by Janet Dailey
“Yes, sir.” Cutter lifted a booted foot into the stirrup and remounted his horse, then paused to touch the brim of his hat and nod to Hannah.
“Thank you, Captain.” She smiled up at him, seeing little details: the thick black line of his brows, the crookedness of his nose, and the hidden things in his keen blue eyes. His lips widened briefly in response, and Hannah remembered how his steady calm and easy silence had comforted and reassured her.
“Fetch Doc Griswald, too,” Stephen ordered, his gaze coming back to Hannah. Before she could protest that nothing was the matter with her, he said, “We’d better have him check you over and make sure you aren’t suffering from something.”
“I’m not. I’m fine—now.” Now that she was here with him.
His fingers tightened around her hands before Stephen was distracted by the crunch of gravel under the hooves of Cutter’s horse as the captain turned to leave with the pinto horse in tow. “I want to speak to you later, Captain. I’ll be at my quarters.”
“Yes, sir.” Cutter saluted, and reined his mount away from the couple.
In his side vision. Cutter saw them start toward Officers’ Row, but they were soon out of his view as he rode to the infirmary. Like everyone else, curiosity had brought Dr. Benjamin Rutledge Griswald outside. Cutter saluted’ him, but remained in the saddle.
“Major Wade would like you to come over to his quarters and examine his wife,” he said, relaying the request.
“I figured as much when I saw her ride in with you.” Griswald nodded and picked up the black satchel sitting on the ground by his feet. “I expect after her being with the Apaches, she isn’t right in the head. Sad thing. A refined woman like her.”
“I think you’ll find she’s sound of mind—and body,” Cutter asserted tersely and saluted again, then swung his horse away from the adobe building, tugging on the pinto’s rein for the animal to follow.
Along Suds Row, ragtag pickaninnies played behind the tent houses. The boys were wielding sticks as if they were sabers and charging at imaginary Apaches crawling along the encroaching desert. They came running up when they saw Cutter leading a real Indian pony. A tolerant smile edged Cutter’s hard mouth. Until the captured Apaches were taken to the reservation, he knew they’d have trouble with the young ‘uns slipping around to get an up-close look at some of the “savages” their daddies had fought, and to get a good scare, too.
In front of the third tent, Cutter halted his horse and swung down. He picked out the oldest child in the encircling group, a girl of about ten with rag ribbons trying the ends of her much-braided hair, and handed the horses’ reins to her, “Don’t let them loose,” he said in a mock warning, amused by her ear-to-ear smile; she was so proud to be chosen over the boys.
The door flap was tied open and Cutter ducked through, automatically removing his wide-brimmed campaign hat and combing his fingers through the unruly thinkness of his black hair where the crown had flattened it. His glance skipped by the crudely made pieces of furniture to the iron stove where a flatiron heated and Cimmy Lou stood, so dark against the light walls. An iron was in her hand, poised above the half-ironed shirt lying atop a cloth-cushioned board.
“Well, if it ain’t Cap’n Cutter come to call.” Her drawl mocked the way he came to a stop just inside the opening. The iron was returned to the stove to stay hot while she moved away from the ironing board to cross the room.
Cutter straightened, his body rearing slightly away from Cimmy Lou’s potent beauty with her fine, high-boned features, luminous jet-black eyes, and softly full lips. The dark kerchief around her hair made a cameo of her face.
“I saw the patrol come in, but I shore never expected you to beat John T. here.” When she cocked her head to the side to taunt him, Cutter saw a faint bruise purpling the flesh along her jaw, nearly invisible against her coffee-brown skin.
“Who hit you?” At his demand, she immediately turned her head to conceal the discoloration, but Cutter laid his fingers against her chin and turned it back.
“Nobody. I ran into a post,” she answered sulkily.
“And what was the post’s name?” he queried derisively.
“Always so clever, ain’t you, Cap’n?” She laughed and drew away from him, uncaring of what she’d admitted.
A hard anger made him tight-lipped. “Someday John T. is going to kill a man over you and wind up on the gallows before he realizes you aren’t worth it.”
