“The Knights?”
It seemed to Lettie that Ranny’s cousin slanted a quick look at her father as she made the suggestion. The older man stared out over the railing as if his thoughts were elsewhere.
“Breaking men out of jail isn’t their specialty.”
“Maybe not,” Sally Anne agreed, her gaze on Martin steady, “but the Thorn could do it.”
There was a silence on the veranda. Every glance, in that brief instant, was on Martin. He looked taken aback. “My dear girl, I’m not your man!”
“I would hardly expect you to admit it, but if you have any feeling for Ranny—”
“No,” Lettie said.
Martin was no longer the center of attention.
“What do you mean, no?” Sally Anne demanded.
Lettie gave her a level look. “It won’t work. Anyone who tries to free him will just get him killed, along with themselves.”
“Not necessarily.” The other woman’s tone was defensive.
“And even if it worked, what would become of him? He couldn’t come back to Splendora. He might be able to take care of himself in Texas or farther west, but he wouldn’t be happy away from everyone.”
Martin Eden stared down at her. “I have no intention of doing anything foolhardy, Miss Mason, but I think it highly impertinent of you to be deciding Ranny’s fate.”
“That may be, but it seems to me his chances are better if he depends on the colonel to discover the truth.”
“Even after he and his men search Splendora for evidence, as they will?”
“Are you implying there is something to be found?”
“Are you certain there’s not? Or that the colonel won’t manufacture what he doesn’t find?”
What did he really believe behind that smiling, handsome façade of his face? It was impossible to tell. “I’m amazed you would suggest such a thing, amazed you can’t see that Ranny is better as he is.”
“There are many things about us that amaze you, aren’t there, a lot of things you don’t understand. Like Ranny and the Thorn. You interfered there, and look what happened. Now you want to tell us what’s best for him? It may be, Miss Mason, that you would be better off if you went back North where you belong.”
No one spoke. No one chided Martin for his breach of manners or protested that he was wrong. It was as if he had merely put into words what they all felt. They had silently closed ranks against her, the interloper, the traitor.
Lettie rose to her feet. “You may be right, Mr. Eden. You may be exactly right.”
She walked into the house. The close, stifling stillness of her bedchamber had no appeal, and she continued along the hallway and out the back doors. She crossed the back veranda and went down the steps with her skirts trailing over the treads, then moved along the brick walk past the herb garden and the kitchen building. The tempo of her footsteps increased the farther she went from the big house. Faster she walked, faster, until by the time she reached the schoolroom she was almost running. She hurried into the small cabin and shut the door behind her. With her hand still on the knob, she leaned against the door panel and closed her eyes.
Martin was right; she should go. To stay when everyone wished her gone was like inflicting a penance upon herself. She felt it and longed to have the whole thing over and behind her, but she could not seem to bring herself to think seriously of packing and arranging for the journey. Not while Ranny’s fate was undecided.
Splendora seemed so empty without him. As quiet and unassuming as he was, it was extraordinary how he had made his presence felt. Everyone and everything, to one degree or another, depended on him. He was the sun around which the household revolved. Without him, it was bleak and purposeless.
Even this schoolroom. She opened her eyes and looked around. It appeared the same, had the same dry smells of books and chalk and glue and old leather bindings. The sunlight falling through the window in a wide beam had the same brilliance and the same slowly turning dust motes caught in its shafts. Still, the room felt dull and deserted.
Lettie let her breath out in a tremulous sigh. She pushed away from the door and walked to her desk where she trailed her fingers along its surface. She put her hand on the back of her chair, then dragged it toward the window and sat down. It was here that Ranny had asked her to marry him. He had been so persuasive, so serious, so intent. She could almost hear his voice as, in his simple sentences, he had offered his love, his home, himself. If she had agreed…
What had she done to him? What had she done?
Aunt Em and Sally Anne and all the others seemed so certain that he was innocent. She wanted desperately for it to be so. There was a part of her that could not conceive of it any other way. But there was also the part of her that remembered and weighed and added up and stood puzzled over the sum of the man who was Ranny, Ransom Tyler.
Sometime soon, in a day or two days or a week, the Thorn would ride out on some deed of good or ill, and the questions would be answered. When that time came, she would be glad, incredibly glad. In the meantime, she prayed that Thomas Ward would see to it that no harm came to Ranny, that any interrogation was conducted along official lines without recourse to barracks tactics or brutality.
A shiver ran through her as she remembered Ranny in the hands of the soldiers, disheveled, his hair in his eyes and blood at the corner of his mouth. There were means that could be used, she had heard, to make a man confess to anything. Pain, she thought, would not daunt Ranny for a long time, but there were limits to the endurance of any human. The worst that could be used against him might be mental persuasion. He would have few defenses against it, few wiles or mental acrobatics with which to protect himself. He might be tricked into saying what he did not mean or led to believe that admitting to the crimes of the Thorn would protect someone else. It was useless to think that Thomas Ward would not do such a thing; he might do it without the least intention of entrapping an innocent man.
As she had done.
