Caleb gazed at her for a long time, then went back to eating his stew. His silence was eloquent.
Lily finished her own food and rose to put the bowl in the sink. “Did you have Judd Ingram transferred?” she asked, because she needed the sound of Caleb’s voice, whether it was kind or indifferent.
“He’s in the stockade,” Caleb answered, pushing away his empty bowl. “The colonel’s considering making an example out of him.”
Lily felt the nair stand up on the back of her neck. “By doing what?” she asked.
“The law provides ways to discipline a soldier, Lily.”
She came to stand beside Caleb’s chair and looked directly into his eyes. “Such as?”
Caleb sighed heavily. “Such as a public whipping.”
Lily was horrified. Even though she despised Judd Ingram, she would never have wished him such a brutal fate. “Without a trial?” she demanded.
“Colonel Tibbet has the power to pronounce him guilty or innocent, and it turns out that there are other incidents in his record.”
Lily laid a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, but it wasn’t a gesture of affection. “If you permit such a barbarous thing to happen, Caleb Halliday, I vow that I’ll never speak to you again.”
He pushed back his chair, and Lily’s hand in the process, to stand. “If you have your way, we’ll be apart soon anyway. What do I have to lose?”
“Your honor,” Lily argued.
He crossed the room to take his campaign hat from one of the pegs beside the kitchen door. “When it comes to letting another man lay his hands on you, I have no honor,” he said bluntly.
She grasped the back of a chair as he put his hat on and reached for the doorknob. “Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here—”
“I need to think,” Caleb replied. “I’ll be at my office if you want me.”
“Well, I won’t be here when you get back.”
He grinned at her, but there was no fondness in the expression, no light in his eyes. “You won’t get far, will you?” he asked, and Lily saw mockery in the curve of his lips and the set of his shoulders. “I’ll wager you don’t want to face even Gertrude without my wedding band on your finger.”
He was right, and the knowledge stung Lily like the venom of a snake. She had no place to go now that her cottage had burned.
Slowly she turned away from Caleb and started out of the kitchen, but she flinched when she heard the door close. Lily had been lonely many times in her life, but nothing had ever weighed on her like Caleb’s absence, and his anger.
She ventured through the spacious house, eyes brimming with tears as she explored it. In the study she found books, shelf after shelf of them, and their presence assuaged her aching spirit somewhat. When life became too complicated for Lily to bear, she always took refuge in a book.
After considerable deliberation she chose a novel translated from the French, and, having built a fire on the study hearth and lit the wick in a china lamp, she settled into a large leather chair to read.
The book was considerably spicier than any of the dime novels Lily had devoured over the years, and her eyes were wide as she turned page after page. The heroine was having some very naughty adventures, and Lily knew she shouldn’t be enjoying them so. Still, she couldn’t put the volume down.
The clock on the mantelpiece was striking twelve when she finally finished the rollicking novel and set it aside. The instant Lily left the story world for reality her problems crowded around her like invisible specters.
She thought of her sisters and wished them well, wherever they were, but something else was distracting her tonight. Caleb had gone out to “think,” and he wasn’t home yet.
Had he ridden to Tylerville, through the dark of night, to take solace in the arms of some new mistress?
Lily wrapped her arms around herself and bit down on her lower lip in an effort to hold in her despair. She reminded herself forcefully that she had no say over what Caleb did, since she wasn’t his wife.
Because she was too proud to let him find her waiting up, Lily turned out the lamp and banked the fire, then felt her way upstairs in the dark. On the second floor the rooms were flooded with the light of a bright spring moon.
She selected the one furthest from Caleb’s and slipped inside. After sitting at the window, looking down at the silver-bathed yards of the houses around her for some time, Lily finally stripped to her camisole and drawers and got into bed.
There was no scent of Caleb on the sheets, and that was both a relief and a torment to Lily. She snuggled down into the musty covers and waited in pained silence for the sound of a door opening and closing in the distance.
