Steel Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #2, Chloe and Matthew's story)

by Rose, Amelia

  There were the bruises on my ribs, my legs and arms from being dragged by someone taller than me—everyone was—but not necessarily stronger. There was the reason someone would set fire to the Faro Queen, when the Longrens shouldn't have enemies anymore in Gold Hill or in Virginia City. Hutch and Maggie legally married, Maggie had saved more than one mother and child with her midwifery and Hutch and Matthew had sold the mine.

  Elizabeth Seth. Because when Matthew had stopped seeing her the previous summer, just before Maggie came to town, just before Elizabeth's overprotective brother shot Matthew, she hadn't let go easily. She'd cried and clung and followed him everywhere, her face drawn and eyes red and Matthew had told me it was a small town and I was imagining it, that of course she might frequent the same plays or the same shops.

  "Someone pushed me in front of a carriage yesterday," I said.

  "What?" He reached for me. I was fine, but also more than willing to let him hold my hand on the table top.

  "I went into Gold Hill to fetch groceries for my mother. Coming out of the shop, I stepped into the street, couldn't see past the wagons and boards and horses and people and a carriage was coming. Ow, Matthew."

  He'd squeezed my hand quite hard.

  "Someone pulled me back, some older man who was visiting his daughter, a caretaker from a ranch down in the valley. He didn't see who pushed me, but he saw me lurch in front of the carriage and he pulled me back."

  "You're not hurt?" He almost made it a statement.

  "No, I'm not," I agreed. "But angry." I met his eyes. "The carriage belonged to Mrs. Hastings. I came to Virginia City today to talk to Maggie. I thought maybe—"

  He shook his head. "That Violet's mother wanted to run you down?"

  "Or that Violet pushed me. When the carriage stopped, I didn't see her in it but Mrs. Hastings didn't bother to get out and then, when the carriage went on, after their retainer replaced my parcels, she was there." I spread my hands, waiting for him to see my logic.

  "Violet is assured of her own beauty," Matthew said, despite the fact I hissed at him. "And she is quite beautiful. Stop that. She is. You know she is. She likes to campaign for the unobtainable."

  I stared.

  "I don't think Violet Hastings ever really thought I was going to choose her. I think, if she had thought it, she'd have run a mile to avoid it."

  That was an image. Violet was dainty, the type of girl who never had a hair out of place. I couldn't imagine her running across the room to welcome her husband, let alone a mile.

  "When I told her I was going to ask you to be my wife, she was completely willing to offer advice." He met my eyes. "I can't imagine she'd try to harm you. And the burning—"

  "—The burning came before I was hit," I said. "Though, perhaps…"

  "Perhaps, nothing. Let's not imagine there are so many girls pining for me and willing to—” He’d started lightly but ended somber. "Willing to hurt the one I love."

  In the interlude, before Maggie and Hutch came back, before we realized we needed to find Sheriff Gannon and tell him what we suspected, what I now remembered seeing and the face that was falling into place, in that interlude we made the most of our time together in the empty kitchen, hands and mouths and eyes, touches and kisses and whispered plans. We'd marry in spring. We'd marry in summer. We'd marry the next day and, in the meantime, as long as we were going to marry, why didn't we—

  "You were the one who went away last night," I reminded him.

  "Sometimes, I have no sense," he admitted.

  "May I get that in writing?"

  "Wench."

  Chapter 6

  Sheriff Rick Gannon was actually in his office when we went there sometime later. The potbelly stove put off a welcome heat.

  "Is the Queen on fire again?" he asked when we came through the door.

  "Not yet," Matthew said. "And maybe not again."

  Rick Gannon looked from Matthew to me. "Did you remember something?"

  "I know who hit me," I said. There was nowhere to sit in the Sheriff's Office and I felt like a schoolgirl, called upon to recite. My hands automatically laced in front of me. "And why I couldn't place the face. She was dressed like a man."

  The Sheriff started, moving forward in his chair but not quite coming to his feet. "She?"

  "It's Elizabeth Seth, Sheriff," I said.

