Lily and the Major
Page 14
The next morning she awakened before dawn. Soldiers came for their laundry, paid Lily generously, and brought more dirty clothes.
At midday, when Lily was scrubbing long underwear, her hair drooping around her face in damp loops, her dress wet with perspiration and wash water, Caleb arrived. He looked crisp and cool in his flawlessly laundered uniform, and he grinned at Lily’s dishevelment as he swept off his hat. Under one arm he carried an intriguing blue satin box.
“Hello, Major,” Lily said, and she went right on scrubbing.
Caleb approached. “Put down those long Johns and look at me, Lily. I’ve got something to give you.”
She glared resentfully at his perfectly pressed coat, thinking of his plans to escort Sandra back to Tylerville. “Who washed your clothes?” she demanded.
“Your competition,” he answered easily. “After all, if I brought my laundry to you, it would be like paying you, wouldn’t it? And I know how you feel about that.”
Lily stiffened at having her own logic thrown back in her face, then went on scrubbing. The washboard was rubbing her knuckles raw. “Sandra tells me you’re going to Tylerville with her,” she said, careful not to look at him.
“Lily, if you don’t stop that washing and look at me, I swear I’ll throw you over my shoulder and carry you inside like a sack of grain.”
Because she knew Caleb wouldn’t be afraid to carry out his threat she stopped working and glared up at him impatiently.
He laughed. “You’re a bad-tempered little creature. Maybe it will take me two months to get you in line rather than one.”
Lily’s eyes were drawn to the satin box despite valiant efforts to avoid looking at it. “Is that for me?”
“Yes.”
She reached for the box, knowing it contained her favorite indulgence: chocolate.
Caleb withheld the temptation. “Not only bad-tempered,” he teased, “but greedy, too.”
Defiantly, Lily went back to her washing, and Caleb immediately hoisted her off her feet. The breath went out of her when her stomach struck his shoulder, but she managed to kick.
Caleb gave her a hard swat on the bottom and strode through the maze of clotheslines to the back door, where he stood her summarily on the stoop. The expression snapping in his eyes was not one of mischief when he jammed the box of chocolates into her hands.
“I’ve had enough of this nonsense,” he announced. “You’re moving in with me. From now on, you’re going to be my housekeeper.”
Lily’s backside was stinging as badly as her cheeks. “I’m staying right here!” she said fiercely.
Caleb remained on the ground, his eyes level with Lily’s. “My house is two doors down from the Tibbets’. I’ll expect you to be there waiting when I get home. Preferably with dinner on the table.”
Lily would have clouted him over the head with the candy box if not for the distinct possibility that her chocolates would be squashed. She whirled, stormed r little house, slammed the door closed, and drove the bolt home.
“Saturday,” Caleb called to her, and she watched through the window as he put his hat back on and strode out of the yard.
Thirty precious minutes passed before Lily had the nerve to go outside again. She comforted herself with a chocolate cream bonbon and the sure conviction that God would strike Caleb Halliday down with a lightning bolt somewhere between Fort Deveraux and Tylerville for his arrogance.
“I tell you, Caleb,” Colonel Tibbet expounded with energetic sincerity, “you’re going about this all wrong. You’ve let the woman see that you want her, and that was a tactical error. Puts me in mind of Custer over at the Little Bighorn. Damn it, he let those Indians catch him with his pants down!”
Seated behind his desk, his jacket draped over a nearby chair, Caleb sighed. The colonel was right; he’d tipped his hand. Maybe in the frenzy of lovemaking he’d even told Lily straight out that he loved her—he couldn’t be sure. “I wish I could take back that ultimatum I gave her,” he said wearily. “Even if Lily wanted to move in with me, her pride wouldn’t allow it.”
The colonel was leaning against the framework of the window, his arms folded across his chest. He smoothed his white mustache with a thumb and forefinger before replying thoughtfully, “I’d say you’re making the wrong offer. A woman like Lily—well, she won’t live under your roof unless she has a wedding band on her finger. She wants to be your wife—she just doesn’t know it yet.”
