Carson's Christmas Bride (Hero Hearts; Lawmen's Brides Book 3)

by Natalie Dean

  “That’s true, sir,” Carson said respectfully. “I’m just doing what I’m told to do. We’ve gotten reports that this man is a runaway, and his owner wants him back.”

  “How do you feel about owning a man, Deputy?” Preacher Shepherd asked, peering at Carson as if he were trying to read into his very soul.

  “I don’t own slaves.” What would he be doing with a slave? He didn’t farm or ranch; a slave wouldn’t be able to offer help in Carson’s line of work, and it wasn’t as though he needed a manservant. He could shave himself, bathe himself, and dress himself just fine on his own.

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Carson wasn’t sure how to answer. His family in Tennessee had owned slaves; it was common there. Some people in Knox Mills were slaveowners, but Knox Mills also had a thriving community of men and women who had once been slaves but had earned their freedom and had come west to make a new start for themselves.

  “I guess I don’t really think about it all that much,” Carson said.

  “Well, son, folks is thinking about it a whole lot these days. Best that you start thinking about it too. There’s gonna be a war over it before it’s done and settled, and you’d best know what side you’re fighting on, and what you’re fighting for. There’s no runaway here.”

  “Thank you for your time.”

  Carson mounted his horse and rode out of the community, aware as he did so that eyes were watching him. He was a stranger here, he realized; the people regarded him as an invader, even though he had never done wrong to anyone who lived here. It was a discomfiting thought.

  Maybe he’d better stop by the Boone cabin and see how Mrs. Baker was getting along. The kids would be out of school by now and maybe things were calming down some. Mrs. Baker had prevailed upon him yesterday to take her to the general store to buy more supplies and he wondered if she thought that she’d be able to buy the children’s good behavior with peppermint sticks and toys. It wasn’t a good habit to get into, but he couldn’t tell her how to spend her money.

  As he waited for someone to answer his knock, he could hear voices raised inside. He knocked louder.

  Sarah answered the door. She appeared startled by his appearance. “Yes?” she inquired.

  “I thought I’d stop by and see how y’all are doing,” he said.

  “Please come in. You can join us for supper.”

  Supper was apparently not being well received. He could smell the odor of burned bacon in the room. The children were seated at the table wearing expressions of rebellious disapproval, but when they saw him enter, they smiled in greeting.

  “Deputy Harlow!”

  “Hey, kids, what are you up to? Looks like it’s time to eat. I’m sorry I just had supper,” he lied, “or I’d be stealing Miss Lucy’s plate here and helping myself.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Lucy said, glaring at Sarah. “I cook better than she does, but she won’t let me.”

  “You’re a child and it’s not your responsibility to prepare the meals,” Sarah returned. It was galling to be spoken to in such a manner by a mere child, but she could not, in kindness, retort that in Charleston, she knew how to cook well because she had many more choices of food items to use.

  “Ma taught me how to cook good and I can cook better than you can.”

  “Well,” Sarah corrected. “Your mother taught you how to cook well. She did not teach you how to cook ‘good’, she taught you—"

  Lucy rose from her chair, color high in her freckled cheeks. “Yes, she did, she taught me how to cook good and don’t you say a word against Ma! She could cook better than you can, and she took care of us better than you can!”

  The girl raced out of the kitchen and left the house. The other children, with angry glances at Sarah, followed suit, ignoring Sarah’s orders not to leave the house.

  “You see what this has become?” Sarah said to Carson. “I cannot stay here any longer. If they want to fend for themselves, then let them. They seem to be much more capable of managing on their own than I am able to help.”

  Chapter 9

  Carson couldn’t get Mrs. Baker out of his mind the following day. The night before, he’d rounded them up and scolded them for running off, reminding them that they weren’t behaving the way their mother had raised them. Chastened, they had returned to the cabin and apologized to Mrs. Baker, then gone to bed.