  His expression didn't instantly resolve into understanding. It had been Sheriff Bill Townsend in Gold Hill who had dealt with Jason Seth shooting Matthew and who had accompanied Mr. Seth when he tried to evict Hutch and Maggie before the bank actually foreclosed on the house.

  But, the towns aren't that far apart and people talk. He turned to Matthew. "Mr. Seth bought your mine? And he was the fellow who shot you."

  Matthew agreed.

  "Awfully good of you to sell him your mine after he shot you," Sheriff Gannon said contemplatively.

  "And may he have all the luck he deserves with it," Matthew finished. "Mr. Seth shot me because I'd been stepping out with his sister, Miss Elizabeth Seth, for a little while last winter and spring. Miss Anders and I were…" He glanced at me. "We weren't."

  That seemed to satisfy the Sheriff, who didn't seem to care as much about Matthew and I as about Matthew and Elizabeth Seth, which was as it should be.

  "She didn't take it well, Sheriff, when I stopped courting her. She made a fuss and didn't care who knew about it."

  "I see. And did Mr. Longren stop seeing Miss Seth because he was seeing you again, Miss Anders?"

  "Yes. Elizabeth was upset. I might not have seen much of it except she followed Matthew—Mr. Longren," I corrected, but it seemed silly to call him that, I'd known him for so many years. "She behaved…" How could I put it delicately? "Quite badly." Not that she had put things delicately. The young lady could teach the Longrens' carpenters a thing or two.

  "You're sure?" The Sheriff was standing now, ready to head into the cloudy, darkening afternoon after the now-elusive Miss Elizabeth Seth.

  And I was. Since talking to Matthew and sorting things out, I could remember her face above the scarf, the way she'd been dressed like a man, in trousers, boots and a big coat, but that the clothes had been too big for her, her movements too wrong for a man's, her face too familiar but out of place above the scarves.

  I told him that, briefly, and I told him that she'd dragged me, awkwardly, because she might be tall but she wasn't necessarily strong. I tried to delicately tell him I was bruised but, when he didn't understand, Matthew simply said, "Chloe said she has bruises. It sounds like Miss Seth banged her about because she was too heavy for her."

  "Likely, there will be a bottle of lamp oil there, too, at Miss Seth's residence, or at her brother's." She still lived with her mother, though her brother didn't. One of them would have the oil, a sloping sided glass bottle with blue printing. There were shards of the other that had been collected from the alley near the outbuildings. The bottle had looked strange to me, not the same type my family used.

  "More than one person can use the same kind of lamp oil, Miss Anders," Sheriff Gannon said. "If Miss Seth says that she was somewhere else on the afternoon in question?" the Sheriff said. It seemed a bit rote, the question, as if he'd made up his mind already to, if nothing else, go ask questions, but he was asking this one of me anyway.

  Even Matthew didn't know this. "Then ask to look at her hands," I said, and when Matthew turned to look at me, surprised, and Sheriff Gannon raised an eyebrow, I said simply: "I bit her."

  Miss Seth was home when Sheriff Gannon arrived at her parents' house in Gold Hill, accompanied by Sheriff Bill Townsend. Her widowed mother protested briefly and Elizabeth claimed to have been with her brother the day before, the two of them spending the day going over the accounts for the mine.

  The sheriffs had asked to see the oil the family used in their lamps, to the confusion of Mrs. Seth and Jason when he arrived, having been called by a family friend who rode to the mine to fetch him. Elizabeth had protested to no avail.
Her mother didn't know; Jason didn't suspect in time. The oil was produced, in its glass bottle with sloping sides and blue ink.

  And then there was the neat circle of tooth marks on the back of Elizabeth Seth's left hand.

  Matthew and I didn't budge from the Sheriff's office, but we weren't needed once the Sheriff returned with Miss Seth. I had expected deputies might want to compare the bite marks on her hand to my teeth, or that they'd ask her questions, or any number of things that happened in the mystery novels Maggie shared with me.

  There was no need. Despite having been told why she was being arrested (and truthfully, she must have known), the minute she was led into the Sheriff's Office, Elizabeth Seth went mad, clawing and scratching and shouting. She raked her nails down the face of the deputy who held her by the arm, leaving bloody furrows in the instant before she yanked her way free of him and tore across the office at me, claws out, face twisted in a snarl.

