Surprised, she searched her memory. “He was god of the North Wind, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, and long and long he loved a princess of Athens and wooed her with soft words and singing, trying his best to be gentle, though it wasn’t his nature. After some seasons, he despaired of winning her and swept her up, carried her to a rocky shore surrounded by dark clouds, and ravished her. Once it was done, once he behaved according to his true self, she became his wife and bore him twin sons who became Argonauts.”
“An interesting myth.”
“And lesson.”
“It wouldn’t have worked if the woman had loved someone else.”
“Who knows? The sure thing is he had her.”
“I’d hate a man who used me that way!”
“Hate’s very close to love.” Rolf’s breath came faster. “In an embrace, Deborah, a struggle can be as rapture-making as returned desire.”
Thwarted need twisted through her. “Don’t talk to me like this!”
Rolf chuckled. “Will you tell your brother? A shame if I had to hurt him! I don’t think your father’s ever shot a gun in his life! Now don’t berate me, darling! I won’t do anything—yet—to imperil my honored guest status in your home!”
Thos and Sara had waited for them, and all together, they flowed with the crowd back across on the ferry and to the hotel.
The considerable portion of celebrants who preferred to wash down their meat with whisky were feasting in the grove, punctuating their meal with whoops, song, and occasional shots, but the women and more settled and substantial citizens flocked into the hotel to partake of venison, buffalo, roast pork, and turkey less fortunate than the one Deborah had loosed.
The women of Lawrence had added their dishes and silverware to the hotel’s supply, and they joined with the staff to prepare and set out food that loaded the tables. There were tubs of roasting ears of corn, crocks of butter, willow wash baskets heaped with cornbread, great kettles of boiled potatoes and wild greens, hominy, green beans flavored with side meat, constantly renewed skillets of gravy, and innumerable pies—molasses-sweetened sorrel, blackberry, rhubarb, dried apple, and peach. There were even a few cakes, breathtaking extravagance, and big bowls of custard and pudding. A basket of green apples was kept replenished for the children, and most people left the cake and fresh strawberries for the elderly, but there was no lack of succulent red slices of watermelon. There were pitchers of buttermilk and sweet milk, steaming pots of “coffee,” a little of it real, and an assortment of pickles and relishes that would have been prize-winners at a county fair.
When table seating ran out, the remaining throng filled plates, platters, or pie pans and sat on the stairs, the porch, and any available perch, or stood while plying forks, or, in some cases, Bowies.
Off and on during the day, Deborah had glimpsed her parents, and now she was glad to see them settled on a couch with the Cordleys. After Sara and Deborah preceded their escorts through the line, Rolf suggested they all go sit on Melissa Eden’s porch, just off Massachusetts Street, where they’d be less crowded.
The prospect of comparative peace was inviting. Carefully balancing filled plates and cups, the four maneuvered out of the hotel and down the street, then got to one side as a wagon creaked past.
“Miss Lander!” Sara cried. “Mr. Lander!” And then, as the wagon stopped and she recognized the shaggy-haired, broad-torsoed man supported in Conrad Lander’s arms, she ran to the wagon. “Johnny! Johnny, what’s wrong with you?”
“Mmm,” grunted Johnny, trying to sit up. He failed and slid back.
“Is he hurt?” pleaded Sara. “Oh, what—”
Ansjie Lander flushed painfully. Her brother said, “Mr. Chaudoin’s not … well.”
“He’s, drunk,” Rolf cut in brutally. “Stupid drunk. But what’s that blood on his face?”
“Blood?” Sara tried to clamber up, but Thos put her back and climbed up himself.
Ansjie Lander said carefully, “Only a scratch. Mr. Chaudoin had out his knife, but Conrad persuaded him to come with us.”
A few more questions forced the main facts from the reluctant young Prussians. Unaware of the holiday, they’d stopped that morning at the smithy to find Johnny in a belligerent mood, though they hadn’t realized that he’d been drinking. He had insisted that they all go to Lawrence to celebrate, scolding the Landers for not trying to honor their adopted country. Between bullying and coaxing, he’d gotten them to come while he rode horseback beside them.
