The Wildest Heart (6 page)

I had reached the water's edge, and as I lifted my head I felt the tangy, salty kiss of the wind on my face, felt it ruffle my skirts and tug at my bonnet.

“Journeys end in lover's meetings.” Now, why had that ridiculous piece of nonsense suddenly sprung into my mind? I had no lover to meet me—indeed, I had already made up my mind that I would never have, if I could help it. I would never be controlled by anyone again. I would be my own mistress from now on.

Hadn't I learned about love? A ridiculous, fumbling thing that made an animal of a man and required from a woman only a certain degree of compliance: At least animals didn't try to rationalize their expressions of lust or attempt to prettify it by calling it love.

“We'll be sailing with the tide,” I heard a sailor call to another, and the same wind that touched me made little dancing ripples in the water. A fine, sunny day. A good day to begin a journey.

The vessel on which I sailed was an American one, and I was soon to get used to hearing the strange, nasal accents of my fellow passengers. These Americans were all more friendly and outgoing than the English, and although I kept to myself they persisted in being friendly and curious. Strangely enough, the fact that I was possessed of a title excited the most comment. For all that they prided themselves on their form of democracy, most of the friendly Americans I met could hardly hide the fact that they were impressed at meeting the daughter of an earl.

We stopped for over three days at Le Havre to pick up passengers from Paris, and I had the chance to visit Paris again myself, but under vastly different circumstances from all the other times I had been there. I saw none of Sir Edgar Cardon's friends this time, but spent my time in shopping, completely on my own, which in itself gave me an exhilarated feeling.

Still, I was impatient for my journey to be over, and for the time when I would meet my father at last. My mother, who should have known, had said we were alike, Guy Dangerfield and I. I thought we would understand each other, for we were both travelers.

I had come halfway across the world and as I looked out for the first time at Boston harbor, I found myself wondering what my father's impressions must have been when he first landed here. He must have been around the same age that I was now. Would he be here to meet me, or was he too ill to travel?

As I left the rail and made my way to my stateroom, the echo of my mother's bitter voice suddenly came back to me.

“You are hard, Rowena… it is not strength, but hardness. I wonder if you are capable of any emotion…”

Well, at least I wasn't weak. I remembered the diamonds that Edgar Cardon had presented me with—hard, scintillating stones, each one burning with its own tiny fires. How often he had compared me to a diamond. I had a cutting tongue, he had complained, and he had never been able to arouse in me the warmth and passion he had hoped to find. But I could not pity him. We had used each other—each for our own separate reasons—and now, at last I was free. I would never let myself be used again by anyone.

“Lady Rowena—” the steward's voice broke into my thoughts, and I turned away from snapping the lock on my last trunk.

“Pardon me, Lady Rowena, but you have visitors. The other passengers have already begun to disembark, but your friends are on board to escort you personally to shore.”

“Thank you.”

I had not been sure whether there would be someone to meet me. We had been delayed by bad weather, and I had noticed that Boston, although basking in watery sunshine, had been thinly blanketed by an early snowfall. Still, I had been expected, and there were “friends” to meet me. Not my father, then. I wondered who his friends were.

When I went up on deck, they were standing there rather uncertainly, amid all the bustle of visitors and disembarking passengers. Mrs. Katherine Shannon was obviously a widow—a rather formidable-looking lady dressed in black. She was the sister-in-law of Mr. Todd Shannon, who was my father's partner, and was accompanied by her niece and her husband, a pleasant young couple with friendly, if rather sober, manners.

I was soon to learn why they had taken the trouble to come on shipboard to meet me, and why Corinne Davidson, who was normally a vivacious, bubbling young woman, appeared so subdued on our first meeting. “The telegram arrived only a week ago,” Mrs. Shannon said in her quiet voice. “My dear, we are all so terribly sorry! It is not precisely the way your father would have wished you to be greeted upon your arrival in America. But you had to be told, of course.” She said again, “I'm so very sorry…” and I saw that Corinne Davidson's eyes had filled with tears. My father was dead. I would never see him now. I could not cry. I suppose I felt numb, and I knew that my face had gone stiff, betraying no emotion.

It was a relief to be taken charge of for the moment, with Jack Davidson, a quietly competent young man, seeing to the disposition of my luggage.

