Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been thinking. How would you like to go to Europe? We could make an extended trip, a grand tour, if you like. We could stay a few weeks in New York, then sail for England. From there we could go to France. We could visit the salons of the best couturiers, order dresses, ball gowns, coats, whatever you wanted. Then we could go on to Rome, Venice, Athens, or north to Germany and Austria, if you prefer. When we return to Paris your clothes should be ready for you to wear on the homeward voyage.”

  “Nathan — it sounds lovely, but I’m not sure.”

  “You won’t have to go in rags, even if you do want to buy out Paris. I ordered several dresses, walking costumes, evening costumes, and the like, from the New York salons for you. I thought they would be here in time for Christmas, but there were delays. They should be arriving any day, along with a dressmaker to attend to the fit.”

  Serena could not bear to look at him, to watch his transparent enthusiasm as he spread his eager plans for her approval. It was disturbing in a way she had not heretofore experienced. The feeling it aroused in her was compassion.

  Turning back toward the window, she said, “Do you remember last winter, Nathan, when you offered Ward mining shares and — and other interests if he would let me go?”

  It was a moment before Nathan answered. “You know about that?”

  “Ward told me. He thought I should have the chance to accept or refuse, since I had as much to gain from the arrangement as he did.”

  “And you refused?”

  “Yes, I did. I was in love with Ward, you see, though I wasn’t properly aware of it at the time. But my greatest objection was to being bought and sold, like a head of cattle, or a promising mining claim.”

  “What are you saying? Is that what you think I’m trying to do again?”

  She swung back to face him, her blue-gray gaze unflinching on his pale face. “Aren’t you? Beyond the enjoyment of giving, which I don’t deny, aren’t you trying to impress me with what you can give me, what you can do to make my life rich and easy and interesting?”

  “If it is, it doesn’t look as if I’m succeeding,” he said, his voice tight.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she answered, her smile wry, “but I would like the chance to make my decision without such things being pushed at me.”

  “I understand what you are saying, and I will try to respect it, though it won’t be easy. The clothes that are coming will be my last gift until — well, until later. I hope you will accept them?”

  Serena gave a reluctant nod. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, or seem ungrateful. And if I truly have wronged you, I am sorry.”

  “It’s I who should be apologizing to you. I didn’t realize you were in love with Ward. I understood from Pearlie that he more or less forced himself on you. And, of course, I never dreamed he would let you know of my offer. I can see how it would appear an insult to you.”

  “I think Ward did it in the nature of a test, because he thought I wanted a rich husband. He was interested to see — to see how much I wanted one.”

  “And you showed him the money didn’t matter at all,” Nathan said, his tone bleak.

  Serena blinked at the haze of tears that rose to her eyes. “In — in a manner of speaking.”

  A small silence fell. Nathan stood still, staring at her with narrowed eyes. Abruptly he took a step away from her, clasping his hands behind him as he walked to the fireplace and turned with his back to the low-burning flames.

  “It’s quite a coincidence that you should bring up this subject. I’ve been thinking of Ward off and on all day.”

  “Have you?” So had she, though there was no reason to say so.

  “I’ve been wondering what he will think when he finds out you are married to me, now.”

  “What?”

  Serena turned toward him, the color draining from her face.

  “It can happen. Any day now he will pick up a newspaper and read the announcement, or somebody he sees at the Eldorado will tell him. Maybe he knows already. It seems unlikely that Pearlie would let him remain in ignorance for long.”

  “What are you saying?” Serena whispered.

  “I’m trying to tell you,” Nathan said, his hazel eyes dark as they rested upon her, “that Ward is alive. He returned to Cripple Creek two days ago.”

