Daughter of the Sword

by Jeanne Williams

  “It—it’s late. I have to go home.”

  He turned her hand over and kissed her palm, lips searing the exposed flesh. His voice was a rustling sigh. “You danced with me.”

  She tried to laugh. “And with dozens of others.”

  “You didn’t give yourself to them.”

  She made an inarticulate sound of regret and dismay. He’d noticed then, sensed her yielding to the fantasy of Dane. Rolf couldn’t be allowed to think that softness had been for him.

  “Rolf, I’m sorry!” He stared at her and she said miserably, “The music—it was so lovely I got lost in it. I know it was wrong but I … made believe you were Dane.”

  She flinched at the shock that paled his face, then put out a hand he ignored as, recovering, he gave a hard laugh. “It might be interesting to see how long and under what circumstances you could maintain that illusion! But I’m warned now, and you had best be: from now on I’ll take care that you know whom you’re with!” Turning, he called over his shoulder that he’d be back shortly with the surrey.

  Refusing the men who eagerly begged her to dance, Deborah felt overheated and strangling for fresh air. Making her way to the door, she was joined by Melissa Eden, who was explaining to a disappoined Captain Harrington that she really must help these delightful young people be together in spite of Miss Whitlaw’s quaint prudery. And splendid as it would be to have the captain’s escort, he had duty next day and would never be in time for it if he spent the night jaunting about the prairies. She’d never forgive herself if he were court-martialed, but assuredly they’d have other times. Perhaps he could call next week?

  Deborah was sure Melissa meant to spend a good portion of what was left of the night in her young boarder’s arms. Fevered, yet shamed at the thought, Deborah wondered if the older woman pretended, too, and if she knew what Dane’s ardor was like, the better to reproduce it with his brother.

  Such imaginings were wicked, a dark quicksand that inexorably drew one into a lewd morass. Dane couldn’t love or respect her if he knew the wanton way she’d relaxed in Rolf’s embrace—unless, wretched notion, he was doing the same thing with other women!

  When the hurt of that subsided, she accepted that he probably was, and more, that he wouldn’t stop at dreaming. Men, she suspected, usually didn’t if they had a means of gratification. Nor did women like Melissa.

  So while Melissa and Rolf eased each other, while Dane might very possibly be spending himself with some distant woman, Deborah would sleep alone.

  This night had shown her the folly of dreaming. It was a long drive home.

  Rolf had taken himself in hand and he and Melissa bantered most of the way to the Whitlaws’, an undercurrent of male-female anticipation so strong between them that Deborah, contrarily enough, felt shoved aside, woefully young and inexperienced. When Rolf walked her to the door, he thanked her for dancing and said he’d visit soon, but he didn’t linger. And as he went back to the surrey, Melissa’s knowing, sensuous laughter welcomed him.

  Deborah stood in the dark cabin for a few minutes after the surrey wheeled off. Chica was near the, stable, so Thos was home. Deborah thought of waking him up to learn about Johnny, but she decided that could wait till morning. If anything had gone too wrong, Thos would’ve stayed at the smithy. Let him sleep.

  But Deborah, through a stifling, restless night, could not sleep at all. She was worried for Johnny, her brother, and Sara, confused and ashamed at her mixed reactions to Rolf, and achingly needful of Dane. It was so long till spring!

  And even if it came, and Dane with it, what chance would there be that his resolves or hers could be different? Turning repeatedly on the shuck mattress, she wept for her love.

  x

  Summer wore on. Johnny seemed none the worse for his spree, but Thos grew more and more fidgety. “Can’t go to the gold because all this slavery business is coming to a head,” he grumbled as they pulled fodder, helped by Judith, stripping leaves downward from the ears of tall corn and putting bunches of them to dry in the crotches between stalks. “Can’t get married; wouldn’t be fair to Sara if I have to go off to war!”

  Deborah paused, scrubbing away chaff and perspiration. “Don’t talk that way, Thos! We could have a war just because everyone seems to think we will!”

  Thos shook his head gloomily. “More than that to it, ’Borah. Seems like everything’s about to bust wide open, and I wish it would so we could have it over with and get on with living!”

