Seasons of Glory

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Seasons of Glory Page 22

by Cheryl Anne Porter


  Then he recognized the rig. And the driver. The Lawless buckboard and Biddy handling the team’s reins. His gut tightened. This could only be trouble. Apparently spying the assembled men in front of the chuckwagon, and the milling cattle arrayed off to a side, Biddy brought the team to a dust-stirring halt, still a good distance from the watching men. And sat there, obviously waiting. With the combined weight of his family’s stares burning in his back, Riley turned to his father. “I’ll go talk to her.”

  Ben wrinkled his nose in his grimace. “Maybe that’d be best.”

  Riley exchanged a charged look with his father and then broke away from the crowd of quiet men clustered around the chuckwagon. Breaking into a sprint, he caught up with Pride, unhobbled and mounted him … all under the watchful eyes of the Thorne men and their hired hands. With a muscle jumping in his cheek, Riley wheeled Pride and urged him into a loping gallop across the hard-packed, uneven ground. In only moments, he reined in beside the Lawless buckboard, saw the worry lines framing Biddy’s faded-blue eyes, further shadowed by her gingham sun bonnet.

  Controlling his restive mount with a firm tug on the reins, and ignoring the stark, blue cold of the day, Riley took the gloved hand Biddy offered him. “What brings you over this way, Biddy?”

  “Oh, Riley, yer a sight for sore eyes. I thought I saw yer horse over there.” Then she frowned, pulled her hand away, and pointed toward the milling cattle. “Is that the Lawless brand I see on some of them cattle?”

  Riley didn’t need to look where she pointed. “Yep. Someone’s trying to make the Thornes out to be cattle rustlers. We’re getting ready to drive them back to Lawless land.”

  Biddy swung her bonnet-covered head back to him, considered him a sober moment, and then nodded. “I’ll say a prayer yer done with it before Mr. Rankin comes huntin’ them cows.”

  Riley tipped his Stetson’s brim to her. “I would appreciate it. Now don’t tell me you came all this way as your foreman’s advance rider.”

  Biddy gave a vigorous shake of her head, which set her plump little chins into motion. “No, not at all.” Then she seemed to crumple into herself. “Oh, Riley, ’tis Glory. She’s in a bad way, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Riley exhaled, fearing he knew exactly what was wrong with Glory. He didn’t know which hurt the most right then—his empty stomach or his throbbing temples. He heaved out a sigh, shook his head, and then focused on Biddy. “Wait here. I’ll go tell my father I’m leaving. And then … I’ll go to her. Don’t try to keep up in your wagon, because I—”

  “Don’t worry about me. It’s to yer mother I’m going.” Biddy paused, gave Riley a considering look, as if she wrestled with some decision, and then blurted, “There’s more. I don’t quite know how to say it, but Glory’s not really a—”

  “A Lawless. I know about her real folks. Ma told me just the other day.”

  Biddy exhaled, slumped, put a hand to her cloak-covered chest. “Thank the Lord for that. Yer knowing makes everything easier. I was right to come seek ye out. Ye go, Riley. I’ll collect yer mother and we’ll follow directly.”

  “All right. But why do you need my mother? I can handle—”

  “Ye don’t understand. After ye left, Glory got a packet from Jacey. In it were Laura Parker’s letters and journals.”

  A spasm of surprise tightened Riley’s grip on his reins. “Laura Parker? Isn’t that—?”

  “Yes, ’tis. Glory’s real mother. Only Glory’s not knowing it yet. She doesn’t know any of this. At least, she hadn’t figured it out before I left this morning.” Biddy tsk-tsked and shook her bonneted head. “And what’s more, Jacey warned Glory—just as Hannah did in her letter—about men hired to track the girls, maybe to kill them. The very thought just stops me heart. I know I’m asking ye to ride into a hornet’s nest, but don’t let that girl out of yer sight.”

  Riley firmed his lips, looked out over the low, brown hills in the direction of the Lawless ranch yard, as if he could see it from where he sat atop Pride. “I won’t.” He then looked down at Biddy. “You go visit with Ma, but don’t hurry home. Give me some time with Glory. Alone.”

  Biddy raised her eyebrows and stared right into his soul. Riley’s heart thudded. His hands, encased in his riding gloves, sweat against the soft leather as he pressed his knees against his horse’s belly. Biddy’s expression changed. She looked up at him from under suspicion-lowered eyelids. “Time alone with her? Is that what’s wrong with her?”