  He considered stopping at the cabin in the morning to make sure they got off to school, but decided against it. He’d stop by later in the day, when Mrs. Baker was likely to be alone; maybe he could help.

  He was the first one at the office. Justin was at the desk; he glanced up as Carson entered.

  “No sight of Boone,” he said by way of greeting.

  “I didn’t expect there would be.”

  “I asked my sister if she’s heard anything.”

  “Why would your sister hear about Boone?” Carson asked, puzzled.

  “Janice was friends with Mrs. Boone, and some of Mrs. Boone’s kin keep her current on the family. The word is that he’s got it in for you.”

  “Me? I’m not the only one who’s hauled his sorry backside into the jail.”

  “Yeah, but you did it in front of the woman he was set to marry.”

  Carson hung his hat on the rack. “He hit her,” Carson said.

  Justin seemed to want to say more, but Carson wasn’t in the mood for chatting. He wasn’t sure why Justin seemed to have climbed down off his high horse. Maybe he was trying to get himself back in Jack Walker’s good graces. Anyway, it wasn’t his concern. Justin would have to earn his place among the lawmen, just like Carson had had to do. And was still doing, he realized; having the responsibility of looking after a mail-order bride wasn’t going to help him rise from being a deputy to being a marshal.

  Still, he wasn’t entirely sorry that he’d been given the assignment. There was something about that Sarah Baker, something more than just being pretty and having a voice that could melt butter like noon in July. She was more than just frilly petticoats and a fancy hat. He smiled to himself as he recalled the image of her after she’d fallen on the floor in a sitting position, her dress up to her knees and—

  No call to be thinking like that. She wasn’t some floozy at one of the saloons, she was a respectable woman, a widow, in fact. And anyway, he had no business getting soft on a woman just because she was pretty and curvy and completely unable to manage a brood of kids.

  Benjamin came in soon after. Jack was heading to Fort Worth, he told Carson.

  “What for?”

  “He wants to find out firsthand what’s going on with the Comanche. You’ve seen the reports; they’re blaming white settlers for the smallpox outbreak. Turns out it hit them pretty hard.”

  “It hits everyone hard.”

  “They don’t see it that way. They see it as something we did to them. And with more of it showing up, Jack wants to be ready.”

  “Fifty miles away ought to keep us safe from it.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. A lot of people pass through these small Texas towns and who’s to say what they bring with them. If smallpox hits the Comanche again, they might come raiding. So Jack’s on his way to Fort Worth to find out what the army is doing about it. Did Justin talk to you?”

  Carson, who was on his way to give the jail cell its weekly cleaning, paused. “He mentioned that Boone hasn’t been sighted. I don’t expect he will be. There’s nothing for him here; he sure doesn’t care about his kids.”

  “Justin seems to think you might be in harm’s way. His sister knows some of the late Mrs. Boone’s family, and they’ve heard that Boone is out to get you.”

  Carson, a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other, was aware that he was hardly projecting the appearance of a lawman who could take care of himself. But even so, he wasn’t afraid of a drunk like Boone. “There’s four of us,” he said. “I didn’t figure Justin for someone who’d jump at shadows.”

  “He’s not jumping at
shadows,” Benjamin said critically. “He’s looking out for you.”

  “Then he can take a turn at cleaning the cell. That’s the only kind of looking out I’m interested in.”

  After he finished mopping the floor of the cell and the office, Carson decided he might as well ride up to the Boone cabin and see if Mrs. Baker was doing all right. It was a chilly day and he wondered how she stood for firewood. The kids certainly weren’t up to a chore like that, and it was unlikely that Boone had been mindful of winter coming on. Even if Knox Mills had mild winters, folks still needed firewood.

  He knocked on the cabin door. Mrs. Baker opened it.

  “Deputy,” she greeted him.

  He noticed circles under her eyes, evidence that she wasn’t sleeping well. He also noticed that her eyes were red, and that the crying had been recent.

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  He noticed that the cabin was neat and tidy. The floorboards had been newly scrubbed. “Looks like you and me were doing the same thing,” he commented.