  Though she might chide her twin, Deborah felt much the same way. She laughed ruefully. “Well, Thos, it’s lucky we’ve got work to do!”

  He gave some leaves a particularly vicious jerk. “Seems mighty tame and all-fired dull when this part of the Territory’s got gold fever and that miserable old pro-slave Judge Williams in southeast Kansas is still handing down decisions. Free State men can’t swallow! Doggone it, ’Borah, this isn’t a time when a man belongs in a corn patch!”

  “We have to eat. The horses and Venus will need this fodder come winter. I think a corn patch is a pretty useful place to be!”

  “That’s right,” said Judith unexpectedly. “Got to eat and sleep no matter what. No one tend the crops, everybody go hungry!”

  “You’re women!” scorned Thos.

  “Good thing, if that mean we got some sense,” retorted Judith. “Best lay up the harvest and leave blatherskitin’ to crazies like Jim Lane!”

  Lane, after a grand jury failed to indict him for killing Gaius Jenkins, was trying to regain his popularity with law-abiding folk by getting religion at several different Methodist churches, and though one tavern keeper had been heard to say he didn’t want his horses watered below where Jim Lane had been baptized, the Grim Chieftain’s shrill-voiced spell was working.

  He sold his old claybank horse and gave the money to women who were starting a public library. And he was fond of saying that the only time he’d ever used profane language was in the Mexican War when his “Midwestern farm boys” were up against fancily tasseled lancers and he’d exhorted his troops to “Charge on ’em, God damn em! Charge on ’em!” His ambition was to represent Kansas in the Senate once it became a state, and Father resignedly said that would probably happen.

  Rolf continued to meet the Whitlaws at church and go home with them for Sunday dinner. Deborah found it like being watched by a large cat, having no notion of when it might spring.

  August 2 came and the Lecompton constitution was soundly rejected, which broke the last clutching of what had once been the pro-slavery death grip. True, Kansas would now have to wait for admission till its population reached that required for a congressional district, but Free Staters were in control, and when Kansas became a state, it would be free.

  After years of struggle for this goal, there was more weariness than triumph in the Whitlaw home, which reflected the mood in Lawrence and around the Territory. It wasn’t a question of Kansas now, but a matter of whether and how the nation itself would survive. There was thankfulness in the Whitlaws’ prayers, but little joy and much anxiety.

  The fodder had long ago been stacked in a corner of the stable and the naked stalks stood in the field, supporting the hardening ears. The wheat which Dane had helped reap was ready now for threshing in the circular spot the twins had raked down to the hard clay, banking up the topsoil in a diameter of about twenty feet.

  Father stayed home to help with the actual threshing, placing bundles of wheat with grainy heads pointing to the center of the ring, while an overlapping row was turned with its stalks to the center and its heads on top of the first row’s. Judith and the twins took turns leading Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar around the ring till the straw was crushed. It was stacked behind the center of the ring and new bundles were placed.

  It was hot, tedious work, followed by winnowing. Fortunately, there was a breeze, which blew away the chaff as the workers poured the wheat from buckets onto a sheet. Failing a natural wind, one would have had to be laboriously created by stretching
a big cloth tight and fanning it.

  Still, at the end of the sweaty, tiresome labor, along with aching backs and muscles, the family had a hundred bushels of wheat stored in big covered bins at the side of the stable that served as a granary.

  Since getting to any mill and waiting one’s turn meant a number of days, Father decided to take Mother with him to the mill at Topeka and visit friends. Thos rode Chica to The Clarion office and tended to business there in the elder Whitlaw’s absence, while Deborah and Judith caught up on laundry, cleaned house, and washed each other’s hair.

  Father and Mother returned with bags of real flour, and for a while the Whitlaws indulged in an orgy of biscuits, “light” bread, and even a cake made with sugar from one of the collections of small luxuries Rolf brought from time to time.

  September passed with sowing wheat and shucking corn, and Father brought home that month’s Atlantic Monthly, purchased at the City Drug Store, which also carried Harper’s, Knickerbocker, and Godey. That night, while the family was gathered for dinner, he read them Whittier’s poem “Le Marais du Cygne.”

