She flipped over the page of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Hints. Aha! A recipe for something called Plain Yellow Cake. “Take two good handfuls of flour...” What, exactly, was a handful? Would it be a large hand, like Gray’s? Or a small one, like hers? What if Emily wanted to bake a cake with her tiny little hands?
She gazed out the window over the kitchen sink into the grove of willow trees behind the house. In the clear spring sunshine the new leaves looked like green glass, but now the light was fading. Face it, Clarissa, you don’t belong out here on a ranch in the West. She felt inept. Foolish. Out of place in this godforsaken land, and what was even worse, she felt a kinship with no one. At least she didn’t feel at odds with the man who had rescued her from Caleb Arness, or with down-to-earth, understanding Maria. But everything else out here was like being on a different planet.
With a groan she tried to focus again on Mrs. Beeton’s book. She simply must stop feeling sorry for herself. She’d gotten herself into this pickle, and she would have to get herself out of it. Besides, thousands of women were surviving—even thriving—out here in this rough, untamed country. A month ago she’d even thought she might become one of them, but one look at Caleb Arness had told her how wrong she had been. Now she realized how foolish and misguided it would be to be any man’s wife, mail-order or not.
Back in Boston she’d been an acknowledged spinster at twenty-four. “On the shelf,” everyone said. But even so, she had a life in Boston. She had fit in. There were concerts, afternoon teas, even happy hours spent in the library. On fine days people walked along the streets and in the lush, green parks, stopping for a soda at the candy store or the creamery. She missed it all.
She marveled that Emily was not lamenting the lack of ice-cream sodas. But her daughter seemed to revel in every new and exciting thing she found in the West—horses to pet, Maria’s cornhusk dolls to play with, spring wildflowers to pick, even the nightly tall tales Gray spun to lull her to sleep. Even now she could hear his low, gravelly voice coming from the parlor where he sat with her daughter cradled on his lap.
“And then,” he continued, “I left home. Well, to tell the truth, I ran away from home.”
“Why’d you do that?” Emily queried. “I’d never run away from my mama.”
A long silence fell. Instead of measuring out flour for the cake she was determined to bake, Clarissa found herself listening intently.
“Well, it’s like this, honey,” Gray continued. “My ma and my pa didn’t like each other much. They yelled and screamed at each other every day for fourteen years, and finally I’d had enough.”
“What’d you do?”
Another silence. “Not sure I should tell you, Squirt.”
“Yes, you should tell me!” she persisted. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
Clarissa heard a low chuckle and then his voice continued. “Well, let’s see, what did I do? What do you think I did?”
“I bet you found a horse and a lot of money and you ate lots and lots of strawberry ice cream.”
“You like strawberry ice cream, huh?”
“Uh-huh. I like it better than anything.”
“Better than...scrambled eggs and bacon?”
“Yes!”
“Better than...roast chicken?”
“Way better! Especially when Mama bakes it.”
Clarissa’s lips tightened.
“Better than...Maria’s molasses cookies?”
“Yeah!”
“Guess that settles it, then. Gotta churn some ice cream one of these days.”
“Strawberry!” she shouted. “But first you have to finish my story.”
Clarissa laughed out loud as she mixed the listed ingredients together. Once Emily set her mind to something, she never gave up.
“Ah. Well, let’s see...where were we?”
“Your mama and your papa were screaming and you got a horse.”
“Yeah. Well, I lit out. Uh, you know what that means?”
“It means you...bought a big lamp?”
“That’s right in one way, Emily. I got myself a job and then I bought a lamp. I went to work in a silver mine, way down deep underground.”
“Was it dark?”
“Plenty dark. And cold.”
Clarissa dropped her mixing spoon. At only fourteen years of age he went to work in a silver mine?
“What’dja do?”
“I worked my a—worked really hard. And pretty soon, guess what?”
“You bought some ice cream!”
Gray’s rich laughter washed over Clarissa, but his tale was sending chills up her spine. How awful that must have been, working in a mine. What happened then? she wanted to ask. She slid the cake into the oven, still listening intently.
“No, I didn’t buy ice cream. I bought something else. Something a lot bigger.”
“What was it?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow night, okay?”
“No! Tell me now. Please? Puleeze?
Clarissa snapped Mrs. Beeton’s cookbook shut. “Emily...” she warned. “Time for bed.”
In the next moment her daughter’s light footsteps pattered up the stairs, and Gray appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hope you don’t mind me tellin’ her these stories.”
She looked up. “They are certainly...educational,” she said carefully.
“Never thought of it that way, but yeah, I guess it was educational. For me, anyway.”
“It would seem you learned a great deal, at a very young age.”
When he didn’t answer, she shot a look at his face. He had a hard time keeping his unruly dark hair out of his eyes, which, she admitted, were quite nice—an odd gray-blue, like the barrel of the revolver he kept in a holster hanging over the front door. She liked his mouth, too, except when it narrowed in disapproval at something one of the ranch hands did. Mostly his lips were firm and usually curved in a smile, especially around Emily.
But tonight it was his eyes that caught at her—steel hard and unblinking. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling her those things,” he said slowly.
