Chapter Twenty-Three
“Pick a card. But don’t show it to me.” Cousin Gareth held the worn deck out to Annabel. She reached across the small table, pulled out a card and glimpsed at it—five of spades—then slid the card back into the deck.
They were in a first-class compartment on a Southern Pacific train, traveling toward Phoenix Junction. After Clay had left, it had taken Cousin Gareth three more days to be up on his feet, and he still lacked the full use of his left arm.
They had bought a horse for her, a small gray mare, and ridden south to Las Cruces, where they had put their mounts in the freight car and boarded the train. Throughout the journey, Cousin Gareth had been polite but laconic, making no special effort to bridge the gulf between them.
He pulled a card from the pack. “Is this it?”
The king of clubs. Annabel frowned. “No.”
As a child, when Cousin Gareth had been an adored visitor at Merlin’s Leap, she’d seen him perform the trick many times. Were his skills going rusty? Had the blow to his head affected his mind?
“Hmm...” Cousin Gareth studied the card, then laid it face up on the table between them. “Are you sure?” he asked, glancing up at her.
“Positive.”
He slid another card out of the pack, laid it next to the first. Annabel craned forward to look. The five of spades. “That’s the card I chose,” she told him.
“Are you sure?” Cousin Gareth asked. He laid his forefinger on the king of clubs and switched the places of the two cards on the table. “Sometimes things are not what they seem,” he went on. “A man who appears to be worthless on the outside might be a prince inside.”
Baffled, Annabel contemplated her cousin. She was still getting used to how he looked now. The excess flesh around his waist was gone, and his skin was smooth and tanned. He was a handsome man, even at thirty-two. Why had he never married? It occurred to her she didn’t really know much about him.
Cousin Gareth slid the king of clubs toward her. “I didn’t refuse my consent to the marriage,” he told her. He picked up the five of spades. “Had you really chosen this card, a man who would have been as lacking in moral values as he was lacking in worldly goods, I would have withheld my permission.”
“Are you saying...?”
“I’m saying that your young man loves you. But he believes love is not enough to live on, and he is honorable enough to accept the fact. I hope he makes something of himself. I wish him luck, and I am grateful for his decision not to expose you to the dangers and hardships of a mining camp.”
Cousin Gareth fell silent, picked up the papers stacked on the bench beside him and began shuffling through his notes. He’d been the same at Merlin’s Leap, always shut away in Papa’s study, buried in ledgers, a frown on his face. For a moment, Annabel contemplated him, only the rocking of the train filling the quiet.
“What happened to you?” she asked in a low voice, a question she and her sisters had debated endlessly but never dared to ask. “What made you change?”
Cousin Gareth hesitated. He spoke with reluctance, the words dragged out of him. “You and your sisters ruined my life. You stole my birthright, and remained blissfully unaware of it, for your father blackmailed me into silence.”
Baffled, Annabel stared at him. “We did nothing of the kind. How could we have? We’re young women, wholly without influence.”
Cousin Gareth turned his attention to his papers. “I’ll tell you when we find your sisters. I do not wish to repeat myself. I will explain once, and once only. Then I wish never to mention the topic again.”
As Annabel mulled over the point Cousin Gareth had demonstrated with his card trick, it occurred to her that he might have been talking about himself as much as Clay. Was he suggesting she and her sisters had misjudged him? That in their grief for their parents they had heaped more blame on him than he deserved?
* * *
In Phoenix Junction, instead of waiting for the train to Gold Crossing that ran only once a week, on Thursdays, they unloaded their horses and rode north across the rolling hills covered with towering saguaros. When the night fell, they struck camp, talking quietly in the firelight, something of their old friendship rekindling between them. Late in the afternoon on the second day, they came to a wooden sign.
Gold Crossing
Population 8
Cousin Gareth burst into laughter. “What is this? A town of eight people? Why, that would make the staff quarters at Merlin’s Leap a greater metropolis than this place.”
Curious, they rode on. In the slanting rays of the setting sun they arrived into a town made up of a single dusty street bordered by ramshackle buildings. A general store, with a post office and a telegraph. A hotel with a saloon. Railroad station. A few residential buildings, most of them boarded up.
They had telegraphed ahead, to alert Charlotte and Miranda to their arrival. Annabel felt her heart pounding as she studied the dusty street. A few ragged children were playing around the water trough, and the mournful sound of a trumpet drifted out through an open window above the saloon.
Then two slender figures jumped down from the boardwalk and raced toward them, skirts flapping around their feet. Charlotte’s dark curls unraveled to spill down her back. Miranda’s blond upsweep was more robustly constructed. Behind them, two men stepped into the evening light but remained in the background.
“Scrappy!” Charlotte called out. “We were so worried!”
Annabel tumbled down from her mare, and then Charlotte was hugging her, and Miranda wrapped her arms around the both of them. For a moment, emotions welled up in Annabel, joy and relief and a fierce surge of love, but the new maturity she had gained in the last few weeks stopped the tears from falling.
“Cousin Gareth has regained his memory,” she whispered to her sisters. “But that knock on the head seems to have done him good. He is more like he used to be when we were small. He’s even said he is sorry for behaving so beastly toward us.”
