He shook his head.

“Tough enough for what? Dammit!” Matt rubbed at his shin and Patty Mayfield, in a knot of women surrounding the genuine lady, sent a quelling look in his direction. He looked quickly at Jared, who hadn’t missed the exchange.

Jared thought it proved his point, but he just shook his head. “Tough enough to ride plumb to Texas and chase some damn cows,” he answered gruffly, making it up as he went along. “But if you’re gonna complain about a little kick in the shins…”

“Wait.” Matt grabbed Jared’s arm and pulled him away from the little cluster of women, down to the wet stones along the creek-bed. Children throwing pebbles laughed at them and then scattered back into the shade of the cottonwoods. “What gives? I thought you said no to Texas.”

“I been doing some thinking.” Jared shrugged, not looking at the woman who had got him doing all that thinking. “Thought maybe winter here was a bad idea.”

“Maybe you shoulda thought sooner.” Matt sounded completely exasperated. “I’m gettin’ to likin’ Patty here. I don’t know as I want to leave her here to get friendly with anyone else. Winter’s a long time for a girl cooped up with a bunch of other men. Could be she’ll forget all about me. Some fella’ll get off that train and smile at her and she’ll forget I was ever born.”

Jared sighed. One thing he’d always had to deal with, was Matt being ornery and contrary. He was as bad as a damn cow himself. One morning he’s complaining about spending the winter in Bradshaw, the next he’s in love with a Bradshaw girl and can’t leave. “So you changed your mind, is that it?”

“I might have.” Matt looked a bit wily. “I just don’t know.”

Jared decided that he couldn’t take another second of the damned party. Everyone was acting so contrary. Matt in love with Patty Mayfield. The Englishwoman turning up her chin at him for nothing more than making sure she was alive. Jared figured that Bradshaw was just about the most irritating place he had ever been in his life. Texas, with all its disappointments and reminders of heartbreak, was looking mighty appealing right now.

But if Matt wouldn’t go with him…
 

He stomped away, leaving Matt grinning maddeningly, a fool in love, and went across the dips and hollows of the prairie towards the drab clapboard of Bradshaw. A jackrabbit shied up from nearly beneath his boots and went bounding away through the gleaming summer grasses, ears pinned back against its furry skull. Fluttering little birds skimmed away, mouths clenched tight around the hoppers they’d been foraging for in the roots. Further out, he knew, away from their homesteads and their fires and their noise, shy antelope still ran wild beneath an endless dome of blue. He wanted to saddle up the roan and go out and gallop after them. He wondered how he could ever have decided to put down roots and file a claim. Because right now he was pretty sure he couldn’t see it through, couldn’t make it long enough to own the land. Sitting still like that just wasn’t in him. He’d tried it, and it just wasn’t working out.

Jared didn’t want to sit still long enough to have to think.

Cherry saw him leaving, his cream-colored hat a bright spot against the unrelieved emerald of the prairie. She noted that he’d chosen to go south, around the party, so that no one would stop him and talk to him.
 
What an unrefined bear, she thought. What an unpleasant boor. And what a shame that he was her closest neighbor, her closest
English-speaking
neighbor, anyway. She was starved for conversation out there and it would have been nice if Jared had turned out to be the sort of fellow one could visit with, perhaps have a bit of a chat with over a cup of tea. The folk in Bradshaw were not the sort to stand on ceremony if a widow and her neighbor wanted to be social without a chaperone, she supposed. And it would have made such a nice change from the visits with the Jorgensons.

The Jorgensons were lovely people, of course, a golden shining family of five, but not a single one of them spoke a single word of English (although the three youngest went to school each day and seemed to concentrate very hard on what the teacher was saying, so it was to be hoped, Patty Mayfield explained, that one of them would pick up
something)
and visits to them consisted of a great deal of smiling and nodding and the partaking of tea and butter cookies. If Cherry was completely honest with herself, it was the butter cookies that kept her going back. She wasn’t much of a baker, and still hadn’t mastered butter-making. At any rate, sugar was very expensive out here. She’d never dreamed sugar could cost so much. It made the constant parade of sweets and cakes and tarts and pies back at Beechfields seem positively princely, and they had not been an extravagant family.

