"My father doesn’t mind. He spends most of his time in Santa Fe. So, he doesn’t really know how wild Wayne is about me.”
She jammed the daguerreotype in her reticule. Maybe, just maybe, Wayne would really be at the train depot this time. And she could not help but wish that things could have been as they were when she was a child, when Wayne came to spend the summers at Cambria. He was always taunting her, spurring her into one misadventure after another. She remembered wryly the summer he had challenged her into riding Malcreado. Cody had kept her secret, and she had told Jamie and Wayne that she had ridden the stallion . . . but not what had become of it. She suspected her mother somehow found out, for that fall her mother packed her off to finishing school, saying, "’Tis time you learned to be a lady, my pet.”
Along with Wayne’s taunts and mockery there had been the companionship of the three of them — she, Wayne, and Jamie. The laughter and fun of their childhood had created a camaraderie she badly missed as she grew into a young lady. Now, when she thought of Wayne as a polished lawyer, she feared she might still seem the gawky tomboy despite the fact she had spent eight years at Mrs. Goddard’s academy acquiring both an education and gracious deportment.
Stephanie turned to face the three spellbound schoolgirls. "Besides,” she declared, "I’m eighteen now. Old enough to get married.”
"Oh, Lottie,” Betty Jo squeaked, "can you imagine being married to someone like Wayne Raffin?” Her little face with the round mouth and button eyes screwed up in a gesture of ecstasy. "It — it’d be like marrying Adonis!”
"I don’t believe you, Stephanie Rhodes!” Priscilla said. Her hair, like Stephanie’s, was red but a washed-out shade — not the vibrant hue of blazing fire, and it was kinky. "Why, I bet Wayne Raffin’s never once looked your way. There’s no more truth to you marrying him than there is to your yams about rattlesnakes swallowing their babies and Cambria being the size of Rhode Island. You’re just a liar, Stephanie Rhodes!”
Her black eyes narrowed until they looked like two small obsidian rocks. She ached to jump on the prim Priscilla Broadbent like a tarantula on a toad. "I could tell you tales about the Indians, Miss Smart-aleck, that’d make your hair straight as a toothpick!” Her fingers uncurled from their fists, and she relaxed, secure at least in her knowledge of the wild New Mexican frontier. And secure in the knowledge that she would be leaving the academy for the last time, never to return.
She crossed to the doorway and picked up the two calfskin suitcases and her reticule. She faced the three girls. "If you don’t believe anything I’ve told you, Priscilla,” she said smiling, "you’re welcome to visit Cambria any time you wish. I’ll even send you our wedding invitation.”
The boast had been foolish, she knew. Yet later, as she squirmed on the train’s uncomfortable seat, she realized she had meant it. She would wed Wayne Raffin. And Priscilla Broadbent would receive the first invitation. Just how Stephanie would accomplish the feat, she did not know. She was half afraid he would not come back this time from Virginia where he and Jamie were reading law.
The heat in the car was unbearable, and the coal dust and smoke blew through the car’s open windows. Still, she was able to follow the sweep of the terrain as the train took her further into her beloved Southwest. After the train chugged over the steep Raton Pass and down into the high plains of the New Mexico Territory she watched the mustang ponies as they raced alongside the train, their manes and tails flying. Occasionally she sighted a buffalo, but their herds of fifteen thousand were depleted mightily from almost a decade before when she could remember taking three days to ride through one herd. Thinking back, she estimated there must have been between two and three million in that one bunch.
She had forgotten how much she missed the wide expanse of prairie, like a sea of grass, and the limitless sky that was bluer, clearer, than any she had seen in the East . . . but most of all she missed the mulberry blue mountains. There was something about their majestic heights that she found reassuring. She remembered them dimly from her childhood, remembered moving about in their maze of canyons from one Indian camp to another.
Once she had questioned her mother about those years they had spent with the Indians, but it seemed to her that her mother had been reticent, telling her merely of their abduction and their final return to Cambria three years later. Stephanie could only reason that those years of captivity brought back agonizing memories her mother did not wish to recall.