“How do you know? Maybe I am.” Wickedness danced in her eyes, “It ain’t my fault he’s gone for weeks—months at a time. A girl gets lonely.” Always she flirted with him, baiting Cutter with her body and watching to see if he’d rise to the lure. “And don’t try to convince me John T. wouldn’t find hisself some ‘company’ if’n he had the chance. ‘Course, it’s okay for him.”
“Mrs. Hooker—“
“Why don’t you never call me Cimmy Lou like everybody else does, Cap’n Cutter?”
“Mrs. Hooker, Major Wade requested that you be sent to his quarters. As you already know, we brought Mrs. Wade back with us, and the major would like you to be of assistance to her,” he stated.
“Fo’ a white woman, she didn’t look no worse fo’ wear. Maybe she found out it wasn’t so bad after all. Did she talk about what-all they did to her?”
Cutter swung away in disgust. “The major is expecting you.”
She laid a long-fingered hand on his arm, halting him. “Ain’t you gonna pick up yore laundry while yore here, Cap’n?” she asked in a silkily innocent voice.
After a split second’s hesitation, Cutter pivoted back, a closed expression on his hard and trail-weary features. “Yes, I will.”
With a swing of her hips, she sashayed across the earthen floor to the piles of neatly folded clothes. “That’ll be five dollahs fo’ the month.” She came back, cradling the stack of his clothes in her arms. The gold coin was between his fingers, his hand extended toward her offering the payment. “My hands are full,” she reminded him, her look and gesture provocative. She turned at right angles to him, standing close to give him a clear view of the deep cleavage between her upthrust breasts. “Why don’t you do like all the rest of the officers an’ put the money in my private bank?”
It was a challenge, a husky taunt that said she knew he wouldn’t do it. Cutter made a two-fingered drop straight down the middle, barely brushing the firmly rounded skin. Then he took the bundle of clothing from her arms. She looked disappointed, while trying to hide it.
“I don’t know if’n I’ll ever figure you out, Cap’n,” she declared. “Most of yore white officers gots to feel around a little before they find the bank. What makes you so high an’ mighty? White men have been messin’ ‘round with colored gals ever since they found out the color don’t rub off.”
“Good day, Mrs. Hooker.” He pushed his hat onto his head, nodding curtly.
“I guess it bothers you that I ain’t lettin’ you do the chasin’. Let me tell you somethin’ about women, Cap’n, colored or white. You men think you do the chasin’ an’ the winnin’. But there wouldn’t be no chasin’ if we didn’t surrender. You’d never catch a woman less’n she made up her mind to let ya. So ya see, she always gets what she wants.”
“What is it you want me to see?”
“John T. thinks yore somethin’ special, but I say yore jest a man.”
“Maybe, or maybe it’s something as simple as having more respect for your husband than you do, Mrs. Hooker.” This time Cutter stepped out of the tent and crossed to the young girl holding the horses.
With the freshly laundered clothes tucked under his arm, he swung into the McClellan and searched with his toe for the other stirrup. Cimmy Lou sauntered over to his horse, looking at him as she started stroking a hand slowly along his thigh.
“How long you been out on patrol, Cap’n?” she teased, noticing the taut flexing of his leg muscles. His horse sensed the hot agitation that fired his blood, and danced nervously. “Why do you suppose yore hor
se is gettin’ al excited?” She laughed.
Her throaty laughter followed him as Cutter caught up the braided rawhide rein of the pinto and rode away with it in tow. Halfway down Suds Row, he met John T. on his way home. The black sergeant saw the laundry under his arm, and a closed-up look came over his face. Cutter gave a cursory response to Hooker’s salute, and continued toward the stables. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw John T. start walking a little faster toward his makeshift dwelling. And Cutter damned that woman; he damned her to hell for twisting a man up like that.
It was all so sweetly familiar. Hannah moved slowly through the rooms, her fingers trailing over precious objects—so many little discoveries to make, so many little things she’d forgotten, but she had only to see an item again to recall it afresh. When her circle of the parlor was complete, she stopped in front of Stephen. A wondrous feeling of moving through time claimed her.