  Riley found reason to study his pommel, to stretch in his saddle, to look everywhere but at the Lawless nanny. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Riley Thorne. Shame on ye.”

  Feeling his cheeks heat up, but refusing to admit he was actually blushing, Riley shot her a look. “You all that surprised, Biddy?”

  She shook her head, pursed her lips. “I should be. But I’m not. Well then, be off with ye. Go. ’Tis ye she’s needin’ to see, after all. And not the rest of us.” She gave a heavy, dramatic sigh. “Not for a while, at least.”

  Riley understood. He grinned at the fearless, wonderful Lawless nanny. “I think I love you, Biddy Jensen. But don’t tell Mr. Rankin I said that. I don’t want him calling me out.”

  Wide-eyed and brushing him off with a wave of her hand, she whooped out her girlish enjoyment. “Go on with ye, lad. Mr. Rankin, indeed. Ye’ve all ye can do to worry about one Glory Bea Lawless.”

  * * *

  The long shadows of the quiet afternoon—quiet because Biddy was gone to visit Louise Thorne—cast themselves over Glory’s bedroom. Seeping in through the window, the graying beams crept across the floor, creating ripples of dark which tiptoed on cat’s paws for the security of the corners.

  Noticing one such dust-mote-laden beam, and watching its progress for long moments, Glory sighed and stretched her aching back. Sitting ensconced on her bed, her legs folded Indian-style, she eyed the scattering of letters and the old journal spread about her. Another day all but gone by as she pored through them, rereading them. And still, she could make no sense out of it all.

  Oh, she had inklings of ideas, and various notes she’d made in an effort to correlate people and events, but still … what was Jacey thinking with her little mystery? It wasn’t in her sister’s straightforward nature to play such games. Which only frustrated Glory more, and suddenly told her this was no game. Maybe she was trying too hard, looking too deeply. Maybe the answers were obvious.

  Glory gritted her teeth, shook her head. She wiped her dry, scratchy eyes and then blinked until she could focus again on Laura Parker’s life. Why would Jacey send the woman’s letters to her? If these brittle and yellowed pages were related in any way to the murders and the present danger, Jacey wouldn’t have been this coy with them. She would’ve sent James McGinty at a tearing pace with an out-and-out warning. But she hadn’t.

  Why? In a tired, bored snit, Glory told herself she couldn’t care less why at the moment. She folded her arms under her blouse-covered bosom and stared at her bedroom’s open door. And frowned. Shouldn’t Biddy be home by now? Glory shook her head, wondering at her nanny’s determined haste to be gone this morning. And at her admonition to “Stay at them letters until they make sense to ye.”

  Glory’s frown suddenly deepened. She sat up straight. Her heartbeat picked up speed. She heard again Biddy’s words that she’d just repeated for herself. Ye stay at them letters until they make sense to ye, Glory Bea. To me? Did that mean they made sense to Biddy? Glory cast her gaze down to her lap, fingered the worn cover on Laura Parker’s journal. And had the sudden urge to fling it across the room. But she didn’t. Because she didn’t want to pick it up, like she wouldn’t want to touch a coiled snake.

  Instead, she picked up her own notes she’d made of dates and names and places mentioned by the young woman almost twenty years ago. Almost twenty years ago? Glory’s head popped up. She stared vacantly at her reflection in her vanity’s mirror across the room. Almost twenty years ago would be 1854. The year I was b
orn.

  With suddenly shaking fingers, she gingerly picked up the journal. Turning the brittle pages one after the other, she found the one on which Seth Parker had recorded the date of his … Glory swallowed the lump in her throat … daughter’s birth. And forced herself to read it again, even knowing what she’d see. There it is. May 9, 1854.

  Instantly denying what she now realized she’d suspected all along, ever since her first reading of the journal, she closed it with an angry flip of her hand. The Parkers had a baby girl born on May 9. That was her birthday, too. So the Parkers’ daughter was the same age as her. So? Almost defiantly, Glory awaited an answer, a conclusion, from her otherwise empty room. And got one. As if her conscience were another physical presence in the room, it leaned over and whispered, So they named her Beatrice, Glory.

