by Jane Steen
“Now write ‘horse.’”
Well, at least I now knew what the picture was supposed to represent. I complied and handed the slate back to her.
“Try to copy the letters,” I suggested. I looked at Tess, who had taken her cue from my own interruption of my work to head for the most comfortable chair in the room. Her expression clearly stated she was going nowhere for the next few minutes. “Show Tess when you’ve finished. I need to talk with Mrs. Drummond.”
It was late September but still warm enough that my clothes felt heavy on me as I walked. At this time of day, the seminary building was almost silent. I could hear a far-off clatter of pans from the distant kitchens, but nothing else. The great staircase with its row of stained-glass windows brooded solemnly in the peace, the pools of colored light flickering as clouds passed before the sun.
I walked through the door to the left of the cloakroom, into the warren of rooms that surrounded the housekeeper’s office. Dorcas was in the room that held the ledgers, complaining under her breath as she meticulously dusted each book and replaced it on the shelf.
“She bin makin’ trouble,” she whispered to me as I passed.
I stopped, feeling uncertain. “Trouble?”
“For you.” Dorcas groaned and massaged her lower back. “Wit’ Mist’ Lehmann an’ Mist’ Poulton. It eat her up till she cain’ help but talk, iffen you aks me. She had them gentlemans in here, one by one, this very morning.”
“Dorcas?” Mrs. Drummond’s voice, sharp and accusing, sounded from nearby. “What are you saying?”
Dorcas rolled her eyes at me. “Jus’ them ledgers is heavy, Miz Drummond. I tell Miz Nell they makin’ the misery in my back worse.”
“Is Mrs. Lillington there? If she has something to say to me, she should come in, not stand gossiping with the servants.”
“Yes’m.” Dorcas made a meaningful face at me, and as I passed into the next room, I heard her say, “Lordy, Lordy,” as quietly as she could manage.
I stiffened my spine. I had expected trouble to come from Professor Wale, and it hadn’t. But trouble had come indeed, so it would seem.
“Have you come about the sheets?” Mrs. Drummond did not bother to wish me a good morning.
“No, but since you ask, I’d like to order another bolt of cotton,” I said. “I think we should pay the extra couple cents a yard for the long staple cotton—the cheaper stuff isn’t nearly hardwearing enough.”
Mrs. Drummond pulled one of her smaller ledgers from the pile on her table and flipped it open to the most recent page, running a long, strong finger down the column of figures. “Very well, we can manage that. Only Fruit of the Loom or Gem of the Spindle, mind you, none of those fancy New York cottons at seventeen cents a yard. I leave it to you to write the supplier.”
I gazed at her glossy topknot of hair as she opened her small notebook and made a meticulous note of our agreement, her pen dipping, writing, and dipping again. Of course, all I had were my suspicions, but—what, exactly, had she said?
Mrs. Drummond closed her ledger and looked up at me. “And how is your study of Scripture proceeding, Mrs. Lillington?” she asked, a half smile on her face.
I seized the opportunity to pull out a chair and sit down. I was not going to suffer her to make me stay on my feet like a housemaid. I had struck a nerve—her lips tightened, but she said nothing.
“Tess and I study a passage every morning,” I replied politely.
“And do you feel that your grasp of moral precepts is improving?” So might a cat smile, I thought, if it came across a mouse with its back turned.
Inspiration struck, and I looked Mrs. Drummond straight in the eye. “Tess taught me a valuable verse today,” I said, making my eyes wide and innocent. “‘Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people.’ That means not to gossip, of course. You haven’t been gossiping, have you, Mrs. Drummond?”
It gratified me to see a deep, dull red stain the housekeeper’s cheeks. But the look in her eyes grew harder, her green-gray irises round balls of flint.
“Not all conversations where you impart something about someone are gossip. Sometimes, it may be necessary to warn another person of facts they do not know.”
Well, that confirmed what I suspected. “I find it hard to distinguish the difference,” I said as pleasantly as I could.
