Because Edward had come before many minutes had passed; he knew her every whim and fancy, after all, and he knew that she would turn to Daisy for comfort, and he knew that the warmth of the mare would not be enough. He slipped into the box, then, unnoticed, and she did not stiffen when his arms slipped around her waist; she knew it was him, as always. His lips were at her neck, only comforting, he thought, only comforting, she thought, and then she was relinquishing her hold on her mare, her pretty maiden mare she had been riding since she was a young girl, and she was leaning back into Edward’s chest, Edward’s hard stomach, Edward’s hard everything, and his hands were sliding up from her waist to her breasts, and his lips ceased to caress and became urgent, feverish against the sensitive nape of her neck, and she turned, sighing, eyes closed and lips parted, and then she was sighing beneath him down in the hay. How how had it come to that, how had the sweet kisses become urgent, how had the gentle caresses become his hands tugging at her gown, her fingers tearing at the buttons of his breeches?
She knew not, only that she was writhing beneath his bewitching touch, loss forgotten, propriety forgotten, the world forgotten, darling Daisy forgotten, removed discreetly to the back of the box to avoid the calamity before her eyes, and he covered her lips with his when he slowly slipped inside of her, to mute her cry and atone for her hurt. But she would not accept his sympathy any longer, she did not want it; she bucked her hips up against him and he groaned into her mouth and plunged on, faster and faster, and she clutched at his shoulders through the fine linen of his shirt and welcomed every thrust.
And when he had found that spot at last, when he was sending her into a frenzy with every stroke, when she was scrabbling with her fingernails against his back and he was clutching her slim white shoulders hard enough to leave bruises, when they had both reached the highest peak, that was when he flung his head back, and loosed her lips at the very moment of her scream.
They were jolted from ecstasy then, returned to reality and its frights with horrible suddenness, for someone would have heard. Someone would come, and quickly.
She remembered the calamity with a rose-red blush, as horrified two years later and a continent and ocean away as she had been that moment.
He was plucking straw from her hair when the groom arrived, panting from his climb down from the rooms beside the haymow where he slept at night and, fortunately, during quiet afternoons when no one wanted the carriage.
“Is she alright, milord?” the boy asked. He had seen her ride out with Lord Walsall and the lady always looked so happy in his company. He assumed she was safe, then, if the young lord was with her.
“Her father has died,” Edward said shortly, and she quivered and leaned against him, burying her face in his shoulder, passion spent but for the awful, relentless grief squeezing at her heart.
She had thought then that she would never be parted from Edward, not for a blessed moment. He had stayed close to her, taken a suite within the house with her Aunt Mary in attendance as chaperone, and if Aunt Mary was plagued by migraines and a sensitivity to light and sound so grievous that she slept with a mask and earmuffs, well, it would be unkind to name her illness a blessing but it certainly had a great deal to do with Cherry’s invitation to her to come and stay at Beechfields.
And then… and then he had gone off on that trip, at the request of his father. It should have been a short excursion to their holdings in the north country; he should have been home within the sennight. They should have been married by the end of the month. Their slate of indiscretions would be wiped clean by a marriage license and a family breakfast.
He had come back in a box.
A carriage accident.
Such a dull death for an adventurous man.
They had talked of South America, they had talked of sailing away from England and all its prejudices, from the books of peerage and the whispers of gossips who suspected — had the groom said something? — who said she was no better than she should be, who said that she was an adventuress. “You are an adventuress,” he had laughed, and wiped tears from her eyes when she had been huddled over some new slight in one of the gossip papers. “I shall take you on great adventures, you see, and that is the sort of adventuress you shall be.”
And he had died when a carriage had rolled over, a wheel broken in a stone, dead in the mud of England, and there had never been any adventures at all.
This was an adventure. She was living up to his hopes of her, she thought. She was an adventuress again, staking her claim in the new world, putting down roots in the wide prairie. “An adventuress,” she whispered, and the ladies went on talking without noticing her, the countrywomen with their broad accents and their simple dresses and their talk of children and baking and menfolk, and she thought that while it wasn’t the adventure any of them, not herself nor her father nor Edward, would have chosen for her, she would do her very best to live up to their expectations.
