Suddenly he frowned. “You’ve startled.”
His fierce stare, the one that once made her jump, now made her smile. “The baby’s kicking. He’s just like his father, you know.” She placed her hand over his, and together they felt the sharp little punch against her belly.
“How do you know it’s a boy? It could be a girl just as well.”
She smiled. “Oh, he’s a boy, all right. He’s kicking and screaming to get into this world, and will no doubt come early just to be difficult. I told you, he’s like his father.”
He kissed her then, a searing tender kiss that left her aching for more. “Tyrant,” she whispered. Then he kissed her again, proving her correct.
Afterward she snuggled into the crook of his arm, relishing the weight of his thigh as it covered hers.
“I love you, á mhúirnín, do you know that?”
Their eyes locked, and she looked at him, every emotion written clearly on her face. “Yes,” she whispered. “I knew it when I saw your letter. I’ve never doubted it since.”
His gaze didn’t release her. “I want you to rest this next month. I don’t want anything to go wrong. You mustn’t worry about your sister.”
“I just hope Christal is out there somewhere, finding a happiness as deep as mine.”
“And are you happy?”
“I love you, Trevor. Does that answer your question?”
It did. He leaned over, cupping her breast, kissing her mouth. Her hand drifted up to his hip, and she tenderly fingered that small round scar. She’d been foolish ever to grieve over his inability to waltz. She thought that now as he began the waltz of lovemaking again.
Read these faint runes of Mystery,
O Celt, at home and o’er the sea;
The bond is loosed—the poor are free—
The world’s great future rests with thee!
Till the soil—bid cities rise—
Be strong, O Celt—be rich, be wise—
But still, with those divine grave eyes,
Respect the realm of Mysteries.
—The Book of Orm
Turn the page to start reading the follow-up to Lions and Lace
Chapter One
June 1875
It was a bad hanging.
And if there was one thing Doc Amoss hated, it was a bad hanging. He surveyed the seven white-draped bodies laid out in his small office. Even these men, the infamous Dover gang, had deserved the respect of a sharp snap to the neck and a swift journey to damnation. But this hanging hadn’t been clean. At least, not at the end.
Doc shook his head, pushed up his spectacles, and went back to work. He’d spent all day with the Dover gang, first watching them be hanged, one by one, until their seven bodies dangled from their nooses, limp and solemn in the haze of dust kicked up by the horses. Afterward he’d helped cut them down and haul them to his office. The small town of Landen didn’t have an undertaker, so it was Doc’s job to ready them for burial. It’d taken all afternoon to wrap five of them. He was now on the sixth.
Doc leaned toward the spittoon, missed it, and left a pockmark in the dust on the naked floorboards. Outside, beneath the peeling sign Haircut, bath, and shave, 10 cents—Surgery done Fast he could see to the end of town where seven men dug seven graves in the anonymous brown sweep of eastern plain.
The shadows grew deep in his office. It was late. He pulled off the sixth man’s boots and checked his mouth just in case the fellow had some ivory teeth the town could sell to pay for the hanging. Doc wrapped him, then crossed his name off the list.
Now there was no avoiding it. The last man had to be attended to. The seventh and worst.
Macaulay Cain. Just the mention of that name made a chill shiver down Doc’s spine. He’d seen it on enough wanted posters to spell it backward and forward. He’d never wanted to mess with the likes of the notorious gunslinger. God and his sense of justice. Just when the hanging went bad, it went bad on Macaulay Cain.
Doc reluctantly looked over to the seventh white-draped figure. In all his days he’d never seen a man so difficult to put atop a horse and get a noose around his neck. Cain had required every one of the sheriff’s deputies and even at the end, when his face was covered by the black bag and the men were ready to put the whip to his horse, Cain struggled and demanded that they wait for that telegram, the one he claimed was going to clear him.
The one that never came.
“Son of a bitch.” Doc hated a bad hanging. It made a man feel right uncomfortable inside just thinking about the horse rearing and Macaulay Cain twisting in the wind, no broken neck to put him out of his misery.
