A Westward Love

by V. J. Banis

  She had left the front door open, as was common during the warm nights. As she came up to it, she thought she heard a sound from within, and she hesitated, wishing she had taken time to light a lamp before she went out.

  She chided herself for being foolish. No one had come here in days except Peter, still trying to persuade her that she must come to live at the mission. And she had continued to resist.

  She stepped into the deeper darkness of her parlor. As she did so there was the unmistakable sound of a match being struck. From her bedroom came a quick flare of light as someone put the match to a candle.

  She stood spellbound in the front doorway, unable to will herself to move. Her legs ached from the work of hauling the heavy funeral basket and the bending necessary to fill in the grave hole.

  A man appeared in the bedroom doorway. His back was to her, and the lamp, which he held in front of him, cast him in a silhouette.

  She found her voice at last. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Her voice startled him. He whirled about too quickly. The candle went out. She had a glimpse of him starting toward her.

  Genuinely frightened now, for she had seen enough to realize that he was not dressed like the local vaqueros, Claire turned and tried to run away. She had gone only a few feet when he caught up with her. She was caught in a powerful embrace and lifted from the ground, her feet still churning.

  “Claire—it’s really you,” a familiar voice said.

  She stopped fighting against him and threw her head back, staring wide eyed up into the face of Camden Summers.

  * * * * * * *

  He carried her back into the house to her bedroom. She clung to him, kissing his mouth, his throat, his chest where the shirt lay open. She was too dazed at seeing him again, too thrilled by the long-remembered feel of his arms about her, to question how and why. He was here. It was enough.

  It was not until she was lying upon the bed, her clothes gone, watching him shed his own with practiced speed, that she remembered Peter.

  It cast a dark cloud over her pleasure. “I think I ought to tell you...,” she began hesitantly.

  He kicked aside his trousers and came to kneel naked over her, lowering his mouth to the upturned tip of one breast.

  “What?” he asked in a muffled voice.

  A shiver of excitement rippled through her at the touch of his tongue. His hand glided over one impatient thigh.

  “Nothing,” she murmured, lifting her arms about his powerful neck.

  * * * * * * *

  “How on earth did you ever find me here?”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, fishing in his pocket for a tobacco pouch and a rolling paper, sifting tobacco through his fingers, deftly rolling it into a cigarette. She ran her eyes like loving fingers down the hard expanse of his back, savoring the stark relief of musculature, the ridged spine, the cleft that disappeared under him where he sat. She had forgotten, perhaps had never fully known, how a man’s body could excite and stimulate her. At least, this man’s body could.

  “I looked around some,” he said, lighting the cigarette and blowing the acrid smoke out his nostrils. “Asked a few questions.”

  He looked down at her, letting one hand rest lightly at the base of her stomach, barely touching the fringe of red-gold hair.

  “We thought you had drowned.”

  “Thought so myself for a while,” he said. “Finally got to the bank, but my leg was broke. Didn’t even know it was till I tried to stand up. I waited around a few days, thinking maybe there’d be some sign of you. Finally I figured you must have drowned or been washed farther down than where I was. So I tied myself to a log and started downriver. Found a place where you must have camped, but that was as close as I got. Morton must have taken good care of you.”

  He glanced at her face. “Morton’s dead,” she told him.

  “You kill him?”

  “No. His greed did it for me.”

  He nodded, knowing Morton well enough to recognize the probable truth of what she said. The rest he didn’t ask about because he already knew what it would have been for her with the man, and he didn’t want to hear. If Morton had still been alive, he would have found him eventually. It was just as well Morton was dead. It saved him the trouble.

  “When I got out of the canyon,” he went on, “I had to wait around a while for my leg to get better. Then I set out west, figured if you made it, you’d be in one of the settlements. When I got to Los Angeles, I heard about an English lady who’d traveled north to Monterey in the company of the governor and his wife. Figured that had to be you.”

  She was silent for a moment, thinking how badly things had worked out. If only Summers had come a little sooner; she would gladly have ridden out of Monterey with him, gone anywhere at all that he wanted to go; and she need never have encountered Peter again. She could have married Summers, believing her husband dead, and no one would ever have known the difference. A husband lost in the wild reaches of the west would have had little occasion to haunt them. But this man down the road, tormenting her for her “sinful ways,” he could not be so easily dismissed.

  “You look thoughtful,” Summers said. “You’re not sorry I found you?”

  She smiled and stretched lazily, reaching to run the fingers of one hand down the broad expanse of his back.

  “No, I’m not sorry,” she said.

  Later she would have to find some way of telling him about Peter. But not now, she thought, as he lowered his mouth to hers. Dear Lord, not now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  She told herself that it was a fool’s paradise in which she was living. The local people could not have helped seeing Summers. It could only be a matter of time before one of them told him the truth. Worse yet, Peter himself might appear on the scene.

  A score of times and more she tried to tell Summers about her husband, and each time her courage failed her. This was too good, this interlude that had unexpectedly been granted her. For the first time in her life, she was in love, she was loved, and reveling in it. He made love to her day and night, seemingly inexhaustible.