“You mean about working in a silver mine?” At his startled look, she added, “I was listening as I made the cake.”
“No. Other things I guess maybe I shouldn’t be telling her, about my ma and pa and why I left home. Bet you never met anybody who ran away from home before.”
Something in his voice changed, and all at once she didn’t know what to say. He pushed past her toward the back door. “Gotta check the barn before I turn in.”
“Gray?”
He stopped and stood unmoving, his back to her. “Yeah?”
“My cake will be done when you get back. I’ll cut a piece for you and leave it on the table.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Clarissa.” He grasped the doorknob, then spoke over his shoulder. “Cut a piece for yourself, too. Maybe heat up the coffee. There’s something I want to say to you.”
When he disappeared through the doorway she found her mouth had gone dry. He wanted to say something to her? What was it? Was it about Emily? About Ramon spending his valuable time showing her daughter how to plant seeds for a kitchen garden?
All at once she was certain she knew what it was. He’s going to fire me.
She untied the apron and paced back and forth across the kitchen floor, waiting for the cake to finish baking and the cold coffee to heat up. Where would she go? What would she do?
She couldn’t think about it. At last she peeked in the oven, tested the cake with a straw from the broom on the back porch, and lifted out the cake pan using her bunched-up apron as a pot holder.
She was learning to cook! But perhaps not well enough to warrant her weekly three-dollar salary. Perhaps he expected his fried eggs not to be too hard or so runny they slid off his
fork and the biscuits to be light and fluffy, like Maria’s, not hard enough to bounce, as her first batch had been. She couldn’t even think about attempting another roast chicken; she had to work up her courage for that.
The more she mulled it over, the more unsettled her stomach grew. She picked up a knife, sawed two squares from the cake and set them on two small plates. Before she could find forks, the back door banged open.
“Coffee smells good,” he remarked.
“It’s not fresh, I reheated this morning’s.”
“Still smells good.” He dropped into a chair. She poured him a large mug and slid the plate of cake toward him.
“You havin’ some, too?”
“Yes.”
He took a bite, and Clarissa watched avidly as he chewed and swallowed.
“Tastes kinda...um...flat.”
“Flat?” She took a tentative bite. The cake was nicely browned on top, and it had a fine texture. But he was right—it had no flavor at all. What had she done wrong? She grabbed Mrs. Beeton’s book and thumbed through the pages until she found the recipe. Flour. Sugar. Eggs. Saleratus. And salt. Salt! Good heavens, she’d forgotten to add salt. No wonder it tasted flat!
She snatched Gray’s plate away.
“Hold on a minute, it’s not that bad, honest!”
“Don’t lie to me, Gray. Don’t ever, ever lie to me.”
He blinked and his fork clattered onto the table. “Clarissa, I never lie. I’ve never lied to anyone in my entire life, not even—” He broke off.
Her breath stopped. “Not even who?”
“Not even my pa when I left home, uh, I mean ran away. I wanted to, though. God, I wanted nothin’ more than to tell him the truth, but...well, I couldn’t. But I couldn’t lie, either. So I didn’t say anything at all, I just up and left.”
Clarissa stared at him. “You hate my cake, don’t you? You just don’t want to tell me.”
Gray chuckled. “No, I don’t hate it. It’s true, it’s not a very tasty cake, but maybe you can pour something over the top, like a frosting or something. Maybe Mrs. Beeton can suggest something to rescue it.”
She began idly riffling through the pages.
Gray sipped his coffee and watched her. “You know, there’s lots more important things in life than one flat-tastin’ cake.”
She said nothing, but he could tell by her face that she wasn’t convinced. She’d probably been raised so starchy and proper in her rich brother’s house in Boston that she expected everything she put her hand to to be perfect. Well, he had news for her. Nobody’s life went like that.
For a brief minute he thought about telling her so, but the wary expression in her eyes made him hesitate. There were other emotions in her face, too—some he could read, like tiredness and disappointment and discouragement; other things were a mystery, especially an odd, hungry look she tried to hide that made his breath catch.
“I’m going for a walk,” he announced. He escaped out the back door and again made his way down the path to the barn where he plopped down on a hay bale to think things over. The warm air smelled like straw and horse dung. There was nothing in particular he had to do out here, so after a while he found himself talking to Rowdy.
“Had to get out of the kitchen, fella. Felt kinda closed in, hard to breathe, you know? Don’t understand why, exactly, just felt surrounded. Clarissa feels things, see. Me, I try not to feel things. That’s what’s kept me safe all these years.”
He stood up and nuzzled the gelding’s black nose. “We’ll talk again soon, boy. Next time I’ll bring you an apple.”
Chapter Eight
Some days later, Clarissa finished wiping the last of the supper plates and paused for her nightly stocktaking meditation. She had saved a few dollars already. Precious dollars. But she needed many more for the train ticket back to Boston. Emily was adapting, almost effortlessly, to life on the ranch but Clarissa grew more and more dispirited with every passing day. Or rather every passing breakfast, dinner and supper. It was a wonder Gray had not complained. It was an even greater miracle he had not fired her! Maybe that was what he’d wanted to talk to her about that night.
