by V. J. Banis
After a long period of silence he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re a worthless fool,” she told him, trying to set her clothes right again.
* * * * * * *
It was the morning after this incident that Peter made his announcement.
“I’m going to go,” he told her, coming into their bedroom. She was still abed, but he had not slept all night.
“Go? Go where?” she asked sleepily.
He gestured with one hand. “Out there. West,” he said.
She sat up, no longer sleepy. “You’re mad,” she told him. “You know there’s hardly a grain of truth to any of those tales, and besides, you’ve heard what they’ve had to say about the dangers.”
“If the stories of treasure are false, then the dangers must be too.”
“And they might not be,” she argued, scrambling out of bed and slipping into a dressing gown. “You should be more realistic. What do you know about dealing with Indians, or—or any of the other problems? You’re not an explorer, you’re not even a very brave man. You’ve lived your entire life in ease provided by your brother’s fortune.”
“That’s exactly the point. I came to this country to make my fortune and to escape my brother’s domination. I wanted to prove—to you, if you must know—that I could stand on my own two feet, make it on my own. So far all I’ve managed to put between my brother and myself is distance, but at the same time, I’ve stretched his purse strings to cover that distance. I might as well have stayed in London. Perhaps you’ve been right to ridicule me.”
She had a sudden sense of what she had driven him to, and crossing to where he still stood, just inside the door, she laid a hand on his arm. “Peter, I—we’ve neither of us been happy here, but perhaps the fault is our own. Perhaps if we tried to change—”
Peter shook his head, smiling ruefully. “No, it isn’t only the treasure I’m after, I want to find something else, as well.”
“What do you want to find? Your head on a platter?”
“I want to find God.” He looked at her, seeing her surprise. “Oh, I know, I’ve talked about him, and prayed to him till I’m blue in the face, but for all that, Claire, he’s eluded me. I’ve never felt that he was actually there, in person with me, if you understand what I mean. Perhaps out west, away from everything that I’ve known, I’ll find him, and myself, in a sense. I’ve never known myself at all, except in terms of other people. I’m my father’s second son, Richard’s brother, your husband. I think that when I’ve struck out at you I was trying to shatter that particular mask and in that way get at myself. I don’t suppose this makes much sense to you. I’m not even sure it does to me.”
“When—when will you be back?” she asked.
“When I’ve found my fortune. When I’m fit to be your husband.”
“But you might be gone years.”
“Perhaps.” He smiled. “Or perhaps I’ll prove more of a man than you thought, and be back soon.”
CHAPTER TWO
At first Peter’s letters arrived with surprising regularity, considering the distances and the primitive areas through which he traveled. He wrote from Kentucky, and from a town called Cincinnati, and finally from St. Louis itself.
It was there, after six months, that the letters stopped.
It was a terrible time for Claire. Over and over she berated herself for her selfishness and her cruelty. It seemed to her that she had ruined not only her own life but those of everyone with whom she came into close contact. She could not forget how deeply she had hurt Richard in breaking her engagement to him. Afterward, merely to escape the scene of her selfishness, she had married Peter, only to drive him to his own destruction.
In her isolation, and the inactivity of her life, she found no escape from her own harsh judgment of herself. She spent her days pacing the small rooms of her home like a caged animal, or sitting on her verandah, staring off into the west.
The Henshey boy, hearing she was alone, came to see her, smiling smugly, but he soon left with a dour and disappointed expression. Her neighbors, though they considered her snobbish and were not overly fond of her, continued for a time to send her invitations. But when it became apparent that she meant neither to accept nor even acknowledge them, they eventually ceased.
If only she knew where Peter was! Was he alive, dead, perhaps the captive of some savage tribe? Or had he simply found a new life for himself, more to his liking? She had to smile when she imagined Peter living in sin with another woman, perhaps in some frontier log hut, but her smile was one of bitter irony.
Hearing that a traveler had arrived from the west, she went uninvited to the Hensheys one evening and questioned the man at some length, but he had no news of her husband. The Hensheys, seeing her agitation, concluded that they had misjudged the couple on their previous visits, and that they were more in love than one would have guessed, but Claire welcomed their sympathy no more than their friendship.
The weeks stretched into months, each more unendurable than the last, and just when it seemed to Claire that she could endure no more, an unexpected visitor arrived with startling news.
It was evening. The soft Virginia dusk had settled over the house and its lawns. Claire, desperate to help the time pass, had taken up embroidery, with thus far disastrous results.
The sound of a horseman riding up the lane surprised her so that she pricked her finger with the needle. She sat sucking at the wound and glowering in the direction of the front hall. Doreen, the little maid she had been trying to train as a proper house servant, went to the door; Claire could hear her in conversation with a gentleman, his low voice indistinguishable at the distance, yet oddly familiar.
Doreen came into the parlor a moment later to announce that a gentleman wished to see her. Claire, thinking that the Henshey boy had again come courting, said, “Tell the gentleman that I have retired, and if he would care to leave his name, perhaps he could return at a more convenient time.”