And there it was, that glimpse of triumph. “That is because you are deficient in moral sensibility,” Mrs. Drummond said. “Read the Apostle, Mrs. Lillington, and strive to emulate his ceaseless efforts to better himself and everyone around him.”
I ransacked my brain for an answer and found—nothing. Not all my wealth—of which, of course, Mrs. Drummond had no inkling—nor all my quickness of mind and boldness of spirit could answer the certainty in Mrs. Drummond’s heart. I was the sinner, she was not. She had imparted my secret to both Reiner and Judah out of what she saw as the purest necessity, and nothing I could say or do would shake her conviction that she was right.
I walked back to my workroom through the smells of frying chicken and fresh cornbread, but it wasn’t the scent of food that made my stomach roil. It was the horrible conviction that, somehow, Mrs. Drummond was in the right. If I was even contemplating, somewhere deep down inside, marrying Judah or Reiner, they had the right to know about my past. It was only fair.
I’d been so careless of the future in that May sunlight when I’d let Jack Venton have his way, as the saying goes, with me. The spoiled, bold girl I had been then thought only of her own pleasure and her desire to take the privileges owing to an adult without any of the consequences. And here were the consequences, unwanted and unsought, following me down the years—and, worse, they were also following Sarah and anyone else whose fate was, or might be, tied up with mine.
21
Bargain
The feelings I experienced over the next few days were odd. If anyone had asked me before that interview, I would have told them I entertained no specific hopes or anticipations as far as Reiner or Judah were concerned—and that had not changed.
Yet the knowledge that Mrs. Drummond had revealed my secret to them, stripped my pretense of respectability away, gave me the odd sensation that I’d lost a foot or a hand but couldn’t quite work out which one. I felt raw, exposed—if I happened to be in the same room as either man, the back of my neck crawled as if covered with ants.
And yet the waiting stretched over ten agonizing days. If Mrs. Drummond had invented that particular torture expressly for me, I would have considered her a genius of exquisite refinement. As it was, I had to lay my long period of suspense at the door of the gentlemen themselves. Should I speak up? Or give them time to consider what they had learned? It was a fortunate thing that I had so much work to distract me, else I thought I might have run mad on the prairie.
And then Reiner spoke up. I suppose he had been biding his time for a chance to see me alone, which, naturally, was not easy. But Tess had taken a sleepy Sarah up to bed. I had a dress to finish for a new customer, and Tess had offered to return and help me once Sarah was asleep, but I didn’t expect to see her. Tess tired far more easily than I did, and one of the reasons why she so frequently offered to take Sarah to bed was that she could lie on her own bed and half doze while Sarah fought sleep with chatter. This often led to Tess herself deciding she could not keep her eyes open, and that would be that.
I didn’t mind. The walking dress I was making posed some interesting challenges. It was almost entirely in a pink plaid with a large check that had to be carefully matched, and I was enjoying myself. I was thinking so hard about the exact placement of my pattern pieces that I didn’t even hear Reiner enter the room.
“Oh,” was all I said when I looked up from my work and saw him standing before me. He started to smile, but somehow his smile failed, and an awkward silence descended between us. Reiner broke it by gesturing at the cloth spread across my cutting table.
“That’s pretty. I like to see a woman in pink.
Is it for you?”
I laughed at that. “You definitely do not want to see me in pink, not with my hair.”
I was beginning to relax a little, but then I looked at Reiner’s face again. His blue eyes, once so frank and ready to engage mine, looked as hard as pebbles.
“All right,” I said, abandoning my work and leading the way to the pair of chairs that bracketed our empty fireplace. “I don’t think the next few minutes will be easy for either of us, but we may as well be comfortable. You want to talk to me about what Mrs. Drummond told you, I presume.”
Reiner politely handed me to a chair and seated himself, looking as if he were heading for the gallows. “So it’s true, is it?” was his opening salvo.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure what Mrs. Drummond has told you. If it’s that I’ve never been married, that’s true enough.”
