The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback)

by Sydney Alexander

  Galahad’s ears were pricked at the horse racing towards them, but he persisted in his nervous jigging, going so far as to rear a little, forelegs just leaving the ground. Cherry, forced back into the present, gasped and leaned forward urgently, her face nearly connecting with his shaggy mane. She slapped the pony with her riding whip and sent him plunging forward to meet Jared. Her mind was made up. She would go with her cowboy, and accept his protection. They would decide about the other things later.

  Jared’s face was white in the moonlight. He swung the roan around as she approached and they galloped side-by-side, his horse making slight adjustments in their course as they raced across the featureless grasslands. They were heading straight for the storm, and neither horse was eager to continue, but Jared slapped the ends of his reins hard against the roan’s neck, and the little horse pinned his ears and went on. Galahad followed gratefully, and Cherry just hung on for dear life, with a renewed determination to find out how to ride astride in one of those big cowboy saddles. The side-saddle had never been made for such rough going as this, no matter how many hunts she had participated in.

  The horses’ hooves made a rumble as they found the hard earth of the track again, but the drumming sound was dwarfed almost immediately by the growls of the approaching storm. It was nearly upon them, Cherry thought with horror, that grasping white edge ragged at the fronts as if it had been torn from a book of engravings, and the dark terror behind it an illustration of some awful freak of the atmosphere in an inhospitable, alien land, like the old pictures of India, or Australia. But there were plenty back in England that would have thought the prairies of America were inhospitable alien places, and right at this moment Cherry was inclined to agree.

  The lightning flashed behind the ragged cloud like a lantern behind a curtain, growing more and more frequent. The prairie began to burn itself on her eyes in reverse, blue flame where the dark track had once been. She closed her eyes and hung on, breathing a prayer of thanks with every stride that Little Edward was safely asleep in the snug refuge of the Jorgenson’s stout hill-sheltered house.

  The wind was blowing up to a roaring gale as they came into the yard of the homestead. Jared slowed the roan down to a trot as they entered the barn, and Galahad followed gratefully. The cowboy swung off and ran to shut the wide barn door. “Get into the hay!” he shouted over his shoulder, but the creaking and groaning of the barn in the rising winds drowned him out. Cherry slid off of Galahad and stood leaning against him on weak legs, clutching tightly to his reins while he tried to whirl and pivot and she sought his warm and solidity. Jared ran back to her and pulled her up against him.

  That’s all the warmth and solidity you need, the little voice in her head said, and she forgave everything else, the stolen kisses and the infidelity to Edward’s memory and his questionable lack of dedication to farming, and decided he could have all of her, all of her, if he would only keep her safe on this night.

  Then he flung her down in a pile of hay.

  “Whatever—” she started to screech, but he flung hay on top of her and she became too busy sputtering and trying to spit out strands of grass and oat-seed to berate him, and then she felt his bulk next to her, pulling her beneath the bales, wriggling to get beneath weight of the hay-stack and she realized with a little start of fresh panic what was happening, what was going to happen, what he was preparing them for. And she thought of the roan and Galahad, poor loves, out there exposed in the creaking, screaming, dying barn, the chickens’ screeching being drowned out by the roar of the storm, if that’s what it was and not the end of days, for surely it was too loud to be a mere storm, and she clutched at him from beneath their tomb of hay and he pulled her close, up against him, arms so tight she was sure they’d leave bruises, and then, as the sounds grew worse, so much clattering and slamming and banging, he folded himself over her, and she heard him grunt as if something had hit him, and then everything grew quiet, but for the unending growls of thunder that seemed to go on and on forever, and then a cold rain was falling, beating through sparse remnants of the haystack, and she wondered how they could feel the rain when they were in a barn.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She could have cheerfully stayed beneath that hay-stack forever, but the night behind the storm was icy cold and the raindrops coming down were quickly soaking the hay through. Cherry fleetingly thought, with the practicality of a farmer, that the hay would be ruined by the wet. And then she realized that most of the hay had disappeared, and possibly the barn itself must be gone, a much greater calamity.