When Caleb arrived home from his office, where he’d sat thinking in the darkness for hours, Lily wlse was diin his bed. While the discovery certainly didn’t surprise him, it was painful. For one wild moment he thought she’d gone—maybe even persuaded the guards to let her ride out of the fort.
His panic subsided when his senses told him Lily was nearby.
He found her sleeping soundly in the spare room, arms and legs akimbo, blankets tossed aside. Gently he covered her, bent to kiss her forehead as he might have kissed his sister, and then left the room.
Despite his relief at finding Lily safe, Caleb was still troubled. There were so many things he and Lily hadn’t resolved, might never resolve. At one time he’d been so certain about the course his life was taking, so sure that he was doing what he wanted to do. Now he felt more confused with every passing day.
All he was sure of was that he wanted Lily and needed her, not just in his bed but in every part of his life.
Alone in his room, he sat down in a chair to pull off his boots. After tossing them aside he stripped away his shirt and belt and trousers, climbing naked into a bed perfumed by Lily’s presence.
He ached, not just to have her beneath him, but to have her beside him. He wanted to tell her why he needed to go home and face Joss, why he was tired of the army, why he wanted sons and daughters. He wanted her to hold him in her arms and tell him that everything would be all right, that they would work out all their differences and learn to live together in peace.
It seemed impossible. Turning onto his stomach, Caleb pounded his pillow into shape and collapsed into it. The erection he’d gotten, thinking about Lily, forced him to flip over onto his back again. If that woman had the sense God gave a gopher, she’d have been in that bed, warm and willing. She’d have taken him to her, burned him with her gentle fire, made him cry out in the night.
Caleb’s shaft seemed to double in size.
Cursing, he got out of bed, walked into the bathroom, and, without lighting the kerosene-fed heater under the water tank, began filling the tub.
He gasped and bared his teeth when he settled into the frigid water, but it did its work. Ten minutes later he was in bed, shivering even in his sleep.
When Lily awakened the next morning she quickly discovered that Caleb had already left the house. After washing she dressed and groomed her hair, then squared her shoulders and went out. It was time she stopped hiding under Caleb’s roof.
She was halfway up the Tibbets’ front walk when Velvet came bursting out to greet her.
“Lily!” she whispered, as though she’d never expected to see her friend again.
Lily smiled wanly. “Hello, Velvet. Have you come to warn me that the Scarlet Letter Society is out to put an ’A’ on my chest?”
Velvet looked baffled. “The who is about to do what?”
“Never mind,” Lily replied. “Is Mrs. Tibbet at home?”
Velvet shook her head. “She’s at a special meetin’ over at the church.”
Lily sighed. “They’re pobably casting lots to decide whether to tar-and-feather me or hand me over to the Indians.”
Eyes rounded, Velvet shook her head. “No, they’re jawin’ about what to do with the women and kids that still live down on Suds Row.” Hesitantly she gripped Lily’s hand. “I’ve been wor
ried ever since I heard about what Judd done. You didn’t set foot out of the major’s house, and I was afraid you’d been hurt bad in the fire.”
“I’m sorry, Velvet,” Lily said softly, touched at her friend’s obvious concern. Her cheeks stung a little as she remembered what she’d been doing, with and for Caleb. “I didn’t think anybody would be concerned.”
Velvet was starting off down the walk, and she clearly wanted Lily to go along. “They’re going to knock down my shack and chop it up for firewood, and I don’t want to miss that!”
Lily laughed, but before the sound had died away an idea came to her. A stunning, daring, wonderful idea.
“Come on. Velvet!” she cried, lifting her skirts and bursting into a dead run. “We’ve got to get there fast!”
Lily ran breathlessly down the street, her skirts still clasped in her hands, Velvet hot on her heels. She was gasping when she reached Suds Row just in time to see the last wall of Velvet’s weathered hovel topple inward.
“Stop!” she screamed as one of the half dozen men assigned to the detail hoisted an ax to begin breaking a wall into manageable pieces.