When all was done, the deputies had brought Cain to the office. They cut the hands free and crossed them over his chest in a reverent manner. But Doc was the one to take the black bag off the head. No one else would do it. In a really bad hanging the tongue gaped out and the expression was frozen into a mask of terror as the poor bastard struggled to breathe while the noose tightened around his neck. The deputies visibly flinched when Doc removed the bag, unsure of what they might see. But before the sheet went over Cain’s head, they all were relieved to see the expression loose and peaceful beneath the outlaw’s scruffy growth of beard.
Resigned to his task, Doc walked over to the last body. The sheriff would be there soon to take the gang away for burial. He’d best be quick.
He bent to get a length of rope to tie the shroud. The room was quiet except for the buzz of green flies against the windowpanes and the sound of Doc’s breathing. He leaned over the body, hand outstretched to grasp the sheet.
Then he felt it.
Another man might not have taken note of the small drop of blood that plopped onto Doc’s black store-bought shoes. A man less trained in the medicinal arts might never have given it a thought, but John Edward Amoss had spent forty of his sixty-odd years learning one thing: Dead men don’t bleed.
Sure, in a hanging there was always some oozing around the neck, but not enough to run off the table and plop right onto his toe.
The hairs on the back of Doc’s neck rose. His hands itched to remove the sheet, but his feet were wiser. He stepped back.
Too late.
The hand shot out from beneath the sheet and clamped around his neck. Doc squeaked like a prairie dog caught by a coyote, but no one heard him. The townfolk had all gathered on the prairie waiting for the burial.
A long moment passed while neither man moved, Doc and the infamous gunslinger poised like statuary. In the silence Doc heard the man’s labored scratchy breathing as Cain greedily filled his lungs.
Unable to help himself, Doc croaked, “You coming alive just now, son?”
The outlaw swept the sheet from his face. He looked bad. Too bad for a miracle. His voice was painfully hoarse. “Yeah. Sure. I’m the Second Coming.”
Doc nodded, too scared to laugh.
“The telegram. Where’s the goddamned telegram?” the renegade choked out, his words barely discernible.
“Nobody cleared you, son. No telegram came.” All the while Doc said this he kept thinking about the twelve men the Dover gang had been convicted of shooting and wondered how many of those men were this one’s doing. He wondered too if in the end the final toll wouldn’t be thirteen.
Cain’s hand tightened around his neck. Doc could hardly swallow.
“You lying to me?” The outlaw’s features tightened, already pale with the trauma of the hanging.
“I wouldn’t lie to you at a time like this, son.”
Cain looked straight at Doc. Then he smiled, the smile never reaching his eyes. “I reckon I’ll have to take you with me, Doc. I’m hell-bent to get outta this hanging town. One way or the other.”
The man quit smiling. His wrists bled, his neck bled. And by God, thought Doc, he has cold eyes.
Doc swallowed. Not easily, with the man’s steely grip on his throat. “They ain’t going to hang you again. They owe you. We all agree. It was a bad hanging.”
“Bad al
l around,” the man spat.
Doc didn’t answer, his eyes drawn to the man’s neck. The rope had sure made a bloody mess.
“You got a horse?”
Doc drew his gaze away from the wound. “Yep. Out back. Good solid Indian pony. Take her.”
“Gun?”
“Ain’t got one. Don’t rightly believe in them. Being a doctor and all.”
“Then I’ll take you with me. I gotta have some insurance.” The man massaged his sore throat, then swung his legs over the side of the wake table. The fringe of his chaps was almost all sheared off, a sign of a renegade. Men running from the law sure as hell couldn’t waltz into town to repair a harness. They used their fringe for everything from buckles to bootlaces.
Doc swallowed, conscious of the hand on his throat, the hand that at any minute could close and choke the life out of him. Fear made the blood drain from his face. “How far do you think you’ll get with me dragging behind you?”