  Jared stirred beside her and shoved the hay aside, then he bent over and helped her out of the wet stack. His hands were trembling, and he seemed to stumble beneath her weight as he pulled her up. She felt a rush of fear. Something was wrong — he must be hurt.

  Somehow, she thought, she had to be the strong one this time. She pushed away her fear and got to business, slipping her hands under his jacket and up his back so that she could feel for injuries. The intimacy of the gesture should have caused her to blush, or for him to step back, but the gravity of the situation left no time for niceties such as that.

  And he didn’t seem to mind her touching him, despite her behavior earlier.

  Then he flinched.

  “Does that hurt?” she whispered, brushing rain-wet hair from her eyes. She drew her hand across his back and felt a warm patch which stood apart from the chilly damp of his shirt. He shuddered again, and she felt a stirring of panic that she tried to tamp down again. She must be sensible. She must think. The roof was gone, and there were bits of shattered wood all around them. If a board had hit Jared in the back, or worse, pierced into him… she bit her lip and tried to control her nerves. “We must get you inside the house,” she said urgently. “Come.” She tugged at his hand.

  “Is there a house?” he asked, voice weary and ragged, and they both looked looked up at the dark sky, blinking their eyes against the half-hearted raindrops still weeping down. All around them, the ragged remains of the barn groaned and creaked in every breeze. She wasn’t sure why the walls were still standing, and not lying atop their lifeless bodies… but it seemed like too much to ask that they had escaped with their lives and still had the cabin to retreat to.

  “I don’t know. Was that a cyclone?”

  “It was.” He sounded hopelessly exhausted.

  Well. She had experienced the great prairie cyclone at last. Wasn’t she just a lucky little pioneer, then! It was enough to send a girl back to London and the public shaming waiting for her, back to New York and a life below-stairs, just to escape the mere possibility of ever going through another cyclone.

  But now that she had lived through one, there were things to be done. Jared had to be attended to. This was no time to fall apart. First and foremost, she had to get him out of this ruin and find out if the cabin was still standing. Cherry straightened her shoulders and took control.

  “We have to get you someplace where I can see what has happened,” she said firmly. “You have a wound on your back, but I can’t very well tend to it while we’re standing out here in the rain. Come with me, we must see if the house is there.”

  He followed her like a puppy, wincing with every step, as they stumbled through fallen timbers and over little piles of wooden shingles: the remnants of the barn roof. It had been a very nice barn, one that Cherry had often coveted, and she wondered bleakly if it could be repaired. They saw splashes of white near the door, which was now hanging askew from one hinge, and Cherry breathed a sigh of relief. “There are the horses, and they are on their feet,” she pointed out.

  “We need to let them out of here,” Jared panted. “They’re not safe… this whole thing could still come down.”

  Cherry shoved at the door, but she couldn’t move it; the wood was twisted in the frame by the shifting walls. “Can you help at all? I don’t want you to be hurt, but —” and the walls of the barn creaked ominously, as if to illustrate her words. They didn’t have much t
ime to get themselves and the horses out safely. She wondered fleetingly what had happened to the shrieking chickens; there was no sound from them now at all. She supposed the poor things had been blown away.

  Jared set his jaw and shoved hard against the door; it gave with a great crack, and he groaned as he fell through it, stumbling hard on the sodden ground outside. Cherry darted through the opening, pushing as she went to be sure that it would be wide enough for the horses to escape, and she heard Galahad and the roan come splashing through the puddles behind her and knew that they were just as eager to get out of the ruined barn. Good, she didn’t want to have to worry about them. She didn’t worry that there was no fence to keep them contained. The horses were intelligent and knew where their oats came from; they’d stay close to the farmstead despite its damage. She couldn’t spend any time worrying over them just yet; first, she needed to concentrate on Jared.

