McCrory's Lady
Page 37
“What indisposition?” he asked, already growing tense.
“Just a perfectly normal symptom of breeding women that quickly passes. In fact, it's how the doctor discovered my condition back at the reservation.” She chuckled, rubbing small circles on his chest with her palms. “I tend to lose my breakfast—but after I've been up an hour or two I can eat my weight. You already commented on how I've filled out.” She could feel his hands roaming over the curves of her derriere, then moving to cup her swollen breasts.
“I should’ve recognized the changes, I suppose...” He did not want to say that his first wife had been so prim and shy he had never seen her body unclothed after she became pregnant and sent him from her bed. Then, a disturbing thought indeed flashed into his mind. “Maggie...should we—that is, should I—”
“Don't you dare even think it,” she interrupted fiercely. “Making love never harmed a baby, but not making love would definitely harm this mother.”
“Are you certain?” he asked, suspicious, yet at the same time relieved, for he knew he could not leave her bed.
“Yes. I've seen lots of pregnant women over the years in my former business. And, as an extra precaution to reassure you, I asked Dr. Torres.”
He raised one eyebrow sardonically. “That must've been a very interesting conversation the two of you had.”
“Very. I swore him to secrecy about the baby until I could find the right time to tell you myself.” She looked into his eyes. “This is the right time, isn't it, Colin?”
“From the day I first saw you in Sonora, everything has been right. I'm only sorry it took me so long to realize it...but maybe there is a way to show you just how right everything is...”
Her joyous laughter blended with his as he rolled up, pinning her beneath him. Then he lowered his mouth to hers and began kissing her as she drew him deeply into her embrace.
Epilogue
Spring, 1881, Crown Verde
“By all the saints, if that dog doesn't stop his barkin', I’ll be takin' the mister's shotgun to him,” Eileen whispered to Riefe Cates as the Presbyterian minister struggled to make his sonorous voice carry over Rufus's loud protests at being excluded from the solemn festivities held on the front porch of the ranch house.
“I baptize thee Ian Scott McCrory…” The tall, distinguished Reverend Osborne looked every inch a curate as he read the words from the prayer book while the assembly beamed on in witness.
Colin stood beside his wife, who proudly held their month-old son. Little Ian gurgled placidly, not in the least upset by a few drops of cool water on his head of thick brown hair.
The proud parents were flanked by the motley assembly whose varied religious backgrounds had given the minister pause when he had been summoned from Prescott to the big ranch to christen the newest member of the McCrory family. Dr. Aaron Torres, a Jew, stood beside Esmeralda Phibbs, a Unitarian, flanked by Eileen O’Banyon, a devout Roman Catholic, and Riefe Cates, who had made it clear he was unchurched and planned to stay that way.
McCrory's daughter and her husband had been married in his church, but somehow Reverend Osborne suspected that the dangerous-looking half-breed probably still prayed to some bloodthirsty Apache war gods.
“Do you think our baby will behave so well when his time comes?” Wolf whispered to Eden.
Patting her swollen belly, Eden smiled up at him. “Not if he takes after his father.”
Just then the reverend finished his final prayer and the baptism was officially over. All the people who worked for Crown Verde had assembled in the warm spring sunshine to witness the christening of their boss's new son. A line of well-wishers passed by, admiring the infant and complimenting his parents as the irate housekeeper took out after Eden's excited dog.
Laughing, Eden caught up with Eileen and placed a restraining hand on the old woman's arm. “He's just so happy to be back here and knows something's going on. Why don't I pull a juicy bone off that huge beef roasting out back? I'm sure it will quiet him.”
“If ye spoil the little one coming as bad as ye do that mutt, there'll be the divil to pay,” Eileen replied, her stern expression softening as she turned from Rufus to Eden.
“I'll take that rascal for his bone,” Gideon Blake volunteered, “with your permission, Mrs. O'Banyon?”
Eileen actually blushed. Wolf's father was tall and silver-haired, a lean, spare man of sixty-five with an engaging grin that softened the harshness of his perfectly chiseled features. “I'll show ye the way, Mr. Blake.”
As the two of them disappeared around the side of the porch, Eden turned to Wolf and put her arms around him. As he returned the embrace she whispered, “Aren't you glad we went to Pecos, even though you'd already taken the appointment as Indian agent?”
“As in everything else, you were right about my father,” he replied.
“He grieved for what he'd done to you, Wolf. Being here to see the work you've accomplished has made him so proud of you—and happy that you've let him be a part of it.”
“His money for medicine and schoolbooks at the reservation has made a lot of difference. I'm kind of proud he's my father, too,” he replied gravely.
“Why don't you tell him that?” she asked.
“I already have.”
“So serious, you two. This is a day to celebrate,” Colin said to his son-in-law, holding out little Ian to him. “I think it's time you had some practice at being a father.”
Wolf's dark face actually paled and his eyes grew round with consternation. “I, er...I don't know, Colin.”
“Go ahead, Wolf,” Eden urged with a chuckle. “My little brother is quite sturdy. He won't break.”
Ed Phibbs stood by the front door scribbling furiously on her notepad as Maggie approached the group and rescued Wolf by taking Ian for his feeding. Colin and Maggie passed her with a smile and a nod as they entered the house.
As managing editor of the Arizona Miner, which Maggie had bought from the disgraced Clement Algren last year, Ed Phibbs took her job seriously. The christening of her employer's firstborn son was the news event of the season. After the excitement of chronicling the breakup of the Tucson Ring, life had settled down to more prosaic pursuits. And writing a good society column wasn't such a bad job after all.
