The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback)

by Sydney Alexander

The Professor’s breakfast was a greasy delight of sausages and fresh eggs, to be washed down with a black bitter brew he swore was coffee. Jared, who ate it whenever he was in Bradshaw overnight, was fairly certain it had a lot to do with his constant bad temper. But a bachelor kitchen was a sorry thing, and a cabin on the prairie a lonely one. Jared spent some of his nights in town to get away from the quiet, laying down his head in a room at Miss Rose’s. Miss Rose set a real pretty table, but her girls were always giggling and giggling got on his nerves, so he dragged the weakly protesting Matt down to the saloon most mornings to break his fast and work on his hangover.

  Matt, as usual, recovered much more quickly from a night ill-spent than Jared did. Jared supposed this was because Matt was a cheerful drunk, and he was just a gloomy one. There was nothing really to be cheerful about, in Jared’s estimation. He’d gotten tired of cattle drives, and wanted a ranch, so he’d filed a claim out here in hopes of putting cattle on that good green grass. It wasn’t a place he’d ever planned upon settling, but it had made a lot of sense at the time, and now here he was. It was good enough land. He had the cattle. He’d plant some wheat where he could irrigate. He’d asked Michael Wassbaum, the town’s attorney, if that crazy neighbor-lady he’d met last week could actually sue him for diverting the creek, and Wassbaum had said she couldn’t, and that was about the sum total of his life right now.

  But Matt, who had no claim and no land and no worries, Matt was prattling on now about some party. A party! Like they were schoolgirls, or Galveston debutantes out in their billowing white dresses, pretending they were royalty. Jared just hated royalty. And parties. And debutantes. And Galveston. He wished Matt would quit talking about going back. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “I hear there’s going to be a genuine lady at this party of Patty’s,” Matt announced with some delight. “Patty Mayfield said so just now, over to the store. She said it’s going to be some…” he paused to remember the word. “Some swar-ray. Fancy, like Back East, with nice clothes and a punch bowl. On account of the genuine lady she met. In the store. Buyin’ pickles, she said.” He thought. “Even genuine ladies like pickles,” he said wonderingly.

  “We got ladies enough,” Jared said absently. He was absorbed in a month-old newspaper some cowboy had left lying around, and barely paying attention to Matt, who was no better than a fool most days anyhow. “Seems every week another one gets off the train looking for a husband. Don’t know why everyone wants to get excited about this one.”

  “Not some schoolmarm,” Matt scoffed. “A Lady. An English lady, the kind you got to bow and kiss her hand. Patty Mayfield said she talks like she has something wedged in her throat. Said she talks real fancy.”

  Jared looked up from his newspaper, suspicion rising in his thoughts. “She say where this lady lives?”

  “Just she has a claim in the district. Don’t know why she’s out here. Don’t know much about her at all, except she’s a widow. That’s why Patty Mayfield is throwing her a party. So everyone can talk to her.”

  A widow! Well, that would explain why she was alone at the claim… although not why she would have thought it would be a good idea to actually be on a claim. A woman alone on the prairie… with a baby… and a lady besides…

  Call that a lady! The way she’d spoken to him! The way she’d slapped him!

  The way she’d looked at him… as if, for a moment there, she wasn’t so much wantin’ to kill him as wantin’ to… well… Jared grinned to himself.

  “Well, hell.”

  “What?”

  “I do believe I spoke out of turn to a lady.”

  Matt’s smile fairly split his face in two. “Go on! Tell me!”

  Jared had a sudden vision of the sleeping woman, the curve of her breast, the gold of her braid, her lips slightly parted as if welcoming a lover’s kiss in her dreams, and instantly revised an earlier plan to get up from the table and walk up to the bar. It had been more than a week, but the sight was still firmly entrenched in his mind’s eye. He’d stay seated for the time being, yes he would. Quite cozy here in this chair, no need to stand. “She’s got quite a temper,” he allowed. “Don’t think much of men, if you asked me.”

  “No woman thinks much of you,” Matt reflected. “You haven’t had a nice thing to say in two-three years. Women like it when you say nice things. You got to be sweet to them. I think you forgot that.”