  And when he was sorted, she thought grimly, she would have to catch Galahad and ride hell-for-leather across the prairie to the Jorgenson’s. She squinted across the yard and saw it there, the most welcome sight in the world: the cabin, still standing erect, intact, unharmed.

  Cherry tugged gently at Jared’s arm and pulled it down around her shoulder. She staggered a little under his weight, but she was stronger than she’d been in her old life, when she’d been a fine lady in England. Now she was a farmer, however fair-skinned she tried to keep her face, and she had muscles in her arms and shoulders and back from hammering nails to build her shanty and barn, and digging trenches for irrigation to water her unrealized crops. She could help this big cowboy into his cabin even if he fainted.

  She hoped.

  But Jared didn’t faint, and they made it falteringly across the debris-strewn grass to the cabin without incident. Once inside, she paused for a brief moment to thank God that the cabin had been spared. The cyclone that had destroyed the barn had not even poked a finger in the direction of the little lumber-built house. The very glass in the windows was undisturbed. It was a true miracle, although she was at a loss as to explain why they hadn’t been directed by some divine hand to weather the storm in the cabin instead of the now-wrecked barn. Clearly it had been in the center of some sort of cyclone bulls-eye.

  Well, God worked in mysterious ways. She shrugged and went to work building up the fire in the pot-bellied stove. She would need hot water. Nurses always needed hot water, it was the first rule of medical care… or so she had gathered from the novels she had read back in England, when she had time for such idle pursuits.

  Jared lay on his stomach on the bed in the corner, and she could see the bloody patch in the blue flannel of his shirt, spread across the small of his back in a stain nearly a foot wide. Her breath caught at the breadth of the blood stain, and she felt a fluttering panic in her heart, a dizziness in her temples that threatened to send her reeling into the hot stove. He can’t die, she thought desperately. He cannot die, not now…

  Not now?

  It was a question that didn’t bear thinking about. She didn’t have time to think about it. She had to do whatever it would take to save him, and quickly.

  Without another second of hesitation, Cherry went to work. She snatched through the drawers of the sideboard until she found a pair of scissors and used them to carefully cut open the plaid shirt in a broad square all around the blood-stained fabric, then gently, painstakingly, she peeled back the shirt from the skin beneath. She stopped breathing as the cloth came ripping away, pulling at his bloody back. She feared the worst; she pictured a great gash, slicing through skin and bone and organ, letting his blood flow to the timbered floor in a crimson gush that would end only when he was dead. She thought of engravings in history books. She thought of grievous wounds and knights with swords cleaving to their brain pans. She thought that she would die if she lost another love.

  She stopped thinking.

  And then the flannel was peeled away from the wound and she could see it, a long dark sliver of welling blood, but it did not look so deadly after all, and with hands as steady as a teetotaler’s she dipped a clean-looking rag from the sideboard into the pot of hot water on the stovetop and began to pat at his bloody back. Jared groaned. She went on. Jared groaned again, and twitched a little, to get away from her touch. She went on. Jared tried to squirm away.

  “Be still!” she snapped, like a fierce governess to a boy with a skinned knee, and Jared was still. She went on.

  Pat, pat, pat, she dabbed at the wound, dripping the red-soaked cloth across the floor, ringing it out in a crimson puddle upon the timber, never thinking of the everlasting stain that it would leave on the scrubbed-white floors, and dunking it again into the steaming hot water. She supposed the water was too hot to be comfortable on his back, but she wasn’t scalding him and she had an idea that hot water would stop infection.

  She thought that perhaps she ought to have known these things before she went traveling out onto the prairie to become an independent farmer, far from surgeon or barber. She thought that she would like to learn a great deal more about nursing, of humans and animals besides. She did not realize that she had started thinking again, that her blank terror had relaxed into a calm, business-like state, that she was going about the process of nursing Jared with a firm determination to do her job and do it well, and she had quite lost all her fear. The blood-flow stanched with the steady pressure of the towel; the hot water cleared away the smearing of gore upon his back, and she could see that what had happened to Jared truly amounted to a very nasty scratch—very nasty, to be sure, but nothing that could not be kept clean and dry until it healed without infection, nothing that was going to threaten his life. She found another clean towel—goodness, someone had taught this man to be very tidy with his things!—and laid it across his back while she considered what to do about a bandage.

