Rage, she felt such pure rage and grief over this final trick of bringing her here. That it was camouflage for the pain buried beneath it did not matter. It could be used as a shield.
“Are you all right?”
She had not heard him return. His ability to move soundlessly, to surprise her, was so annoying that it was all the trigger she needed. She straightened, her eyes blazing.
“Of course I’m all right; why ever should I not be? I’ve merely been abducted, nearly been raped, watched two men beat each other half to death, and been as near a witness to a hanging as makes no difference, but what of it? A perfectly normal morning!”
“I’m sorry that it had to be that way.”
“You’re sorry? A fine lot of good that does! I don’t know why you took me off the stage in the first place. Nor do I know why you brought me back here! You must realize this isn’t exactly the scene of fond memories.”
“I wanted to talk to you. I have to talk to you, to explain—”
“I’ve heard all I want to hear, and I’ve said all I have to say. I want to go home, back to Boston. I want to go now. The only thing you can do for me is to see that I get on my train before my trunk disappears!”
“No.”
The single word was calm, without heat. She stared at him, her fury growing. Her tone ominous, she said. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean,” he answered, “that I have no intention of letting you go until I have had my say.”
She got to her feet. Where she was on the steps made her eyes nearly on a level with his as he stood at the bottom with his hands on his hips. “If you think you can keep me here—” she began.
“I don’t just think it, I know it.”
He was blocking her way, his broad shoulders a most effective barrier. But far more effective was the hard, determined light in his hazel eyes.
She met his gaze squarely. Her voice soft with menace, she said, “You will be sorry.”
“No doubt.” His smile was wry as he surveyed her from the flush on her cheekbones to the quick rise and fall of her breasts to her fists that were on her hips in imitation of his belligerent stance. “But first I mean to find out just why you were afraid for me.”
Her wayward tongue. Why could she not have kept silent? She lifted her chin. “You are a fellow human being. It appeared to me that the Thorn was about to meet retribution, just or unjust. I didn’t care to see it.”
“I don’t think that was it, or at least not all of it. I think you feel something for me whether or not you are willing to admit it.”
“Oh, yes, if that’s what you mean,” she agreed with a show of carelessness that took her own breath away. “You are a most attractive man, as you must know. It seems I am easily influenced, you might even say excited, by a set of shoulders or a mustache.”
“Don’t say that!” For the first time there was real anger in his voice.
“Why ever not? You saw it yourself.”
“I saw nothing of the kind. What are you trying to do, punish yourself for using the wiles God gave you?”
“Me? Goodness, no! Mere wiles, were they? Here I was thinking I had been playing the brazen temptress at the very least, a veritable Delilah! And you were in such agony at the sight, so embarrassed. Men turn women into creatures whose sole purpose is to attract men and then are outraged when women turn that attraction into a weapon. There’s no logic in it, or fairness.”
“If I was in agony, it was because I was afraid your wiles were going to work so well that I would be forced to stand and watch your rape.”
“You thought I was deserting you, admit it!”
“If it was to save your life, you were welcome to do it. But I never thought any such thing. I trusted you, damn you, Lettie! I knew you, and so there was never a moment when I had the least doubt of what you were doing. If there had been, I would not have been ready.”
Ready to step in when the time came, ready to help. It was true. Something deep inside her lifted, the easing of a weight so great that she realized that he had been right. She had been punishing herself, or at least accusing herself before he could accuse her. She looked away over his shoulder and took her fists from her hips, clasping her hands together in front of her.
That sign of uncertainty gave Ransom his first hope. “It was only,” he said quietly, “that I could not bear to see you do my fighting for me, whatever your methods.”
“I had to stand and watch you fight, too. Do you think it was easy to see Martin pound and tear at you while I did nothing?”
“You didn’t just stand and watch. You were ready and waiting.”
She looked at him, a blind light in her eyes. “I nearly killed him. He was so close and the gun was there, and I had no more feeling about it than if he had been a poisonous snake that I had to destroy. I wanted to kill him, I really did.”
“I know.”
“I never knew it could be so easy, for me, for a woman. Did you?”
“I learned it, in the war.”
She lowered her head and turned from him. She picked up her skirts and walked up the last two steps to the porch. He followed her as she moved to stand with her back to one of the peeled cypress posts. She refused to look at him, staring out over the yard.
“There is nothing of the lady in me, no delicacy, no refinement.”
“I have no use for ladies. I want you, as you must know.”
Her lips curved in a humorless smile, though the look in her eyes was weary. “Of course I know. I’m not a fool, though I must have seemed like one. You duped me so easily, didn’t you? How you must have laughed.”
“Never. I swear it.”
“Oh, come. All that playacting. ‘Would you kiss me, Miss Lettie?’ ‘Is there anything else you can teach me, Miss Lettie?’ When I think of it, I could — I could—”
“You could what? Scream? Hit me? Do it, then! Do it and get it over with. I can’t stand to see you like this.”
His voice was low and intense. He stood before her, unguarded, with pain in his eyes.