Caleb chuckled ruefully at that. “I’m not looking for a wife. I want her for a mistress.”
Colonel Tibbet spread his hands. Well past sixty, he was still a fine figure of a man. “In that case, you’re probably wasting your time. Best thing to do is go on seeing Bianca in Tylerville and forget about Lily.”
“I can’t forget Lily,” Caleb confessed, gazing out the window. “I’m obsessed.”
The colonel shook his head. “Then stop paying so much attention to her, at least. Let her wonder just a little about your affections. Women can be perverse creatures, Caleb—give them an advantage and they’ll beat you into submission with it.”
Caleb couldn’t help grinning. “Is that what Gertrude did to you?”
The colonel’s smile was fond. “She tried, God bless her, but I woke up to the situation in time to save myself. I put my foot down, let her know who was boss.” He paused to take a pipe from his pocket and clamp it between his teeth. “That’s what you’ve got to do with Lily.”
Caleb let out a heavy sigh and leaned forward in his chair to riffle through the paperwork on his desk. Always an organized man, he was now hopelessly behind on his reports and evaluations. Because John Tibbet was the best friend he’d ever had, the difference in their ages and ranks notwithstanding, Caleb let his doubts show. “You don’t know Lily. She’s determined to get along without me. And what if she falls in love with someone else?”
“Can’t happen,” the colonel answered with certainty. “Lilylready in love with you. She needs to have the fact made plain to her, that’s all.”
Splaying the fingers of his right hand, Caleb shoved them through his hair. Maybe John knew what he was talking about. And it wasn’t as if his own efforts were working. “So you think I ought to ignore her for a while?”
The colonel chuckled and rubbed his hands together with good-natured glee, Father Christmas in a blue uniform. With a nod he said, “You’ll have her proposing marriage within the month.”
Caleb didn’t bother to repeat that he had no intention of marrying Lily or anyone else. It was getting to the point where he didn’t know what he wanted.
At the general store Lily couldn’t help splurging on the book she’d noticed before: Typhoon Sally, Queen of the Rodeo. Business was good, and she was feeling rich.
On her way home with her shopping basket over one arm Lily noticed Caleb walking toward her. She was prepared to snub him and already had her nose in the air when he crossed the road without so much as a smile or a touch to the brim of his hat.
Lily felt uneasy. Hardly more than an hour before the man had ordered her to be waiting in his house when he got home from Tylerville. She quickened her pace as though by walking faster she could distance herself from the disturbing feelings she had for Caleb.
She wouldn’t exactly call them love, she reflected. But she surely felt passion—scandalous passion—and she didn’t like the idea of Caleb traveling with a woman who frankly admitted she cared for him.
Something prickled at the back of Lily’s neck as she approached her small house, which was directly across the street from the schoolhouse. The children were outside playing noisy games in the April sunshine, and Lily smiled at their joy, but her uneasiness deepened as she turned her attention back to the cottage.
Something was very wrong.
She took her purchases in through the front door, glancing around the one-room place and even peeking under the bed before she closed the door. It was when she set the shopping basket on the table and went to the back window that she
saw what had happened.
The clotheslines were down; shirts and trousers had been ground into the mud. Her entire morning’s work was ruined.
Fury kept Lily from weeping. She opened the cottage’s rear door and stepped out onto the sagging little stoop. Her wash kettle had been overturned, and her soap flakes, carelessly left outside, had been dumped over the wreckage like lumpy snow.
Lily’s eyes burned like fire, but she blinked back her tears and bit down hard on her lower lip. Velvet and her bunch had gone a long way toward putting her out of business, but they weren’t going to make her cry.
Clutching her skirts in her hands, she waded through the destruction, setting the wash kettle up again—it would take forever to refill it and heat new water—and rescuing the clothes from the dirt. When everything was picked up and the kettle was filled and just beginning to bubble over a new fire, Lily began rehanging her clotheslines. She’d taken time and care to wipe the mud from the lines.