All that would not matter if the Thorn were to make another move. What would happen, however, if he did not? What would become of Ranny if the man who played the part of the righter of wrongs decided that this was a fine time to fade from sight? What would happen if Ranny was indeed the Thorn and there was no possibility of an incident occurring to gain his release?
The charges laid at Ranny’s door included assault, theft, interfering with the official duties of the United States Army, and murder. The penalty for the least of these would be several years in a Federal stockade; for the worst, it would be hanging.
Hanging. Ranny.
The idea was so unthinkable that she got out of the chair and began to pace with her skirts swinging about her ankles. It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t.
But if it did, she would be to blame.
The thought of it was intolerable.
She stood with her hands clenched to her stomach as if that would still the ache of guilt and fear and misplaced caring that she refused to call love inside her. Nothing could. It was possible that nothing ever would.
One thing that would help for the moment was to see Ranny again. To see if he had forgiven her. She would go as soon as the others had left Splendora, as soon as the way was clear so she need not explain what she did not entirely understand herself.
Lettie pulled the buggy up in front of the big, old two-story house that had been taken over as headquarters for the occupation army. She took out her handkerchief and blotted the perspiration from her face, then flicked away the dust that had settled on her clothing. The afternoon was so hot that the sky seemed to have a brassy sheen and the leaves hung limp on the trees. The streets of the town were deserted. The proprietors of stores stood in their doorways, fanning themselves. Here and there, on the shady side of a building or under a tree, a man was lying asleep. The cats and dogs had withdrawn to the cool crawl spaces under the houses where they lay stretched out, panting, waiting for sundown.
Inside headquarters, a clerk at a desk
in what had once been the hall sat with his feet up and a piece of newspaper over his face, snoring mightily. Lettie’s clearing of her throat failed to rouse him. With a look of irritation, she moved to open the nearest door.
An officer looked up from a desk littered with papers. His hair looked as if he had been scratching his head and there were ink stains on his fingers. As he got to his feet, a paper clung to the underside of his forearm that was beaded with sweat above his rolled sleeve, and he snatched it free and flung it down before coming around the desk toward her.
“May I help you, ma’am,” he began, then exclaimed, “Miss Lettie, what are you doing here?”
He was one of the men who had been to Splendora that summer. He was from Kentucky and had a sister named Marcy, Lettie knew, but she could not recall his name. She smiled at him with warmth, however. “I was looking for Colonel Ward.”
“Sure thing. This way, Miss Lettie.”
The lieutenant put on his uniform jacket before he led the way back out into the hall. As he passed the sleeping clerk, he swept the man’s feet from his desk without ceremony, then moved with quick strides to open a door farther along. Thomas Ward’s office had once served as a dining room, if the punkah hanging from the ceiling was any indication. The punkah was in motion, swinging back and forth as a small Negro boy sitting in a corner pulled on its rope. Two men stood near the windows at the far end of the room. One was the colonel, the other Samuel Tyler. They turned as Lettie entered.
“Miss Lettie to see you, sir,” The man from Kentucky announced, then with a smile and a wink went away again.
Tyler said a few last words, only one of which Lettie caught and that was the word money. No doubt they were discussing some detail of the mortgage on Elm Grove.
“If I intrude,” she said, “I can wait outside.”
“Not at all, I was just going,” Sally Anne’s father said. He nodded to the colonel and Lettie before replacing his hat. “Good day, Thomas. Miss Mason.”
The door closed behind him.
Thomas Ward came toward Lettie and took her hands. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I won’t keep you long. It’s about Ranny.”
“You want to see him? My dear girl, you and half the rest of the world. The other half of his well-wishers have sent him some kind of food or other comfort. I’m about worn out with looking through everything for files and keys and whatnot.”
“Have they convinced you yet that you have the wrong man?” Her tone was rallying, but beneath it ran a thread of hope.
“Not entirely.”
Lettie lowered her lashes to hide her disappointment. “I suppose you have questioned him?”
“I have, between visits.”
“What does he say?”
“Say? Next to nothing. He sits there and smiles and looks as innocent as a choirboy at Christmastime, but having been a choirboy myself, I refuse to be taken in.”
She played with the strings of her purse, which hung on her arm. “Suppose he never says anything? What then? You wouldn’t — that is to say — you would not allow him to be questioned too harshly, even mistreated, would you, Thomas?”
“Is that what’s worrying you? Is that what you think of me and of the United States Army?”
“You won’t, I hope, try to say that it never happens.”
“You and Sally Anne. The two of you must think I’m a real bas — a real brute.”
Lettie supposed that the other woman had as much right to be concerned about Ranny’s welfare as she did, more in fact. It was completely illogical for her to be annoyed.
She ignored his near slip of the tongue. “I think that you are a fine officer, but you are under a great deal of pressure to put an end to the Thorn’s activities and to the atrocities that have been committed in his name.”
“That sounds as if you think the Thorn may not be the guilty party, whether or not Ranny is our man.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” she exclaimed.
He was silent for a long moment, watching her, his gaze on her flushed cheekbones. “Just what is Tyler to you? Sally Anne I can understand, she’s related to him, but I don’t see why you’re so upset.”