Charlotte and Miranda turned to dart a suspicious look at their cousin. Annabel smiled, not letting anything ruin her joy of the reunion. Her sisters would observe Gareth, put him through an interrogation and make up their own minds.
* * *
On their first evening together, they congregated in Miranda’s house. She and her husband had bought one of the boarded-up homes and were refurbishing it to live in, even though most of the time they were touring the western territories in their private railroad car.
Miranda’s husband, James Blackburn, was part Cheyenne Indian. He’d earned his living as a bounty hunter before he inherited a fortune in railroad stocks from his Baltimore grandfather. Charlotte had married Thomas Greenwood, a fair-haired giant who owned a farm out of town.
They trooped into the living room, where a few crudely made wooden chairs provided seating around a low pine table. Surrounded by the smells of sawdust and paint, they sat down and turned their expectant eyes to Cousin Gareth.
“You promised to tell us why you were so beastly to us,” Annabel prompted him.
Cousin Gareth shifted in his seat. “So I did.”
“Well, go on then,” Miranda ordered. “Spit it out.”
Cousin Gareth tugged at the collar of his coat, as uncomfortable as a sailor biting into maggot-filled hardtack. “As we all know,” he began, “my father was the younger son of Lord Fairfax, and your father was the elder son and the heir. However, as your father did not marry until late in life, for the first few years of my life I was treated as the heir presumptive to the title and the fortune. Then your father married, but only girls were born. I remained the heir.”
Annabel glanced at her sisters. Miranda was scowling. Charlotte looked troubled. Did they guess what would follow with the same clarity as she did?
Cousin Gareth went on. “Your father pe
titioned to get the patents to the title altered, so females could inherit. Of course, the petition was rejected. Your father renounced the title and stripped away the fortune. It was unlawful, of course, but he said the English crown no longer ruled the colonies and to hell with their rules and regulations.”
“Papa said he renounced the title because such things were outdated,” Miranda cut in. The tallest of the sisters, and the only one with fair hair, she was the feisty one, a natural leader. “He never mentioned it had any impact on who would inherit the wealth.”
“No.” Cousin Gareth studied the silver handle on his walking stick. “But I am telling the truth. I was eighteen at the time, and you were too young to understand the implications. Charlotte was ten, Miranda eight and Annabel four.”
“Why did you not contest it?” Charlotte asked.
“My father was dying and I did not wish a family dispute to overshadow his final years.”
“But later on, after your father died?” Charlotte pressed. “You could have contested it then.” Few people understood that, although soft and pliant on the outside, the eldest sister possessed a steely core of determination. She had asked a question, and would not be silenced until she had received a satisfactory answer.
Cousin Gareth looked pained. Annabel’s recollection stirred. “You said Papa blackmailed you into not telling us.”
Cousin Gareth would not meet their eyes. “Your father said that if I told you, he’d never allow me to see you again, or set foot in Merlin’s Leap.” A flush rose on his face. “My mother died when I was small, and my father was in ill health. You and your parents were the only living relatives I had, and I did not wish to cut off the family bond.”
“But you turned against us.” Miranda’s tone was cool.
“I was eighteen when your father altered the line of inheritance. I’d grown up filled with pride about my role as his heir, the one to carry on the family name and tradition. When your father did what he did, it felt like a rejection. And I had an understanding with a young woman...”
Cousin Gareth’s mouth tipped into a bitter smirk. “But when my prospects altered, the understanding turned out to be a misunderstanding. With one strike of a pen, I had lost my birthright and the girl I loved. In my bitterness, I took to drinking and gambling.”
“There was no need to keep us locked up in the house,” Charlotte complained.
Miranda scowled. “Why did you never let us have any new clothes?”
Cousin Gareth swore under his breath. His expression darkened. “All right,” he said harshly. “You want to know, and I’ll tell you. There was no money to pay for new dresses. No money to splash out on parties and balls. Even if I’d found some time to escort you, the fact that your clothes were three seasons out of date would have revealed we were strapped for cash. I did not wish our precarious financial position to be known, and neither did I wish to start selling ships.”
Charlotte launched into a protest. “But—”
Cousin Gareth cut her off. “Your father was a sea captain, not a businessman. He lacked the skills to negotiate contracts and administer credit lines. My father took care of that, and when he died, things started sliding downhill.”
“But there is money,” Charlotte argued. “Lots of it.”
“There is. Now.” Cousin Gareth’s tone was grim. “It took me three years to get the business back to even keel.” He glared at them. “I might have succumbed to drinking and gambling as a young man disappointed in love, but since your father died, the only gambling I’ve done has been against the benevolence of the ocean. Half the time, I couldn’t afford to insure the cargoes. If I drank too much whiskey, it was because every rumble of thunder made my blood run cold with fear.”
Miranda held up her hand and spoke slowly, incredulity in her tone. “Are you telling us that Papa had run the shipping line to the ground? And all those hours we thought you were getting whiskey-soaked in his study, you were working hard to restore our fortunes?”
Cousin Gareth gave a reluctant nod.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Charlotte pressed.