At last the tasks were completed. Lily went inside and heated water then carefully washed her face and hands. She took down her hair, brushed it with a thoroughness born of pure outrage, and pinned it up again.
And then she put a clean apron over her calico dress and set out for Suds Row.
Lily was too angry to be intimidated when she reached the place and was greeted by cold stares from the ragged children and their hard-eyed mothers.
She stopped at one rickety fence and demanded, “Where does Velvet Hughes live, please?”
The woman was leaning over a scrub board and washtub, but she stopped her work to glare at Lily. Her eyes moved over Lily’s tidy hair and calico dress with a sort of desolate contempt. “Right there,” she answered, gesturing toward the tumbledown shack next door.
“Thank you,” Lily said, sweeping up both her chin and her skirts as she approached Velvet’s gate.
The latch came off in her hand, and she was still making her way up the dirt path when Velvet herself came out onto the stoop. Her hands were resting on her generous hips, and her eyes were narrowed. “What do you want?” she asked, running the words together as though they were all one.
Lily looked around her and saw that half a dozen other Suds Row women were watching from their dooryards. Then she focused all her attention on Velvet. “You tore my laundry down and stomped it into the dirt,” she accused evenly. “I just came here to tell you that it’ll take a lot more than a silly prank like that to drive me off.”
Velvet started slowly down the steps, her manner calculated to frighten Lily. “I didn’t go near your place after we talked,” the woman vowed.
Even though Lily knew Velvet would probably best her in an out-and-out fight, since she was nearly twice her size, she was too angry to be afraid. She took another step nearer, just to let Velvet know she wouldn’t be browbeaten. “You’re a liar.”
The laundress made to lunge at Lily, but someone called out, “Velvet, she’s the major’s woman!”
At that, Velvet stopped where she was.
It was Lily who was stung to fury. “That’s not true!” she said, sweeping all those downtrodden, destitute women up in one glance. “1 don’t belong to any man, and you don’t have to, either.”
There was a sudden silence, except for the creaking of the sagging screen door on Velvet’s shack. Private Ingram appeared in the opening, shirtless and barefoot, his thin brown hair rumpled. “You get in here, woman,” he said to Velvet. “Right now.”
Velvet cast a defiant glance back at him, but Lily could see that she was weakening. “1 never touched your damn laundry,” she spat, then she turned and obeyed Private Ingram’s summons.
Lily felt vaguely sick to her stomach as she walked away.
Back at home she rewashed and rehung all the laundry, and by the time the clothes were dry enough to press or fold it was stone dark outside.
Lily opened the prettyblue satin box Caleb had given her and took out a chocolate—she and Sandra had consumed the remains of the first box while looking at Mrs. Tibbet’s stereoptic pictures. The candy gave her a certain guilty pleasure, and she fixed herself a modest supper and went back to work.
Pressing the shirts and trousers took hours, and it was late when Lily finally set her work aside, got ready for bed, and read a chapter of Typhoon Sally to relax her mind.
She was in bed, exhausted and in a state resembling despair, when she finally allowed herself to think of Caleb. She remembered how it was when he’d kissed her, and held her, and taken the tips of her breasts into his mouth. She recalled the weight of him, the way he fit between her legs, the feel of his bare back under her hands.
And even though the stove had gone out, Lily felt warm.
Chapter
9
Velvet felt Judd Ingram’s eyes following her as she got out of bed that rainy April morning and put on her flannel wrapper. Standing in front of the streaky mirror affixed to the wall, she studied herself, turning first in one direction and then in the other. She wished she was dainty and fair-haired, like the major’s Lily, but there was no sense in wanting something that could never be.
She saw Judd’s reflection in the mirror, watched as he raised himself to sit with his back against the iron headboard. He took a cheroot and a match from the rickety little table beside the bed and began to smoke.
The smirk on his face made Velvet turn to face him directly. “What are you grinnin’ at?” she wanted to know.