  She looked bewildered.

  “I was mopping the jail cell,” he explained, “and you were mopping the cabin.”

  “Oh. Yes, I thought that even if I’m not particularly good at cooking, I might as well turn my attention to cleaning. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  The coffee was a bit stronger than he was used to, but it was bracing on a chilly day and he thanked her.

  “You don’t have to be real good at cooking,” he said. “Just good enough.”

  “I can’t compete with an eight-year-old who cooks exactly the way her mother taught her,” Sarah replied, her lips turning down in a rueful smile. “The things that I’m familiar with from home . . . I can’t make them here. Buttermilk biscuits, chicken and dumplings, pecan pie . . . our table at home had such variety. Herr Wiessen is a true gentleman, but the store doesn’t have the variety that I am accustomed to.” Her nose crinkled in an expression that he found endearing. “There is only so much that can be done with salted meat.”

  “It’s not Charleston,” he acknowledged.

  “I didn’t give a thought to what I would do when I got here and meals would need to be prepared,” she admitted. “I simply thought that I would cook what I knew how to cook. But I can’t make a chicken; we need the hen for the eggs she lays.”

  “You could likely buy a chicken off someone,” he said. “Mrs. Calhoun keeps chickens and pigs and cows and a vegetable garden that has just about anything you’d want. Mrs. Boone used to have a garden, but I guess her husband didn’t tend it after she died.”

  “It looks fairly overgrown. Of course, it’s November, but I can see traces of what it was.”

  “After Mrs. Boone died, there wasn’t anyone to tend to things. The kids did the best they could. Did they get off to school today?”

  “You must have given them quite a scolding last night. They were very quiet this morning and went off to school without any truculence at all.”

  “They’re good kids,” he said.

  Mrs. Baker signed. “I suppose they are. But I am not their mother and they resent me being here. I don’t even know if it would be any different if I were a better cook, or if I were more adept at managing a household.”

  “Maybe not, but at least you’re here.”

  Her full lips curves in a smile. “Do I have a choice?”

  “No one put shackles on you.”

  “I have nowhere to go. I could take a room somewhere, I’m sure someone in town would let me board. But then what? Wait until some lonely cowboy decides that I’ll do for a wife? That’s not why I came here.”

  “You can’t blame a man if he notices a pretty woman and thinks he’d like to marry her.”

  “I would only disappoint him,” she said. “I am afraid that I am destined to be a disappointment. My first husband left me. We were married three weeks and suddenly, one night, he didn’t come home. He was a gambler and the word was that because he could not pay his debts, he was dispensed with.”

  She looked so refined; how could such a well-bred woman have been married to a man like that? And then to come across the country, thinking herself the intended bride for a professional man, only to find out the truth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing that the words sounded lame.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I am simply very inadequate at judging a man’s character. I cannot go back to Charleston; my family expects me to fail here and if I return home, I will remain, in their minds, the youngest child who is prone to error. I cannot endure that. So I will stay here, and I suppose I will find a boarding house and I will wait for a gentleman to notice me, and I will marry because there is nothing else for me to do.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to settle for less than what you want,” he said, feeling emboldened by his words, as if they were too honest for a conversation with a woman he barely knew.

  “I want what any woman wants,” she said. “I want to love my husband. But as you can see, I have not encountered that emotion in my attachments.”

  “Does anyone?” he asked and his voice sounded harsh to his own ears.

  “I believe so,” Sarah Baker answer. “I believe it is possible.”

  “In poems, maybe, and songs. And maybe for the first year or so, when everything is new. But after that?” Carson shook his head.

  “Do you think me foolish for wanting something that you believe does not exist?”

  “No . . . I just . . . I don’t know much about love, I reckon.”

  “Plainly, neither do I. Except that I believe it exists, if only out of my reach, and you do not believe in it at all,” she said with a sad smile. “You will be the happier man for not seeking what may never be found.”