Arriving in the middle of the speeches, the Landers had lost track of Johnny till the barbecue was under way. He had jumped up by the flagpole and challenged any and all to a fight. Another equally drunk riverman had accepted. Johnny had wrestled him down and was pounding his head on the ground when Conrad intervened. Only his sister’s presence had kept him from being mobbed for halting the sport. The scar stood out whitely on his tanned cheek. From the erect way he carried himself, Deborah was sure that he, like Dane, had been an officer. His blue eyes rested on her in a way that made her feel terribly young and yet very much a woman.
Sara’s eyes were full of unshed tears and her mouth quivered. “He never gets drunk,” she muttered. “He told me he had lots of work today, that he couldn’t come—” Shaking her head, as if to clear it, she turned to Thos. “I must go home, take care of him.”
“Maccabee’s there,” Thos protested. “Good Lord, Sara, men get drunk every day, and if I know Johnny, he wouldn’t want you around watching him!”
“I know him better than you do,” she said coldly, then handed him her plate and kilted up her skirt to climb into the wagon.
“Oh, damnation!” Thos cast a hunted look about. “Sara, I’ll go with you!” He tried to foist the cups and plates on Deborah, but she retreated.
“Sara, you both need to eat,” she reasoned. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“I’m not hungry!” Sara half-wept.
“Yes, you are,” chided Thos. He handed her one plate and a cup of buttermilk, took a hasty bite of venison, and admonished her rather thickly to eat up and not delay the Landers.
In less than ten minutes the wagon creaked on its way, Thos beside it on Johnny’s paint horse, which had been hitched to the tailgate. Deborah, who’d been battling flies away from her now thoroughly cooled plate, looked at it and said, “I’m not hungry.”
Rolf somehow lodged his cup on his plate and took her arm. “As Thos told Sara, ‘Yes, you are,’” he said. “Don’t let that old savage’s going on a toot ruin your day. It’s just his way of celebrating.”
“No. Johnny likes his whisky, but I’ve never heard of him having too much before.”
Rolf shrugged. “Well, it’s scarcely a tragedy. There’ll be hundreds of people in his condition tonight and who will share his headache tomorrow.”
Melissa Eden’s white frame house had hollyhocks around it and was shaded by a big black walnut tree. Mechanically taking the wicker chair Rolf placed for her on the vineshaded porch, Deborah gazed unseeingly down the tree-shaded streets with their well-built houses. Lawrence, because of its comparatively well-educated and better-equipped founders, was a much more prosperous and attractive town than most thrown-together, happenstance frontier settlements, whose main attraction was generally liquor. Lawrence had had schools and churches from the start, plus enough professional men to give it advantages seldom found on the prairie.
“It’s not like Johnny. He—he despises men who get drunk and start bragging and brawling. It must be that even though he wants Thos and Sara to be happy, he can’t stand the way they’re getting closer.”
Rolf’s tawny eyebrows climbed. “That old rip loves the Indian wench? Then surely he’s had her!”
“He has not!” Deborah stared in outrage. “Johnny was friends with her family. When her parents died six years ago, he brought her and Laddie to live with him. She’s been like a daughter.”
“Bit old and pretty for that now,” said Rolf clearly skeptical.
/> “You don’t believe a man can want a woman who’s in his power, yet deny himself because he thinks he’s not right for her?”
Rolf lifted one shoulder, then let it fall unargumentatively. “A man might try. But sooner or later, Deborah, restraints snap.” In a more sympathetic voice, he added, “Maybe Chaudoin had to get drunk or take the girl next chance he had. Do Thos and Sara know how he feels?”
Deborah shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it myself when it first struck me this spring, but today makes me sure it’s true.”
“It may work out,” Rolf suggested. “Chaudoin married one Indian. He could marry this one, too, after Thos has his fun.”
“Fun!” Deborah choked at the crudity. “Fun’s not what Sara and my brother want! He wants to marry her, when they’re older, when the country settles down.”
“What will your parents think?”