  ***

  Jared had since stopped worrying about how much his back hurt and was concentrating instead on how calmly and efficiently his Englishwoman was going about the business of fixing it up. He turned his head upon his pillow to regard her while she stood in the center of the room, hands on hips, and gazed about with a thoughtful expression.

  “Rip a sheet,” he suggested, and she turned around at once, expression solicitous. It was the first time he could recall seeing such a look upon her face. Cherry was not one to give.

  “You are laying upon your sheet,” she said. “Have you another?”

  “In the press,” he said. “In the other corner.”

  She hurried to the opposite corner of the cabin and opened up the doors of the press she had not noticed before, lurking as it was in the shadows. A flash of lightning lit the eastern windows and flooded the cabin with a blue light; he saw her clearly for a moment, going through his things so that she could see to his comfort, and he was so overcome with love and desire that he had to close his eyes.

  No woman had ever gone out of her way for him.

  The women he had known had always forced him to dance to their tune.

  Cherry had seemed just as demanding as the rest, but, he could see now, she was capable of the same deep devotion and care that she showed towards her baby son.

  Jared began to wonder what the hell he was going to do.

  She turned around, hands full of white sheets, and smiled. He could see, even through the dim orange light of stove-fire and candle-flame, the brilliant humor in her face. A woman who could laugh in times of trial, he thought, and tumbled a little bit more into love. “Jared,” she said laughingly, “Jared, what sort of cowboy has so much clean white linen in his press? You have deceived me, I think. You are just a dandy after all!”

  He smiled with cracked lips. “You found me out, Cherry,” he rasped. “You found me out.”

  ***

  It was not until the next morning, when the sun rose triumphant on a world shivering and frightened, that they were able to ride to the Jorgenson homestead and fetch a safe, bright-eyed Little Edward home.

  Mrs. Jorge
nson was standing in the doorway, gazing out over the prairie, when they rode into the farmstead’s tidy yard. She wiped her apron at her eyes, a quick gesture, but Cherry saw and her heart was touched. She had family here, no matter what Cousin Anne would have her think. People cared about her out here. She glanced over at Jared and let a tiny smile play over her lips.

  He saw her head turn and looked back, and the look in his eyes was so intense and smoldering that she gasped aloud. And then she looked away, quickly — it would never do for Mrs. Jorgenson to see such things.

  “Gut,” Mrs. Jorgenson said, nodding her head rapidly as they dismounted from their horses. “Gut, gut.”

  “Gut morning,” Cherry said, half-imitating her speech, and the other woman smiled.

  “Gut mornen,” she repeated in reply, and they smiled at one another.

  Then the daughter came slipping out with Little Edward’s hand in hers, and he smiled a great smile that lit up his entire face. Cherry dropped to her knees, suddenly aware of how terrified she’d been that he might have been hurt in the storm. But no — this pristine place had barely been touched, there was scarcely a puddle in the yard. How strange and frightening prairie weather was!

  “My own darling,” she told Little Edward, her lips in his fluffy gilt hair. “Did you have a big rain last night?”

  “Loud,” he announced gravely. “Loud rain. Loud sky.”

  She looked up at the Jorgensons, the mother and daughter so alike, so stoic and strong and utterly suited to this rough western life. So utterly unlike her! She thought she would never be as capable and steady as them. “Thank you,” she said fervently. “God bless you all.”

  ***

  “They aren’t like me,” she mused aloud as they rode back towards Cherry’s own claim. She was still worried about what she might find there. Despite the lack of damage at the Jorgenson’s, her own property sat that much closer to Jared’s and thus the path of the storm, and so she could not dare to hope that the same cyclone had not touched her own shanty and barn.