The Wildest Heart

by Rosemary Rogers

  Everything would settle down to normal again, just as it had been before I arrived; and I—but things would be different for me this time, I vowed to myself. I had learned my lessons in survival as diligently as I had once studied my books that taught me of abstracts. Soon, when I was on my own, I would have the chance to see how well I remembered these lessons.

  There was nothing to do now, but to wait. The carriage pulled up before Sir Edgar’s imposing town house, and my mother and I, incongruous co-conspirators, alighted in silence without glancing at each other.

  Upstairs in my room, Martine was waiting for me.

  “We have been shopping, but I did not see anything that I wanted,” I told her casually, and dismissed her on the pretext that I was tired and would rest again before dinner. Poor Martine. What would she do when I was gone? I told myself that I must leave her an excellent letter of recommendation, and perhaps a bonus of fifty pounds to take care of her until she found another position. It would be more than she would earn in two years, but what did fifty pounds matter to me now? In my reticule I carried a packet of carefully folded bank notes, amounting to well over five hundred pounds—money for “incidentals,” Mr. Braithwaite had called it. My father, it seemed, had been insistent that I must lack for nothing. I had also been given a letter that authorized me to draw as much money as I needed out of my father’s banks in Boston and New York. I was really an heiress, after all!

  I sat at my small Chippendale desk—another gift from Sir Edgar, who had allowed me to refurnish my room according to my own tastes—and carefully opened the sealed envelope I had taken out of my reticule. The writing on the front was in black ink—a rather spidery, unfamiliar scrawl. “To my Daughter, Rowena Elaine Dangerfield.” Now, at last, I would learn something about my father, from himself.

  My fingers trembled as I drew out the stiff, crackling sheets of paper. My father. Strange that I, who had so carefully taught myself to suppress all outward show of emotion, should suddenly feel almost moved. Strange too, that even before I began to read, I should feel a sense of familiarity, even of closeness.

  My Dearest Daughter,

  It must surely seem as strange to you to read this letter from me as it seems for me to be writing to you at last, knowing that you will be reading this letter. And yet we are hardly strangers. I do not refer only to the tie of blood that binds us, but to the fact that you have never been far from me in my thoughts. Whatever you have been told about me, I hope you will believe this much at least; that I love you, as I loved you ever since I first held you as a tiny, squalling scrap of humanity, your eyes tightly screwed shut, and on your head a thatch of black hair that had to come to you from me. My daughter!

  I felt closer to you, in that moment, than I have ever felt to any other human being…

  My eyes moved down the closely written pages, reading more slowly than was my wont. My father had not wasted too much space in explanations, or reasons for our long separation, except to tell me that it had not been of his own will or doing. He had kept journals, which I would be able to read someday. They would explain everything.

  I have tried to envision New Mexico through your eyes—as I saw it first. A savage, beautiful land of contrasts. Perhaps, since you have lived in India, the transition will not prove too difficult. You see, I am already taking it for granted that you will come here. I have begun to hope again, to make plans….

  Further down he had written,

  I have spoken to Todd of my plans. He does not believe that you will want to live here. He does not understand. How can he? I feel that I know you, in spite of everything; it is more instinct that tells me this than anything else. But to satisfy Todd, I have included certain stipulations in the will I have drawn up. Whether you decide to make your home in New Mexico or not, you will be amply provided for, as I am sure Samuel Braithwaite will have made very clear to you. If, before a year is up, you decide you would rather make your home elsewhere, the SD Ranch will be all Todd’s—but even now, when I have been forced to realize that I am a dying man, I have hopes that I will live long enough to see you again, to talk to you, and explain all that you will have to face when I am gone. I have certain requests to make of you—they are requests only. I think, when you have read my journals, you will understand why I make them. But I would make another request of you, my daughter, and that is that you read my journals in sequence…

  I was to get in touch with a man named Elmer Bragg when I arrived in Boston. “An ex-Pinkerton man,” my father called him. “A frontier lawyer with the soul of a scholar—or perhaps a prophet. Elmer chooses his clients since he had retired, but he is one of my closest friends, and if I am unable to meet you, it is my wish that you will contact him.”

  The letter was signed “Your loving Father, Guy Dangerfield.”