“It’s all exactly the way you left it,” Stephen told her with an encompassing gesture. “Not a thing has been moved.”
This demonstration of devotion and loyalty touched her. She gazed at him, seeing in his face the changes that the room did not show. With the tips of her fingers, she traced the gauntness of his cheeks.
“You’ve lost some weight,” she murmured as he caught at her hand and lowered it. She studied his face, the glitter of gold in the tobacco-brown of his mustache. The thick sweep of his lashes hid his eyes from her, but she sensed that he was looking at her hand. Its callused roughness was a far cry from the velvety-soft texture it had once had. Then Stephen lifted his head and she felt the hard thrust of his gaze, so intense and probing.
“Did they hurt you?” he demanded in a voice made harsh by raw feelings.
She shut out the horror of her own memories to reassure him. “I’m all right now.” Her body swayed toward him, wanting his kiss, needing it.
She pressed her fingers to his lips as he tightly shut his eyes, as if in fervent prayer. He spoke against her desert-chapped hands. “Sometimes I thought I would never see you again.”
“I know,” Hannah said gently, surprising him with her answer.
“How?”
“The armband. Or has someone died in your family?”
“No one died.” Stephen released her and drew away to remove the black cloth from around his sleeve, all his attention becoming rapt in it. “This was my reminder of you. You were always with me. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I carried the thought of you. Whatever pain and grief I endured, I knew that it was small compared to what you must be suffering.” He paused to look at her. “Does that make sense?” Then he seemed to see her, and all that restless, intense energy was channeled into another subject. “We’ve got to get you out of those clothes. Where is that Cimmy Lou to help you with your bath? I had my striker put water on to heat. You wait here.”
Alone, Hannah turned back into the center of the room and caught a glimpse of her refection in the wall mirror. She stared at it. The image of the woman the Apaches knew as Coloradas gazed back at her, clad in hand-sewn buckskins, curl-toed moccasins, and a colored headband around her forehead. Her skin was so brown, and her eyes were so dark. Yet Hannah recognized herself.
She remembered the last time she’d looked in this mirror; it had been the night of the Sloanes’ party, but the face of that other woman seemed to belong to a stranger, even though the features were the same. All the things in the parlor were familiar to her—except the remembered image of that other Hannah. During her captivity, she had forced herself to remember objects, acquaintances, places, details about Stephen; but she had forgotten what she used to think and feel, what she had wanted, what she once believed. She wasn’t sure anymore who that well-bred, well-schooled, and blissfully ignorant woman was.
Hannah turned away from the mirror and faced the parlor, a room meant to hold lavender scents and silks and the rustle of long skirts—not crushed mint and buckskins and the cat-footed silence of moccasins. In so many ways she hadn’t changed—not in her loyalties nor in her love for Stephen—yet an uneasy feeling plagued her. She couldn’t be that other woman anymore. She didn’t know her.
When Cimmy Lou Hooker came to the back entrance of their quarters, Stephen’s striker, Delancy, showed her through. Hannah had forgotten how much water was needed to fill the copper tub; the amount seemed prodigious after her desert existence with the Apaches. Luxuriating in the bath, she forgot her nudity in the pleasurable sensation of immersing her body in so much water. She didn’t display any of the modesty she would have shown before with servants present. “Miz Wade, where’d you get them scars? Did them Apaches do that to you?” Cimmy Lou stared at the bum marks gouged into the skin below her collarbone.
“Yes.” She covered the marks with the large bath sponge. Time had dulled the memory of that sharp-searing pain, but not the sight of the red-hot stick coming at her. “I tried to run away once,” Hannah admitted in an emotionless voice. “They punished me.”
“I bet you didn’t try to escape from them again.”
“Only once.” Hannah dipped the sponge in the soapy water, then raised it and squeezed the liquid over her outstretched arm. “When the Mexican army attacked the rancheria, I tried to give myself up to the soldiers so they could bring me back. But they thought I was an Apache and tried to kill me.”