“Isn’t that right, Mrs. Beacham?” Patty Mayfield was saying brightly. Cherry blinked and came back to the present.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Mayfield, what was that?” she asked gracelessly, but Patty was not perturbed.
“I was saying that you live right next door to Jared Reese!”
One of the other young ladies tittered, and her companion elbowed her. “Gracious, Hetty, mind your manners!” But she was giggling too.
Cherry was looking at the ladies with confusion. The tall one who had elbowed the giggling Hetty smiled. “Hetty’s sweet on Jared Reese,” she explained. “But so are all of us.”
“Jared?” Cherry asked blankly, as if she had never heard the name before. “Jared Reese?” There was surely some sort of mistake. Or the young ladies of Bradshaw had been raised to have some very strange opinions of what was desirable in a man.
“Those eyes!” Hetty sighed. “Blue as the sky before a storm.”
“Hetty writes poetry,” Patty explained in an apologetic tone. “She can’t help it.”
“They are, though,” Hetty said more stoutly. “And his hair is black as a raven’s wing.”
“You girls,” Patty said indulgently, as if she was their long-suffering aunt.
Cherry looked from one to the other, still not comprehending. Blue as the sky? Black as a raven’s wing? Jared’s hair was brown. Dark brown to be sure, dark like the earth beneath the grass, and rich like a dark horse’s coat, a deep mahogany which could fool a person into supposing it was black… Heavens, these girls certainly didn’t know Jared Reese very well, did they? She decided to add a line to Hetty’s ode. “Grouchy as a cow at dinner time,” she suggested. “Stubborn as a mule at a stream.”
It was everyone else’s turn to stare at her blankly. Cherry blinked.
Patty put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “You funny thing! Isn’t she funny, Hetty, Annette? That’s what I like best about you, Mrs. Beacham, you have a real funny sense of humor!”
Cherry put on a smile and tried to cover up her confusion. If everyone thought Jared was charming and handsome and didn’t see his rudeness and short temper, maybe she was in the wrong and not them. Maybe Jared just didn’t like her. Too bad. She nearly said that she was sorry she hadn’t seen Jared’s good side, but then decided to just let the whole conversation go. “Call me Cherry,” she said instead, and Patty beamed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“An adventuress,” hissed Anne Braithwhite, née Beacham. “She is nothing better than an adventuress. You cannot possibly expect this of me! They don’t know what a poisonous little witch she is. The child will be no better.”
Charles Whittier had not expected such vitriol from his client. He had been the Braithwhite solicitor for years, even before Mrs. Braithwhite had come from England as Mr. Braithwhite’s blushing bride, a young English lady who seemed utterly shocked by New York’s crowds and muds and stench, but he had never known her to be anything but a perfect gentlewoman, a paragon of aristocracy and good manners amongst the females of New York society. This s
how of temper was unprecedented, and to be demonstrated against the wishes of her own family, besides! He really did not know how to react. Charles Whittier did not enjoy being at a loss for words. Indeed, it was the sort of thing a solicitor could really never, ever, allow himself to suffer from. Solicitors lived by their ability to say precisely the right thing, at all times.
“Mrs. Braithwhite,” he said slowly, searching for delicate words. “Mrs. Braithwhite, the Beachams’ desire to have their nephew near to them is understandable, is it not? Surely the bonds of family will outweigh any unpleasantness regarding his birth. Of course they would wish him to be educated suitably, and brought up as a gentleman. I do not believe this is an unreasonable wish.”