  Chapter 10

  When the children returned from school, they changed out of the new clothes that she had bought them into their everyday garb and went to do their chores, avoiding Sarah’s gaze. She wasn’t sure that she liked them this way, so subdued and downcast, even if they were more manageable.

  “Lucy,” she said when they came back inside. “After you’ve finished your homework, do you think you could help me with supper?”

  A light came into Lucy’s blue eyes. “You mean, help you cook?”

  “Yes. I wonder if we could prepare one of your mother’s recipes? I would appreciate your help; I regret that my cooking skills seem more suited to South Carolina than to Texas, but I am willing to learn if you are willing to teach me.”

  “Sure! I’ll be glad to teach you,” Lucy said eagerly. “Ma could cook like no one else.”

  “Excellent! Ruby, would you like to learn, too? The three of us will prepare supper.”

  “What are we going to do?” Isaiah demanded.

  “It would be most helpful if the two of you would go outside and clear the weeds and overgrowth from your mother’s garden. Next spring, I am sure you will want to plant again.”

  When the boys came in, dirty and sweaty from their work, Sarah said that even though it wasn’t Saturday night, they would need a bath that night. They protested, but Lucy joined in. “Ma would have said the same,” she told them.

  “Let’s go out and see how they did,” Sarah suggested.

  So the children followed Sarah outside behind the cabin where the garden, now shorn of some of its excess overgrowth, occupied a generous section of land. Eagerly the children told her where everything had been planted; where the green beans would go, and the tomatoes and potatoes, and the onions and carrots. They were so vivid in their recollections that Sarah realized their mother had been diligent in providing food for her family. She may not have had much money, but she did not shirk labor when the ground could surrender its bounty.

  “Next spring,” Lucy said happily, “we’ll have a garden again.”

  “Yes,” Erich agreed, his eyes sparkling with eagerness. “We used to go out all summer and pick ourselves whatever we was hungry for.”
/>   “’We’re hungry for, Erich,” Lucy corrected him. “That’s what’s proper, isn’t it, ma’am?”

  “Very good, Lucy,” Sarah said, her heart swelling with a strange sense of pleasure that was unfamiliar to her. This wasn’t a well-bandaged wound or a prayer shared with a grieving soldier; it was a child offering something precious and fragile, something that couldn’t even be named. But it was, Sarah realized, more genuine than any nugget of gold that a California miner might dig from the ground.

  Supper was fried potatoes and onions, salted beef, and canned peaches from the general store. Sarah praised Lucy and Ruby for their work and in return Lucy, her freckles showing up golden upon her blush, said, “Ma’am, you were a fine helper. I reckon you cooked just fine back in Charleston.”

  “Thank you, Lucy. Deputy Harlow tells me that there’s someone named Mrs. Calhoun who raises chickens and pigs. What do you think about us going there for meat?”

  “Meat is very dear, ma’am,” Lucy said, sounding very much like a matron. “I don’t think we can do that.”

  “I think I might be able to buy a chicken, perhaps, and some ham. We can do a lot with a ham.”

  “I mind that Ma used to make soup with a hambone,” Erich recalled. “That was fine soup.”

  “Soup is perfect for cold days,” Sarah agreed. “We’ll see if Deputy Harlow will let us borrow his wagon and we’ll go shopping on Saturday. What do you think?”

  There was silence. “I don’t think we’d better do that, ma’am,” Lucy said.

  “Why not?”

  Erich and Lucy exchanged glances. “Because . . . we owe Mr. Wiessen money, and Ma said that if we couldn’t pay him, we couldn’t buy.”

  “I see. Perhaps I shall pay what we owe, and then we shall shop. Would that be acceptable?”

  The children looked to Lucy, who was struggling to come up with a response that would satisfy her understanding of what was right according to her mother’s code. But at the same time allow her, and the children, to go into the store where there was candy in jars and toys on shelves, none of it within their means, but still a wonderland to behold.