  “Free homes and free altars

  Free prairie and flood—

  The reeds of the Swan’s Marsh

  Whose bloom is of blood!”

  It was long and Father’s voice broke several times before he finished. “Now the whole country will be stirred up about the massacre,” he said, putting the pages down. But Deborah, though she felt sick to remember Jed and his night-riding Missourians, thought that much the same poem could have been written about John Brown’s slaughter at Pottawatomie. When would “Bleeding Kansas’s” wounds be stanched?

  Along the river, maple leaves were flaming, and golden-rod and purple asters stood knee-high; while wild geese honked over, going south. Deborah, Thos, Sarah, and Laddie gathered hickory nuts and hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, and small, tangy wild grapes. Thos and Sara laughed together, feeding each other the choicest grapes, so that Deborah was almost glad when Rolf, as if by accident, joined them on their third expedition.

  He behaved so well that even Sara thawed toward him, and by the time autumn moved into winter, the four young people, in the rented surrey, were frequently together—at taffy pulls, pie suppers, the literary society, church, or simply out driving, sometimes with a picnic lunch.

  Deborah wasn’t sure how it happened. Rolf never directly asked to take her somewhere, but he would mention some plan to Thos, who was delighted at the chance to squire Sara around without having to borrow his parents’ buggy and horses.

  When Deborah told herself that she should stop seeing Rolf, she shrank from spoiling her twin’s happy times with Sara, and she was moreover compelled to admit that the autumnal days would be drab without the almost weekly outing.

  Rolf didn’t try to get her alone or kiss her, even hold her hand. The only physical contact they had was when he helped her in and out of the surrey or steadied her on rough footing. Now and then there was tingling shock as their eyes met, but she avoided gazing at him and rarely glanced up to find him watching her.

  Grateful at his changed manner, she puzzled over it for a while, and though she found no satisfactory explanation, she decided that she, Thos, and Sara made pleasant company for him.

  It was too late now to go on to Pike’s Peak; he’d have to wait for spring. While it was rather surprising that he didn’t winter in Kansas City or St. Louis, he had good hunting and drinking companions among the wilder youngbloods headquartering at Lawrence and was snugly ensconced in Melissa Eden’s house.

  He wouldn’t be the first man to spend a season somewhere because of pleasures found in a woman’s arms. Deborah’s cheeks grew hot when she wondered about them, and she quickly banished such forbidden speculations, but these did return, and she had to confess to a certain unreasonable pique that Rolf had apparently been able to divert his passion for her into the delights he must share with Melissa.

  The first snows fell and winter began in earnest. When Deborah rode Chica, cakes of slippery ice collected in the shoes, dropping off after a time, but making the footing treacherous while the snow lasted. Rolf brought a bobsled now instead of the surrey, when snow was on the ground, and they traveled to the jingle of sleigh bells, with robes tucked over their feet and legs.

  Christmas was nearing. There’d been no word from Dane, and even Rolf began to worry. Then, on the same day, within the same hour, Father brought home a large oilskin-wrapped parcel and Rolf rode out with a letter, both sent from Santa Fe with a trader who was going to winter in St. Louis. At Rolf’s voice, Judith pulled on a coat and went through the rear window to the lean-to.

  With shaking fingers, Deborah untied rawhide thongs laced around the oilskin, then unwrapped a tight-woven gray and brown blanket to reveal a sketch pad bound in leather. On the first page, he had written in a bold, slanting script:

  So you share my journey, sweetheart—you have been with me every day, in everything I do.

  “One hopes not quite everything.” Rolf’s voice was strained. He’d been reading over her shoulder.

  Flushing, Deborah gave him a rebuking glance and took the pad over to her mother, near the lamp. With Father, Thos, and Rolf peering over her shoulder, Deborah turned the pages she’d later treasure and study, so tremulously elated that she kept fumbling.

  The first sketch was of the buffalo wallow. “Where we met,” was penciled in the corner. Next was the smithy, with Johnny and Maccabee. There were Mother and Father in the office of The Clarion, but the rest were drawings of the journey west—buffalo, Conestoga wagons, antelope, geese flying overhead, prairie dogs at their burrows, meadowlarks and mockingbirds, hawks and owls, a cavalry patrol, freighters, bull-whackers, tall Osage Indians, handsome Cheyenne, stocky Comanche, Bent’s old fort, and then the New Mexican mountains and the plaza of Santa Fe, the inn, La Fonda, the cathedral, and a sampling of the town’s Indians, señoritas, caballeros, trappers, and scouts.