He rested one hand on his narrow, almost concave chest and drew deeply on the smoke of the cheroot before answering. “You,” he replied. “And all them big ideas spinnin’ in your head right now. You’re wastin’ your time thinkin’ you don’t need me and the money I give you.”
Velvet supposed she wouldn’t have been so angry if she hadn’t been coming to the same conclusion. She went to the wall and laid a hand to her one good dress, a black and white checkered percale, feeling pride in its starchy freshness. Maybe she was wasting her time, just like Judd said, but she knew she had to do something to make her life better. If there was a way off of Suds Row, a way out from under Judd Ingram’s thumb, she wanted to find it.
He threw back the covers, annoyed at her silence. “You listening to me, woman?”
“Yes, Judd, I’m listenin’,” Velvet replied. She was afraid of him when he got that look in his eye.
Judd strode across the room and took a painful grip on her arm, whirling her around to face him. “You ain’t sweet, pretty little Lily,” he reminded her, shaking a finger in front of her nose, “and folks ain’t gonna fall all over themselves to look after you like they do for her. You listen to her, you let her get your hopes up that things is gonna be better, and you’re in for a bad fall.”
Velvet bit down on her lower lip, too scared to fight Jdd, willing him to let her go.
His eyes narrowed as he bent closer to her, and he spoke through his teeth, his breath foul from last night’s whiskey. “I ain’t through with you yet,” he rasped out, and then he dragged Velvet back to the bed and flung her onto the lumpy mattress.
He opened her wrapper, revealing her heavy breasts and her belly and private place.
Velvet closed her eyes and prayed it would be over fast. Judd was never a tender lover, but when he got in a mood like he was in now, he liked to be rough.
Sometimes it helped, Velvet had learned, if she just stared up at the ceiling and thought of something else. She remembered coming west on the wagon train with her pa and her brother Eldon. Except for the awful way she’d missed Hank, those had been good times, though surely not easy ones. Then the cholera had taken Eldon, and Pa had drowned crossing the Snake River….
Judd was nearly through; she could tell by his rapid breathing and the quick, fevered movements of his hips. He was thin, but his lean muscles were sinewy, like little corded bands of steel, and Velvet ran her hands up and down his back, urging him on.
When he stiffened in release he flung his head back and cried, “Lily—oh, God—Lily—”
She arched her back and, taking a page from Judd’s book, made him into Hank in her mind. To her surprise, her body suddenly tensed in involuntary elation, and the hoarse cries coming from her throat were real.
Judd laughed breathlessly, moving down just far enough to roll one of Velvet’s nipples between his teeth. “See there?” he gasped out. “You do need me.”
Yes, Hank, Velvet answered from the place within her where her spirit hid. Yes, I need you.
He circled the nipple with the tip of his tongue, and Velvet moaned, her hips already seeking new contact with his.
“Say it,” Judd ordered.
“I need you,” Velvet whispered as the rain battered at the thin, leaky roof above. Minutes later the sound was drowned out by her moans of release.
The rain was merely a dull drizzle as Lily hurried through the streets toward the Tibbet house, where there was to be a going-away party for Sandra. She devoutly hoped Caleb wouldn’t attend and, at the same time, prayed that he would.
Lily pulled her tattered corduroy cloak more tightly around her as a gust of wind blew a chilling mist toward her. She recalled that she had only a little wood left for the stove and wondered where she would get more, since the nearest trees were several miles from the fort. Even if she managed to chop one down, she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever get it back home.
Lamplight glowed in the windows of the Tibbet house, since it was a gloomy day, and Lily put her worries out of her mind as she opened the gate and hurried up the walk.
She knocked at the door and was admitted by Corporal Pierce, the good-looking, dark-haired young man who worked in Colonel Tibbet’s office and had leave time coming up soon.
He smiled broadly and ran one hand over his slicked-back hair. “Hello, Miss Lily,” he said, and he made a great business out of helping Lily off with her cloak, as if she hadn’t removed it on her own a thousand times. “Would you like some punch and cake?”