I watched his face darken at my admission but plowed ahead as best I could. “If she’s been telling you that makes me some kind of scarlet woman, she’s wrong. I was—foolish. Once.” I felt my own cheeks redden. “I have not been similarly foolish since.”
Reiner picked at a patch of dry skin on his thumb, scowling at it as if it were flaking on purpose to annoy him.
“And would you have told me?” he asked.
“If I’d settled in my mind that I would marry you, yes, I would have. In such circumstances, you would have a right to know. I don’t see how you’d have such a right in any other situation.” I knew I sounded arrogant, but the alternative was humble penitence, and somehow, with Reiner, I couldn’t adopt that role.
Reiner’s mouth tightened in a way that was becoming all too familiar. No longer being the carefree student was changing him, I realized, as was his growing antagonism toward Professor Wale.
“You let me court you under false pretenses, Nell,” he said in the tone of a sulky boy who’d had his favorite toy taken away from him.
“I didn’t ask you to court me. Do you think I can push away every man who shows interest in me with a declaration that I bore my child out of wedlock? It might be the nobler thing to do, but in practical terms, it simply doesn’t work.”
“You came here knowing men would court you. As you well know, unmarried women are rare on the frontier.” Reiner had pulled so viciously at the tag of dry skin that he’d drawn blood, and he put his thumb to his lips with a muttered curse.
“I came here looking for a fresh beginning, where I could raise Sarah far from gossip. But the gossip followed me. Mrs. Drummond had no right to make trouble for me.”
“She has a right to see that the truth comes out.” Reiner rose to his feet, pushing back the chair. “Nell, I’d even written to Pop about you. He’ll never accept a—a—fallen woman as a daughter-in-law, don’t you see that? I couldn’t marry you now even if I wanted to.”
I tipped my head back to look at him, feeling my eyebrows practically meet my hairline. “Even if you wanted to?”
Reiner fished a somewhat grubby handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his thumb. I almost laughed at the sight he made, standing there red-faced and angry with a wounded digit—but, truly, this was no laughing matter. Laughter had been a point of connection between us, but that was gone now.
“You must release me from any promise I may have made to you,” Reiner said.
“I do.” I stood up and went to put a hand on his arm, but he took a step back, sending his chair crashing to the ground. “And I’m sorry, Reiner. Perhaps I should have told you earlier. I suppose I thought—well, that if you loved me, one mistake would not make so very much of a difference.”
“No difference?” Reiner’s eyes were slits of blue, and his voice issued in a hiss. “It makes all the difference in the world, Nell. It’s the difference between bringing a respectable bride home to my father and expecting him to sanction a marriage with—with a woman who won’t be able to hold up her head in Saint Louis society. To expect him to accept a grandchild who’s going to bear the taint of illegitimacy forever.”
He looked down at his boots. “That poor child. There might well be men who’ll accept what you have to offer, Nell, but it’s beyond me.”
And with that, he turned abruptly, picking his way over the fallen chair without bothering to set it upright. He slammed the door with such force that the pink taffeta on my table jumped in the breeze, and I darted over to prevent it from sliding sideways and undoing all my work.
“Drat it.” I smoothed my hand over the cloth, feeling the sting of tears in my eyes. They weren’t for the loss of Reiner—in many ways I thought I was better off sticking to my original plan to remain unwed, happy in my life with Tess and Sarah and free of a man who would wish to rule me and put his life before mine.
And yet it stung to think how right Reiner might be. If the knowledge of Sarah’s birth became widespread in Springwood, could I hold up my head even in the society of that small town? Would people treat Sarah differently? And, dear God, would Reiner spread Mrs. Drummond’s insidious gossip farther afield?
I didn’t get any more work done that night but sat brooding by the empty fireplace for a full hour. Perhaps it was time to leave the Eternal Life Seminary—but where would I go?
“Young Mr. Lehmann looks as if he’s been chewing a lemon.” Judah’s thoughts uncannily echoed my own. He had appeared as if by magic when I went for a short walk before dinner. “Is it his obsessive hatred of Professor Wale that’s the cause, I wonder, or dear Mrs. Drummond’s startling revelations about your recent past?”