The outlaw stared. Those frigid gray eyes assessed Doc’s paunch and balding head. “I need time” was all he offered.
Doc understood. “I won’t tell. Not for a while anyways. That’ll buy you some time. Get on out of here.”
Those eyes narrowed, reminding Doc of a wolf’s he’d once seen in the dead of winter. “Why would you do that for me?”
“I don’t believe in hanging a man twice is all. You survived it. Must be for some reason. I ain’t playing God.”
The man pinned Doc with those eyes as his hand pinned him by the throat. “I need five minutes,” he finally rasped. “If I don’t get it, if you don’t give it to me, I’ll come back from the grave to get you.”
“I swear you’ll get your five minutes if I have to barricade the deputies from the door.” Doc nodded as best he could.
Cautiously the man slid to the floor, his hand still clamped to Doc’s throat. Together they walked over to the back door. For one brief second the two men looked at each other, a strange understanding passing between them. Just like that wolf, Doc thought, remembering how he’d lowered his rifle and the wolf ran off, leaving only the memory of those shattered-ice eyes.
The outlaw was at least a foot taller than the doctor, lean, hard, and capable from years in the saddle. There was no reason for Doc to say it, but he whispered it anyway, his throat still constricted from the power of the man’s grip. “Good luck to you, Macaulay Cain.”
The outlaw glanced at Doc, his expression startled. He looked as if he was about to say he didn’t need any good luck from a man who had tried to hang him. But instead he took his moment, like the wolf, and he cleared the back door in a dead run. He leapt onto the startled Appaloosa in the corral and hightailed it west as if he were part Indian, with no need for a saddle or bridle to take him to the mountains that jagged up from the blue horizon.
And Doc watched him. Strangely anxious to see him free and gone, like that wolf in the snow.
Red is the rose
That in yonder garden grows
Fair is the lily of the valley
Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne
But my love is fairer than any.…
August 1875
When traveling she always wore black. Widows were never questioned. They said all that needed to be said in the color of their weeds. Christal Van Alen had learned to wear black. She had learned the trick of wearing the black cotton gloves so no one would see she didn’t have a wedding ring and therefore no late husband. And she had learned to wear the long black netting over her face, labeling her as a widow, veiling her features, obscuring her age. Dressed as she was, she rarely got inquiries, or conversation. It was safer that way. One would think that a woman traveling alone would want the friendly solicitations of her fellow passengers. But she’d learned, too, in her time out west that the only thing more dangerous than a renegade band of Pawnee was a stranger too inquisitive about her past.
The Overland Express coach hit a rut in the road, shoving her into the sharp corner of an object next to her on the seat. She eyed it, a small replica of a bureau that was the pride and joy of the hefty furniture salesman who held it.
She straightened, almost envying the salesman his wide girth. The stage accommodated six passengers, but the man next to her had been charged double fare because of the room needed for his samples and his large size. Squeezed between him and the side of the stagecoach, Christal could barely keep her skirts from being crushed. Her petite stature was no help. While the salesman was so heavy he hardly bounced around at all, she was thrust onto the corner of that tiny bureau at every jolt.
Clutching her grosgrain purse, she resumed her position, sitting primly, ankles crossed, hands placed one on top of the other in her lap. The ride grew smoother and she chanced a look at the other three passengers who had boarded the coach with them at Burnt Station.
One was an old man with a placid grandfatherly face. She thought he might have been a preacher when he reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out a book of Scripture. But then she noticed that the inside of the book was carved out to hold a small metal flask, which he eagerly swilled from, and she wasn’t so sure anymore.
The young man next to him—a kid, really—looked anxiously out the window as if he was ashamed of riding in the coach instead of doing the manly thing by pulling his weight alongside on a cow pony. His traveling companion might have been his father, a grizzled character with a faded indigo vest and a large wiry gray beard that would have benefited from a pair of shears.
No one chatted. The “preacher” drank; the man in the blue vest dozed; the salesman stared at his little bureau as if thinking of his next account. Another jolt of the coach sent her once again into the vicious corner of the bureau. This time she sat back rubbing her ribs.
