Lily bit back a sharp reply and forced herself to smile. “About that tea …”
“I couldn’t swallow a thing,” said Gertrude, and she did indeed look a little peaked. She moved unsteadily into the parlor and collapsed into a chair. Her manner was quite resolute when she spoke again, however. “Lily, I simply cannot tolerate this situation. It absolutely will not do. You are not only ruining your own reputation, my dear, but Caleb’s career as well.”
Lily was dejected. “I’d never hurt Caleb on purpose,” she said.
“I don’t know about that,” Mrs. Tibbet replied, her blue eyes sharp and uncompromising as they swept over Lily’s person. “You’ve quite bewitched him, and you’ve as much as admitted to me that you and Caleb have been intimate. And yet you refuse to marry the man. Do you think that does>
Lily swallowed. “I suppose it does,” she confessed. “But I do love him—that’s why I can’t resist when he wants”—she hesitated and blushed furiously—“when he wants me. And I’m only here because the cottage burned and I had no place to stay.”
“You know very well that you could have come to the colonel and me!” Mrs. Tibbet flared, shaking her finger at Lily.
Lily swallowed again, and her eyes were burning with unshed tears. “I know. Caleb has only to touch me, or look at me in a certain way, and I lose my head.”
Mrs. Tibbet relented a little in the face of Lily’s abject repentance and spoke more gently. “Believe it or not, I do understand—it was the same with the colonel and me, once upon a time. The difference is that I couldn’t wait to marry John—the moment he asked me, I set a date.”
It was hopeless trying to explain why she couldn’t marry Caleb. Nobody understood—sometimes Lily didn’t understand it herself. “I’ll be leaving the fort on Sunday,” she said finally, “if all goes well. May I stay with you until then?”
“Certainly, though it’s a little late if you’re hoping to save your reputation. Nothing will do that but a wedding!”
Lily bit her lower lip. Her reputation be damned, then, for there would be no wedding—not unless Caleb decided to live with her on the homestead. And he’d have to give his word that he wouldn’t drag her off to Pennsylvania, either. “Thank you,” she said, leaving her other thoughts unspoken. Since she had no things to gather, she and Mrs. Tibbet left the house at once.
The soup tureen nearly slipped from Velvet’s hands when she walked into the Tibbets’ dining room that night and found Hank Robbins sitting at the table, bold as you please. His brown eyes seemed to strip away her dress as she stood there, and suddenly she felt as delicate and attractive as Lily.
“Hello, Velvet,” he said.
Velvet glanced at Lily in desperation. Her friend was smiling, a sure sign that inviting Hank for dinner had been her idea. “Hello,” she managed to croak, setting the tureen down in the middle of the table with a clunk. Hank’s hair brushed the underside of her breast as she reached, and she felt as though she’d stepped into a lake just as lightning was striking the water.
Somehow she got back to the kitchen, where she used up a good five minutes trying to figure out what to do. The only thing she could think of was strangling Lily.
Just walking in there and serving the roast beef, once the first course was over, took all the fortitude Velvet possessed. She gave Lily a look that would have ignited a wet blanket even as she carefully avoided Hank’s gaze.
“Mr. Robbins was just telling us that he didn’t mean to leave you at the altar at all,” Lily announced with a bright smile. “He was hurt in an accident—you’ve noticed, of course, that he limps—and when he was supposed to be at your wedding he was laid up in the hospital in the next town.”
Velvet scowled at Hank as the pain of that day came back, fresh as ever. “He could’ve sent a message,” she said.
“I did,” Hank replied quietly. “My guess would be your dear old daddy just didn’t pass it on to you. He wanted you to go west with him, remember, so he’d have somebody to cook his meals and wash his clothes.”
Velvet reflected that that was just the kind of nasty, underhanded thing her pa would have done, God rest his soul. “You sent a message?” was all she could say, even though she knew it sounded stupid.
Hank nodded. “I told you I loved you,” he said. “I’ve been searching for you ever since, Velvet.”