  Matthew moved fast. He stepped directly in front of me, pushing me back with one hand as the other caught Elizabeth neatly. The instant he had one hand captured and me pushed back, he reached for her other wrist, then held her as she spat and kicked until the deputies got hold of her and forced her into a cell.

  "She can't stay there," Sheriff Gannon said gruffly. "Jail's for men. But we'll find a place to hold her."

  During the struggle, the bite on the back of her hand had opened; blood dripped from the outline of my teeth.

  There wasn't anything else needed from us. When a circuit court judge came through, we'd make statements and there'd be a hearing.

  "Will she be held until then?" Matthew asked. He eyed Elizabeth the same way he'd eye a rabid coyote. Elizabeth Seth was tall, taller than her brother, but slender enough, we both kept judging if she could slip through the bars.

  Probably not. But it would be nice to be even further from Gold Hill than Virginia City. I think that's the first time the thought occurred to me. Maggie had worried she and Hutch were running away when they chose to move to Virginia City. I had no qualms about leaving the area. I'd miss my parents and my friends.

  But I wouldn't miss the Seths.

  "We'll find a place to hold her," Sheriff Gannon said. "Judge is due through soon. Maybe they'll take her to Carson City if she's convicted. There's a prison there for women."

  And that was that. A hearing would be set and, in the meantime, Jason Seth would be watched and Elizabeth Seth was behind bars. Violet Hastings had never done anything to me, though in the back of my mind I was still wary of her.

  Matthew and I stepped out of the Sheriff's Office into the lowering sunlight of the day and my knees gave way promptly. Matthew caught me, almost as if he'd been expecting it.

  "Easy," he said.

  "Everything's over," I protested. "Shouldn't I be—"

  "—Upset someone tried to kill you? Twice?" He raised an eyebrow at me.

  He had a point. My life had been much calmer before Matthew Longren became such a big part of it. Calm. And dull.

  "Let's take a walk," he said, as if it were a beautiful spring day instead of the tail end of a freezing cold January day. We walked half a block before my father, the Mayor, stepped from his office and demanded an accounting of our behavior—we'd been seen leaving the Sheriff's Office and, although he didn't preface his questions with "What have you done now?", the sentiment was there.

  Until we explained … and told him again we were engaged to wed. I promised that I would be home early, though there was no consensus on what constituted early.

  We met at Maggie and Hutch's for the dinner to celebrate. Maggie briefly protested that celebrating the arrest of a young woman was uncouth, but she was outvoted by the rest of us. We roasted a chicken with potatoes and cabbage and Maggie made a shaker lemon pie as I made biscuits, one of the few things my mother was able to teach me not to burn or bake into the semblance of building materials. I thought it would be best if Matthew didn't learn until too late that his bride-to-be couldn't cook.

  Annie came, back from visiting her son, Jacob, at the University of Nevada in Reno, and brought Sarah and Kitty, both of them bursting with ideas for going to University, if only for the number of eligible young men there who weren't miners. At 16, Sarah was developing an unbridled interest in men. At 14, Kitty still split her attention between catching lizards and catching boys. Annie looked tired, as if the conversation had been running that way most of the train ride back from Reno, but once dinner was served and Hutch toasted Matthew and I and then explained that I'd be needing a wedding dress and would Annie care to assist, she woke completely. Matthew dodged hastily out of the way as Annie, Sarah, Kitty and I met and embraced and began talking, fast and loud, about all the most important things.

  The men left the kitchen. They'd be back, they said, when we were actually planning on eating. And that took a while.

  Chapter 7

  January snowed its way into February. Workmen came and went, transforming The Faro Queen from both fires. Imported marble made up the entrance to the lobby where Matthew slept, more nights than not, on the davenport. Whenever the snow allowed sufficient excuse, I spent nights in a room upstairs in the Queen, chastely allowing Matthew to make his way down to the lobby before turning in. When my father became belligerent, or the snow, miraculously, stopped for a day or two, I went back to Gold Hill, where Elizabeth Seth seethed in her parents' custody and the circuit court judge worked his way closer.

