The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback)

by Sydney Alexander

  Anne turned her head sharply to look at him. The tall man stood in silhouette against the sunlight streaming in from the chilly autumn afternoon. She felt a flutter of foreboding in her stomach. “How convincing do you intend to be?”

  He did not move from the window, from his leisurely perusal of the street below. “As convincing as necessary,” Richard said in an even tone. “I will not accept no for an answer. I can assure you on that point. The boy goes back to England with me, and Charlotte will understand that soon enough.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Look, Patty, I have Eddie up on Percival’s back!”

  Cherry laughed as Patty came rushing out of the house, tucking a dishcloth into her apron as she came. Poor Patty, didn’t even have on a coat. It was too mean a trick to play. But Cherry couldn’t help it. She knew what was coming next.

  Patty did not disappoint. “Lord’s sake, Cherry Beacham, you take that blessed child off of that bronco’s back this instant! What could you be thinking?”

  Eddie joined in with his mother’s laughter. “PERCY!” he announced, handfuls of the horse’s black mane between his fingers. “I RIDE PERCY!”

  “Isn’t he darling, Patty? He kept asking and asking and I couldn’t resist him. Such a little horseman, just like his father!”

  “And like his mother,” Matt interjected, coming around the corner of the barn. “You’re as good as a cowboy, Cherry. Glad to see this horse coming around so nicely.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Cherry agreed, stroking the Thoroughbred’s neck with her free hand. Her other hand was firmly on Eddie’s chubby little leg. “I am so happy the snow has been light. Being able to ride him every day has kept him from having too much time on his hands to think up tricks. And he isn’t the sort of horse that wants to hurt you, anyway. He wants to learn how to please.” Cherry tickled Percival’s nose and the horse wiggled his soft lips back in her hands. “Such a darling. I shall hate to give him up when I am through with him.”

  Cherry had really fallen head-over-heels for only having had the horse a few weeks. It wasn’t necessarily the best trait in a horse trainer, she knew. It was unhealthy for one’s heart to always be falling in love with a horse that would come and go. But she would just have to learn as she went.

  “Not a bad winter, so far,” Matt mused. “I’ve spent winters, you couldn’t get yourself away from the fire from the first of September. Huddled up to the cookstove all day and night. That was why I liked goin’ to Texas.”

  Cherry looked at him for a moment, and then busied herself with settling Eddie more securely in the saddle.

  Patty gave Matt a poisonous glare. Matt shrugged, hands outspread, as if he hadn’t known that Jared was still, after a month’s absence, a taboo subject.

  But of course he was. No one mentioned Jared. He was ever on the tip of someone’s tongue, he was the cause of countless discarded anecdotes and half-told stories. The man who had brought them together, Matt’s best friend and Cherry’s lover, had removed himself from their little circle and had thus put a hole into their lives which was proving impossible to fill. He was part of their story. He was not easily left out of its telling.

  Cherry, if pressed, would have supposed she thought of Jared all the time. While she was out riding Percival, patiently putting the elegant horse through figure-eights and voltes and half-voltes, teaching him, despite the heavy western tack, to carry himself as grandly as any English horse, with a proud high bearing and a ground-covering, reaching stride. She sweated beneath her leather hat and coat and heavy skirts, she ground her teeth and set her jaw as she repeated the exercises again and again, and in the back of her head ran a little thread of one single thought: Jared. Where was Jared, how was Jared, did Jared miss her at all, why had Jared left her.

  It was a weakness she could not help; it was a sorrow she could not confess; it was a tragedy she would not give credit to. She put up her chin and she told herself she cared not. She insisted to herself that she was only being dramatic. She reminded herself that she was an independent woman, and she would never, ever rely on a man again. Horses like Percival were scattered across the prairie around Bradshaw: young, un-started, or started badly, and hardly anyone possessed the necessary skills to train them properly. Many of the homesteaders here were city folk, after all; if they were tricked into buying a horse without much training, they were stuck with it. Cherry could scarcely ride through town without getting inquiries about horse-training. Her business idea was blooming before her eyes.

