The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback)

by Sydney Alexander

  “Something from Mayfield’s.” Jared smiled and shook his head. “Son, I’d have to get her somethin’ from Timbuktu to make up for what is about to happen.” He thought. “Or Paris,” he amended. Cherry probably wouldn’t like anything from Timbuktu. Her tastes were a little more refined than that.

  Wilbur didn’t know what a Timbuktu was, but he looked alarmed nonetheless. “What’s gonna happen?”

  The knock at the door made them both jump.

  “Who’s that?” Jared called.

  “It’s Matt!”

  Jared sighed. “I mighta guessed.”

  “What’s Matt want?” Wilbur asked.

  “Drag me back to town.”

  “You gonna go?” Wilbur looked hard at the bottle, memorizing its curves. He’d only have a little.

  “Not a chance in hell. I’m going to hide out here like a goddamned coward and let the women scratch each other’s eyes out. Much safer.” He took another swallow and shut his eyes.

  Matt gave up waiting and just came in, bringing the cold night air with him. “Women sent me out here looking for you,” he told Jared. “ ’Lo Wilbur.”

  “ ’Lo Mr. Barnsley.”

  “Are they terrible mad at me?”

  “Patty thinks you’re dead, but since you aren’t, I imagine she’ll want to do the job proper.”

  “I got some news,” Jared said heavily.

  Matt went very still. “Not from—”

  Jared nodded.

  “Bitch.”

  Wilbur gasped with shock and delight.

  “Come on, Matt—” Jared shook his head. “There’s no reason for that.”

  Matt thumped his fist against the cabin’s wall. “There’s plenty of reason! She led you on for years, and then when she thought she had you good and trapped, she saw something shinier and went after that instead. And now that you’re finally settling down with someone else, she’s trying to get you back again!”

  “It’s not her fault. He died. She’s all alone in the world. She didn’t write just because she knew I was with Cherry, Matt, now that’s just absurd.”

  Wilbur’s eyes flickered from man to man, absolutely entranced.

  “All alone in the world? Except for his children and his family and his money, Jared. His money and that’s all she ever wanted, anyhow. She ought to be happier than she’s ever been now.”

  Jared shook his head. “She hasn’t got any children.”

  Matt looked up at the cabin roof, as if to heaven. “God help you, Jared, what the hell happened to that damn child?”

  Wilbur was in transports.

  “There never was a child.” He jabbed a thumb at the letter. “She wrote. There never was a child. They fought somethin’ terrible and then he just up and died last month and she’s got nowhere to go in the world. She didn’t even inherit the house. He left it to his brother.”

  “Who?” Wilbur couldn’t contain himself. “Who are all these folks?”

  Jared ignored him. “So she’s comin’ here and —”

  “You can’t let her come here!” Matt’s voice was close to panic. “I tell you, Jared, you better write that crazy bitch a letter and tell her she can’t come here!”

  “I can’t stop her, Matt, she’s already on her way, according to this. She’s probably two days away, if she left the day she sent this.”

  Matt leaned against the wall. “I need a drink.” He looked to Wilbur as if for help; Wilbur blanched and sat deeper into his chair. He didn’t touch Jared’s bottle! He’d never even thought of touching the bottle! Why was Mr. Barnsley looking at him?

  Matt shrugged and looked back at Jared. “Jared, you better be waiting for her and put her right back on the train before she even gets her trunk off. You have a life here. You have a woman waiting for you back in Bradshaw. The past is the past.”

  Jared didn’t do anything. Didn’t nod, didn’t shake his head, didn’t give any indication that he’d heard Matt. Matt came over and took the bottle from him. He tipped it up and took a long drink, throat working. Then he handed it back and wiped his mouth with his shirt-sleeve.

  “Jared.”

  “What.”

  “Don’t let her come here and upset Cherry. That lady’s special. And she ain’t gonna break your heart as soon as she hears some old moneybags jingling the change in his pockets. She got news today, too. And it isn’t good news. Cherry’s got troubles of her own.”