  Evenings, Maggie, Annie, Sarah, Kitty, Issy, Caroline and I sewed on my dress and on Annie's and Maggie's and, eventually, everyone's. We all wanted new dresses for my wedding.

  I was afraid to touch mine; afraid the slightest mistake would ruin it entirely. White satin spilled over our laps as we worked; our fingers and mouths working and filling Annie's shop with talk and warmth. My dress had a square neckline that dipped down to where ivory buttons started. The buttons led to a shirtwaist line, the bodice fitted and covered with an ivory lace almost too fine to touch. Fitted, puffed-shoulder sleeves stopped mid-forearm. The full skirt went down to my white kid boot-tops, and the back trailed into a train. In the early dark of February evenings, the light from the oil lamps made the dress glisten and shine.

  "If baby's breath is blooming, you can wear it in your hair," Kitty said, dreamily. She missed the fact that Annie gave her a sharp look. Kitty wasn't so much planning her own wedding as planning all weddings; she hadn't picked out one beau, she'd picked out all of them. Romantic only began to describe her nature.

  During the days, I worked at The Queen as often as not. Maggie interviewed girls to clean the rooms and cooks to prepare meals and Hutch interviewed bartenders, though he intended to work the bar himself whenever time and circumstance permitted. Matthew showed unexpected talent working with the crown molding that circled the tops of the walls, and at any details that needed a fine, finishing carpenter's hand.

  Nights, my father expected me home if the weather held. My mother would cook, knowing better than to entrust that to me, and I'd make biscuits and wonder how I was going to feed my husband once we'd married.

  As the month grew old, the activity in the Queen increased, people running from one task to the next, shining brasses, setting glasses onto the mirrored shelves behind the bar, bringing pots and pans into the hotel kitchen, curtains and quilts into the upstairs rooms. Maggie collapsed each night closer to midnight, from all appearances and tales, and Matthew began looking as if he never slept.

  There were no more fires, no hands emerging from nowhere to shove me bodily into the path of a carriage. Violet kept her distance and Cynthia, when I saw her on the street, gave me a look of intense fury; she'd heard about the engagement and clearly was overjoyed on my behalf.

  Saturday, March 5, 1881. The snow stopped in the last week of February. A weak sunlight filtered into Nevada, a promise of spring that wouldn't really arrive until May.

  At five o'clock that unexpectedly temperate evening, The Faro Queen officially opened her doors for the first
time.

  Brasses shone; the marble floors sparkled. Glass in the windows shone clean; the mirrors behind the bar reflected crystal cut bottles of whisky and bourbon, wines and a selection of beers. Hutch Longren stood behind the bar, shaking hands, taking orders, talking to friends and strangers, laughing at comments, watching with pleasure as Maggie, her blonde hair swept up, her new dress a deep blue that suited her, greeted everyone entering the hotel. The Faro tables were up, the dealers trained, Matthew standing in on one table, though I suspected he'd cheat for the fun of it. Oil lamps lit the woodwork and the rose-patterned rugs that softened the wood floors. From the kitchen, the scents of shortbread and roast chicken, potatoes and pies, filled the restaurant and wafted into the bar, drawing the patrons to eat.

  The Faro Queen was open. The mayors of both Virginia City and Gold Hill had come, bringing wives and families, meaning my father and his counterpart in Virginia City, and Sheriffs and deputies and teachers and the affluent from both cities as well as those curious about the new games and the new hotel. Women wore their finest dresses, the new shirtwaist jacket style dresses and light wraps in the almost-warm evening. The opening was scheduled for early evening, giving residents plenty of time to eat, drink and play before the evening performance of Hamlet at Piper's Opera House.

  The Longren boys had made the move from silver miners to casino owners, Hutch and Maggie had moved from Gold Hill to Virginia City and Matthew and I were soon to wed.

  Spring was on its way.

  Chapter 8

  Saturday, April 16.

  "Did you sleep at all last night?" Maggie asked. She had flown into the room I'd taken pretty much permanently in the Queen, opening curtains, opening windows, singing to herself, and making certain that if I had been sleeping, I was no longer.