Although Lily had no power to give orders and expect to have them obeyed, the soldier lowered the ax to his side.
Corporal Pierce approached, with a touch to the brim of his cap and an embarrassed aversion of his eyes. “Begging your pardon, Miss Lily,” he said uncomfortably, “but we’ve got orders to follow here.”
By then Lily had almost caught her breath. “I—want it—” she gasped out.
Wilbur looked patently horrified. “Surely you wouldn’t consider living on Suds Row,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “If the major won’t marry you, I will.”
Lily was now exasperated as well as winded. “Of course I don’t mean to live on the Row,” she answered, ignoring Wilbur’s whispered offer to make an honest woman of her. “I want to haul that building onto my land and nail it together again.”
A buzz went through the small company of men, then spread to the women looking on, children clinging to their skirts. Their eyes were flinty with hardship and perpetual suspicion.
Lily put her hands on her hips. “I have a homestead a few miles from here,” she explained. “In order to prove up, I’ve got to have a house, and I don’t see why this one wouldn’t do until I get my lumber.”
Wilbur sighed. He clearly wasn’t much fonder of Lily’s homesteading notions than Caleb was, and he had even less room to say so. “This shack is government property,” he said, “and the colonel told us to chop it up for the mess hall stove.”
“It’s such a waste just to burn it,” Lily reasoned, her voice carrying through the small crowd.
“How would you get it out to your land anyhow?” one of the laundresses inquired. She sounded curious rather than hostile.
“You’d need lots of help,” observed another.
Three of the soldiers volunteered to haul the four downed walls to Lily’s homestead by mule team. Corporal Wilbur Pierce, not to be outdone, insisted on leading the expedition.
“Wait a minute,” Velvet called out. “What about your orders? How are you going to explain this to Colonel Tibbet?”
Lily glared at her friend. “He doesn’t care what happens to this pile of old boards,” she insisted. “He just wants it cleared away.”
The soldiers discussed this, and Wilbur allowed as how he couldn’t turn a wheel without speaking to the colonel first. He set off to do so while Lily walked around and around the fallen building. She’d live in it until her other house was built, then turn it into a chicken coop or a stable for Dancer.
It never once occurred to her that Colonel Tibbet might have an objection, and, as it happened, he didn’t. Wilbur returned within fifteen minutes, beaming.
“He said he didn’t give a damn what I did with the thing as long as I got it out of here so Mrs. Tibbet would stop pestering him about ‘flourishing sin,’” Wilbur confided, reaching Lily’s side. His smile faded. “There’s no telling what the major’ll have to say when he hears about this, though.”
“Nothing,” Lily said confidently. “Caleb’s under Colonel Tibbet’s command, same as you are.”
“He’s going to tan your hide, that’s what he’s going to do,” Velvet fretted, fidgeting at Lily’s side.
“He wouldn’t dare.”
Wilbur cleared his throat. “Don’t be too sure of it. The major isn’t afraid of anybody or anything. He probably wouldn’t think twice about walloping one puny little woman.”
Lily gave the corporal a quelling look, causing him to blush to his ears. “When can we move this building?” she asked practically.
The soldiers consulted with one another and agreed that Sunday would be the day, since they’d all be off duty then.
Lily would have liked to undertake the project that very morning, but she knew she wasn’t going to get her way, so she thanked the men graciously, and they left. Wilbur hesitated, but in the end he followed the others.
Assessing the women around her, Lily approached the one with the most threatening countenance. She held out her hand in a gesture of friendship but said nothing.
The woman, not big like Velvet but wiry and hard-looking, ignored Lily’s hand. “Are you like them church ladies?” she demanded. “You wantin’ to see us run off for good?”
Lily drew a deep breath, then let it out again. Although she could be dous if the situation called for it, she didn’t make a habit of telling lies. “I don’t approve of what you do,” she answered, “but I’m not part of any crusade to send you away. The ladies of Fort Deveraux aren’t any fonder of me than they are of you.”