“Do we get any dessert?” the colonel boomed.
Lily was immediately out of her chair. “I’ll finish serving dinner and clean up afterwards,” she volunteered. “Velvet, why don’t you and Mr. Robbins go out for a walk?”
Tears slipped down Velvet’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the corner of her apron. “You don’t know what I’ve been doing all this time!” she wailed to Hank, and then she turned and fled back to the kitchen.
She dashed out the back door and down the steps, but she found she could go no further than the rear gate. She was consumed by grief and stood sobbing into her palms.
Hank stood behind her at a little distance—she was aware of him long before he touched her shoulder and said her name.
She forced herself to turn and face him, but she still couldn’t speak.
“What is it?” he asked quietly, his eyes full of concern. “What have you been doing that’s so terrible?”
A great shudder of anguish moved through Velvet. Once he learned the truth Hank would never forgive her, but there had been enough running away, and she couldn’t bring herself to lie. Not to this man. She accepted the handkerchief he offered and dried her face.
“Things was hard after Pa and Eldon died,” she managed to say, mopping at her eyes again.
Hank nodded, his gaze tender, silently urging her to go on.
Velvet drew in a deep breath and gripped a picket of the gate in one hand. For the first time in her life she thought she might faint. “I did cleanin’ work mostly till I came to Fort Deveraux. I’d heard I could make a lot of money here, washin’ clothes for the soldiers.” She paused and looked away for a moment, drawing strength from the orange and crimson blaze of the setting sun. “I found out soon enough that there were a lot of other women here lookin’ to wash clothes—there just wasn’t enough work to go around. I—1 ended up takin’ money from men.”
For a moment Hank just stood there, the color draining out of his skin. “For what?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.
Velvet felt as though she was being torn apart piece by piece, organ by organ. She lowered her eyes for a moment, then met Hank’s gaze squarely. He knew—she could see that—but he was going to make her tell him. “For sleepin’ with me,” she said.
With a muttered exclamation Hank turned away, his broad shoulders stiff beneath the rough, plain fabric of his shirt.
Velvet reached out her hand, then let it fall helplessly to her side. She’d lost him a second time, and the experience was a cruel one. She doubted she’d ever recover from it. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He whirled so suddenly that Velvet was startled and leapt backward. His face was taut with anger and pain.
“You were my woman,” he whispered with hoarse fury. “How could you have let another man touch you?”
The resilience that had allowed Velvet to survive the many hardships life had dealt her surged to the fore. She advanced on Hank, raging. “I wasn’t your woman. I wasn’t anybody’s woman. I was all alone in this world, and I did what I had to do!”
Hesitantly Hank lifted his hand to her face. His thumb brushed away a tear. “There wasn’t a day or a night that I didn’t think about you, Velvet.”
She hugged herself, afraid to hope or trust. “I didn’t love none of those men,” she said miserably. “I could only stand lettin’ them touch me because I pretended they was you.”
Hank’s smile was soft and infinitely sad. “I’m not going to lose you again because of pride,” he said. “I don’t like that you took money from those men, but I figure I love you enough to get by that in time. All that really matters to me is now,
Velvet. Now and next week and next year, and all the years after that, when you and I are going to be together.”
Velvet hardly dared to believe her ears. She’d had very little good fortune in her life; she didn’t know how to deal with much besides trouble. “Folks around here won’t ever forget—there’ll be talk—”
He laid two fingers to her lips, silencing her. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’ve found you. That’s all that’s important.”
With a sob, Velvet let her head drop against Hank’s sturdy chest. Tenderly he enfolded her in his arms.
“Hush, now,” he said. “Things are going to be different after this. Very different.”
An hour later Velvet and Hank were married in the Tibbets’ front parlor, and Lily and Mrs. Tibbet cried throughout the ceremony. Velvet figured Lily was touched by the romance of it, and Mrs. Tibbet was probably grieving because she’d lost another housekeeper.
Velvet didn’t care about anything but the man at her side.