She barely looked at him. “And that night on the ferry. A forfeit for Johnny’s life. You asked it and, like a mindless idiot, I paid it. So easy, it was so easy.” She balled her hands into fists once more and held them to her eyes.
The leash he had been holding on his temper snapped. He reached to grip her wrists and dragged her toward him. “Stop this! Don’t do it to yourself. Don’t do it to us.”
She jerked at her arms but could not free herself. With her lips in a tight line, she glared at him. “I’m not doing it to me or to us, you snake. I’m doing it to you! So upright and valiant, such a crusader against evil you pretend to be, so good and pure and fine and gentlemanly. But what you did to me wasn’t right, and it certainly wasn’t the act of a gentleman.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said, his eyes steady though he was pale under the bronze of his skin. “I try to do what is right, but I’ve never pretended to be a saint. I’ve tried to apologize, tried to make amends—”
“Oh, yes,” she mocked. “‘Marry me, please, Miss Lettie.’“
He gave her a shake that loosened her hair from its pins so that it uncoiled down her back. Abruptly he pulled her against him, drawing her arms around his neck, encircling her waist with an iron grasp as he thrust his fingers into the silken twist of her hair. He took her mouth, plundering its sweetness as he held her against his hard body like a man who fears some long-sought treasure will be snatched from him.
Lettie felt a rush of tenderness and vital desire. It grew, pressing, flooding in upon her. She twined her fingers in the clean silkiness of his hair and let the feeling take her, surrendering to it this one last time. It could do no harm.
He kissed the corners of her lips, her cheeks and chin and quivering eyelids. His chin against her temple, he said, “Dear God, Lettie, you drive me insane.”
“You were that way already,” she said, her voice thick. She tried to draw back, but he would not allow it.
“No, not until you came. From the moment I first saw you, no more than a shadow in a room that should have been empty, from the moment first I touched you, I lost control and integrity. You are my nemesis, my just punishment for all the years when I thought love tokens silly things and men who lost their heads over women, who could not keep their hands off them, spineless weaklings. My need of you is so great that there is nothing I won’t do, no trick so low or ruse so debased that I won’t use it, to have you.”
“You make it sound as if it’s my fault, what happened between us.”
“No, no, mine, only mine, for falling in love with a stubborn, opinionated, headstrong Yankee woman!”
“And I’ll never change, either,” she said against his shirt collar. “I’ll never fit into your image of gentle Southern womanhood like Sally Anne.”
“Sally Anne is a fine woman, for a cousin. I prefer someone with more spirit.”
She gave an involuntary chuckle, scarcely noticing as she felt another layer of resistance and suspicion dissolving. “She would show you spirit if she heard you say that. She would scratch your eyes out.”
“Very likely.”
“In a very ladylike way, of course. She wouldn’t be — wouldn’t be shameless about it.”
“You have my permission, even my encouragement, to be as shameless as you like,” he said, his tone rich with amusement. “As a matter of fact, I have a great interest in the exploration of tingling secret places and gasps of fulfillment.”
“Don’t!” she cried in distress, pushing away from him. “Don’t mock me.”
Silently he cursed his uncontrollable tendency to tease. It was a part of the deep vein of loving affection for her that ran through him, though she was too suspicious, too highly strung at the moment to realize it.
“I would never do that. Never. I only meant that you are free to do as you like, be as you like, without fear of censure. I take no right for myself to judge you or anyone else. I enjoy what and who you are. I don’t require that you change in any way to please me. I would not want you to be any other way than you are now.”
She gave him a frowning glance. “You called me headstrong.”
“Aren’t you? How else am I to describe a woman who goes galloping off in my clothes stuffed with bed pillows and wearing my mustache? Except, of course, to say that she is also gallant and stout of heart?”
Her forehead smoothed. The corners of her mouth twitched, lifted. She made a small sound that might have been a breath of laughter. “You are really the most—”
“What?”
“Never mind. The mustache itched.”
“I know.” His face was solemn, though his eyes were not.
She looked at him, studying his features one by one as if to etch them on the walls of her memory. Compelled by something inside her, she reached out with tender fingertips to trace the new split place on his lip, the old bruise at the corner of his mouth and chin from his mishandling by the soldiers, the puffy place at the corner of his eye, the dark scar. Despite everything, he was still beautiful.
“Your poor face. Does it hurt?”
“Not now.” She sighed, letting her fingers fall. She met his gaze, her own serious, sad, but firm. “It wouldn’t work, you know. We are too different. The worlds we live in, that we come from, are too different. There would always be misunderstandings, doubts, and fears, even if there wasn’t this — this bad beginning between us.”
“I don’t call it bad.”
“That’s because you’re as stubborn as I am, maybe more. Anyway, it isn’t the normal beginning.”
“We aren’t normal, either of us.” He would fight to the last against what he sensed was coming.
“That’s why it won’t work. One of us should be. I think it’s best if I go. If you care for me in the least, you will help me do that. You will take me to Colfax now before we do something both of us will regret.”