“Name’s Mr. Henry Glassie, ma’am.”
She looked up to find the salesman smiling at her again. He was a very pleasant-looking man, one whom she could believe provided good companionship on a long, dusty ride across a prairie such as this. But she didn’t want companionship. She preferred silence. She could hide in silence. At least from everyone except herself.
She stared at the man through the anonymity of her veil. Bitterly she wondered if the kindness would flee from his eyes if she told him who she was. That her face was on wanted posters from Maine to Missouri. That the gloves she wore to hide her lack of a wedding ring also hid the scar on her palm that was sketched onto every one of those posters. She’d seen the last poster in Chicago. That had been three years back, and Wyoming Territory seemed far enough west to be safe, but every day she worried that it might not be. She’d been held captive in a nightmare in New York. Now she was running from that nightmare and from her own face. And from one violent man who would see her dead before she could utter the truth about a crime she didn’t commit.
“Madam, if I may be so honored to address you as …?” The man raised his eyebrows as if imploring her for her name. She could see he was determined to get conversation from her.
“I am Mrs. Smith,” she answered in a low, polite voice.
His smile widened. “A lovely name, Smith. So proudly democratic. So easy to remember.”
She almost smiled. He’d all but said her name was common—which it was. That was why she had chosen it. Yet Mr. Glassie made her feel complimented. He possessed the tools of a brilliant salesman: a silver tongue and a smooth presentation, and his comportment, his fashionable verdigris suit, and the large pearl stuck in his black four-in-hand tie, all proclaimed he was very successful at what he did.
But poor widows didn’t buy much furniture, and conversation quickly trickled away, much to her relief. She was left once again to look out the window at the ironing board-flat prairie. Every now and again she removed her handkerchief, reached beneath her dark veil, and dabbed the perspiration that beaded along her brow. The sun burned overhead, and dust blew in the open windows, coating her gown with a gritty blond powder. They had just started out. Noble was a long day’s ride. She wa
s anxious to get there.
She’d heard a lot about the town of Noble the last three years. All her hopes now rested there. She was sick of running and she’d heard Noble was a good place to hide. A lot of gambling, a lot of women, and nobody asking questions. Not even a sheriff. They hadn’t had one in years. People talked about Noble the way they talked about South Pass and Miners Delight; the town had sprung from nowhere with the rumor of gold and had faded just as quickly. But Noble’s hedonistic ways lingered on and now it served cowhands and men heading north to Fort Washakie from the Union Pacific. She thought she’d be happy there for a while, working in a kitchen, dealing faro, even selling dances if she had to, in a small, nowhere town with no lawman to point fingers. It wasn’t her first choice to sell dances for a living; the men were usually rough and sometimes they smelled. But she’d do it if there was no other work; her first thoughts were always on survival. And there were so many worse ways to make money. Especially for a woman.
Christal’s eyes clouded as if she weren’t seeing the scenery any longer. Vice. She hated thinking about the word, but it followed her like a shadow that persisted even when the sun had gone down. Way back in the olden days of a life she hardly remembered anymore, a word like vice never would have entered her vocabulary. Words like vice weren’t in her family’s dictionaries. In her world, vice was kept permanently untranslated and unexplained. For a young, well-bred Knickerbocker girl from Manhattan it was meant to be as meaningless a word as something written in shantytown Irish Gaelic—a language most definitely not taught at Miss Bailey’s Conservatoire for Young Ladies, the exclusive girls’ school on Fifth Avenue where once her destiny had led her.
But destiny had somehow come off its tracks, and now, instead, she was in Wyoming, living a life she never imagined, understanding vice all too well because she’d spent three painful years trying to avoid its clutches.
“Oughta be riding shotgun too, Pa. Them Sioux—never know when they gonna act up.” The boy’s voice brought her out of her dark thoughts. He looked at his pa, who was trying to sleep beneath his hat.
Lions and Lace Page 39