Author’s Note
Arizona Territory had as violent a history as anywhere in the West, the perfect backdrop for my story of a scalper and a prostitute trying to go straight and start anew. Colin and Maggie both want to hide their sins. What sort of villains might want to uncover their past? To what end? I knew the key to the story lay with the bad guys.
In my preliminary research, I found frequent references to a ring of corrupt merchants and politicians who got rich off the bloody conflict between whites and Apaches during this era. Variously called the Tucson Ring, the Federal Ring or the Indian Ring, its headquarters were in the Old Pueblo, whose leading businessmen were in cahoots with corrupt government officials from Prescott to Washington. Thus, I unraveled the background about a perfectly marvelous set of villains from real life.
Caleb Lamp is a fictionalized version of J. C. Tiffany, the actual White Mountain Reservation Indian Agent to whom fate was far kinder; he was allowed to resign in 1882 “for reasons of business necessity and health.” I thought Caleb's demise would have been more fitting. Among Tiffany's numerous crimes were the use of Apache slave labor in the reservation coal mines and the pocketing of monies supposedly earmarked for the Indians. For the purposes of our story, I moved the date of the mining operation from 1881 to 1880. I also altered the dates for the final demise of the Tucson Ring, which was not actually exposed until 1882.
While pleading literary license, I must clarify a few other minor points. The telegrapher in Prescott during 1880 was a gentleman named Pat Kearney, who actually worked the key from the back of his saloon. However, unlike the greedy Hector Spoede, a fictional creation, Kearney was quite honest in the performance of his duties. The territorial legislature met only in odd years, so the
presence of councilmen and representatives in the capital during 1880 was stretching fact a bit, although they might have turned out for a special Bureau of Indian Affairs investigator. The last bit of tampering with history for which I must beg pardon concerns geography. Arizona is a big country. A plot with so much action moving back and forth between Prescott and the White Mountain Reservation required that I make the journey shorter than it actually was.
As to the rest of the Arizona cavalcade found in McCrory's Lady, truth is often stranger than fiction and usually more entertaining. John C. Fremont was a vastly unpopular absentee governor and the territorial secretary John Gosper did act in his place. The foolish young Indian agent John Clum, whom Colin mentions, did oversee the massive Apache relocations during the 1870s. Other than these gentlemen, and of course, President Rutherford Hayes and his Secretary of the Interior, Carl Shurz, all the other heroes and villains in the book are fictionalized.
To recreate this bloody era, I did a lot of research. I will mention only a few of the many pertinent works that I found to be particularly helpful. The two most authoritative standard references on Arizona are Marshall Trimble's Arizona and the wonderfully detailed political history by Jay J. Wagoner, Arizona Territory, 1863-1912. For general background on ranch life during the era, the Time-Life Old West Series again proved an excellent source for pictorials and bibliography, in particular The Ranchers with text by Ogden Tanner. Arizona Ranch Houses by Janet Steward and Ghost Towns of Arizona by James E. and Barbara H. Sherman gave me the look and feel of life in this harsh yet beautiful land. Melissa Ruffner Weiner's Prescott: A Pictorial History was especially good for recreating life in the territorial capital.
The tragic situation of the Apaches confined on the White Mountain Reservation is portrayed as honestly as I could write it. Many of the details regarding the long and bitter campaigns waged by United States troops and Arizona settlers against the Apaches are vividly described in Jay J. Wagoner's work cited above. For splendid pictorials and a sensitive text on how the Athapaskans lived, I relied heavily on The People Called Apache by Thomas E. Mails.
The grisly flashback in McCrory's Lady and indeed the concept of an ex-scalper as a protagonist I owe to Savage Scene by William Cochran McGaw, whose biography of James Kirker is a masterpiece about the Scottish immigrant's incredible life.
Those who have read the “Discovery Duet” probably recognized Dr. Aaron Torres as a distant descendant of the Sephardic dynasty created in Paradise & More and Return to Paradise. For background in medical treatments during this era, I relied upon Richard Dunlop's Doctors of the American Frontier, although I will add in Dr. Torres's defense that I think he was a far more learned physician than most of the actual doctors who practiced out West in those early days.
I hope you have enjoyed Colin and Maggie's story. They were certainly the unlikeliest pair of lovers I've created to date. Wolf and Eden proved a delightful surprise, and their romance played a larger role than I had originally envisioned. Please let me know if you enjoyed McCrory's Lady. I always answer emails via my website.
Happy reading,
Shirl Henke
www.shirlhenke.com
About the Author
SHIRL HENKE lives in St. Louis, where she enjoys gardening in her yard and greenhouse, cooking holiday dinners for her family and listening to jazz. In addition to helping brainstorm and research her books, her husband Jim is “lion tamer” for their two wild young tomcats, Pewter and Sooty, geniuses at pillage and destruction.
Shirl has been a RITA finalist twice, and has won three Career Achievement Awards, an Industry Award and three Reviewer’s Choice Awards from Romantic Times
“I wrote my first twenty-two novels in longhand with a ballpoint pen—it’s hard to get good quills these days,” she says. Dragged into the twenty-first century by her son Matt, a telecommunication specialist, Shirl now uses two of those “devil machines.” Another troglodyte bites the dust. Please visit her at www.shirlhenke.com.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Author's Note
About the Author