It had been forty years, but every time she heard Mrs. rather than my lady, Anne felt another little stab of disappointment. That title, or rather lack of title, was all of her disappointments rolled into one. The Duke of Rochester, whom she’d called Harry, had stopped laughing at her little jokes after Lord Trefethen’s angelic daughter made her debut. Soon he’d stopped calling on her altogether. Prince Mikhail had gone back to Russia a bachelor yet. She didn’t know if he’d ever married. Thomas Richland and John Rutherford, heirs to earldoms both, had drifted off and married blondes in the end. Anne’s dark hair had long since gone gray; she kept it ruthlessly covered with a cap anyway. Hair that had never done anything for her, why should she give it the time of day?
“I simply cannot have anything to do with such a person,” Anne said, tones modulated. She understood that she had to sound reasonable, although inside she was screaming. Would Charlotte Beacham never go away and leave her in peace? “You must understand, my reputation…” She let her voice trail off as if contemplating a ruin so complete that she could not bring herself to speak the words.
“You need only contact her and assist in arranging for the child to be sent to England. A nurse will be provided at the Beacham’s expense. They do not think that she will listen to a solicitor she does not know.” He looked doubtful.
Anne knew why. “A woman that takes a lover, boards a ship for America and disappears into the west with a newborn babe is not the sort to meekly hand the child over to wealthy relatives.”
He inclined his head. “Nonetheless, Lord Beacham asks that you make every attempt to convince her to do so.”
“I cannot,” Anne insisted. “It would be impossible. My position here does not allow me sufficient liberty to communicate with the sort of woman my cousin has become. If the Fernsley Beachams wish to be associated with her and the child, they will have to come to America and do it themselves.”
“I am sure you are aware that the Fernsley Beachams are both more than sixty years old, and cannot be expected to make such a journey in their state of health,” Whittier said mildly. “Indeed, worry over the boy has been very difficult for their constitutions. I am told Lady Beacham has suffered an arrhythmia.”
Anne was well aware of their age; it was the same as her own. Even before they were cousins, Lady Louisa Beacham and Anne had been close as sisters when they were young. Anne paused in her protestations, drawing a harsh breath at the thought of Louisa old and suffering. They had been parted by the Atlantic Ocean at eighteen years old; in her mind’s eye, Louisa was still a girl in a white gown, laughing over the foolish poem some suitor had sent her curled in the bloom of a rose. His name had been William Fairfax, Anne remembered suddenly, a sweet boy who had courted them both with brotherly good-nature before he was killed in a hunting accident.
Louise had been fond of him, despite his poor hand at verses, and had been red-eyed and quiet for a month afterwards. Then cousin Richard, Marcus’s younger brother, had married her just a few months later; the ceremony had been private, and much-whispered-about. Anne had thought the whole situation remarkably sad, but one did not get one’s hopes up that much about a baronet’s son, and Richard Beacham was heir to three estates, including a very pretty spread near Beechfields, and now he had come into Beechfields and the title with Marcus’s death. It had ended up perfectly satisfactory, hadn’t it? Except for Marcus, of course. And Charlotte. And Charlotte’s little Walsall bastard.
But Anne knew that Louisa had loved her baronet’s son, and Anne had loved Louisa. She sighed.
Whittier waited.
“I have only to write to her,” Anne finally said. “That is all? I do not have to receive her into my home.”
“You need only make the arrangements,” Whittier confirmed. “She does not even have to come to New York. A nursemaid can accompany the boy.”
“And if she insists on coming? What then?”
“Put her up in a hotel,” Whittier suggested. “There are funds. It will be paid for by my offices. But they would prefer she remain in America.”
“She may refuse that.” She will refuse that, Anne thought. Unless she was already destitute, which was a possibility, this entire affair was nothing more than a fool’s errand.
“If she comes to England,” Whittier continued. “She will not be permitted to live with the boy, and she will not be permitted back into the society she is accustomed to living amongst. Be sure to make that clear: she is not going to be welcomed back. Only the boy. The boy must not be made to suffer for the sins of his parents, that is the Beacham’s standing.”