“They love Sara!” Detesting the cool cynicism of Rolf’s bland expression, Deborah felt driven to explain further. “Sara’s proud of her people and sees marrying white as a sort of rejection of her blood, I think. She’ll get over that. I’ll be glad to have her for a sister-in-law.”
Studying her for a moment, Rolf’s full mouth curved down. “Strange if I get a red Indian for a sister-in-law by marriage,” he pondered. “But since Sir Harry’s got to swallow a camel, a gnat won’t hurt him.”
“I’m not going to marry you, Rolf. And it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll marry Dane.”
“You won’t marry Dane,” Rolf said calmly. “I think you’ll want to marry me by the time we’re finished, but if you don’t, no matter. You’ll still be my woman.”
She spaced the words out evenly, though blood pounded in her ears and she didn’t know if she was more aroused than angry. “I will not.”
He only smiled, watching her in such a disconcerting way that Deborah gave him a final look of defiance and concentrated on her food. They ate in silence. Deborah brooded over Johnny, longed for Dane, and came near hating him for leaving her alone, exposed to his brother.
“I want to go home,” she said as they started toward the hotel. Fiddlers were tuning up amidst a hubbub of laughter and talk while more boisterous sounds of merrymaking floated from the grove.
“Why, the sun’s not down yet! The party’s just beginning!”
“I don’t feel like dancing or hearing music—or any of that!” Suddenly she thought of what should have occurred to her long ago. “I’ve got to find my parents and go home with them! I can’t drive with you now that Sara and Thos are gone.”
The look in Rolf’s eyes told her he hadn’t overlooked the situation. His square jaw hardened but he clamped his lips shut on whatever he’d started to say and moved her along the street, then up the steps of the hotel.
Taking their plates, he brushed aside Deborah’s insistence that she should help with the dishwashing. “I’ve paid the hotel to hire people, for that and the clean-up,” he said. “Dane left me enough to pay for everything. Said it was cheaper than my gambling. Wait here and then we’ll find your parents and decide how I can have that waltz you promised!”
While he was gone, Deborah vainly scanned the crowd for the elder Whitlaws and was thoroughly nervous by the time Rolf, besieged by handshakes, smiles, and congratulations, made his way back to her.
“I’m afraid they’re gone,” she said.
“So Reverend Cordley just told me,” Rolf agreed. “Your father said since Thos and you wouldn’t be home in time for chores, he’d have to see to the milking and such.”
“Then we’ll have to leave right now to get there before dark!”
“Deborah, Deborah! I’ve seen enough of Kansas customs to know it won’t hurt your reputation to drive home alone with me! Couples do it all the time!”
“But I don’t want to be alone with you!”
“Ah.” His eyes went obsidian-black, with only the faintest tinge of green. After a moment he smiled. “But I want to be alone with you, and though I was resigned to putting up with your brother and his Indian maiden, it seems the fates have rewarded my patience.” He smiled cajolingly. “If you’re destined to drive with me, what does it matter, daylight or dark?”
“It matters!”
“Are you afraid of the dark? Or of me?”
He mustn’t know that to her in some ways he was the dark, unknown, tempting, fearful, yet exciting. When she looked into his eyes, she was staring into midnight. And she caught there an image of herself that frightened and shamed her, recognition of restless, building need, the craving Dane had awakened but refused to satisfy.
She was afraid of the dark and Rolf, but more, she feared herself. As she tore her eyes from his triumphant ones, she swallowed and said harshly, “I want to go now, Rolf. If you won’t take me, I’ll start walking.”
“Little fool!”
She whirled away, moving blindly for the entrance. His fingers closed on her wrist, turning her around. “Deborah!” he scolded. “You’d try the patience of a saint!” They stood in silent conflict for a moment, but when Deborah tried to pull free, he sighed and covered her hand with both of his. “I can’t believe the things you make me do! If I find a chaperone for the drive home, won’t you keep your promise and give me the waltz?”
She had promised, and rushing home would in no way help Johnny or Thos or Sara. The way that Rolf subjugated his haughty will to her wishes made her feel under obligation to him, at least for this occasion.