  Jared looked up at that. “What happened?”

  “Trouble from home,” Matt said simply. “I’d leave it for her to tell you, though. And if you’re not going to deal with that woman, you’d better be the one to tell her, too.”

  There was silence for a few unhappy minutes. Then Matt spoke up again. “I’m not telling her.”

  Jared just sighed and took another drink. “I’ll tell her when I can.”

  “When’s that gonna be? Tonight? She’s waiting for you.”

  “Not tonight. I can’t…” he looked at his shaking hands helplessly. He’d had more than one too many. He’d had a bottle too many. “I’m a damn fool, Matt,” he said, and Matt didn’t disagree. “I have to deal with this my own way. Cherry…” he trailed off, at a loss for words, or even for what to do.

  “I’ll tell her you said hello,” Matt said drily, and went back outside to mount his horse.

  “Wait, wait,” Jared called after him. He sighed in resignation. “At least let me send along a letter.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Cherry read the letter exactly one time, from beginning to end. Then she put it down and went into the kitchen and got to work. There were bigger problems in her life just now than Jared. And if Jared wasn’t going to stand up and help her, if Jared was going to send his regrets from the claim, saying that there was too much work to do to see her, well then, she wouldn’t worry about him another minute. Cherry floured her hands and pounded at dough and set a loaf of bread to rise, something that she could never have imagined being able to do just a short time ago.

  Nor could she have imagined the comfort it would give her, to do things with her hands that had to be done, not things that were done merely to keep her busy, to make her appear lady-like, to show off her white hands as those of a gentlewoman.

  When had that happened, exactly? When had she become so capable and practical and skilled? She had been the heiress to a fortune and the daughter of a marquess and the betrothed of a future peer, and it had not been so long ago. She could embroider a cushion and she could manage a staff of servants and she could write the seating charts for a dinner party without offending anyone, from a duchess to an honorable. But of all the things that she had learned growing up, the only thing that had really come in any sort of use to her had been how to ride a horse.

  She was good with a horse. She wondered if that was something that could be of practical use to her. Farming was an idea that she knew something of, from riding out with her father. But when she called herself a farmer, named herself a farmer to people like Jared, who were questioning her ability to live out on the prairie and provide for herself, she knew in her heart that she was desperately overstating her knowledge. She was a farmer who had overseen farmers. She was a farmer who had watched others plant her fields and bring in her harvest. She was an overseer, in truth.

  But what she did know of farming was this: it was not a quick venture. A field she had barely plowed this past summer was not going to feed her in the spring. And the seed that she had saved and scrimped for, well, it would go into the black ground as soon as the last frost had come and gone, to be sure, but it would not put food on her table all through the hot summer.

  She did not have enough.

  But she could sort this out somehow. She was not the girl who had left England, compromised, disowned, frightened. She was a woman: a woman who could build a shanty — however ramshackle — to keep the rain from her head, and to bake a loaf of bread to feed her son. She wasn’t a Jorgenson, to be sure, nor even a Mayfield, with their in
nate abilities to take care of themselves somehow etched in their very upright stance and stoic faces, but she had left behind a life of luxury and comfort, of being cared for and waited upon, and she had not gone hungry and she not gone unsheltered. That was something her Cousin Anne could never have foreseen.

  They had said that she would fail. And they still thought that she would fail. So much so that they thought she’d be willing to give up her child.

  What if they knew that she had managed to much? That she had been able to live on her own, and that she had been gifted with the help of strangers that had become dear friends? Would they still be hounding her over Little Edward? Would that letter from her once-dear uncle ever have arrived, threatening her with financial disaster if she did not give in at once to his wishes and ship her son like some parcel back to England?