  Jared decided, for the umpteenth time, that Matt was something of an idiot.

  “Don’t matter though, was she beautiful? I expect a lady, a genuine lady, would be beautiful.”

  Jared thought. Those sky-blue eyes, sparkling like a pretty morning in May… and the dangerous sparks they’d thrown when she’d remembered she was furious with him. “Beautiful,” he allowed. “But mean. I don’t think you’d want to get mixed up with her.”

  “I can tame any filly,” Matt boasted. “Didn’t I tame that filly of Big Pete’s, and didn’t everyone say she couldn’t be broke? Rode that blasted filly clear to Long Lake and back again, that’s what I did, and Big Pete takes her everywhere and he bred her to Wellman’s Kentucky stallion and says he’s going to do it again next year, she’s such a nice riding horse. I did that. Me.”

  “Well,” Jared made an effort to speak seriously. “It is possible that a filly and a genuine lady are not the same thing.”

  “Hell, Jared, I know they’re not the same thing! But a good hand with a filly and a good hand with a woman… that’s the same thing. You gotta be sweet.”

  “Which I am not,” Jared clarified.

  “Which you are not.”

  There was a lengthy pause while Jared tried to figure out why the hell he cared that he wasn’t sweet enough to tame fillies or ladies. Matt fidgeted with his coffee cup and considered the empty pot sitting between them. Jared knew what was going on in his mind. Matt had an empty pocket and he wanted more coffee, so he was trying to convince Jared to go and fill it without actually asking him to pick up the tab. They’d been playing this game for years. Then Matt’s gaze fell upon the discarded newspaper.

  “Any news from Texas?” he asked.

  “Not a goddam thing,” Jared drawled, shoving it across the rough table.

  “Wish you’d go to Galveston with me for the winter. Why you don’t want to get the hell out of Dakota and go back is beyond me. We could sit on Mrs. O’Keefe’s porch all winter long, looking at the palm trees, ‘stead of shivering around the stove here. Two winters is enough for me. Hell, I might go without you.”

  He wouldn’t. Matt didn’t go anywhere without Jared. It had been that way for ten years, and they were too old to change now. Jared slid his eyes away from the newspaper. He’d be damned if he’d go back to Galveston. He’d be damned if he’d see her there, in her big house and wearing her fancy dresses. He’d be damned if he’d see her passel of brats traipsing after their nurse on the way to Sunday School.

  He’d be damned, he’d be damned, he’d be damned.

  Jared’s mind wandered back to the golden-haired bitch who had slapped him out on the homestead. She seemed a sight more pleasant than Hope, even with the slap. Even if Hope had never struck him, not with her hands, anyway. Hope had hurt him in entirely different ways.

  He stood up and flung back his chair. Matt looked up, alarmed. “Where you goin’?” he asked worriedly, as if Jared had decided to up and light out for Texas after all, right that moment, alone.

  “To get more coffee,” Jared grunted. “Maybe something to dress it up, too.” A man needed more than coffee, thinking about things like that. “Sweeten me up a little,” he threw over his shoulder as he went up to bother Missy Carter, who made the breakfasts and pestered the Professor in the mornings. “Maybe some filly will take a shine to me.”

  ***

  Cherry straightened up from beneath the new cow and stretched, arching her back to try to work the kinks out. There was a satisfying popping sound from somewhere between her shoulder blades, and she sighed with genuine pleas
ure. The cow turned, watched her impassively, and then went back to the hay that had been heaped before her as a bribe to stand still. Cherry was very fond of that cow. She was a patient soul, that cow.

  Cherry still wasn’t a confident milker, despite the pantomimed lessons from the Jorgenson girl, but after a week of proud cow ownership, she could now coax a pailful from the pendulous udders each morning and that was enough. For the moment. Butter-churning lessons started next week. She liked the idea of putting her own butter on her own bread. She liked the idea of just having butter.