  Glory’s lips quivered. She closed her eyes against the fat, hot tears threatening to flow. Almost of its own will, her hand sought her mouth, covering her lips to keep back the scream that billowed like a storm cloud over her heart. And still, she sat there. It was all very simple, wasn’t it? In fact, obvious. This was why Jacey’d sent Laura Parker’s letters to her without any explanation. This was why Biddy’d fainted when she saw the woman’s signature. Jacey knew who Laura Parker was. So did Biddy. And now, Glory suspected, so did she.

  Downstairs, a door opened and then slammed. It sounded like the back door. The one into the kitchen. Biddy’s home. Glory absorbed the sound, listening as it faded into a memory, only to be replaced bare moments later by the scuffing sounds of someone slowly climbing the stairs. With a growing sense of bleak destiny, of bleached-bone finality, Glory riveted her gaze on the empty, open doorway to her room and waited for Biddy to be framed there.

  She knew already what she wanted to ask her nanny. Who did Beatrice Parker grow up to be?

  Chapter 15

  But it was Riley Thorne who turned into her room. Glory lifted her chin and stared at the silent man. Even from across the room she could smell the life he brought with him, the benediction of his presence: horses, leather, the open plains, and the cleansing wind. Looking tall and serious in his long saddle coat, he looked into her eyes and then down at the papers spread all around her. A muscle in his jaw jumped. From under the low brim of his Stetson, he narrowed his eyes at her. And didn’t say a word.

  Glory hauled in a breath deep enough to raise her bosom. Holding it a moment, she then exhaled the spent air slowly and said, “You know, don’t you? You know I’m”—she held up the ragged-edged journal for him to see—“this baby in here, don’t you? Say it. Tell me I’m Beatrice Parker. Not Glory Lawless. I want to hear you say it.”

  Framed by the doorway, looking as serious as a gunfighter, he intoned, “You’re Beatrice Parker.”

  Glory’s heart plummeted, her blood ceased to flow, seemed to pool in her legs. She closed her eyes against the truth and concentrated on taking stunted breath after stunted breath. It seemed the world faded, taking her with it as she shrank into her bed’s depth like she would a churning sea.

  “But you’re also Glory Lawless.”

  Glory opened her eyes, stared at Riley. “There is no Glory Lawless. There never was. She was a prideful girl, a made-up person. Someone who stuck her nose in the air and thought she was better than everyone else for being a Lawless.”

  Riley quirked his mouth, shook his head. “Just because Lawless blood doesn’t flow in your veins, Glory, that doesn’t make you less of a person. The Lawlesses aren’t royalty. Or even something more than the everyday person—for all their thinking otherwise.”

  Glory cocked her head as she considered his words. And what lay underneath them. “You don’t like the Lawlesses one little bit, do you?”

  Riley shrugged, looked right into her eyes. “Some more than others.”

  Harboring a growing sense of betrayal of all that she knew, of all that she believed—about herself, her family, and her entire world—Glory kept on, wanting to hurt, wanting to make him hurt her. “But I’m not a … a Lawless. So I guess you can like me even more.”

  Riley moved, as if he meant to turn away, to step out of her view. “I’m not going to do this, Glory. And I’m not going to let you do it, either.”

  “Wait. Please.” Glory held a hand out as if to hold him in place. The air around her seemed so paper-thin, so spider’s-web fragile. If he took something as solid as a booted step away from her, she and her surroundings would shatter like dropped china, she just knew it. Already, porcelain shards of who she’d thought she was all her life cut into her belly, making her ill.

  She then clamped that hand over her mouth and again closed her eyes. Swallowing the bitter bile of truth—a horrible, sour lump in her throat—Glory’s first shudders of reaction stuttered inside her chest, wrenched her shoulders spasmodically. But before the first wail tore from her, Riley’s footsteps sounded on the wooden floor, his weight sank next to her on her feather-stuffed mattress, and his arms went around her. Glory clutched at him, turned her face against his shirt, against his thudding heart. And knew if he turned her loose, she’d die.

  But then, just as suddenly, she couldn’t stand the closeness, the warmth and vitality of Riley’s body against hers. With a violent wrench, Glory freed herself from his embrace and all but flung herself off her bed. She stood facing him, but backing away, pointing an accusing finger. Her long, dark hair, wild and curling around her face, blocking her vision, forced her to see him as if through a dark veil. “No,” she warned. “No. Don’t touch me.”