  I thought about my mother, whom I had known these past two years, and for whom I could feel nothing but a vague kind of dislike. I had hated her at times, but I was beyond that violent emotion now. She was a poor, wily woman, the product of her environment and upbringing. I was more my father’s daughter than I was hers, and she, oddly enough, had realized it first.

  I had passed the time for looking back! The thought came to me with a kind of violence, bringing me to my feet, and to the mirror again, where I looked at my reflection with a feeling of wonderment, remembering myself when I had first come here. It was a different Rowena Dangerfield who would be traveling to America—not a girl, but a woman.

  “It is better this way,” my mother said, as she rode opposite me in the carriage. It was our first real conversation since we had spoken of my new life a week ago, and now we were on our way to the docks. “You’ll get on in America, I’m sure,” she went on, her eyes flickering over me. “Guy should have been allowed to have you, of course. I see that now. But at the time your grandfather was insistent, and I had no choice in the matter. I was forced to go abroad for a while. The scandal was really terrible. I wasn’t prepared for any of it—then.”

  “I’m sure Sir Edgar went with you,” I said idly, and saw her eyes narrow.

  “Yes, he did! But then, it is not something you would understand. You have never felt deeply about anything, or anyone, have you? Oh, I see you raise your eyebrows. I know what you think about me. But you have never loved. I wonder if you are capable of it! I might have—I might have felt something for you, even if it was only pity, if I hadn’t recognized how hard you are, under that indifferent surface!”

  “What is the point of saying this to me now?”

  She leaned forward, and her mouth, usually soft and pouting, was hard. “It has to be said! I know you never loved Edgar. You never felt anything for him, did you? And perhaps it was for that very reason that he became so—besotted—obsessed! You saw him merely as a man you had maneuvered into an awkward position, and then you used him, did you not? But I love him. Yes, look at me any way you want to. You may think me a silly, stupid woman, but at least I’m capable of feeling! He had his mistresses when we first met, and he had them afterwards, but he married me. It didn’t matter until you came. Guy’s daughter—Guy’s revenge!”

  I said coldly, “How unfortunate that you had me at all! And how awkward of my grandfather to die so soon.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said a trifle wildly. It seemed as if she was suddenly determined to have her say. “Yes,” she added, in a lower voice. “You would not understand, but I was only seventeen. What did I know of love or marriage at the time? It was all arranged. I was to be married to Guy Dangerfield, who was so much older than I was, a man I had met only twice before. It was what I had been brought up for, after all. To make an advantageous marriage. No one thought to consult my feelings in the matter! I was married in order to produce more Dangerfields. Thank God that after I had you I was allowed some respite!”

  A tiny shiver of anger shook me as I looked at her flushed face.

  “You hated my father. And you hated me from the moment I was born. I’m a product of your hat
e, Mother dear. Why blame me for being stronger than you were?”

  “Why? Because you are hard. It’s not strength, but hardness—a lack of feeling in you.”

  “It’s hardly important now.”

  “No, I suppose not. But the blame wasn’t all mine! I was prepared to be a good wife. If your father had loved me more and despised me less, something might have come of it. But he too married to please others. There was another woman. I never knew who she was or what she was to him, but he would mutter her name sometimes, in his sleep. ‘Elena—’ he would say—‘Elena!’ And he called you Rowena Elaine. No, he never loved me! Is it any wonder that I sought love?”

  For an instant I saw her as she must have looked twenty years ago, before she became overly plump and the fine lines etched themselves in her face. Poor Fanny. Product of her environment. But as selfish in her own way as she accused me of being. Whatever her reasons for her sudden outburst, we were past the point of understanding each other, or, for that matter, of any genuine communication.

  So I looked back at her, saying nothing, and after a while, shrugging, she seemed to regain her composure.

  “Ah, well. Perhaps it’s a good thing we need not indulge in the conventional strain of farewells. There were things that I felt had to be said, and they are behind us now.”

  We did not kiss when the time for final parting came. A footman lifted my trunks from the carriage and set them down for the swarming porters to carry. Nor did I turn my head when the carriage drove off. Within a few hours I would be leaving the past behind me and embarking on a new life. I remembered my last journey, and could almost have smiled with pity for the miserable, frightened, and resentful creature I had been then. Could it have been only two years ago? This time, at least, I knew what I was going to.

  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.

  Three

  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.