  Her fists punched the bread dough and her mind wandered across the ocean, to the high-ceilinged drawing room at Fernsley, where her uncle and aunt had chatted with her father about the prices of hunters and the merits of operas while she played at a secretary with a plumed feather-pen and an open book of foolscap, drawing her pony over and over again… her pony with a crown, her pony in a ship at sea, her pony climbing tall mountains. The soft Somerset breeze blew in through the windows, and her eyes would be drawn out to the willows lazing by the pond below the house, and the horses grazing on the slope just beyond, and she knew that behind that green hill and a dozen more green hills, beneath the smiling blue sky, sat great, grand, shimmering Beechfields, stretching its glittering windows in both directions away from the Palladian front doors, and with the strength of her family and her land and her home she had felt a safety that she could only dream of today.

  She would have that safety again.

  She would. She punched the dough viciously. She would.

  She would have it for Little Edward. One day he would look out the door of his farmhouse and see the nodding waves of wheat where the harsh prairie reigned now, and he would feel the safety of land and family and home. A second Beechfields, in the Great American Desert. One they had built with love and friendship and hard, hard work.

  Cherry could see it all in her mind’s eye, and it was a beautiful daydream. Her fingers softened up on the bread dough. She didn’t need Jared for all that. And, if she had come this far, she could find a way to keep going, even without the money her father had set aside for her.

  Cherry left the dough to rise and went back into the parlor. The letter was lying where she had left it, on the pretty little carved side-table, and she settled back into the padded leather chair and picked it up again. The buttons in the chair arms bit into her arms as she leaned upon them. The words were as familiar as a love letter’s might have been, but Jared’s flimsy excuses were no impassioned plea for understanding, nor an ardent declaration of his love.

  Things out here need more work than I thought.

  Of course a claim in wintertime needed more work than their relationship might! Cherry sniffed, feeling more disgust with his cowardice than hurt now that she had resolved herself to carry on without him.

  I guess you understand since you’re a farmer too, so that’s something I’m real glad about.

  Cherry allowed herself a smug moment of disapproval over his grammar. Of course she wasn’t a snob — she had been raised better than that! But really, his grammar was atrocious. Did she really want to marry someone who could construct a sentence in such a way and call it the English language?

  I’m sorry.

  That sentence… there was nothing wrong with that. She sighed a little and touched a smudge of ink softly. He had written it so quickly, and with a shaking hand. Some of the words were nearly illegible.

  Right down to the last few.

  I love you dearly, Cherry. I’ll come back to you if-when I can.

  The scribbled out if perplexed her. And worried her. Why would he have written “if”? He was only a couple of miles away, out on the claim — he’d said nothing in the letter about even staying out there throughout the winter. Up until that point, he was just apologizing for not being able to laze around Bradshaw with her as the days grew shorter. And that cryptic, scribbled over, if.

  There was something more to his removal to the claim than a barn repair. And if she wasn’t very much mistaken, it was something to do with his promise to her. But why couldn’t he just have come out and told her? And not once was their engagement mentioned. Were they going to be married or not? Did he expect her to sit in Patty’s parlor all winter long and sew linen for her trousseau like some sort of naïve bride? Had he changed his mind? How exactly was she supposed to know?

  She thought for a fleeting moment of riding out to ask him herself, to demand a straight answer in no uncertain terms, but no. She wouldn’t do it. If he didn’t want to be a man and be honest with her, let him sit in his cabin with his hired boy and rot all winter.

  What a problem men were!

  She put the letter aside and looked out of the window for a long while, eyes scarcely noticing the shaking grasses of the cold prairie.

  ***

  Patty looked in a few times, peeping through the parlor door with her worry etched across her face, and came away each time feeling not a bit relieved. She saw the letter on the table, and burned with curiosity to read it, but Cherry hadn’t read it aloud as Patty had hoped; she had merely told them that Jared had decided to stay out on the claim to do some work, and he didn’t know when he’d have time to come back to town. She didn’t say it with any degree of the outrage that Patty felt, that Patty herself would have related such a Banbury tale with, had she been presented with such a letter.