  She rose in the early mornings, hurrying about the town. Eggs from Señora Albego, who kept chickens and goats, flour for tortillas from the general store, fresh fish down by the water. If she could but keep him there, within the confines of her house. It was like an enchanted cottage. So long as he did not step outside its sheltering walls, the spell could not be broken. She cooked and hurried back to bed. She cleaned and joined him once again. He took her and rested, and took her again. Ate and slept, and took her once more.

  And the hours passed.

  For two days she kept the world at bay, each moment more precious than the one before, for she knew that they were dwindling.

  On the third morning she came home to find him gone, the bed empty. There was no note, no explanation. Had he simply gone for a stroll? Or had he somehow found out? Perhaps Peter had been there, or one of the local gossips.

  She dropped into a chair, her purchases forgotten. She waited, her eyes bleak with the knowledge that the spell was ended.

  He had gone out for some air, unused to being confined for long, and thinking he would find her along the town’s main street.

  He saw nothing of her, but the noise from one of the cantinas made him think of a cool beer and he went in. Like most loners he was sensitive, even in a crowd, to his isolation from others. When he went into such a place, it was his custom to sit alone, for he did not often seek companionship.

  He found a small table off to itself and sat there nursing his beer and ignoring the unwelcome attention he was receiving from the other patrons. Some curiosity was commonplace. Strangers were not an everyday sight in towns such as this, and the convivial Californios could be counted on to welcome a newcomer, not so much for his own sake as for the new contribution to the endless merrymaking that they pursued. But this, he knew instinctively, was something more than that. Though their faces were different, he
had known these men before, he had met them in frontier towns, in mountain camps, along the trails that already had claimed the importance of being named. They too were loners, and such men understood, as others might not, that Solitude was a whore who, having once gotten a man in her embrace, did not easily relinquish him. They knew that there were men who wanted to be alone, and some, a few, who were doomed to loneliness, want it or not. They left them alone, partly because they respected such needs, and partly because it was often dangerous to do otherwise. Frontier men learned quickly—or sometimes too late—that it was wise to leave such men alone.

  Sipping his beer, tilting his chair back so that it rested precariously against the wall behind him, Summers observed that his entrance had made a stir something more than that afforded a mere stranger. He interested them in some way. He was someone they had talked about, perhaps had been talking about when he came in, for some of them had that embarrassed air men have when caught at common gossip.

  But why, for Heaven’s sake? He was nothing to them. Not much different, surely, from others who passed through.

  It occurred to him suddenly. It was Claire that interested them, not him. It was unlikely that his coming would have been unnoticed in a town this size. A beautiful widow, a foreigner to boot, living alone. No doubt every unattached man in the place kept one eye on her house. And they would notice and resent his appearance on the scene.

  Satisfied that he had found his explanation, Summers lowered the legs of the chair to the floor. He finished his beer and would have gone, except for the stranger who entered just then.

  Though the newcomer was dressed little differently from anyone else in the place, he nonetheless wore a quiet air of authority about him. There was nothing of the dandy about him. Such a man as that wouldn’t have lasted long in the west. Yet he was unmistakably an aristocrat.

  The governor, Summers thought, seeing the deferential manner in which the other men greeted him, not obsequious but guardedly respectful.

  And handsome. That discovery gave Summers pause. Claire had traveled northward in the company of the governor and his wife.

  Where was the governor’s wife?

  So intently was he studying the man just inside the doorway of the cantina that it was several seconds before he realized the man was looking for him.

  Someone told him I’m here; that’s why he’s come, Summers thought, waiting.

  As if to confirm his intuition, the man’s gaze stopped when it found him. After a moment’s hesitation he made his way across the room in Summers’ direction. Summers saw one or two of those at the bar cast quick glances over their shoulders, while trying to pay no attention.

  “You must be Summers,” he said, pausing before the table.

  It gave Summers an eerie feeling to be addressed by name by a stranger in this distant land to which he’d never before traveled.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked aloud.

  The stranger smiled, a not unfriendly, but slightly condescending smile. “Claire’s spoken of you often,” he said. “Though she thought you were dead. You’re the only likely candidate to be visiting her here.”

  The way he said her name, something that happened in his eyes for a brief second or two—so that’s what happened to the wife, Summers thought.

  The stranger paused, waiting for some reply. When none was forthcoming, he extended his hand, saying, “I’m Don Hernando, provincial governor here in Monterey.”

  Men did not customarily shake hands in places such as this. It made a man vulnerable to a swift knife stab or the bullet of a left-handed gunslinger. Summers’ hesitation was automatic, but he did shake the governor’s hand.

  “I was wondering if we could have a few words?” Don Hernando said.

  “Talk away. I’ll listen,” Summers replied.

  Don Hernando’s eyes flicked toward the bar, but he did not turn in that direction. He must have been aware that theirs was by now the only conversation taking place in the cantina, and that all those men paying such fierce attention to their drinks were straining to hear all they could.