With a sigh, she hung the damp dish towel on the hook by the stove and drifted out the open front door to the porch where everyone had gathered—the ranch hands, Shorty and Nebraska, and even Erasmus, the old man who took care of the horses and swept out the barn. Maria and Ramon sat on the top step, holding hands.
The day had been scorching right up until the sun sank behind the far-off purplish mountains to the north with a last wash of flaming crimson and orange. Out here in the country night fell with a finality she still found unnerving. She gazed out at the unrelieved blackness, then stepped off the porch and looked up at the sky. Back in Boston the stars had never seemed this close, like tiny blobs of silvery dough scattered across the velvet sky.
She remounted the steps, settled herself in the porch swing and breathed in the scent of roses and the honeysuckle vine that twined over the trellis. Nebraska was tuning up his fiddle and soon launched into “Red River Valley.” After one verse Erasmus pulled a battered harmonica from his overalls pocket and joined in. It wasn’t a symphony orchestra or a chamber ensemble, as she had enjoyed back in Boston, but the music sounded lovely, anyway.
Maria brought out a big pitcher of lemonade and a bowl of ripe strawberries, and Clarissa nibbled and let her thoughts drift. What would her life have been like if Anthony and Roseanne had lived? Emily would have had a real mother and a father, and she herself...well, perhaps she would have walked out with an admirer, maybe even married and had a child of her own. As it was, she’d been too absorbed in caring for Emily to entertain many callers, and outside of an occasional concert or visit to the library, she’d spent all her time learning to be a mother. She wouldn’t trade Emily for anything on earth, but sometimes she did wonder about what she had missed in life.
* * *
Emily was quiet this evening. Perched on the porch between Gray’s long legs she wasn’t even clamoring for a story. The music rose and fell, and soon Emily’s head began to droop onto Gray’s knee. After a while, Ramon stood and beckoned Maria into his arms and they began to dance around and around on the porch.
Emily seemed to wake up at this, and jiggled Gray’s knee. “You gonna dance with me?”
“Well, now,” he said in a low voice, “I don’t know. I’m not real good at dancin’.”
The girl jumped to her feet. “I bet I could teach you!” She tugged on his hand. “Come on. You’re not scared, are ya, Gray?”
“Scared?” Gray got to his feet and took both the girl’s hands in his. “I’m not scared of a four-year-old girl with a thousand questions, no.” But he had to admit he was plenty scared about other things, like losing more of his cattle to rustlers or finding more bad water. Or losing his ranch. And he was definitely uneasy about Caleb Arness. He’d expected the man to show up before now, and he couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t. Probably he was in jail. Again. Next time he went into town he’d ask around and stop by the sheriff’s office and inquire.
He had to bend down a bit to dance with Emily, but the ecstatic look on her freckled face made the effort worthwhile. He liked making her smile. She had to take two or three steps to every one of his, so their progress around the porch was slow, but Emily didn’t seem to care. Her red curls bobbed in time with the fiddle music, and she alternately grinned up at him and grinned at her mother where she rocked in the porch swing. It was kinda fun steering the girl around the floor. Maria smile broadly at him, and Ramon sent him a wink.
When they two-stepped in front of the swing, Emily suddenly dropped his hand and darted forward. “Mama, look at me—we’re dancing!” She grabbed Clarissa’s skirt. “Come and dance with us!”
“Oh, no, honey, I couldn’t do that.”
Clarissa sent him a look that made him chuckle—half apology, half amusement, but her warm hand fit nicely in his, and he had to admit he liked that. The three of them began to circle around the porch in time to “Down in the Valley.” Emily swooped and giggled with such uninhibited verve that Gray laughed out loud, and then he caught Clarissa’s gaze. Suddenly the sounds around him faded until nothing remained but a faint humming in his brain.
What the hell?
In the next instant Emily dropped his hand, gave a happy chirp and twirled off by herself, leaving Gray and Clarissa facing each other.
“Well,” Clarissa said with obvious embarrassment, “I suppose we should—”
“Dance,” he finished.
Without another word Gray pulled her into his arms and began to move in a slow, steady pattern.
Clarissa blinked. Where on earth had he learned to waltz? Certainly not in a silver mine! Perhaps at some place like Serena’s on Willow Street; after all, he was young and virile and...
She missed a step. He held her gently, his hand at her back pressing just close enough that her breasts brushed the front of his chambray shirt. Heavens, could he feel that? The contact made them tingle in a decidedly pleasant way.
Emily settled herself near Ramon and Maria and snuggled her head against the woman’s arm. Ramon began singing along with “Clementine,” and Maria was sitting with her head on his shoulder. They looked so happy together her throat ached.
Gray danced her to the edge of the porch, then to the far end where the honeysuckle twined up to the rooftop. What an odd sensation, being this close him. She hadn’t danced with anyone since she was ten years old, but this was decidedly different. She felt light and floaty inside. Never in her life had she been so intensely aware of another human being, not even when she had first held baby Emily in her arms.
Western Spring Weddings Page 5