At this, the woman spat into the dirt, then beamed and returned Lily’s handshake.
With great personal effort Lily kept herself from cringing. “Thank you,” she said.
She would have turned and walked away, but the woman engaged Velvet in conversation.
“How’re you doing over there at the Tibbet place? They treatin’ you right?”
“I’ve got use of the family bathroom,” Velvet replied proudly.
There was a collective gasp of wonder at this, and Lily felt an aching sorrow to think that most of these women envied Velvet her fresh start in life. They weren’t prostituting themselves and ruining their hands with lye soap by choice. after all. They were just trying to survive.
Velvet took Lily’s arm and started pulling her back in the direction of the officers’ houses. “We’ve got a lot to do,” she called to her friends, in explanation.
“Did Hank come to call yet?” Lily asked eagerly as she and Velvet hastened along the hard-packed road.
“No,” Velvet answered, looking crestfallen. “I figure he’s probably heard about me and Judd. Couldn’t have helped it, with everybody yammering about whether Major Halliday’s going to horsewhip that little two-peckered cuss or not.”
Lily felt herself go pale, and not because of Velvet’s language. She’d hoped she’d dissuaded Caleb from having Private Ingram whipped, but it appeared that he was still entertaining the idea. She drew a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Do you still love Hank?”
“Never loved nobody else,” Velvet said firmly.
“Well, then, why don’t you go to him before he gives up and leaves the fort forever?”
Velvet’s voice was hushed. “You don’t think he’d really do that, do you?”
Lily shrugged, wondering why she couldn’t set aside her misgivings and take her own advice. She ought to go to Caleb with a white flag in one hand and let him marry her. “Men get discouraged, just like women do,” she answered.
Velvet looked delightfully worried. “Oh, my. I just naturally figured he’d come to me, since he was in the wrong and all.”
With a smile Lily took Velvet’s hand for a moment and squeezed it. “If I were you, I’d go to him and tell him just how wrong he was.”
A touching eagerness showed in Velvet’s face, but then she gave Lily a stern look. “If I were yo
u,” she countered, “I’d get the major’s weddin’ ring on my finger, and his baby in my belly, and I’d forget this whole stupid idea of homesteadin’!”
Insulted, Lily lifted her chin and quickener pace, as if to leave Velvet behind. “Well, you’re not me,” she said stiffly.
Velvet’s sigh was a little forlorn. “No,” she agreed. “I ain’t you.”
Chapter
17
When Lily arrived at Caleb’s house prepared to tell him that she refused to spend another night under his roof, no matter how he might protest, she got a surprise. He’d left a note in the center of the kitchen table, brusquely informing her that he’d taken some of his troops on patrol and that he’d be gone about a week. His crisp order that she behave herself was followed by a hastily scrawled “Regards, Caleb.”
“Regards!” Lily muttered, the note rattling a little in her hand. “The man steals my virtue, holds me prisoner in his bed like some harem girl, and then he has the temerity to offer me his regards!”
It was only after time had soothed her nettled pride that Lily realized what a stroke of good fortune it was, Caleb’s being gone a full week. By the time he got back she’d be settled on her homestead, living in the house the United States Army had so conveniently discarded.
Humming, Lily went about straightening up Caleb’s house, that being the least she could do in return for his hospitality—however selfishly motivated it was. She’d made very good progress by the time Mrs. Tibbet came to call that afternoon.
“Would you like tea?” Lily asked, straightening her dusty apron as she admitted her friend.
Gertrude beamed. “So you’ve married him after all. Oh, Lily, that’s grand!”
Disappointing Mrs. Tibbet was one of the most difficult things Lily had ever done. “But I haven’t, you see,” she said, lowering her eyes. “The place needed cleaning, and I didn’t want to be obliged—”
“Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Tibbet. As she entered the house she tugged off her gloves and shook her head. “I don’t mind telling you that it’s a blow,” she said. “I was so sure you’d come to your senses.”
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