They were tactful, understanding people, who seemed to take my silence for shock, and did not press me with any further displays of sympathy.

“Jack and I live in New York, but we're visiting Aunt Katherine,” Corinne Davidson said softly. “Of course you will stay with her too. Isn't that right, Aunt Katherine?”

Mrs. Shannon insisted that I must do so—a room had already been made ready for me, and I needed to rest, and to feel that I had arrived among friends.

“If you feel like talking later, I hope you will not feel reluctant to do so,” Mrs. Shannon said kindly, adding that my father had been a frequent visitor to her home in the past, before he had become so ill.

But in the end it was Corinne Davidson, with her natural, open manner, who broke through the shell of reserve I had learned to erect around myself, and became my first friend in America.

She came up to my room that first night, and her soft, hesitant tapping at the door turned me away from the window, where I had been standing looking out at the snow.

“Will you promise to tell me you'd rather be alone if that is how you honestly feel?” she burst out, almost as soon as she had closed the door behind her. She bit her lip, before rushing on, “Jack tells me that I have no tact at all, and that I talk far too much, but I know how I would feel in your place, and I—we were all so fond of Uncle Guy, you know! I just think it's so terribly sad and tragic that you didn't get to know him. He was a wonderful person. So quiet that people wouldn't notice him unless he wanted them to, and yet he cared about people! I remember that he came all the way to Boston to see us after my papa died, and he took me out to dinner and to the opera, and that was how I met Jack…”

She clapped her hand suddenly over her mouth, a dismayed look appearing in her eyes. “Oh, heavens, there I go again! I do keep rattling on, don't I? And I really came up to see if you wanted to talk.”

It was impossible not to like Corinne, although I had never been close to other females of my own age. She openly admitted that she loved to gossip, but there was no guile in her, and she had a habit of saying exactly what she thought, even though it often proved embarrassing later.

I suppose I needed a friend during the weeks that followed. I had never had one before, and although Corinne and I were complete opposites as far as personalities went, we complemented each other in a way; and she had a quick, intelligent mind, for all her madcap ways. Certainly it was Corinne who helped me most during those first difficult days, when I had to adjust to the fact that I had lost my father before I found him again, and that now I was really alone, with no one but myself to depend on.

I was rich, of course, and that would help. And I was no longer naive, for Edgar Cardon had seen to that. It did not shock me, therefore, when Corinne proceeded to drag out what she laughingly referred to as the family skeletons.

“Well, of course someone has to tell you,” she pointed out reasonably, “and Aunt Katherine never would! So it had better be me. Even Jack agrees with me that you should be prepared for what you'll find when you go to New Mexico.”

“Good heavens, you make it all sound alarming!” I teased her, but she insisted, for once, that she would be serious.

“For instance,” she said dramatically, perching herself on the end of my bed, “how much have you been told about Todd Shannon?”

I admitted that I knew only that he had been my father's partner, who owned a joint interest in the vast SD Ranch.

“Just as I thought!” Corinne pursed her lips in an unusual expression of gravity. “And of course he's Aunt Katherine's brother-in-law, although I'm sure she never became too friendly with him, even while Uncle James was alive. You see, my Uncle James had come to America many years before his brother Todd turned up suddenly. He was a serious young man, who had been given an education, and while he studied law here in Boston he went to work for my grandfather, who was Aunt Katherine's papa, of course, and…” Here Corinne stopped to draw in a long breath, and catching my slight smile grinned mischievously back at me. “I know what you're thinking! They say that all of us Bostonians are related in some way, and I don't doubt that it's true! But Rowena, you must listen to me, for I'm trying to be serious for a change. What was I saying?”

“You were going to tell me something about this man Todd Shannon,” I said helpfully, and she nodded her head sagely.

“Yes, of course! Well, it was rather embarrassing for my poor aunt and uncle when he turned up in Boston, for he'd been a kind of black sheep, you know! They said that as young as he was he had been mixed up in some kind of revolutionary activities in Ireland. They're always fighting the British, are they not? Well, anyhow, he had to leave in a hurry, so he came here.”

“Is that how he met my father?” I asked curiously, and Corinne gave a small shrug.