“I don’t want to be silly,” she said in a halting voice. “If you find someone to go with us, I’ll stay for some of the dancing. But you have to understand that I’m worried about Johnny and the others and can’t feel particularly gay.”
“I understand that I picked the most difficult woman in creation to court,” he said feelingly. “But never mind. Come have some punch and I’ll find a chaperone—even if I have to appeal to Reverend Cordley!”
When he returned with the news that Melissa Eden would accompany them, Deborah groaned inwardly but felt she could scarcely protest when she was insisting on a third person. It did cross her mind that the lovely widow would probably save him from too frustrated an evening, but that was none of her business. She shouldn’t even think of it.
The big room had been cleared as much as possible. Older people and women sat on the chairs and benches pushed against the walls. Mothers were trying to get their babies to sleep in upstairs rooms loaned by the management, and though a few young children still sat in their parents’ laps or darted around squealing, most of them were napping on upstairs pallets, which mothers took turns at overseeing.
The three fiddlers on a small wood platform bowed into an uproarious version of “Golden Slippers,” had the crowd whistling and clapping, then saluted each other, and the flanking musicians stepped back to join in the dancing till the present player tired.
He was Tarry Wagoner, Deborah learned from comments around her, the Territory’s best fiddler and renowned for his calling.
He soon had the floor full of couples, four to a set, and chanted in time to the sawing of his bow and tapping foot.
“Salute your partners!” he called. “Join hands and circle left!”
He played and sang them through swinging and circlings and promenades, winding up with: “Grab your honeys, don’t let ’em fall! Shake your feet and balance all! Ring-tail coons in the trees at play, grab your partners and all run away!”
Loud applause greeted the end of the number and Tarry shouted that as many as could get on the floor would do “Jolly Is the Miller Boy.” This was more singing game than dance, and when Rolf took her hand, Deborah stepped into the circling wheel of partners. There were three men to each woman, so young girls and grandmothers skipped briskly along as the miller boy tried with each switching of partners to steal a girl and leave another man in the middle.
It was impossible to stay pensive in the midst of the scrambling and laughter, or to care that she didn’t know the steps. All she had to do was be there and
let the eager men whirl her around or sweep her forward.
During the “Virginia Reel,” Captain Harrington whispered in Deborah’s ear that she was charming, and one bewhiskered, rather ferocious-looking gentleman, during their first brief partnership, told her he was a widower, and on the second meeting he said that he had a mighty good claim, a yoke of oxen, ten cows—and would she marry him? A dashing young scout for the cavalry asked if he could come calling, and shyer men gazed in their admiration. It was heady and exhilarating, especially since it had never happened before.
“I’ve got the belle of the ball,” laughed Rolf as he claimed her for a cotillion. “Don’t say you’re not enjoying it! Your eyes are like amber stars!”
“I’ve been offered a yoke of oxen and ten cows,” she teased. “And that cavalry scout is handsome!”
“I’ll give you a field of oxen and cows, and I’m much better looking than that!”
A riverman swept her away. At the end of that dance, Tarry Wagoner rubbed off the sweat that was glistening on his red sideburns and went over to the punch bowl while a slight, black-moustached fiddler took the platform.
Just to let the assembly have no doubt he could bow country style with the best, he played “Possum Up a Stump” and then announced a waltz. A few ladies insisted on returning to their seats, but most were coaxed into more or less gingerly permitting their partners to clasp their waists and, as a bull-whacker within earshot of Deborah phrased it, “makin’ a lunge at that crazy kind of hugged-up tune!”
Rolf’s hand on her back and his pronounced, graceful lead soon dispelled her awkwardness. She loved the gliding dip, the way the dreamy music directed their motions. Perhaps it did place her body too close to Rolf, but she avoided his eyes by closing hers, and his arms became Dane’s, his touch was her lover’s, for this magic time she was with him again; she wished the dance could last forever.
But it ended. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. Rolf’s were blazing. He became very much himself. What a fool she was, going soft in his embrace like that, drunk on music and excitement! She put up warding hands and stepped away.
Daughter of the Sword Page 16