She moved away from him, walking with grace and steadiness toward the steps. He watched her go, admiring the turn and swing of her hips under her skirts with their small, ridiculous bustle even as his heart slowly swelled toward bursting inside him. She had reached the steps before he found the words he needed.
“I’ll take you to hell itself if that’s where you want to go. But don’t patronize me, Lettie, not now, not ever again. And don’t tell me what is best for me. I’m not Ranny. Once and for all, I am Ransom Tyler and I know what I want. I want to sleep beside you for the rest of my life, to hold you when you have my child inside you, to worry with you over the little hellions we will create, to sit with you on the veranda in the dusk of our lives, and to lie beside you in some churchyard through eternity. I want everything I own to smell and to taste of you. I want, damn you, to breathe the air you breathe, to rest where you rest, to eat what you eat. I want to drink from your glass.”
There was a rending feeling inside her chest, as if the ice of eons was cracking, breaking away, dissolving. She turned to look at him with stark wonder in her eyes. Her voice hushed, shaking, she said, “You do love me.”
“What in the name of all that’s wonderful did you think I have been saying?”
“I thought it was another word for—”
He groaned, closing his eyes. “God preserve us, woman, you think too much.”
In two strides he was upon her, catching her close and whirling her slowly round and round and round with his face buried in the swinging swath of her hair.
A long time later, they were sitting on the floor, Ransom with his back to a post and Lettie lying across his lap. Her head was resting on his chest as she leaned against him in the circle of his arms. For the sake of comfort, the revolver had been removed from his belt, and it lay beside them. The sun was slanting toward the west, but it was cool under the shade of the trees and a vagrant wind drifted down the porch, lifting the golden-brown tendrils of Lettie’s hair. Drowsy and content, they sat and looked at the patterns the sun made through the leaves of the trees and the bright yellow-white ribbon of the road.
At last Lettie stirred. “Was I wrong or was that your Uncle Samuel with the Knights?”
“Shh,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
“But wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but it will be better if we don’t talk about it.”
She was silent for seconds only. “They may go after Bradley again. What will you do?”
“Stop them if I can. But if I can’t, Bradley will take his punishment and do what he must. It’s all any of us can do.”
“What about Sally Anne and the colonel? Do you think they will marry?”
“Whenever Sally Anne is ready, which will be soon.”
“She thought that he…”
“I know. That’s their business,” he said firmly.
She frowned a little. “Reconstruction can’t last forever. The South will be free to go about its business in another year or two, free of the carpetbaggers like O’Connor, free to recover, finally, from the war. When it does, Splendora can be made to pay again, can’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“You suppose? Aren’t you dying to see?”
“Not,” he said, taking the curling end of a long strand of her hair and brushing the curve of her cheek with it, “at the moment.”
She moved her face slightly in enjoyment of the caress, but her mind was elsewhere, straining toward the future, their future. “What about the Thorn? It will be so dangerous to continue. I’m not sure Aunt Em will ever believe that he and her Ranny are the same, but other people will begin to put two and two together.”
He sighed and dropped the curl. “I think he has made his last appearance since he’s to become a wedded man.”
“Do you regret it?”
When he did not answer immediately, she sent him a quick upward glance. He was engrossed in the way that the strand of hair, in falling, had made a mesh net to catch and hold the curve of her breast that was outlined under her shirtwaist. Catching
her eye, he hastily shook his head. “Never.”
“And Ranny?”
“What about him?”
“Will you go on pretending?”
“What would you prefer?”
She smiled a little. “I don’t mind. He’s rather dear to me.”
“I’m jealous. But you needn’t worry about being tied to him. I think he will be much more normal as a result of being hit on the head by the Federal army. They should be good for something.”
“I wasn’t worried! In fact, I’m going to miss him dreadfully.”
He brushed his lips against her forehead. “If you want him, all you have to do is call.”
“I’ll remember. But I may do even better. I may make a Ranny of my own. It could take a little time, say ten or twelve years…”
“Witch,” he said, lifting the mesh net of hair over her breast and rubbing the peak with his fingertip. “Maybe I’ll help you.”
“Devil,” she murmured.
He lifted his hand to her chin, urging her to look at him. His eyes bright with laughter and desire, he said, “When shall we start?”
Author’s Note
I am particularly indebted to Carol Wells of the Eugene P. Watson Memorial Library, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, Louisiana, for her guidance in searching out source material and also for her help in procuring one of the last leather-bound copies of Cane River Country, an invaluable source of data, old maps, and photographs that she researched and edited. Among the many other books consulted that proved of special significance was Lost Louisiana, 100 Years of Photographs by Norman C. Ferachi. Without his photo of a hand-drawn ferry with horse, buggy, passengers, and operator, this book would not be the same. And, as always, I would like to recognize the staff of the Jackson Parish Library, Jonesboro, Louisiana, for their aid and comfort and ready answers to cries for help.
Historical romances often create their effect by blending fact and fiction. For those who enjoy separating the two, or who want to know what happened later, here are a few details.
Louisiana History Collection - Part 2 Page 151