The sun was just setting when he handed her up into his rig, parked out behind the Tibbets’ house. The inside was cool and dark and smelled of chemicals, but it might as well have been a palace as a photographer’s wagon, for all Velvet cared.
As Lily looked down on the photographer’s wagon from an upstairs window that night she was almost overcome with loneliness. She pictured Caleb spreading his bedroll out on the ground and remembered how it had been that night when the two of them had slept on her land, with the creek flowing by in the darkness.
She recalled that first release, brutal in its force. The stars had seemed to melt in the sky….
Resolutely Lily turned away from the window and began undressing. It was Velvet’s wedding night, not her own, she scolded herself, so she might as well stop having such wicked thoughts.
Of course, thoughts don’t go away just because a body decides they’re wicked—sometimes that makes them all the more tenacious. Lily stretched uncomfortably, her body tensed in a way that only Caleb could relieve.
She bit her upper lip. Once Caleb returned from patrol and found out she’d moved onto her land, he’d probably wash his hands of her once and for all and take up with a woman who was less of a trial. Bianca, for instance.
Pain speared Lily as she imagined Caleb leaving Bianca’s house in Tylerville, whistling under his breath. Maybe Velvet and Mrs. Tibbet were right; maybe she should just get Caleb’s wedding band on her finger and his baby growing inside her, if it wasn’t already, and put homesteading straight out of her mind.
A burning ache settled between Lily’s legs. If she didn’t marry Caleb, what was she going to do when she felt like this? And she knew she would, over and over again, night after night and year after year.
“Caleb,” she whispered, and the May breeze flowing into the room through her open window seemed to whisper back.
She shook his name off with a toss of her head. She knew better than to depend on anybody else, especially a man, for anything she needed. Lily spread her legs and arched her neck, and after a few feverish minutes the tension in her came unsprung, like a watch too tightly wound.
It wasn’t the same as it would have been with Caleb, though, and Lily cried a little as she settled down to sleep.
On Sunday morning, while the church service was going on, the pieces of Lily’s house were loaded onto two drays, which were drawn by teams of sturdy army mules. Lily thought the Lord might be against the project—it being the Sabbath day—when a wall slipped its rope bindings and slid onto the ground before they’d even reached the gates.
Behind the drays was a wagon carrying the wood stove and furniture that had been in Velvet’s house. Lily wasn’t looking forward to sleeping on the mattress where so many men had been entertained, but she supposed it was better than stretching out on the floor. The things she’d ordered in Spokane would start arriving soon anyway. She could make do until then.
At noon the small party reached Lily’s plot of land.
She got out a hand-drawn map that she’d made herself and carefully showed Wilbur where she wanted the shack to be erected. Her permanent house would be built with the back wall on the very edge of the property line so she could look out her front window and watch her crops growing.
Lily had been in Mrs. Tibbet’s kitchen since before the sun rose, making doughnuts for the men. These she’d carried in a picnic basket strapped on top of one of the loads. A keg of nails and a collection of tools had been brought along, too, and soon the battered walls were going up.
Using a borrowed ax, Lily went to the woods at the fare of her property and found a fallen tree. She began chopping at it, meaning to secure wood for her stove, and before she’d made more than a dent in the thick bark she was sweating like a field hand.
Lily decided she was going to need a saw and went back to get one from the supply wagon.
The walls of the shack were up, and the dedicated young soldiers were hoisting the roof into place. Lily stopped to watch as the other men started carrying things inside.
When they got to the small cook stove she remembered her mission and began plundering for a saw. She found one and started back toward the woods, only to have Corporal Pierce fall into step beside her.
“Here,” he said, taking the saw from her in an undeniably arbitrary way.
Lily was too grateful for Wilbur’s help to point out that he was being high-handed. “I’ll have to learn to cut my own wood sooner or later,” she reasoned.
Wilbur pushed his blue cap to the back of his head and looked patently annoyed. “Maybe so, but I’ve got leave coming this month, and I mean to see that you’re set up proper. Some of the men will help.”