  Because of Percival’s monthly training fee, added to her little savings, Cherry had enough to contribute to the household accounts, despite Patty’s strenuous arguments against it. When she sat down of an evening and went through her account books, speculating at the summer months, she could see that with little economies and another horse or two to train, she and Eddie would be all right. There would be enough there for seed, for grain, for a new mule to pull the plow through the black earth beneath the prairie sod. Jared had told her long ago that he had dropped the idea to irrigate from her stream, and so she would still have drinking water if the rains were good.

  That was one benefit of this whole mess, she would tell herself with a grim smile. At least her neighbor was no longer some villain intent upon stealing her water.

  But what would happen when spring was stealing over the prairie, the snows receding and green stealing over the sunny slopes of the hills, and when she tipped her head up to look at the smiling blue skies, would he have come back? Would he ride in from his claim and look for her? And what would she say to him?

  And so that afternoon she let Jared’s name cross her lips for the first time in that long lonesome month. She felt dizzy, light-headed, as if she had let some djinn out of its bottle with the forbidden word. They were having tea indoors, Percival put back in his box to munch hay next to Galahad and the Barnsley horses, Eddie playing with wood scraps in the workshop with Matt, who still avoided afternoon tea like the plague. They had been talking of nothing, and silence had come, and suddenly she had said it.

  “I wonder why Jared does not come.”

  Patty was quiet, or perhaps the roaring in her ears was drowning Patty out. Cherry looked around her with a sudden clarity and saw the plush little parlor and Patty’s bustling plumpness as if for the first time. She shook her head to clear it and realized Patty was speaking.

  “I guess you won’t take him back,” Patty was saying. She tipped the pot and poured out the last cup of tea for Cherry. “I couldn’t even imagine, after the way he’s behaved. Tearing off like that and acting like he’s a thousand miles away. Not even bothering to see if you need him — and you getting such bad news that same day! Don’t know what woman would want a man like that. Unreliable.”

  “He was foolish,” Cherry admitted weakly. She added extra sugar to her tea; she felt in need of some sort of stimulant. “But Patty — he said he would come back. It’s not as if he went to… to Texas or someplace. He’s only out on the claim.”

  “Never should have left you like that, with hardly a word of explanation.”

  “Oh, Patty,” Cherry said with a shake of her head. She felt suddenly cool and emotionless, as if her mind had been quite made up and she could do nothing more about it. “He must have had a reason.”

  Patty made a harrumph sound and ate two or three biscuits all at once. She had really grown round as the season progressed into winter, which Cherry thought only made her more adorable to look at. Her rosy cheeks were round as a shiny apples, and her bosom and hips swelled out from her corseted waist most alluringly. Cherry reflected that she herself was too skinny, but all that riding and a desire to be economical, to not eat too much, was going to keep her that way. Only the well-off looked well-fed, and she was far from that.

  “I’ll be thinking of adding another horse soon, so I’ll be giving you a bit more money every week,” Cherry ventured experimentally, and when Patty set down her tea cup with a clatter and went stalking fro
m the room, Cherry reflected that she had never been terribly good at polite conversation, and she was clearly getting no better in Bradshaw.

  “Cherry?” She looked up. It was Matt, calling from the front hall. “You have a letter.”

  “Gracious, who would be writing me?” Cherry made her voice light, so that Matt would not guess her secret hopes. Of course, she was being foolish. A letter from Jared wouldn’t have come from the post office at all. Jared would have had to ride into town to drop the silly thing off.

  “It’s from New York,” Matt said, coming into the parlor, and Cherry’s blood went cold.

  “New York?” she said, hearing the wooden stiffness creep into her voice. “Isn’t that peculiar.”

  Matt looked at her with a still, set expression as he handed her the envelope. And then Patty was at his back, with Eddie’s little hand in hers, her eyes wide and frightened. So everyone was thinking the same thing. That it was about to get much, much worse. That the English family were going to make good on their threats. She took a deep breath and willed her hands not to shake. She was a Beacham, after all. And she had weathered worse than this.