“I'm not sure, for it was all before my time, of course. But I think I remember hearing someone mention that they had met on the ship coming over here, and decided to seek their fortune together. It sounds very romantic and exciting, doesn't it? They went west together, for in those days the frontiers were still expanding, and it was before the war with Mexico. The Spaniards still owned most of the Southwest, and California as well.”

I had made a point of studying American history, so that I nodded, and Corinne, with one of her quick flashes of intuition, seemed to understand that I was becoming impatient for her to come to the point of her recital.

“Oh dear!” she said ruefully, “there I go again. Rambling! You don't want to hear about history, but about Todd Shannon—and your father, of course, for he played a large part in what happened as well.” She giggled suddenly. “How I loved to listen to the grown-ups talk when I was a child! I would stay very quiet, and pretend to be reading, or busy with my embroidery. But you know, to me, the whole story was quite fascinating, and more exciting, than anything I had read in a book.”

“Go on,” I said. “Now you have me quite fascinated. What happened?”

“Well, as I was saying, your father and Uncle Todd—I'm supposed to call him that, but somehow he always frightened me a little bit—went west and they had all kinds of adventures; sometimes together and sometimes not, for they were both very independent men. But then, just before the war with Mexico, Uncle Todd fell in love. They said she was very beautiful, a young Spanish girl of good family, who was under the guardianship of her brother. She had been meant for a convent, but instead she met Uncle Todd and fell in love with him too. They eloped, ran away to Texas, and left her brother vowing vengeance. There!” Corinne looked at me triumphantly. “Now isn't that an exciting and romantic tale so far?”

“Isn't there more?” I asked pointedly.

“Oh, Rowena! Sometimes, I vow you prefer tragedy to romance! Well, there is one involved here. You see, after the Mexicans were forced to cede their lands in the Southwest to the United States, Todd Shannon brought his bride back to New Mexico, and filed claim to her family's lands.”

I frowned. “But what of that revengeful brother of hers?”

“Alejandro Kordes? Oh, he had been one of the few hotheads who refused to acknowledge their new American government. They say he took off into the mountains along with some others like him—and later on there were rumors that he had joined up with a band of
comancheros.
At least, that's what they call themselves, but I've heard Uncle Todd say that they're nothing but a crew of renegade cutthroats who trade with the Indians and sell them guns to use against the white men. Alejandro had become an outlaw, but he still hated Todd Shannon.”

Once she got down to it, Corinne proved a good storyteller, with a gift for evoking atmosphere, so that it was easy for me to picture the terrible, tragic events that had led to a family feud that, Corinne warned me, was still in existence. At the time, it was my father's part in those events that intrigued me the most.

He had made some money in the gold fields of California, and when his old partner had written to say he needed capital, he had traveled to New Mexico. He and Todd Shannon had become partners again, in an enormous cattle ranch they called the SD—Shannon-Dangerfield. They had been prospering when tragedy struck.

“It was the time of the great silver rush in that part of the world, and Uncle Todd and your father went prospecting together. Alma, Todd Shannon's wife, had given birth to a son, and had not regained her strength, so they had left her behind with a young cousin of Alma's who had suddenly appeared on the scene, confessing she had run away from the Apache Indians. Elena, her name was, and she was the result of union between a captured Spanish girl, Alma's aunt, and her captor, an Apache chieftain. Although she was half Apache, Elena had said she had been intrigued by her mother's tales of ‘civilization,' and wanted to live as a white woman, not as an Indian squaw.”

“Elena?”

The name struck a chord in my memory. I heard it again, repeated in my mother's spiteful voice.

“Elena! Sometimes he called the name in his sleep. And you were called Rowena Elaine.”

“Corinne—what was she like? Did anyone ever describe her?”

“Why, not exactly,” she said slowly, as if trying to remember. “She—I believe she was very young—only fifteen or sixteen—and very pretty, in a wild sort of way.”

“Did—did my father ever speak of her?” Something impelled me to ask the question, and Corinne gave me a rather puzzled stare.

“I—I can't remember! But he must have been fond of her, for I know he taught her to read and write, and of course, later, he saved her life.”

She was tactful enough not to ask why I questioned her as she went on with the story in a hushed voice.

My father and Todd Shannon had returned from their expedition within a matter of weeks, only to find that while they had been away, the Indians had attacked. Their house was burned, their cattle stampeded, and worst tragedy of all, both Alma and her son were dead.