  16

  By the first week of the new year the story was all over town. It was even seized upon by the newspapers and printed up with a blazing headline touting it as a return from the grave. Ward had been in a remote area vaguely described as southwest of South Park. His horse had lost its footing on a steep slope and fallen with its rider. Ward’s leg had been broken, his shoulder sprained, and he had suffered a severe concussion. If he had not been found by a band of roaming Indians, he would have died of exposure and hunger. The Indians had taken him far back up into the mountains, and there they had nursed him back to health. The Ute Indians had been confined to reservations in Utah and southwestern Colorado by a treaty signed fourteen years before. The band that had come to Ward’s aid were off the reservation illegally, and were therefore reluctant to make his presence among them known, or to deliver his messages. In any case, the summer was over before Ward had recovered enough to know where he was, or what had happened to him; it had been early winter before he was able to ride, or to convince the Indian leader that it would be worth his while to lend him a mount so he could get back to civilization.

  As the days went by, Serena became more disturbed, alternating between suppressed irritation and an insupportable weariness of the spirit. She took to emerging from her room when Nathan left the house for town, or one of his mines, and wandering up and down the halls, in and out of the rooms, pausing to pick up an ornament here, a bibelot there, out of the hundreds that seemed to crowd the rooms. Mrs. Anson’s daughter, Dorcas, a sullen but biddable girl with a nervous habit of twisting her hair and a need to be told at least three times before she understood an order, had a trick of screaming and dropping whatever she was carrying when she came upon Serena in her flowing wrapper. Mrs. Anson herself was apt to scowl, declaring Serena would have a relapse, when she found her in some cold corridor. She was coldly disapproving when she entered Nathan’s tower-room study and saw Serena leaning over his desk, reading the premier copy of the Cripple Creek Crusher, the district’s first newspaper, printed in gold ink, that was displayed there under the glass.

  The house was large, that much could be said for it. The front door, instead of being centered in its bulk, was at one end. It could be reached from the side portico where an oval driveway ended, or from a flight of steps that ascended from the front lawn and crossed the front veranda. There was a porch swing of wicker and a number of rocking chairs on the long, open veranda with its ornate railing. It would doubtless be a pleasant place to sit and enjoy the air in the summer months, but for the present it was cold and windy, the wood floor made slippery by the ice of melting snow. The same was true for the gazebo with pierced sides and turreted cupola that graced the side yard down near the creek.

  Inside the front door was the entrance hall with the staircase on the left, and directly beneath it, the door to Nathan’s study. The tower that opened out from one corner was used as a library, being lined with leather-bound volumes titled in gold, and arranged in concave shelves that stretched high above her head and could be reached only by a ladder. Opening out of the study was the dining room, a morose place with mustard-yellow hangings, a dark, near-black, walnut table and sideboard, and a large picture over the black marble fireplace that included a lifelike representation of a brace of pheasants being bled for the pot. From the dining room, one could move into the butler’s pantry, where food was kept warming before being served and the dirty dishes were stacked between courses. Beneath the pantry, in the basement, was the kitchen. It was connected to the pantry by a dumbwaiter which brought the food up from the nether regions. The laundry, too, was in the basement.

  It was also
possible to go from the dining room into the front parlor. The latter was a room of stiff formality with dark-green horsehair furnishings and green-and-gold draperies at the windows that were kept tightly closed to keep the Brussels carpet from fading. In one corner was a pump organ. The wax candles in its side holders were warped, apparently from heat, though the room was extremely cold, and it remained determinedly silent, though Serena sat pumping the peddles of the organ until she was tired.

  Opening out of the parlor was the sitting room, the province, in her moments of relaxation, of the lady of the house. Here had been placed the square piano Nathan had bought for her, and her sewing bird had been clamped to one of the side tables. There was also a small secretary desk with a cane-bottomed chair, several étagères with their stepped shelves overflowing with snuffboxes, small bronzes, seashells, ivory figures, glass marbles, china-egg hand coolers, and small busts of Parian marble. Whether it was the massiveness of the piano or the overabundance of bric-a-brac, there was a suffocating lack of space in the room. Otherwise, it was a charming retreat, with curtains of wheat and cream silk, a rug of pale gold and green, and in the circular tower room opening from it a collection of ferns and potted palms that complemented the leaf-design fabric on the settee and fainting couch.