  All of the pages had a phrase or sentence, speaking to Deborah, inviting her to see what he had. She was so happy she was near crying. These days and weeks and months during which she’d felt abandoned, locked away from his thoughts—he’d made these memories for her!

  “He has a gift for catching the spirit of people and creatures with a few lines,” Father said. “No wonder he finds it possible to live from his work.”

  “Oh, I dare say Sir Harry’s name helps a bit,” interjected Rolf. “Some smaller parcels dropped out, Miss Deborah. Aren’t you going to see what they are?”

  Deborah left the sketch pad in her mother’s hands and returned to the bundle. Father’s name was attached to a pencil box inlaid with an etched silver map of the New World. For Thos there was a magnificent buckskin hunting shirt, fringed and beaded, trimmed with triangles of black velvet. A fringed blue shawl for Mother made her give a soft cry of pleasure while Thos was jubilantly pulling the shirt on, holding out his arm and giving it a shake so the fringes would dance.

  Another shawl, golden brown, had “JUDITH” tagged to it. Mother quickly took it and put it on the pianoforte with hers.

  Last, for Deborah, was an exquisite lace head covering of black with a carved tortoiseshell comb. As she unfolded the whispering cobweb, a small silver medallion fell out of a bit of tissue.

  Lifting it with its delicate chain, Deborah smoothed out its wrapping, and once again Dane’s forceful writing spoke to her:

  St. Rita’s the succorer of lost causes. Perhaps she’ll pray for ours. I should be in California by the time you get this, but I’ll be with you as soon as the snow melts from the passes.

  “Has my agnostic brother turned papist?” demanded Rolf, scowling at the sweet face of the saint.

  “With ’Borah so stubborn, he probably figures he needs all the help he can get,” said Thos irreverently, preening himself. He added condescendingly, “That Spanish head thing’s all very well, ’Borah, but wouldn’t you rather have a shirt like mine?”

  “It’d look funny over my dresses.”
She laughed. “Mother, how do you think the comb goes?”

  “One of the sketches shows a lady with a mantilla.”

  Mother searched through the pages till she found the drawing. The girl peered coquettishly over her fan, with lace framing a triangular face not unlike Deborah’s own in contour.

  How well had Dane known his subject? Deborah thought jealously, and she was glad he’d gone on to California, though heaven knew where there were women at all, savage or civilized, many of them would look at him with more than subtle invitation. She was a fool to torture herself with that.

  She was a fool.

  As if sensing how her daughter felt, Leticia’s hands were comforting as she swept up enough of Deborah’s hair to hold the comb in place at the back of her crown. Over this, she arranged the graceful fall of lace and then gazed at her daughter with a startled expression, then glanced at the picture.

  “Why, Deborah! Except that her hair and eyes are black, this lady could be you!”

  “It could,” agreed Father bemusedly. “Same mouth, same tilting up of the eyebrows.”

  Rolf scanned both drawing and Deborah, then grinned sardonically. “It would seem my brother has an eye for your kind of woman, Miss Deborah. But no señorita could look as ravishing as you, with that lace setting off the copper in your hair.”

  How like Rolf to wound and flatter at the same time! Refusing to meet his eyes, Deborah longed to see how she looked. “Take the lamp to the mirror, child,” Leticia suggested with a smile. “And then we’d better have dinner! Build up the fire, Thos, and I’ll make the biscuits.”

  Holding the lamp to reflect her face in the small mirror, Deborah saw a curving mouth, large, dark-lashed, wine-amber eyes, flawless skin—a face that echoed the enchanting one in Dane’s sketch. I—I’m beautiful! she thought. She quickly added: It’s the mantilla and the lamplight. But she wished that Dane could see her so.

  Putting down the lamp, she fastened the medallion around her neck and slipped it between her breasts, where the cool metal swiftly warmed.