“You were mourning for your father. What kind of a man would I have been to sully his memory in your eyes? And in some way, I felt you needed an outlet for your grief. Hating me seemed as good as any, so I made no effort to apologize for my grim moods or to explain that money was scarce.”
“You’ve rebuilt the shipping line, and yet it is not yours,” Annabel said quietly.
“But the Fairfax name is. That I still have.” Cousin Gareth touched the scar on his forehead. “Although for a while it seemed I had lost even that.”
Silence settled over the room, broken only by the sound of the trumpet from the saloon. Annabel cleared her throat. With help and support from Clay, she had found independence for herself. She longed for him to be here now, to witness another great step she was about to take—to act as the leader before her sisters.
She made her point carefully, weighing each word. “When Cousin Gareth coveted Merlin’s Leap and the fleet of ships, he may have acted like a brute, but it was not out of greed. It was because his dreams had been smashed, his pride trampled upon, his love rejected, the family bonds of affection seized away from him. When deciding what is right, we should keep that in mind.”
Charlotte stared at her through narrowed eyes. “You said when deciding what is right. Scrappy, are you suggesting that we do something—change the existing set of circumstances?”
“Yes,” Annabel replied. “That is what I am suggesting. That we accept Papa was wrong. Whatever his reasoning, it was faulty, and we have the power to remedy his mistake.”
For a moment, the mournful tune of the trumpet seemed to sum up all the misunderstandings, all the past hurts and wasted opportunities. Then whispered voices hushed around the room as Miranda and Charlotte conferred with each other and with their husbands. Annabel suppressed the sting of loneliness. One day, she hoped Clay would sit beside her, the way her sisters had their husbands sitting next to them.
Finally, Miranda looked up. Before she spoke, she reached out to take her husband’s hand. “I have no need for Papa’s money. Jamie has plenty from his family.”
Charlotte craned her neck to look up at her fair-haired giant of a farmer and smiled at him. “I have little use for a shipping line and an East Coast mansion. I never wish to live anywhere but our secluded valley.”
“I don’t want the Fairfax fortune either,” Annabel said. “From what we’ve just heard it belongs to Cousin Gareth, and since losing it he has earned it again.”
Miranda got up, fetched a piece of paper from the packing crates stacked in the corner. “It is settled, then,” she said as she sat down again. She gave Cousin Gareth a quick glance not totally void of lingering hostility and started scribbling. “We shall give you a power of attorney, and you can reverse what Papa did.”
Cousin Gareth had been sitting ramrod-straight on the rough wooden chair, his features devoid of emotion, except for the muscle that ticked in his jaw. Now he blinked rapidly, as if to hold back tears. “If you are certain... I will of course give both of you your portion...and to Annabel when she marries...but until then I will be her legal guardian and it will be my duty to look after her.”
I will be her legal guardian and it will be my duty to look after her.
The words made Annabel’s stomach churn. She swallowed down the bile. If the suspicion that had taken root in her mind turned out to be true, Cousin Gareth might once more become the enemy, for he would have the power to issue an ultimatum that might mean she would never have a chance to find happiness with Clay.
Chapter Twenty-Four
After he’d walked away from Annabel, Clay felt empty and aimless. He rode back to the Mimbres mine, thinking he might clear a way into the cave with gold, but he found he could not bring himself to distu
rb the peace of a tomb. He watered the saplings that hid the mine entrance and replaced the two small spruces that had died.
He rode back to Hillsboro and took a look around the Black Hills mining district. Gold had been found in 1877, more than a decade ago, and all the good claims were taken—Snake Mine, Opportunity, Ready Pan and dozens more.
Back in town, Clay stopped at the assay office. A small, dapper man in his fifties stood behind a counter, studying a piece of ore through a loupe.
“Do you know anything about mining around Gold Crossing over in the Arizona Territory?” Clay asked. The knowledge haunted him that he could ride out to Annabel, and she would be his again. He had no intention of doing so, but being near her might ease the emptiness inside him.
The man gave a prompt reply. “Desperation Hill mining district. Name says it all. Gold discovered eight years ago and since then nothing but blood and sweat and misery.”
“Who’s the recorder over there?”
“Man called Art Langley. Runs the hotel in town.”
Clay rode west. He took a month over the journey, riding slowly, a rifle at the ready. Even though Geronimo had surrendered three years ago, a few renegade Apache braves still roamed the hills. He’d been right to give up Annabel, Clay told himself for the thousandth time. Had she been with him, she would have been exposed to danger.
Gold Crossing was a sorry sight, a single street flanked with dilapidated businesses. Clay tied the buckskin to the hitch rail outside a building with a sign that said Imperial Hotel. Below it a cloth banner spelled out “Vacation Camp for San Francisco Widows and Orphans Association.”
In the lobby, a muscular youth stood behind a newspaper stand, selling a newspaper called the Gold Crossing Informer. Clay resisted the temptation to buy a copy or ask about Annabel and her sisters. If he saw her, if he spoke to her, he might lack the strength to walk away from her again.
From Runaway to Pregnant Bride Page 22