  On the second floor there were five bedrooms, each with its own bath in a style similar to that in Serena’s room, and above that floor were smaller bedrooms of the female servants with a bath on each end of the floor, and a retiring room with a dormer in the center. There was also a box room up there, where trunks and valises were kept when not in use, and where bits and pieces of unwanted furniture had found their way. Next to it was a linen room where were stored the thirteen dozen each of sheets, pillow covers, pillowcases, face towels, hand towels, washing clothes, and Turkish towels. In addition, there appeared to be an entire cloth warehouse of bolts of dry goods, everything from striped bed ticking to bird’s-eye cloth for baby diapers.

  The men in Nathan’s employ did not sleep inside the house. The coachman had his quarters over the stable, while the tyrant of the kitchen had his own private cottage beyond the icehouse, the springhouse where their water originated, and the machinery that supplied gas for the lighting.

  It had been just that past December that the Midland Terminal Railroad had reached Cripple Creek, pulling in to the new depot at the end of Bennet Avenue. The Florence and Canon City Railroad was a narrow-gauge, with toy cars and a teapot for an engine; the new line was standard-gauge, a full-size railroad. It effectively eliminated the stagecoach run from Florissant that daily had rattled along the road in front of Bristlecone. It also cut down on the number of freight wagons, and their dust, as Mrs. Anson pointed out, but did not do away with them entirely. It was still not too unusual to hear the jangle of harness, the clip-clop of hooves, and the grinding roar of wheels as a heavy dray loaded with supplies for some store, or the belongings of a new family, rolled past. The sound of yet another horse-drawn wagon did not make too great an impression, then, until the driver yelled and pulled the rig to a halt in front of the house.

  Serena had asked for a fire to be kindled in the sitting room and was sitting before it with her feet tucked under her, reading a book purloined from Nathan’s study. Her first thought was of callers, some of those Nathan had mentioned. Coming to her feet in a rush, she slipped through the parlor as Mrs. Anson moved through the hall to the door. Whisking through the dining room into the butler’s pantry, she hurried up the servant’s stairs at the back of the house. She was at the top before it occurred to her that she had left her slippers on the sitting-room hearth.

  It did not matter. There was hardly time for her breathing to return to normal after her quick ascent of the stairs before Mrs. Anson was knocking on her door.

  “The dressmaker from New York, madam,” she said, her voice at its most formal. “She has arrived with the trunks. Where shall I tell the driver to put them?”

  “Trunks? You mean — the clothes Mr. Benedict ordered?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I don’t know. Not in here, I think. Perhaps in one of the other bedrooms?”

  “An excellent plan, madam. The scarlet room should serve the purpose as a sewing room. Where do you wish the lady to stay while she is with us?”

  The use of the term “lady” in connection with the dressmaker was revealing, “Perhaps she had better stay in the scarlet room also, instead of on the third floor. What do you think?”

  “That should suit very well,” the housekeeper answered, following herself a smile. “Shall I send her up to you?”

  “Where is she now?” Serena asked in surprise.

  “Waiting in the hall, madam.”

  That explained much. In the hallway the dressmaker might be able to overhear their conversation, and the housekeeper was anxious to show that this was a correct household. There was also a fine definition of status here. The dressmaker was left waiting in the hall, instead of outside, like a servant, or in the parlor as a guest would have been.

  “What is her name?” Serena asked.

  “Mademoiselle Dominic de Buys.”

  The accent was atrocious, but the trace of awe in the woman’s tones was plain. Serena suppressed a smile. “Yes, perhaps I had better see Mademoiselle de Buys.”

  The dressmaker and Serena got along with the greatest of ease. Despite the title she had given herself, the French girl was little more than a seamstress, albeit a good one, who was hired to do fittings in the homes of customers. In this case the customer was at some little distance from the Seventh Avenue salon, but it made no difference. Mademoiselle had been to Denver before for fittings, and also to Chicago and Saratoga. She had once delivered a ball gown to the capital in Washington itself, sitting up half the night with the box on her lap on the train, spending all day fitting and sewing, and sitting up half the night again so a senators wife could have a new creation to wear. That had been for the inauguration ball for President Cleveland.