  She looked across the lonely little bowl of grassland where she had decided to rebuild her life and thought that things were looking a bit better. The shanty was still a rattle-trap of gaping boards and leaking tar-paper, but she had roused herself to make some curtains from a lace-y gown Little Edward had once worn in New York, bought when Cousin Anne had been feeling generous (or perhaps guilty, since it was right before she announced Cherry could either go to work or get out). The white linen and lace now fluttered nicely in the crooked little hole that was her window. She had acquired a little collection of livestock at last, and the mule was nice enough to share his lean-to barn with the new cow, and the new chickens were nice enough to not wander too far from their drunkenly-leaning coop, and they always came back at night to roost and leave her a few speckled eggs.

  And in the center of the little clutch of buildings, there were two blonde heads nestled close together: the Jorgenson girl and Little Edward, stacking piles of rocks which the girl had cheerfully brought up from the creek on her way to the homestead each morning. Cherry was a little sorry to see her son playing with rocks, when she remembered her elegant nursery, with its carved wooden blocks and intricately painted Noah’s Ark, but he didn’t seem to know the difference.

  And by the time he is old enough to care, I shall have made enough money to give him the nice things he deserves. She looked beyond the little farmyard she was slowly building, to the pale prairie swells that would soon be split open to spill their black insides to the sunlight. She had no hopes of clearing all this in time for a crop now. But next year, next summer, she would be waist-deep in her own wheat, watching the heads plump with ripening firmness. She would run her fingers through her riches then, and pluck off a precious fruit to show to Little Edward, who would be nearly two years old, a great grown-up boy compared to now. “Wheat,” she would tell him, “Wheat,” as she might have said “Gold,” and he would reply “Wheeet!” Cherry Beacham was building a new Beechfields for Edward Augustus Beacham, to replace the legacy he had been denied, and she could see it all, stretching out in every direction, as clearly as if the future had already come to pass.

  The cow noted that Cherry had not yet left the lean-to, regarded her thoughtfully, and sneezed a violent cow-sneeze. Black droplets of cow mucus scattered around the hem of her once-clean dress. Cherry regarded the cow just as thoughtfully, and sighed again, with a distinctly less pleasant tone. The present was not nearly so interesting as the future. The present was a never-ending drudgery of farm chores and hammering together outbuildings and cooking and laundry and sewing, and Cherry had only just learned to do all of these things. Somewhat, it must be admitted, haphazardly.

  She looked down at her spattered frock with regret. The cow had likely spoiled her last unstained dress, and there was that party to consider next week. The girl from the general store, Patty Mayfield, had been so contagiously excited about the very idea of a party that Cherry had given her consent without realizing what she had done. Now she was meant to be the guest of honor at some sort of frontier hoe-down when she had been so consistently resolved to keep a low profile. Soon everyone in Bradshaw would know that there was an Englishwoman amongst them, living alone, and with a baby to boot. Soon… how silly of her to think it hadn’t already spread all over the county. If there was one thing that traveled fast, it was gossip, and nothing traveled faster than gossip of a husbandless woman and her very young child.

  “I should really try to put together a new frock,” Cherry told the cow, who blinked at her and went back to the hay without comment. “I have never sewn a dress before,” she told the mule, and the mule waggled his ears and looked, she thought, sympathetic. “I shall look foolish, I daresay,” she continued, feeling encouraged by the mule’s response. “But then again, I had never harnessed a mule before I bought you, and we have managed nicely together, haven’t we?” The mule tossed his head up and down and Cherry couldn’t help but laugh. Someone had told her mules were cleverer than horses and she had never believed him — someone back in England, someone from her old life — but now, having worked long hours with her Lancelot, she was more open to the idea. The mule she had named for a knight was a gallant indeed; he never took a bad step, never let her get lost on the prairie, never failed to circumvent a gopher-hole or a rock in the road or a slick patch at a fording. And he was such an attentive listener, she could not help but tell him all of her troubles. And it was such a relief to have someone to confide in! She certainly couldn’t let all of her worries fall upon Little Edward’s tender ears.