“I hardly see that my relationships are any concern of yours.”
“Strictly speaking, no, but it isn’t just idle curiosity. I get the feeling that you just may be regretting what you’ve done and I’d like to know why.”
Lettie lifted her gaze, staring at the open window and the empty, sunbaked street. “If I am, which I don’t admit, it’s because of Ranny, because he was caught. He — he’s like no one else I’ve ever known. He’s kind and generous, and there is a sweetness to his nature that catches at the heart. He’s sensitive, with a soul that is somehow not quite as protected as the rest of us. He’s funny and gallant and sometimes so tragic that I can’t—”
“It sounds to me that if he were normal you would be in love with him.”
She sent him a quick, startled glance, her color deepening. “I will admit that I’m fond of him. I suppose it’s natural; a teacher is often fond of certain pupils.”
“Fond?”
“What else, pray?” She lifted her chin to give him a challenging look.
“Nothing, if you say so,” he answered, but there was a considering expression in his eyes.
“I will remind you,” she said, her tone even, “that Ranny stepped in once to save you injury, that day at Splendora with Martin Eden.”
“I haven’t forgotten. Nor have I forgotten how he brought me to my senses at Elm Grove when I came so near to ruining my chances with Sally Anne.”
“Well, then?”
“Well, then, you have my word that I will handle him with kid gloves. This may come as a surprise to you, but I never intended to do anything else.”
A smile curved her lips, rising to her eyes. “And I never expected otherwise, but it’s nice to hear you say so.”
“Yes, well, I would have mauled him about a bit for the fun of it, and maybe battered him here and there, but he has too many friends. Though it makes me sound like a damned coward to say so, I’d rather not risk having my neck stretched some dark night — the fate Samuel Tyler was seeking to warn me of just now.”
“That is, of course, your only reason.”
“What else?” he said, and as he moved to open the door and then hold it for her, the lift of his brow dared her to accuse him of kindness. “Shall we visit the prisoner?”
The jail was in the raised basement under the main floor of the house, the same small room with a single barred window and door that had been used to hold dangerous or unruly-slaves in years past. To reach it, they went along the hall to the back doors, then down to the ground-floor veranda. Thomas unlocked the double doors that led into this lower floor and escorted her along the hallway that bisected it to the jail room in the right-hand front corner. There were a few rooms in this area that were ordinarily used for storage. The basement was dim and smelled faintly of mildew and dust, but had the advantage of being much cooler than the upper rooms.
Thomas stopped at the barred doorway of the jail room where the outline of a tiny window crossed with bars, a washstand, and a narrow cot with the figure of a man lying upon it could just be seen. The colonel rapped on the wall with his knuckles. “Someone to see you, Tyler.” He turned away and went down the hall, saying over his shoulder to Lettie, “Five minutes. I’ll be back.”
Ranny got to his feet, a solid yet indistinct figure in the gray light of the room. He was silhouetted against the window as he turned to her, his broad shoulders nearly blocking the light, the tilt of his head inquiring. He began to move toward her with his easy, swinging stride, coming out of the dimness.
Lettie saw the shape of his body, the molding of his head and neck, the way he moved, and felt her heart turn in slow and aching pain inside her. She could not think, could not speak. The blood in her veins seemed congealed, so thickened that she felt she might never move from that s
pot.
Ranny came nearer. The light from the doors at the end of the hall picked up the soft gold of his hair, the bronze of his skin, the gentle curve of his mouth. His big hands closed around the bars of the door. He said softly, “Miss Lettie.”
“Oh, Ranny,” she whispered, her voice breaking.
“You came. I didn’t think you would.”
Tears rose, hurting, pooling in her eyes. She stepped forward without knowing she was going to and placed her hand on his. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m fine. But your hands are cold. You aren’t sick?”
“No, no.”
His lips were bruised and cut. She reached through the bars to trail her fingertips over the warm skin, which was faintly stubbled with beard, at the side of his mouth, gently soothing those injuries that had been inflicted upon him because of her. The need to press her lips to his was so strong that she felt light-headed with the effort of restraint. He turned his head, brushing her fingertips with a kiss before he captured her hand and held it to his chest.
“I’m so sorry, Ranny, so sorry.”
Where the words had come from, she didn’t know, but she was glad when they were spoken. She moved closer, clutching at a bar with her free hand.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does. What am I going to do?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing you can do, Miss Lettie.”
“There must be something.”
“Don’t think of it. I’ll be all right.”
Was that a warning? Or was it just his concern for her feelings? She drew back, looking at him, impressing his features on her mind’s eye. He looked the same, perhaps a little strained, a little tired, but the same. The difference was in herself, in the way she saw him.
“Ransom Tyler,” she said, trying the name, hearing the syllables echoing in her memory along with images she would never forget.
“Miss Lettie?”
His voice was puzzled, but the grasp of his hand had tightened perceptibly. For an instant, she had an over powering urge to demand that he drop his pretense and face her as he really was, himself and none other.
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