  With such chatter, some of it in English, some in quick rippling French, the fittings went quickly. There was a need for something to pass the time as Serena was helped in and out of an endless succession of garments that spilled from the three enormous steamer trunks that were unloaded and carted up the stairs. There were morning gowns, tea gowns, evening gowns, walking costumes, driving costumes, riding costumes, boating costumes, and hats to match each. For more private wear there were dressing gowns, dressing sacques, petticoats in sets, each a different color, corsets in amber stitched with black, in black stitched with amber, corsets in green, in red, in pastel blue, hourglass corsets, spoonbill corsets, and Thomas patent Duchess corsets. There were wickedly abbreviated drawers in the latest mode from France of fine, near-transparent silk, silk stockings by the gross, chemises, which Mrs. Anson insisted on calling “shimmeys,” and fine lace-edged handkerchiefs; nothing had been left out.

  “How in the world did Mr. Benedict manage to order all this from here?” Serena asked.

  “His cable merely said to supply everything that might be needed by a lady of fashion and taste, of such and such a coloring, such and such a general size. Money no object.” The French girl winked. “It is easy, when one adds that last little phrase.”

  At the end of five days, Mademoiselle de Buys was gone, riding the train back to the East with a nice pourboire tucked into the top of her stocking. Serena was alone again, at loose ends once more. The house ran well enough without her. Mrs. Anson was used to seeing to Nathan’s comfort, and until Serena had decided once and for all what she meant to do, whether she could or could not be a wife to Nathan Benedict, she saw no benefit in interfering with the routine. If she stayed, she would want to set her own impression on the house, but for now it did not seem either fitting or worthwhile.

  The snowy weather gave way to a day of sunshine. Serena, watching Nathan wheel away from the house in his carriage with the coachman on the box, was reminded of the phaeton that had been his gift for her. It sat in th
e coach house beside the stables, the silver fixtures tarnishing for want of polish. She had in her wardrobe a number of morning costumes just waiting to be worn. The lightweight carriage was equipped with driving apron to keep the dust and mud spatters from her new finery. Why should she not use both the phaeton and the apron? Who would stop her?

  Mrs. Anson tried. Serena should wait for Mr. Benedict. She wasn’t strong enough to drive herself. She needed an escort. She should wait, at least, until she could be driven by the coachman. This was a mad start. She would be set upon and robbed of her jewelry. The horses would run away with her; they were mettlesome after being shut up in the stable with so little exercise. Serena tried to tell her that she had driven a wagon across hundreds of miles, that she felt strong, nearly as strong as she ever had, that Nathan wouldn’t care what she did as long as she was happy. As a sop to the woman’s fears she took the pistol Nathan had given her from its box, loaded it, and dropped it into her beaded purse. Since this seemed to alarm the housekeeper more than anything else, Serena finally turned her back on the woman in irritation and left the house.

  Dressed in a gown of heliotrope and black crepe studded with jet and threaded with gold passementerie, with her French sable coat about her shoulders and her draped fur toque on her low-dressed hair, Serena felt equal to anything. She stopped for a moment on the steps, breathing the fresh, clear air; then, pulling on a pair of black kid gloves, she descended the last of the steps, on her way to the stables.

  The stableboy was the only person around, since the coachman was driving Nathan. He brought the phaeton out and hitched it up without argument, and even gave the silver a quick rub with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Handing her up to the high seat, he passed over the reins, then stood back, a skeptical look in his eyes as he peered from under his tow-colored thatch of hair. Serena thanked him as she gathered the reins in her small, capable hands, then ignored him. She let off the brake, slapped the reins on the rumps of the matched pair of grays, and gave them their office to start. Head high, she wheeled from the yard. Feathering the curves of the drive with precision, she passed through the stone gateway with exactly the same distance from the wheels on either side.