  “I am just going to put this milk in the house, and then I shall put on your hobbles and let you out for a graze,” she told him now, and Lancelot waggled his ears at her again and went back to stealing bits of the cow’s hay, ignoring her threatening tail-swishes and head-shakes. His contentment was inspiring. “I should be so happy with so little,” she admonished herself, walking carefully so as not to lose a single drop of precious milk. “But one does miss simple things like having a dressmaker, or a wardrobe full of frocks to choose from when one gets a stain on it. Or a friend to take tea with, for that matter.” She thought about her empty tea chest. “Or tea.”

  She went into the shanty and set the bucket of milk on the table, which slanted dangerously on the sloping floor, and watched the foamy white stuff angle until it nearly, but not quite, spilled over the rim. “It’s not that I miss having money, precisely,” she went on, talking to herself now in that habit that was so alarming to think about that she simply refused to think about it. “It’s that I miss feeling safe. I miss knowing that my needs will be met. I do not like having to worry about Little Edward’s needs, or about having enough to eat this winter if there should be a blizzard and the roads should be blocked.” She thought. “I miss having someone to ask for help,” she admitted to the empty shanty. “I miss having someone offer to help.” Another pause. “I miss Edward.”

  Ah, there it was. The empty room sat quietly, ruminating on her words. She did not say those words very often. She spoke of Little Edward, and of her plans for the farm, and of correspondence with cattle ranchers and seed catalog representatives and farm implement manufacturers. She told the little iron bedstead with its lumpy mattress about grazing cattle on the rocky northern stretch of the claim, and she told the steamer trunk where her few dresses resided against a fading lavender sachet about the rising prices of wheat and the special drought-resistant strain of seed she was going to plant come next spring. But she did not tell those things, or her few little volumes of Shakespeare and poetry and novels, or the rickety table, or the shabby kitchen dresser, about missing Edward.

  He had died so suddenly, that was the problem, he had died so suddenly and she had been forbidden to attend the funeral, and when the very door of Lady Walsall’s townhouse shut in her face, as mourners arriving stayed in their carriages to avoid her, she had trailed down the steps, face white and set and shocked, her waist still slender despite what everyone was whispering about. But everyone knew, even then, even at Edward’s wake they were speaking of it, as they passed around the sandwich trays and the tea and the wine glasses, even as she went down the wet streets alone, unchaperoned — for who would chaperone her now? She was already ruined — the high and the mighty of England were discussing in shocked and happy voices the dead Marquess of Beechfields, the dishonored daughter, the unshakeable anger of her uncle Richard, the new marquess. It had been a wake for Edward Wa
lsall, but it had also been a wake for Lady Charlotte Beacham, as her character was dissected and dismissed as thoroughly as any newly deceased member of the ton.

  He had died, and he was gone, and she had never said good-bye to him. She had never spoken to anyone as she had spoken to Edward; she had told him everything, every hope and every dream and every wish, every fear and every nightmare and every worry, and he had soothed her and encouraged her and loved her.

  So she spoke now to the walls, to the cow, to the mule, to her son, to the silent neighbor girl. She spoke to keep in the habit, because she was afraid she would forget how, because she wanted Little Edward to hear a human voice. But she knew her words no longer mattered. No one was really listening. Only Edward had ever listened to her.

  And there other things… things there were no substitute for…

  Talking to the walls could not bring back his touch. She was helpless before the memories of his hands upon her skin, the way he would slip up behind her and press firm lips to her bare shoulders, and slip the foolish little sleeves of her gown down her upper arms, one and then the other, placing kisses all along her collar bone, against the nape of her neck so that she shivered helplessly, up to the soft skin beneath her ears so that she thought her knees would collapse and send her sprawling upon the floor in a pool of silk and lace. She could not help but sigh longingly at the remembrance of his fingers tracing a line down her spine as he unhooked her gown and strayed lightly, teasingly, in the little dimple just before her bottom. And then, how the dress would fall, and then the chemise, the corset, the silken coverings cool as they brushed past her breasts, her belly, her thighs, and he would cup her buttocks in those firm hands and press his length up against her, his hardness and heat so intense that her eyes would flutter closed and she would turn back her head, exposing her neck to his mouth and teeth, and they would groan and sigh together until they could not stand any longer, and fell to the bed in a tangle so that he could part her legs and slip inside of her.