Before Doreen could deliver this message, however, there was a clatter of boots and walking stick from the hallway, and Richard pushed his way into the room.
“My dear Claire,” her former fiancé greeted her, making a half-bow from the waist, “this time is as convenient as any for a man who’s come as far as I have.”
“Richard—whatever on earth are you doing here?” Claire asked, rising to her feet.
“I came to see my brother—will you offer me a glass of that port, I’ve worked up a bit of a thirst,” he said, indicating a bottle and some glasses on a tray.
“Of course, please, help yourself. Peter isn’t here.”
“So I heard. He’s gone west.” Richard crossed to the tray and poured himself a glass of the wine. It gave her an opportunity to study him.
She could see that his legs had healed better than the doctors had hoped; one foot was splayed outward at a peculiar angle, causing a limp and necessitating the use of a cane, but his mobility was not greatly hindered.
The scars that had disfigured his face were, if anything, even more grisly looking, perhaps because they bore the unmistakable stamp of permanence.
She had occasionally given herself to wonder, since her arrival on these shores, if she might not have done better to marry Richard, scars and all. Now, in his presence after so long a while, she knew that that was only another of her foolish notions.
It was not merely the scars or the limp. She had begun to understand that outward trappings were not so important as she had once thought. Richard’s appeal for her had been his money and his title, just as Peter’s had been his good looks and what she had mistakenly thought was the freedom he would provide her. She had been wrong in both cases, and she could see now she would have been no more suited to marriage with Richard than she had been with Peter. Perhaps, she thought soberly, she was not suited to marriage at all.
“Well,” Richard said, toasting her with his glass, “have I passed inspection?”
“I’m sorry, was I starin
g? It’s just that it’s been so long and—and you have recovered remarkably since then.”
“Still not a pretty sight, eh?” He chuckled at her embarrassment.
She forced herself to look directly at him, at the livid scars, at the twisted mouth and pitiful remnant of one ear.
“At least you are alive,” she said matter-of-factly. “That is something to be grateful for.”
“Yes, but not to your husband,” he said, emptying his glass and pouring another. “Did he tell you it was he tried to kill me?”
“Peter? Why, that’s impossible, he would never—” She paused, remembering back to the night of Richard’s accident. Peter, riding after her, asking “...if there weren’t Richard....”
Richard, watching her, grinned. “I always told you your face is as easy as a book to read,” he said.
She took a step backward to sit down in the chair she had just vacated. “I can’t believe it,” she said.
“In your heart you must have known. He was mad to have you.”
“Yes, but it was a riding accident, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“It was no accident,” Richard said. “I had a great many weeks to brood about it, to wonder how it had happened. Luckily they’d taken the saddle back to Everly Hall. When I was able to get about, I had a look at it myself, and saw that it had been tampered with. My groom swore it was all right when he saddled my horse for me, and only one person got close to it between then and when I mounted: my brother, in the stables mounting his own horse to set out after you.”
“He came by the road.”
“Exactly. Put him far away from the scene of the crime. He knew that countryside better than anyone, better than I did, at least. He knew I’d have a lot of jumps, that sooner or later the girth would give. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t die as he’d planned, though he managed to get you anyway. And got out of England before anyone got on to him.”
She suddenly stiffened her back. “Did you come here for revenge?” she asked.
Richard laughed again and helped himself to more of the port. “Oh yes, you’re entirely right, I came here with the idea of breaking my brother’s neck, like he tried to break mine.”
“Then you’ve wasted a long journey,” she said coldly. “As I’ve already told you, Peter is gone.”
“Yes, as I said, I knew that. I’ve been asking about since I arrived. Some of these people are old friends of mine, you understand. I’ve had some interesting conversations. I already knew Peter had gotten soured on your fair company.”
“There’s no need to be insulting. If you’ve asked about, you know Peter went west because he wanted to seek a fortune. There’s all sorts of wild stories about treasures—cities of gold—that sort of folderol. Peter has dreams of grandeur.”
“Driven to it by you, wasn’t he?”
“That’s a lie,” she said hotly, angered that his remark had hit so exactly on the point over which she had been fretting for weeks.
“That’s what they’re saying,” Richard told her. “They’re saying he hasn’t got a chance where he went, that he’ll never come back from there alive, and they’re saying that you drove him to it.”
She got to her feet again. “I don’t care to listen to any more of this,” she said. “Will you please go now?”
Richard made no move to go, but only shook his head sadly. “My dear Claire,” he said. “My dear, beautiful witch, Claire.”
“How dare you!” she cried.
“It’s you who’s responsible for all this,” he murmured. “If you hadn’t flirted with Peter, made it clear to him that you’d be available if I were out of the way, he’d never have lost his head enough to do what he did.”
“That’s not true,” she said, but without the ring of conviction. Was it true? It had always been her nature to flirt; it was almost unconscious with her. Had she led Peter on, given him the encouragement he needed to attempt to take his own brother’s life?