On impulse Lily linked her arm with Wilbur’s. “No,” she protested. “I know you’ve been looking forward to this leave—you had plans for it.”
Wilbur favored her with a bright grin, and Lily reflected that if it hadn’t been for Caleb, and their differing dreams, she might have fallen in love with this young soldier. “Sure I have plans for it. Chopping wood and putting up a new house, once that lumber arrives.”
Lily laid her head against the rounding of his shoulder for a moment. “I’m grateful, Wilbur,” she said. When she looked up at him again she saw bewilderment in his eyes.
When they reached the fallen tree Wilbur set to work, sawing with a vengeance. Lily couldn’t just stand still and watch him, so she took up the ax she’d left behind and did her best to cut away some of the larger branches.
There was a neat pile of firewood on the ground within an hour, and Lily was about to gather up an armful to carry back when Wilbur gripped her gently by the shoulders and made her stand up straight again.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, as though the fact troubled him terribly.
Lily felt uneasy. “Wilbur—”
Before she could get out more than his name he dragged her against him and kissed her soundly on the mouth. It was over before Lily gathered the impetus to push away, and it left her stricken. She hadn’t expected to enjoy another man’s kiss, but there had been definite stirrings deep down inside her, and Lily was horrified.
She’d been right, she realized, in fearing that she was like her mother. She squatted hastily to gather up the firewood again, her vision blurred by tears of pure shame. “Don’t you ever do that again, Wilbur Pierce,” she whispered. “Do you hear me? Not ever!”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbur said, crouching to face her and pick up chunks of wood from the small tree.
Lily thrust herself to her feet and started back toward her little house, which was now completely assembled. The photographer’s wagon was sitting down by the creek, and the horses, unharnessed, were drinking.
Velvet and Hank had come to visit. Lily was so delighted that she put the episode with Wilbur out of her mind, dashed away her tears with the back of one hand, and quickened her pace. After dropping the wood by the front door she embraced Velvet, who had been watching Hank set up his camera.
“Mr.
Robbins thought you might like a few pictures,” Velvet informed her friend. “To commemorate the occasion.”
Lily was delighted by the idea, and she posed, looking suitably serious, beside the front door. A tremendous flash exploded from the bar Hank was holding high above his head, and she started.
“Someday you’ll show these photographs to your grandchildren,” Hank enthused, coming out from beneath the black cloth that draped both himself and his camera.
I’m probably never going to have any, Lily thought sadly, but her smile was unwavering.
Wilbur and his friends went back to the trees with a wagon for the rest of Lily’s firewood, and Lily and Velvet walked down to the creek with water buckets.
“Hank and me, we’re probably going to be your neighbors,” Velvet confided. “We got our eye on a piece of land over yonder, on the other side of them trees. Matter of fact, we’re on our way to Tylerville to file a claim.”
“But what about his photography business?”
“Hank says he can still take pictures now and then. What we really want is a piece of land, so we can make a place for our sons and daughters to grow up.”
Lily put down her bucket and flung her arms around her friend for a brief hug. “Oh, Velvet, that’s wonderful! I won’t feel so lonely, knowing you’re nearby.”
Velvet returned the embrace somewhat awkwardly, and she didn’t look all that enthusiastic. “I don’t understand why you’d want to live out here all by yourself anyway, especially when you could be with the major.”
Lily didn’t want to talk or even think about Caleb. Or the kiss she and Wilbur had just exchanged under the fragrant pine trees. “A woman doesn’t need a man to live, Velvet. And I’m living proof of that.”
“Oh, no?” countered Velvet. “Well, what about all these blue-suited monkeys fetchin’ and carryin’ and nailin’ and sawin’? Where would you be without them, Lily Chalmers?”
Lily picked up her bucket again and started toward the house. “They’d have helped a man as willingly as they’re helping me,” she said.
“In a pig’s eye,” Velvet retorted. “They know you’re going to be out here all alone, Lily, and some of them just may expect somethin’ in return for all this neighborliness!”
Lily and the Major Page 26