But she knew she was lucky to have the Jorgensons, even if they did not make much conversation. It had been a stroke of pure luck that she had taken Little Edward out on an exploratory drive one day and met the Jorgensons at all. Well off the main track, their homestead was a tidy little farm set deep in a round green bowl, watered by a determined little spring all set about with willow trees, like something out of a painting on a blue willow plate, with blinking Jersey cows peeping out of a sod barn and the beautiful Jorgenson children going about their blonde business in crimson and blue embroidered dresses. The oldest girl had taken a shine to Little Edward, and her mother had smiled benevolently and indicated, somehow, through much pointing and nodding and smiling, that the girl should follow Cherry back to her own claim on mule-back, and Cherry had allowed it, albeit with some confusion; had she just hired a nursemaid, and where on earth would she put her up?
 

But the girl had only stayed a few moments, to look around the shanty and the beaten-down grass around it, and then smiled and patted Little Edward and bobbed her head to Cherry, and then pointed to the ticking tin clock on the kitchen shelf and tapped the number eight. Cherry smiled, quite mystified, and watched the girl ride away on her big mule without any idea what had just transpired; but the next morning at eight, the mule was back in her yard, and the Jorgenson girl had put him in hobbles to graze, was coming into her shanty, was scooping up Little Edward with a practiced hand, and nodding at Cherry to be about her business. And so it went, every day except Sundays, and Cherry was so relieved to be able to work on the farm without having to worry about Little Edward that she didn’t object to the accidental hiring, and gave her as many pennies each Saturday night as she could scrape up.
 

Oh, the Jorgensons were a blessing, and no mistake! The girl was always bringing over gifts from her generous (and probably worried) mother: the tins of cookies, fresh-baked bread, embroidered dresses for Little Edward, once, memorably, a side of bacon which hung awkwardly
 
in the little shanty, its grisly meatiness keeping her awake as it swung in the moonlight just feet from her bed, until she devised a cabinet to hang the meat in the lean-to barn.

And they were lovely to visit anyhow, without conversation; the girls so tidy and industrious, milking the cows and sewing in the little parlor, for the Jorgensons had a real house and not a claim shanty; they were well-settled here, unlike the newcomers that had swollen Bradshaw’s ranks in recent years. Cherry was charmed by them, and most of all by Mr. and Mrs. Jorgenson’s deep, deep regard for one another. They were in
love,
and there was really no other word for it; regard was just a stuffy aristocratic term that denied the intensity of their gazes, the meaningfulness in their soft touches, the way that Mr. Jorgenson would lean over his wife’s chair and smile down at her work, and brush her cheek softly with his fingers, an entirely inappropriate gesture in front of a guest at tea, naturally, but one that Cherry could not tear her eyes from, could not stop turning over in her mind. She had wanted this, a family and a passionate love affair with her husband, and she had been so close, so close, and now she would always be alone on the prairie, and at times she would have to close her lashes against the suspicious burning in her eyes.

As neighbors went, then, the Jorgensons were something of a mixed blessing. The food and the comfort were lovely distractions from her own Spartan existence, it could not be denied. The assistance of the eldest daughter, she could see now, was absolutely indispensable. It had been naive of her to think that she could put together a fledgling homestead with an infant strapped to her back, however much she hated to think that her Cousin Anne had been right about that.

But despite the cookies, Mr. and Mrs. Jorenson’s love affair, carried out in their every move and look and gesture, always sent her home in a funk, leaving her wondering how she would ever make it through the long lonely years ahead of her. She had been groomed her entire life for marriage and wifehood, and her papa had, however unwisely, encouraged her to aspire to a love-match. And when she
had
fallen in love with Edward Walsall, and confided that he had asked her to marry him and join him in sailing to South America on some scientific exploration he had decided was his newest passion, her father had paled, but had not withheld his blessing.
 

From his deathbed, although no one suspected it at the time, he told his daughter to be happy. And when he had died, succumbing to a sudden fever that set in during what had seemed to be a simple bout of grippe, she had fled the sickroom and the stares and the stern doctor and rushed to the stables, to bury her face and her tears in the mane of her bay mare, and that was when her life’s course changed utterly.