  “My office is in my home,” Don Hernando said. “Just a short distance from here. I’ve got some real brandy, if you’d like a drink. Save it for occasions.”

  Summers hesitated a moment more before pushing his chair back noisily and standing. “This must be one,” he said.

  They went out together, Don Hernando graciously stepping aside to let the plainsman precede him. When the news had first reached him that a stranger had arrived in town and was staying at Claire’s, Don Hernando had guessed that this must be the man Summers of whom she had spoken frequently. Summers was supposed to be dead, but it was never easy to be certain in the wilderness, and anyway she herself had never fully given up hope or she wouldn’t have continued asking about him. And who else could it have been? Her husband was accounted for, the other men who had started west with her were inarguably dead.

  Don Hernando had left word about that he wanted to speak with the stranger, should he venture out alone. Summers had no more than set foot inside the cantina than one of the vaqueros had rushed off to Don Hernando’s with the news.

  When he had first come into the cantina, however, Don Hernando had thought for an awkward moment that he was mistaken. The man looked like an Indian. He thought of the Indian who had purchased Claire and brought her to the Malibu, but had dismissed the notion at once. No Indian would have gone to live with a white woman in a Californio town and stepped out into broad daylight afterward. It would have been inviting a lynching.

  A half-breed. To a man of Don Hernando’s untainted blood that was even worse. Grand God, the man looked like a savage. He moved along the rutted street like a stalking puma.

  Still Don Hernando needed no reminding that this was a different world from that of Madrid and Paris. There were worse qualities here than looking dangerously fierce. Soon after his arrival on these shores, Don Hernando had been treated to a lesson on the relative unimportance of bloodlines in this new world. Disregarding the warning sounds, he had stepped too close to a rattler, who in turn had disregarded Don Hernando’s genealogy and struck as democratically as if the blood invaded had not been blue.

  Don Hernando was a snob but he was no fool. He had come here in political exile, but he had fallen in love with California almost at once. And he was shrewd enough to know after less than a year here that in the taming of this land men like this half-breed would count for far more than men like himself, however useful he might be in some spheres. This did not in any way diminish Don Hernando’s opinion of himself. Don Hernando knew who and what he was, as well as what he was not.

  Don Hernando’s house was cool and dark inside, shutters closed against the midday heat. There was no sound of activity. The maid had taken to spending much of her time in Doña María’s bedroom. Some days Don Hernando saw no one in his house but the unspeaking Indian who served his supper.

  The two men had spoken little since leaving the cantina. Don Hernando’s office was on the second floor with a balcony and outside stairs leading to it. It was here that Don Hernando ushered his guest.

  “The brandy’s from Paris,” Don Hernando said, pouring two glasses. He lifted his own and sniffed tentatively at the amber liquid. Summers half-drained his glass at a gulp.

  “What’s this all about?” Summers asked. He was sure now that Claire and the governor had been lovers. One part of his mind shrugged off that discovery. This was a hard land, and those who survived it learned the art of doing what had to be done.

  There was another part of him, however, that bristled at the thought of the intimacy the two must have shared. It was a new experience for the plainsman. In the past he’d taken women where and when he found them. Why then this need to be with Claire, whom he should have long ago forgotten? His curt account of his search for her had told her nothing of the mental agony, the uncertainty he had suffered, not knowing whether he was actually following her trail or moving farther away from
her at each step. He’d wondered endlessly if she had survived, not only that river, but Morton and the desert and all the rest.

  When he’d heard of her journeying northward with the governor it had been like a man finding a new soul. He had traveled here almost without rest.

  I should have headed east after all, he thought angrily. Just who he was angry with he wasn’t certain. Better yet, I should have stayed in St. Louis.

  “It’s about Claire,” Don Hernando answered.

  Summers finished off the rest of his brandy. It was good, far better than the Indian beer he sometimes had on the plains, or the rot-gutting home brew that was commonplace around St. Louis.

  “What’s she to you?” he asked sullenly.

  “I’m in love with her,” Don Hernando said. “The same as you are.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Aren’t you?” The question earned him a piercing glance but no reply. “You’ve followed her halfway across a continent to be with her. That ought to be enough to convince any man.”

  Summers continued to glare at him.

  Don Hernando went on, uncomfortably aware that the man facing him was as dangerous as any rattler. “The difference is that while we both love her, she only loves one of us. You.”

  “Bull.” Summers turned away and went to one of the windows that overlooked the town. In the distance he could glimpse the sunlight glinting off the ocean.

  Love. How the hell had it come to that? A man fucked a woman not because she meant anything special to him, just because she was there and no one else was. Nothing you planned, just something that happened.

  Though he had to admit, it was something he’d thought about a long time beforehand. And she was different. Not just the sex, which had been different, too, in some way he couldn’t explain. But it was the rest of it. The way she’d come to look at the mountains.

  And the times when he’d finish making love to her and find her staring up at the sky. Not like she was dreaming or thinking of something else, but actually looking. At the sky, at the whole, endless, beautiful sky above. For Christ’s sake, who ever heard of a woman doing that?