Anne nodded. That seemed fair. And if it would make Louise happy to have the baby, well, it had been a very pretty baby. It would really be a pity to let it grow up some ignorant farmer out west, or, more likely, since his mother was hardly likely to find a way to provide for him, a beggar in the gutter. “Very well, then, Mr. Whittier,” she announced, mind made up. “You may leave the matter with me. I shall make she sees the sense in sending the boy to England. It may be easier than we think. The girl hasn’t got a friend in the world, after all.”
***
Patty Mayfield was delighted with her new friend. And the party. She thought the party had just been splendid. Cherry had said that word, splendid. It was a lovely word. A splendid word. Patty giggled.
“It was a splendid party,” she told herself, trying out the word. It sounded perfect.
“Thank you for coming, it really was splendid of you,” she told Cherry when she saw her at the general store a few days later, in to buy some flour and a few boxes of nails, and Cherry smiled and thanked her in return. She even agreed that it had been splendid. Patty’s ears burned red with pleasure; she thought she’d never been so happy.
“It was a splendid party,” she told Matt, walking arm and arm across the grass towards her house.
Matt, who was trying to figure out when exactly they had progressed to walking arm and arm, and if this was also the right time to slip behind the Mayfield barn, where the Mayfield Morgans lived in their own splendor, and lean over and kiss her, didn’t even laugh. He just nodded and said “Why yes, I believe so,” and so Patty decided to add the word to her vocabulary on a permanent basis.
***
Cherry drove home from her shopping excursion into Bradshaw alone, at her insistence, although several homesteaders, bachelors all, had offered to escort her when they happened upon her in the Mayfield’s store and at the post office. The party had been a sort of coming-out for her, and now the attention was rolling in as certain as if she had been a debutante all over again. It was charming, of course, but she didn’t want any of Bradshaw’s bachelors getting any ideas about her. She brushed away their cowboy chivalry with an easy smile and a few old phrases left over from her days in London.
Missing from the eager crew was one Jared Reese, who was apparently, if Hetty and her friend were to be believed, the most eligible bachelor of them all. Cherry recognized the speckled rump of his roan horse outside of the Professor’s saloon and tried not to feel a prickle of disappointment that he had not stepped outside with his compatriots when her accent attracted a crowd on the wide front porch. She was brushing off the gallant offers of Evie Moorehead and Monty Davids, laughing from the seat of her buckboard, when she thou
ght she glimpsed his dark head inside the saloon. She could not help but crane her head a little to see over the swinging doors. But it was too dark within the building to satisfy her interest.
“Aw, come on, Mrs. Beacham,” Monty was cajoling in his funny southern accent, but she just smiled absently and shook her head, trying to shake away the odd let-down feeling that Jared did not think her worthy of his attention. Of course he didn’t! He was a horrid hateful rude man, wasn’t he?
Wasn’t he?
He might have been, but she couldn’t help wanting to look into his eyes again, to feel the air around them crackle and shimmer as it had that first time. There was something about his eyes, she had decided, that was downright uncanny. And made her feel, well, a little trembly, for lack of a better word.
Cherry shook the reins at the mule and went trotting away. She was being foolish, and it was past time to go home and fetch up Little Edward and get on with her chores. She didn’t have to turn her head to know that there was a knot of men, friends suddenly turned rivals, watching her ride away, and she sighed. Some things did not change, whether in London or the Dakotas, she supposed. But she didn’t want to be pursued here. This was not London, and she was not a starry-eyed maid of seventeen. Such romances were over for her.
***
Jared slammed around the pots hanging above the cookstove for a little while, enjoying the satisfying clatter and pretending he was going to do something ambitious, like fry a steak. But in the end he didn’t have a taste for food, just a powerful thirst, and he took a bottle and a glass and settled into a chair near the door, propped open with a cornstraw broom, and looked out into the falling dusk. He hadn’t meant to come home at all tonight, planning to just stay in a room at Miss Rose’s, but something powerful had induced him to pay up his tab and get on the roan almost immediately after all the boys had come in from cat-calling after Mrs. Beacham. He didn’t think she’d ever once turned around. He didn’t think she had any idea he had escorted her home safe.
The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) Page 7