No more than she herself wished to, she thought, as her glance strayed across the aisle to the fat squaw with the irritatingly stupid face. Her memories of the Indians were ones of flies and dirt and fleas. Her association with the Indians had been one thing she had been too ashamed to speak of when she entertained the girls at the academy with stories of the wild West.
Off to the train’s left she could make out the dark basalt foothills called Wagon Mound, a formation that closely resembled a covered wagon pulled by a team of horses — or was it mules, she was never quite sure. But she did know that once Wagon Mound came in sight it would be only a little while longer before the train pulled into the Las Vegas depot and she saw her family again. And maybe Wayne.
As the train chugged to a halt before the frame depot with its nine-stall roundhouse for servicing the locomotives, Wayne Raffin’s imposing figure was nowhere to be seen. Did she really expect him to be there?
She joined the other passengers in the car’s aisle. She was careful to keep her skirts, extended by wire hoops, from touching the old squaw who trod off in the direction of the Fred Harvey Diner where girls worked as waitresses — though with the short supply of women they did not remain long but soon married.
Then Stephanie saw her mother. The locomotive’s steam surged about her skirts, making her look like some celestial figure. With her were Inez and Rita, who was a little plumper than the previous summer but still wearing the exotic look possessed by all Mexican women. Every summer the Rhodes and Sanchez families reunited in Las Vegas where Inez attended Our Lady of Sorrows Convent school and Jamie and Stephanie disembarked from trains arriving from the East. And from Las Vegas the two families usually journeyed on to Cambria to spend several weeks filling everyone in on the nine-months’ gap away from home.
Stephanie hugged Inez first. "You haven’t changed,” she told her friend. "Only taller — and still just as pretty.”
A becoming blush tinted Inez’s tea-rose complexion. "And you, Stephanie, still blaze as brightly as the sun.”
She laughed. "Then why haven’t we been besieged by suitors if we’re such great catches!” She turned to Rita. "Tiarita, have you been keeping my mother busy in naughty things?”
Rita hugged Stephanie, saying, "Si, chiquita. Lately I’ve been trying to teach her to smoke punche.” The woman laughed and rolled her eyes. "But even such a mild tobacco makes tu mama cough!”
Stephanie saved the last greeting for her mother. She thought she might find some sign of age to make her seem more of a — a mother. But the woman stood before her, her eyes shimmering with abiding love, and Stephanie knew that her mother was more special than other women — and knew she would always envy her mother for her qualities.
Beneath her mother’s cool, ladylike reserve, Stephanie had sometimes caught glimpses of Rita’s impishness and impulsiveness and Inez’s sweet, loving disposition. But the way she unobtrusively ran Cambria in Stephen’s absence told of Rosemary’s durability.
She would never age like other women, Stephanie thought. The blue-green eyes were still as bright and sparkling, the cinnamon red hair held no trace of gray, and her figure curved like that of a young girl’s. Stephanie calculated her mother’s age and realized that her mother was nearly thirty-six years old, a terribly old age it seemed to her. She also noted as they stepped out onto Railroad Avenue that the men stopped to stare, and more than half the glances, she grudgingly conceded, were directed at her mother.
Rita hailed one of the six-passenger rockaways as Rosemary explained they
were not going directly to Cambria but would stay in Las Vegas several days. "Your father has invested in a two-hundred-and-seventy-room hotel, the Montezuma, that was just completed last winter. ’Tis six miles out of town, but Rita and I thought it would be fun to try the curative baths at the hot springs there before your father and Jiraldo come to take us back to Cambria.”
Normally Stephanie would have been eager to visit in Las Vegas, to see the changes and meet old friends. But now she did not even bother to glance at the new flimsy frame buildings they passed, barely even heard Rita chattering. It was beginning to dawn on her that this time she was returning to the New Mexican wilderness for good. Once she left Las Vegas it would be her last touch with civilization, except for the occasional visits exchanged with the Sanchezes and the few brief shopping trips into Santa Fe.
And she would never have the chance to try her wiles on Wayne.