I glanced behind me at Reiner’s retreating back. Judah’s description was accurate—the sour look on Reiner’s face had not softened as he’d given me a grudging nod of greeting.
“It could be either, I suppose.” I wrinkled my nose, feeling suddenly annoyed with both Reiner and Judah and not at all inclined to embark on the conversation Judah and I were about to have. Why was life so unfair to women?
“He was, I presume, entirely unaware of the nonexistence of the late Mr. Lillington?” Judah shot me a sideways look, challenging and perhaps even amused.
“Weren’t you? And Lillington is my maiden name, by the way. I used the name Govender—before I came here.”
Now Judah’s expression was definitely one of amusement. “Govender.” He rolled the name around his tongue, seeming to give it consideration.
“Did you know?” I asked again. “Or just suspect?” It was so hard to read Judah’s face and just as hard to read my own emotions. In Judah’s presence, I somehow always wanted to—how could I describe it? To impress, to look my best? There was something about Judah’s sheer physical beauty and authority that made me feel he was above me—a mere mortal—in every way.
“I suspected. A husband who has left behind no mementos, no portrait of any kind, and no Christian name that is ever mentioned seems a trifle insubstantial.”
“And do you mind?” Having begun, I was eager to get the business over with.
“Yes, of course I mind.” Judah’s face hardened. “A woman should be pure. Your sin will follow you all the days of your life and will follow your child too. Wherever you go, the truth will out, and respectable people will turn away from you and shun Sarah. They won’t let their little ones play with her. You won’t be received in society.”
I nodded dumbly, my heart sinking. He was right, and I’d been foolish to think otherwise. In Victory, the love people bore my mother had sheltered me from shame, but nowhere else would I find such protection.
Judah watched me intently. He was hatless, and the prairie wind played in his dark curls—shorter than they had been but still abundant—as if it, too, were enamored of his beauty.
“Except, of course, if you marry a man who would claim Sarah as his own. She is very young—she could soon learn to call a man Papa. If we were to become one, Nell, I would forgive you. I would shelter you from the consequences of your past transgressions.”
For a moment, relief and even gratitude washed over me. A solution—one that would g
ive Sarah a name and make her respectable in the eyes of the world. And then common sense reasserted itself.
“My money, of course, has a great deal to do with your willingness to marry me.”
Judah laughed, tossing back his head in apparent delight. “Thank heaven for a woman who knows a good bargain when she sees one. Yes, Nell, I’ve already told you I can’t afford to marry a poor woman.”
“So you don’t love me.” I said it with conviction.
Judah’s brows drew together. “I’m not sure if I have the capacity to love, if by that word you mean the kind of romantic nonsense in novels. The emotions seem to have escaped me somehow. I’m guided by logic and rationality. Of course, if you’d like me to woo you, I could do that—rather effectively.”
There was something in the way he looked at me that sent a shiver down my spine. “And I would never stray from the marriage bed, because other women would mean—do mean—nothing to me. A wife who was willing to put her future into my hands would be prized above rubies, Nell, especially a handsome and intelligent one. I admire you tremendously, you know.” And for a moment, I felt the touch of a finger on the soft inner skin of my wrist below my glove.
“A bargain.” I stared downward, watching my delicate boots—it was a dry day—appear and reappear from beneath my skirts.
“A marriage. One that would make us a force to be reckoned with. Cam Calderwood—“ He stopped, as if he were unsure whether to proceed.
“What about Dr. Calderwood?”
Judah smiled again. “Dr. Cameron Calderwood thinks highly of me. I’ve been a great help to him in making a success of this place—making it more than poor, misguided Dr. Adema ever dreamed. And one day, Nell, that may mean our partnership will not be entirely unequal. Cam Calderwood has no children, you may recall. Nor brothers, nor sisters, nor sisters- or brothers-in-law, nor cousins of any degree. He and Mrs. C. are quite without heirs.”
I frowned. “He’d give you—“