  Cherry sank back into her chair and took up the little letter-knife that Patty always kept on the side-table. She slit the envelope slowly, with care, so that she would not damage the pages within, and then she pulled out the contents, unfolded them gently, and began to read.

  Matt and Patty waited. Eddie went over to the mantlepiece and gazed up longingly at the china shepherdess.

  Finally Cherry looked up, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “It’s just… these things that she writes to me… she only wants me to feel badly over keeping Eddie from them, and her words are so barbed… she succeeds.”

  Patty shook her head and snatched at the letter, fully prepared to read it aloud and denounce every claim the New York cousin made, but Cherry jerked it away. “No,” she said, her voice already a little more steady. “These are terrible things.” And she flung the letter into the fire.

  They sat and watched the fine paper curl and blacken, the little threads of orange creeping through the folds until it finally caught ablaze and went up in smoke all at once. None of the hurtful words leapt out at her as the paper writhed in the hearth; none of the names that her relative had called her in an obvious fit of rage were revealed to the friends who had taken her and her son into their home. But there were lines that were branded upon her brain, that she thought she should never forget, and they bedeviled her all the rest of that day, and the next, until another letter would come and drive the fretting and fear away.

  ***

  “Of course we will go back together, don’t be foolish!” Hope was making critical faces at herself in the mirror. Her lips weren’t as red as usual and Jared suspected she’d laid off the rouge in order to appear more respectable when she was stepping out at his side. It was a touching gesture. Hope loved her rouge. Well, what else would you expect? She was a dancer, after all. But right at this moment, he wasn’t too happy with her line of thinking.

  “Hope, honey, be reasonable. There is nothing for you in Bradshaw. I’ll just go back long enough to settle things up, and then I’ll come right back. I imagine I’ll only be gone a week or two. You can wait here for me, can’t you?”

  She shook her head, diamond ear-bobs flashing. “No. Absolutely not. You’re not going anywhere without me.”

  Jared was confused by the sudden sharpness in her voice. “Why Hope, what do you think will happen?” He put a hand on her elbow and she shook it off, glaring at him in the mirror. “Don’t you trust me to come back to you?”

  “Let you go back there and fall back in love with that English lady?” Hope’s voice was acid. “I don’t think so. She’s had her claws in you this long, don’t you think I’m going to take any chances. No sir. I’m going to be right at your side.”

  It was Jared’s turn to shake his head. She’d been right at his side for the entire month, it had seemed, shrieking that if he went back to Bradshaw, she’d never forgive him. Sobbing that her nerves couldn’t handle being alone again, that she needed protection from her late husband’s family, that they’d come after her for her little bit of money. She’d had tantrums every time he’d mentioned so much as heading back to the claim. But finally he’d put his foot down and said that he must go back.

  To his dismay, she had changed tack, losing the temper and deciding instead that sailing into Bradshaw on his arm was just what was wanted. And now she was combining that impossible obstinance with more temper. Hope’s temper seemed to have grown just as sharp as Cherry’s, and her claws came out every time he said the wrong thing. Which seemed to be most of the time.

  It hadn’t been a honeymoon, the month they had spent together in Opportunity. Together — not exactly the right word to describe it; since Jared had stayed put in the drab little hotel down the street. Hope herself retained a sitting room and a bedchamber at Hotel Opportunity, where she sat in state, ordering up room service and waiting for Jared to attend upon her. Which he did, daily, bringing her the newspapers, scented soaps, and chocolates she required on a daily basis. Hope had developed some very expensive tastes living in the Townsend mansion, and she seemed to have the money to keep up her living style. Jared didn’t know what her financial state was for certain, though. She wouldn’t tell him if she was living on a trust or just burning through her savings, even when he asked her straight-out. She wouldn’t tell him anything.