There would be only Jamie to while away her loneliness. Jamie, who accepted her mercurial moods. And for the first time she noted his absence. He usually arrived from Richmond a day or two earlier than she. "Mama, where is Jamie?” "The classes were a month late in. letting out. He and Wayne should be arriving tomorrow or the next day.”
Rosemary smiled fondly at her daughter. "I thought you and Inez deserved a holiday, and the Montezuma seemed just the place. I even brought a bathing suit for you.”
Stephanie tried to keep her voice casual. "And Wayne — will he be going on through to Santa Fe or staying at the Montezuma also?”
Rosemary’s discerning glance fell on her daughter. "I don’t know. 1 suppose we could ask him to stay over for a day or so.”
Shrugging carelessly in an effort to contain her joy, she turned to Inez and asked, "Will you be returning to Our Lady of Sorrows or is this your last year also?”
Inez smiled. "Not if mother has her way. She would keep me in the convent forever if it would prevent me from getting married.”
"Men — bah!” Rita said, waving her fan in dismissal. "They bring only trouble. And besides, hija, there is no man your father would have you marry. He would keep you a virgin, no es verdad?”
A becoming blush suffused Inez’s dusky skin, but Stephanie, watching her friend, suspected there was more to Inez’s discomposure than was apparent. She glanced to see if her mother had intercepted the flustered look on Inez’s face and was startled to see her mother frowning at a letter she held in her gloved hand. "What is it, mama?”
Rosemary quickly folded the letter and put it with the rest of the mail she had picked up at the Las Vegas post office before meeting the train. "Nothing, dear. Only some items your father asked me to take care of.”
But Stephanie noted the envelope bore Grant Raffin’s return address.
CHAPTER 28
The Montezuma, set before the Gallinas River with the pine-shrubbed Sangre de Cristo foothills as a backdrop, was a red-stone hotel with casino, stables, and even a hospital — and, of course, the famed bathhouses that could accommodate three hundred persons a day. The hotel’s name derived from the legend that Montezuma and the Aztecs of old Mexico made journeys there.
Built in the Queen Anne style with towers and gables and stained-glass windows, the hotel had all the conveniences found in the East, contrasting with the rustic scenery of the mountains and canyons of the West. And it was this contrast that attracted the leisure section of nouveau riche growing in America — and which attracted Stephanie. "Oh, mama, it’s magical!” she said, when they stopped at the reservation desk that evening. "It’s the best of two worlds!”
"I thought you would be liking it, pet,” Rosemary said and took the room key from the desk clerk.
The next day went quickly for Stephanie as the four women covered the hotel grounds — touring the conservatory reached by an arcade, the gardens of blooming rare flowers and splashing tile fountains, and finally the baths themselves.
They bypassed the mud bathhouse, which was nothing more than a long, low wooden shed, in favor of the mineral waters bath which was housed in a sandstone building of Neoclassic style. There in the large steamy portion reserved for females, the four women lounged about in discreet alpaca bathing suits with attached bloomers and detachable skirts that fell below the knees. Stephanie seriously considered discarding the cumbersome skirt but knew she would probably shock the other bathers. What would the dowagers think, she wondered with delight, if they knew she went swimming in a stock tank every summer in the nude?
Rita related the most recent gossip, keeping the other three laughing at her hyperbolic descriptions. "And Libby, she has put on so much weight! Grant must think it is a grizzly he kisses each morning, if he does kiss her. Do you know that her corset popped during a dinner and knocked the wine-glass out of her hand — si, por la Virgin Santa, it is the truth!”
Stephanie happened to glance at her mother and caught in her expression, rather than the silent humor which usually curved her lips, a fleeting trace of melancholy. Rita went on, saying, "You must make your mother leave Cambria more often, chiquita. I will not stay at our hacienda so long a time now. Santa Fe is the place to be. It’s more alive. Something happens every night! Ejoli! Last week I gambled away three of my best fringed shawls, did I not, Inez? No, I will not let Jiraldo hide me away at the hacienda!” She snapped her fingers. "He goes — I go!”