  Riley stayed where he was, stared at her, stark concern mirrored in his features. Then slowly he raised a hand and removed his Stetson, tossed it aside. Standing, but never looking away from Glory’s eyes, he peeled off his saddle coat, sending it the way of his hat. And followed it with his gunbelt.

  Glory narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting ready for the fight.”

  “What fight?”

  “The one you’re starting. Glory, I didn’t have anything to do with the lies told to you about who you are. I was only six years old at the time.”

  “But you knew.”

  He shook his head. “Not until a few days ago. I didn’t know. I swear it.”

  “Who told you?”

  “My mother. She was here that day your father rode in with you.”

  “My fath—He rode in with me?”

  Riley nodded. “Yeah. He brought you with him all the way from Arizona.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Except maybe you were a helpless baby and he felt sorry for you.”

  Glory absorbed that for a moment, tried to feel something for the man she’d always thought of as her father. But found she couldn’t, not right then. She cocked her head with her next question. “What happened to those … people?” She looked past him to the journal on her bed, eyeing it as if it were a writhing snake. “The Parkers. My … parents. What happened to them?”

  Riley made a helpless gesture, then ran a hand through his hair. “Glory, I’m not the one you should be having this talk with. I don’t know all the answers. Biddy does.”

  “You tell me what you do know.”

  Huffing out a breath, he put his hands to his waist, met her gaze. “Kid Chapelo killed them at Apache Pass. And left you to die.”

  Glory grimaced at the sudden stab of pain in her chest. “Kid Chapelo? Jacey’s with his son right now. And that man’s father … left me to die? But Papa—no, he’s not my papa at all—but he … saved me? And brought me here?”

  Riley nodded. “That’s all I know. You were raised as one of the Lawless girls from that day forward.”

  Glory’s arms dropped to her sides. “Do Hannah and Jacey know this?”

  Riley made a gesture of uncertainty, spreading his hands wide. “I couldn’t say. I don’t know what they were told, if anything. They were so young. But looking back over the years, I figure they didn’t know, or didn’t remember. Because kids being like they a
re, they’d have talked. I can’t speak for Hannah, but since Jacey sent you these things, she must know now.”

  Glory nodded at the reasonableness of Riley’s words, at his calm voice. He spoke as if the unraveling of her life, of her identity, were of no more consequence in this world than ordering oats for the horses. It was almost funny. Then suddenly her mind shied away from the precipice that was this news and took another path, one which led away from the sheer drop into insanity. “Where’s Biddy? I want to talk to her.” Glory turned away from Riley with her question, thinking to go find her nanny.

  “She’s not here.”

  Glory stopped, turned to him, and stared, waiting.

  “She’s at my place. With my mother.”

  “Why?”

  Again Riley shrugged. “I don’t know. All I do know is she came and found me, all upset about Jacey sending you these papers. Maybe she wanted my mother here when you figured it out.”

  “Why?”

  Riley’s mouth quirked with evident impatience. “How the hell should I know? Maybe she expected you to fall apart.” A punctuated silence followed his words. Then, “Are you going to? Fall apart, that is?”

  Glory considered that. Was she? She focused on her body, felt suddenly alien in it, as if she didn’t fit this skin. Then she shook her head. “No. I thought I was going to”—she pointed at the bed—“back there a minute ago … when you held me. But not now. What good would that do?”

  Riley frowned, held out a hand to her, but withdrew it. “I don’t like the sound of your voice, Glory. You sound like … well, like you’re not in there somehow.”

  Feeling cold and dead inside as she did, Glory knew just what he meant. But swiping a hand over her face, clearing her vision of straggling curls, she shrugged her shoulders and denied it. “That’s silly. I can’t be anywhere but here, Riley.” She looked down at herself, spread her hands wide to indicate her body. “It’s me. Who else would it be?”

  Then she heard her own words. Who else, indeed. What a question. One which made her chin quiver, one which forced her chin up a notch. “It’s all been a lie, hasn’t it? My whole life. Here I was, so proud of who I was, so proud to be the daughter of J. C. Lawless, famous outlaw, and Catherine Wilton-Humes, Boston socialite. When in reality, I’m nothing more than the orphaned offspring of two people I’d never even heard of before today. Seth and Laura Parker. Stupid enough to get themselves killed in some godforsaken place called Apache Pass, the last place Laura—my mother—writes about.”

 

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