“And then when he turned out to be less a bargain than you thought, you managed to drive him away, to his certain doom. I came here with the idea of vengeance. I wanted to punish Peter for what he did to me, but now I think that Peter’s already been punished enough, by marrying you.”
“If you don’t leave—”
“Oh, I’m going, spare me your threats.” He laughed, putting his glass down with such violence that the stem shattered, cutting his hand. The sight of the blood it brought made her feel ill.
He strode to the door, holding his hand up to prevent the blood from staining her carpet. At the door he paused to look back at her.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” He laughed again. “To think that you should have been the instrument of my vengeance.”
“Get out!” she screamed.
She heard his cane on the tiles of the entryway and after a moment the door slammed loudly after him. She clapped her hands to her face and began to cry. Since Peter’s departure she had tried not to face the truth about herself, and now Richard had held a mirror up before her and forced her to look. It was she who was to blame, she who had driven poor, foolish Peter to do the things he had done. Her hands were as stained with blood as Richard’s had been a moment before—Richard’s blood, and perhaps Peter’s as well.
She thought of all she’d heard of that savage, primitive land to which he’d journeyed. Peter might die—might already be dead—and she might never know. She could spend years, the rest of her life, trapped in this house, waiting, wondering, blaming herself.
“No, I can’t!” she cried aloud to the empty room. “I’ll go mad.”
She crossed to the bottle of wine and filled a glass with port. She drank deeply, and as she did so the wind rose, blowing through the open windows at the west end of the room and fluttering the curtain inward.
She turned in the direction of the billowing lace and in an instant she knew what the answer must be. She knew what she must do.
CHAPTER THREE
“There’s a woman to see you.”
Camden Summers was in the act of shaving with the blade of his hunting knife. He had, by watching his watery reflection in a polished piece of tin, managed to remove a few patches of beard and quite a bit of skin.
“Not that Frenchwoman again?” he asked. “I made a mistake giving that one a gold piece the last time; now she’s got a notion I’m made of them.”
“This one’s an Englishwoman,” the Indian said from the doorway.
Summers frowned. “I heard there was one working over at Miz Letitia’s,” he said, “a redhead.”
“Never saw this one before. She don’t look the type no-how.”
Summers splashed some water from the basin over his face, washing off most, but not all, of the blood. “They’re all the type, depending on circumstances,” he said. “Well, I guess I’d better put a shirt on, those Englishwomen are funny ones.”
He was, even half-shaved and with a shirt on, a fierce-looking sight—an immensely tall and rangy half-breed, with jet-black hair that hung to his shoulders and, in startling juxtaposition to his swarthy skin, eyes that seemed carved of blue crystal. He had spent most of his life wandering across the wilderness that had come to be known as the far west, and there was scarcely one of its dangers that he hadn’t confronted. His father had been an Englishman, a murderer who had fled into the plains to escape punishment for his crimes, his mother a Quapaw squaw. He spoke a dozen or more Indian dialects, could shoot the feather from an Indian headband at a hundred yards, and had once killed a puma with nothing but his hunting knife, though that encounter had left him with a vivid scar that ran from his left cheekbone nearly to the jaw line, and that turned crimson when he was angry.
Though men invariably kept their distance, women reacted to him in different ways. Some of them were frightened by his grisly appearance while others were fascinated. He regarded them alike as flesh to satisfy his desires, and otherwise dispensable.
He regarded the Englishwoman whom the Indian ushered into his ro
om with curiosity, but little interest. She was not the sort to arouse his desires. He liked them overflowing with flesh and femininity, and preferably a bit ripened. This one was still green, little more than a girl she looked, and so fragile she’d surely shatter under his mounting.
Only her eyes made him uncomfortable, for one seemed to see through them into the very essence of her—feelings and fears and needs made naked, as if she’d suddenly opened her bodice to reveal glimpses of her breasts, closing it again before the details had quite impressed themselves upon the mind.
“You’re Mister Summers?” she asked in a cool English voice that stirred subconscious memories of his father.
“That I am, won’t you sit down, Miss—?”
“Mrs. Denon.” She glanced around. The only chair, a piece of hide stretched over a wooden frame, was occupied by a great frowsy-haired tomcat.
Summers gave the chair a violent shake, sending the angry cat out an open window. She sat down, unmindful of the residue of hair that littered the seat.
“Now what can I do for you, Miss—Mrs. Denon?” he asked.
“I’m told that you’re the best guide St. Louis has to offer,” she said.
He grinned. “Well, I’ve never entered any competitions. Where is it you wanted to go?”
She looked surprised by the question, as if he ought to have known the answer himself. “West,” she replied.
“There’s a lot of that, Mrs. Denon,” he said.
“I don’t know where, exactly,” she said. “You see, my husband came here a little more than five months ago from Virginia. He was on his way west. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“He may still be here in town. There’s lots going on here in St. Louis.”
“No, I’ve asked about, and besides, in his last letter he indicated he was about to set out with some other men, some trappers.”
“For where?”