The following afternoon, as the women prepared to go to the depot to meet Jamie and Wayne, Stephanie had a sudden surge of a nervous headache. She could not believe it — that she, the tomboy, would have weak knees and sweaty palms. "I’ll wait here, mama, if you don’t mind.” Her mother’s thoughtful gaze searched her face, and she added, "I guess I’m still worn out from the trip.”
Rosemary brushed aside a wisp of hair that had escaped from the cluster of curls behind each of her daughter’s ears. "You haven’t started having your dream again, have you?”
Stephanie had to smile. "That was kid stuff. I’m a grown lady now, remember?” But she was half afraid the dream would resume, as it always had before, whenever she returned home. It was a silly dream, she thought, for it was only a face that wove in and out of her sleep . . . but it was the cruelty that glazed the oblique eyes, the mouth that was almost lipless and grimaced like a gargoyle that had caused her to wake up screaming as a child and later, as she grew older, to wake with terrible headaches.
"I remember, far too easily, that ’tis a grown lady you are now,” her mother said, smiling. "But perhaps it’s resting you should be. Then you’ll be fresh when Jamie arrives.”
And Wayne, Stephanie thought. However, she could not lie down. Excitement drove her every few minutes to the window that overlooked the curved drive. Would Wayne notice she had grown into a lady in the intervening years?
At last she spotted a tilbury rolling up the drive past the summer cottages that had sprung up with the construction of the hotel. Its occupants descended from the carriage, and Stephanie’s hungry gaze sought out the taller, more slender, of the two men. He removed the straw planter’s hat, and she saw Wayne’s silver-blond hair and the mustache that matured his raffishly handsome face. He also had grown up in the intervening years.
She hurried to the mirror and fluffed the curls behind her ears, wishing she had sugar and water to give more spring to her hair, which Rita claimed was as straight as an Indian’s. She tilted the brim of the feathered hat low over one eye and pulled on her gloves. As she smoothed the wrinkles from her shamrock green organdy dress her mother entered.
"Stephanie, ’tis beautiful enough you are,” she said, the amusement enriching her lilting Irish voice. "Come along, everyone is in the dining room, waiting. Jamie’s asking about you.”
Stephanie stretched out a hand to her mother’s elbow. "Mama, I — I’m a bit nervous. I’ll be down in just a few moments.”
Rosemary searched her daughter’s face that mirrored so much of her own unique beauty. "’Tis Wayne, isn’t it?” she asked slowly.
Stephanie nodded. "I think I’ve been in love with
him since that first day at Fort Sumner, when we stayed at the Raffin quarters,” she said in a soft voice. “What was I — four, five? But I can still remember the way his blue eyes glared at me. And I hated him then. Now, mama . . . now I want to marry him.”
Rosemary bit her lip. "Stephanie, you don’t know anything about him. If he snores, or drinks himself to sleep, or —or whatever.!”
Stephanie laughed, relieved now that she had unburdened herself of her secret. "Oh, mama! You crossed an ocean and half a continent to wed papa. And what did you know about him? Less than I do about Wayne. You’d never even seen papa. And I dare say you’re as happy as most couples.”
* * * * *
Rosemary turned her face from her daughter, pretending to look out the window at the park below which, besides its free-form bluegrass lawns and graveled walks, even had a section for croquet and lawn tennis. But Rosemary’s mind was not on the two men engaged in the tennis game but on the letter she had received earlier that week.
She hesitated, wondering if she should tell her daughter of the letter’s contents. It was not the fact she would be betraying Grant’s confidential request that held her tongue — nor the bitter knowledge that she, of all people, should be the last to give advice on choosing a husband. What cautioned her was the fear of opening avenues of questions to Stephanie, possibly revealing her long-kept secret . . . or worse, endangering a life. Was he still alive? He had to be, she would know if it were otherwise.
With the fervent hope that Stephanie would come to change her mind by summer’s end, Rosemary made an attempt at smiling. "If your regard for Wayne is your only problem, then I shan’t be too worried.”
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