It was good to talk, to release some of the words. It let some of the horror out. And Hannah knew that the colored woman’s questions were only the first of many that would soon be asked by others. This was merely practice, she thought wryly.
“Well, yore as brown as one, that’s fo’ shore.” Cimmy Lou shook out a toweling blanket and held it up for Hannah to step into as she climbed out of the copper tub. “How’d you get like that, all over?”
“They took away my clothes.” The towel was wrapped around to swaddle the full length of her.
Cimmy Lou stopped rubbing her down. “Every stitch?”
“Every stitch,” Hannah answered flatly. The knock that came at the bedroom door was a welcome intrusion. “Yes?”
“Doctor Griswald is here.” Stephen’s voice came from the other side.
“I’ll only be a moment.” She turned to Cimmy Lou, concerned now with the task of making herself presentable. “My robe, Cimmy Lou.”
After donning a minimum of underclothes, Hannah slipped on the long robe and tied the sash snugly around her waist. Freed’ of its ribbon, her auburn hair tumbled loosely about her shoulders as she crossed the room to the hall door and opened it.
“Please come in, Doctor Griswald.” The army surgeon and her husband were conversing in low tones in the narrow hallway. They stopped abruptly when she spoke, and Hannah felt the doctor’s close scrutiny. She was becoming uneasy with the way everyone was watching her, as if expecting to see something, some mark of her captivity perhaps.
“Your face is thinner,” Doc Griswald announced, and tilted his head back to look at her up close through his bifocals, “It appears you’ve lost weight. Your color looks good though, even with that tanning from the sun.”
“I am feeling well,” Hannah insisted as he walked past her into the bedroom, his medical bag banging against his leg. Actually she’d had more rest in the last two days than she was accustomed to having in a week, and more food and water, too.
Stephen smiled at her, but remained out in the hallway. “You’re beginning to resemble the Hannah I married.” The look in, his eyes was as warm as the low comment. “I’ll leave you in Doctor Griswald’s capable hands.”
“Miz Wade, what you want me t’do with these buckskins?” Cimmy Lou inserted.
“Burn them.” The order came from Stephen, Quick and firm, before Hannah had a chance to speak. “Burn the moccasins, everything.”
Hannah didn’t like the hard set of his jaw, the sudden blaze of light in his eyes; she remembered the temper that boiled behind them. But she held her peace, turning instead to the colored laundress to confirm, “Yes, burn them, Cimmy Lou.”
“Whatever you wants, Miz Wade.” She shrugged to indicate that it made no difference to her and picked up the naturally tanned leather garments, folding them loosely over her arm. “You be needin’ me fo’ anythin’ else, Miz Wade?”
“No, you may go.” Hannah dismissed the woman and walked to the dresser, where the doctor had spread open his black satchel. Again, she felt herself the target of his close attention.
The minute the door closed behind Cimmy Lou and they were alone, the doctor inquired, “What’s the date today, Mrs. Wade?”
The question startled her, especially the tone in which it was asked; he seemed determined to trip her up in some way. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I haven’t asked anyone. It’s late winter, the season the Apaches call Ghost Face, and it’s almost the time of Little Eagles, which I think is early spring—so it might be February ... of 1877.” The answer was the most complete one she could give him.
“Well, it doesn’t appear that you’re addle-witted,” he concluded, and took out his stethoscope.
In the hallway outside, Cimmy Lou turned away from the bedroom door and started for the kitchen. Stephen followed her, his stride quick and determined. “Is she all right?”
She answered him over her shoulder, half angry and half mocking. “If’n yore askin’ me if I could tell how many of them ‘paches she bedded, once a field’s been plowed it’s purty hard to know who done the plowin’.” Cimmy Lou chucked the buckskin clothing in a box that was kept in the kitchen for garbage. “I do know they took her clothes from her an’ made her go ‘round naked as the day she was born fo’ awhile. It’s fo’ shore she ain’t pure an’ white no more.” She swung around to give him a knowing look, smug and self-satisfied that she was getting back at him through his precious wife, “You been wantin’ her back an’ she’s here. Now we’ll see how you like it.”