  And she didn’t seem to be reacting with outrage, either, which was a disappointment. Patty knew Cherry had an impressive temper and she couldn’t imagine why that temper wasn’t in full eruption now. She would have liked to have seen Cherry get up on her spotted pony and go tearing across the prairie to give Jared a piece of her mind, and either drag him back by the ear or burn down his cabin, whichever seemed more appropriate to her at the time. Instead, Cherry was sitting so quietly, so still, gazing out the window with a vacantness that busy-minded, vocal Patty just couldn’t comprehend. She found it downright frightening. Maybe even a little spooky. Something bad was going on, all right. The perfect little wedding she’d been planning all morning (they’d be married from the parlor, of course) was starting to look like it wasn’t going to happen.

  At last Patty tore herself away from spying on Cherry’s still, white face and went away in a fury to berate Matt, who had sought safety in the isolation of his workshop. Ever since he had returned the night before with only the letter from Jared in his coat pocket, he had been a man marked for hanging by his darling wife, and lying low away from the house seemed to be his only option at this point.

  He heard the door swing open behind him and put down the knife he had been whittling with, prepared for Patty to launch into a full attack. But then, the strangest thing happened.

  Nothing.

  Matt turned around slowly and saw his wife standing in the doorway, the cold prairie behind her, with her eyes full and tremulous. “Patty?” he asked cautiously. “You want to come in and close the door, honey? It’s a cold day.”

  She came in, still mute, closing the door quietly behind her, and came across the shavings-littered floor. When she reached him, she looked up, sadness welling from her brown eyes, and he opened his arms without thinking and she crumpled into them.

  They stood like that for a little while, his arms wrapped tight around his wife, and his chin resting on her shoulder, and he wondered what she was thinking. It wasn’t like Patty to come to him for comfort — Patty made her own comfort. Patty was a whirlwind of plots and plans and self-satisfaction; Matt doubted she had ever wasted a moment feeling sorry for herself. And she probably wasn’t sorry for herself now, he reflected ruefully. She was just that upset about Jared hurting Cherry’s feelings.

  “It’s bound to be not
hin’,” he found himself saying, voice gentle as if he was talking to a scared puppy or a nervous foal. “A man gets nervous. Hell, I got nervous. Marryin’ a beautiful girl like you, how couldn’t I’ve? And Jared’s just feelin’ the same way about Cherry. He’ll come back into town and they’ll make up.” But he knew he didn’t sound all that certain about that last part. Truth was, Matt didn’t know what Jared would do when he had Hope batting her long eyelashes at him again, and he was awfully afraid it would be something stupid.

  Patty heard the uncertainty in his voice and pulled back. She looked up at him for a long moment, her eyes snapping with outrage.

  He was actually relieved to see she was mad again. Sad Patty was something so profoundly unlike the woman he knew, he wasn’t at all certain he could manage it.

  “Just let him come back, and see what I do to him! When he’s treated my friend this badly — Matt, I declare, if I get my hands on Jared Reese he’ll wish he’d gone south for the winter and kept riding right past Galveston and slam into the ocean. I mean that. I really do.”

  Matt was impressed by how blood-thirsty Patty sounded. Even if Jared was still his oldest friend. And even if he was certain Jared would be back. She was a very gorgeous little thing when her blood was up and her eyes were sparkling dangerously like that. But he had to cool her off a little bit or she was liable to ride out after Jared and make good on her threats.

  “I’d rather you didn’t kill him, Patty, but you can sure rough him up a little,” Matt conceded. “What do you reckon Cherry will do when he comes back?”

  “I hope she takes a horse-whip to him!” Patty stood back, crossing her arms across her chest.

  Matt couldn’t help but look at his wife’s chest when she stood like that. She pushed her forearms up against her breasts, and they strained against the calico of her dress in response, like two pretty peaches that he just wanted to taste, just wanted to put his tongue on and give a little lick…