  But she told him that she loved him. Late in the evening, after the dinner service had been cleared away and Jared had pressed a tip into the bellman’s hand, closing the door on his disapproving young face, she would sit close to him on the divan, and beg prettily for kisses and promises. Promises that he’d love her always, promises that he’d keep her safe, promises that they’d be married as soon as she was out of mourning and could decently do so. And Jared, entangled in confused emotions, not sure if he was still in love or just remembered being in love or if the whole thing was a folly of lust, gave her her kisses and gave her her promises, half-wondering as his lips were upon hers what in God’s name was going to happen to all of them.

  Because he didn’t know what was between them anymore. Was he in love with her? Was she in love with him? Maybe she had loved him in Texas, and maybe she had married Townsend to protect him. Maybe that was true. For a surety he had loved her, that could never be questioned. He had loved a girl named Hope Sullivan with all his heart and all his soul. Once.

  But did he now? He couldn’t say. Even if she had lied to him to save his life, as she claimed — and it was a pretty story at first blush, but now that the heat of the moment had passed, he wasn’t so convinced that it was true — more than two years had passed since he had thought, for a few dizzy months, that he was going to marry her. That time had since been tainted; those memories were not sweet, but bitter and ruined. He had not suffered from nostalgia at the thought of Hope’s ruinous love; just the opposite, in fact.

  And another fact that could not be denied: Hope hadn’t just been a dancer, as she had always told him. He had been naïve, of course, a fool in love, to believe that she wasn’t just as much a whore as the rest of the girls in the dance-hall. He had been foolish enough to swallow the line, when it was just one more of Hope’s never-ending lies.

  And now, naturally, she was playing quite the opposite act, putting him out of her room and blinking in the hallway every night at nine o’clock sharp. They’d done nothing more than kiss on the divan, and Hope had been acting like an untouched virgin, slapping at his hands and squealing whenever his fingers started to wander away from her shoulders, or her elbows. It was enough to make a man crazy, the constant teasing with her lips and the constant pushing away with her hands.

  But there had been one benefit to Hope’s changeable temper and teasing ways: it had let Jared slip out from under her spell before he was completely lost. If she had been the lovely, giving, sweet-natured girl that
he had fallen in love with all those years ago in Galveston, he would have followed her anywhere. But this Hope, raw and unshielded by her actress’s poise, was an altogether different woman, and one that Jared did not care for.

  And so night after night he vowed his eternal love to her even while he struggled to remember just what it was he loved about her. None of the answers seemed right. Nothing that he thought of seemed to apply, in anyway, to the harridan in jewels who was glaring at him, angry as always, right at this moment.

  “Hope,” he began, exasperation at the ragged edges of his voice. “Hope, it is unreasonable to expect me to stroll into town with you on my arm. Good God, woman, half the town thinks I’m marryin’ someone else! What will they say? These things take time. It’s a small town, we don’t want too much talk.”

  “Oh, why do we care?” Hope sounded bored. She leaned back towards the mirror and pinched at a curl next to her cheek. “It’s not as if we’ll be living there or something.”

  “My claim is there.” Jared was startled. This was the first he’d heard of any objection to living in Bradshaw. Although, honestly, they hadn’t actually discussed any sort of future. Just a lot of vague promises about taking care of her and protecting her and loving her, that sort of thing. He hadn’t wanted to make anything as solid and irrefutable as a plan, and she hadn’t brought it up either. The open-ended nature of their relationship was a safety valve he hadn’t thought he’d need, but he’d been grateful for it. Now he was losing it.

  “My claim is there,” he repeated. “I’m proving up that land. It’s going to be my homestead. Of course I’ll be living there.”

  Hope narrowed her eyes at the sound of the word “I,” instead of “we.” She turned from the mirror and put her hands on her hips, glaring at him. The black lace netting atop her full skirt rustled beneath her clenching fingertips. But when she spoke, her voice was strangely soft, even wheedling. “Now Jared,” she sighed. “Surely you don’t want to live up here in the old Dakotas forever. Wouldn’t you care to go somewhere warm, darling? What about your land in Texas?”