The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback)

by Sydney Alexander

  Cherry stood rigid, but her mind was ablaze and her body — well, there were parts of her body that were equally ablaze. They stood that way for a long moment, while the sounds of the party and Mrs. Mayfield’s protests and Patty’s laughter faded away to nothing, utterly absorbed with one another, and then Cherry felt a tug on her skirt, and she bent down to see the flower that Little Edward had brought her, thinking as she did so that if it were not for this darling little boy, she might have made the mistake of going over to talk to him. “It’s lovely, darling,” she breathed into his ear. “You’re lovely, too.”

  But she was trembling, and her heart was racing. And she could not help but wonder if Jared’s heart was as troubled as hers. When she lifted her eyes again, there he was still watching her, and she thought she knew.

  And so the fuse was lit, and they could neither of them deny it, though they would not have said anything aloud. Two broken hearts do not speak their secrets easily. But things crept along in their own time. If courtship in London was a brazen thing, done in front of God and Men, Mothers and Fathers, Peers and Chaperones, with a carefully choreographed dance of reels and drives, waltzes and flowers, and a few words with the lady’s father in the latter gentleman’s library to settle the arrangement, the courtship of Jared Reese, bachelor, and Charlotte Beacham, widow, was a slow, secretive thing, a blossom peeking shyly out of a dark crevice in an early uncertain spring, and Patty Mayfield Barnsley did not say a word, despite being simply bursting with the gossip, not even to her darling Matt. And darling Matt was so delightfully unobservant about that sort of thing, he didn’t even realize it was going on right before his very eyes, in his very house.

  ***

  It happened like this: after the wedding, Patty was set on the tradition of having Cherry over for tea once a week. She was madly in love with her English friend, with her accent, and her dresses, and her mysterious history back in that land of fairy tales and castles that Patty’s grandparents had so foolishly forsworn, coming to a country with no princes to fall in love with her and make her into royalty. Patty had often, growing up, read her books of fairy tales and lamented that she would never kiss a frog that was secretly a prince; there were scarcely any frogs in these dry parts, anyhow, and the ones that were here would surely not have emigrated from their royal ponds and come all the way to the desolate prairies in search of their true love’s kiss. These things were reserved for the lucky girls who had stayed home, in their rightful place, as milkmaids and goose-girls in an indistinct land of frequent rains and green hills. Patty was certain of it.

  She had never lost her anglophilia, and she was endlessly fascinated that Charlotte Beacham had abandoned her own chances at a prince and come to America. Oh, sure, she had already been married, and widowed, and was clearly deeply affected by her husband’s death. But all that had surely gone out the window when she had been lying under Jared on Patty’s upstairs landing, wrapped in Patty’s wedding veil, kissing him so passionately. Patty was immediately struck with an Idea, and Patty’s tenacious mind was not going to let go of that Idea, no matter how unlikely it might seem to everyone else in Bradshaw. She was going to see that the English princess kissed her American frog, again and again, and if he turned into a prince, so much the better… but Patty had grown old enough, and wise enough, in her own love affair to know that sometimes love makes up the difference between a frog and a prince.

  And so the afternoon tea became a weekly ritual, with the forced addition of Matt and Jared.

  “I don’t want to sit to tea like some sort of dandy,” Matt had groused. They had been married all of seven days and already she had instituted a number of rules he had not expected, like taking off his boots when he came into their fresh, sawdust-smelling little house on the outskirt of town, and taking his shirt clean off to wash all over himself before supper. Tea parties was really taking it too far. “I have work to do.”

  That was a fib. Matt, officially retired from the cowboy life, was laboring gently at being a carpenter, but he mainly sat and admired pieces of wood, and thought about what he was going to do with them. Patty had kept an allowance from her father that was more than generous, and the money Matt had saved from cattle driving and few investments Jared had steered him into — since he had never paid any mind to earthly possessions, he had an impressive bank balance that he simply never thought about — was plenty for them to live on while he day-dreamed. One of these days, Patty supposed, he would get around to building a nice cabinet or a set of chairs and they could send them back east on the train to be sold. She wasn’t going to rush them. She liked her Matt to be a dreamer. But she wasn’t going to let him off the hook with the Wednesday afternoon tea party.

  “You’ll be there, Matthew Barnsley, because Jared is your good friend and Mrs. Beacham is mine,” she announced fiercely, and slammed a few pots around in the washtub for good measure, to show that she was deadly in earnest.

  “I don’t see what the two things have to do with each other,” Matt complained. He picked at a toenail with a pocketknife, then stopped abruptly, presumably remembering a recently wifely edict against such behavior. He pocketed the knife and sighed deeply, eyeing the offending toenail. Patty was unperturbed by his disappointment. She knew the toenail would keep until he was safely alone in his workshop tomorrow morning. She had no laws governing the workshop. Matt continued in an aggrieved tone: “Why on earth should Jared come to tea? That’s not like him.”

  “Well, he’s accepted the invitation, so I guess you can just ask him when he gets here.” Patty had especially enjoyed Jared’s fumbling thanks when she had way-laid him in the Central Emporium, as he fished through a drawer full of nails, and pointedly invited him to tea with herself and Mrs. Beacham. “Mrs. Beacham?” he’d asked, as if he’d never heard of such a personage before. “Oh! Oh… I see… well… well yes, thank you, Miss Mayfield. Mrs. Barnsley.” The whole thing had been too much fun. Patty was enjoying being a match-maker; Matt would just have to sacrifice his happiness for an hour on a Wednesday afternoon so that she could pursue her own line of work, that was all. Everyone would be happier for it in the end.

  “I don’t know what to do at a tea party,” Matt grumbled.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Patty was unsympathetic. She opened the kitchen door and flung out the greasy dish-water. “I’ll make you a cup of tea right now, and you can practice drinking it. That’s about all you have to do.”

  ***

  Two weeks after the wedding, and the kiss, and the smoldering silence that had followed it, Cherry was setting her bonnet on the bed in Patty’s spare room and placing her light woolen coat next to it. The day was gray and the clouds were swollen; the coldness of fall rains seemed to be inevitable, and Cherry had shivered when she looked out the shanty’s meagre little panes of glass, glass she had scrimped for because she could not bear boarding up her window for winter. She could scarcely stand to look at the brown prairie and the leaden sky. Winter was coming, and she had not made arrangements to stay in town. There were rooms at the boarding-house, or she could have stayed with Patty, making do with their spare room, while the winter storms she had heard so much about raged outside the snug little house.

  But she could not quite come to terms with living amongst other people yet. She and Little Edward made such a cozy couple, alone on the homestead. The Jorgenson girl, so silent, was hardly a real presence to her, although she supposed Little Edward might have thought differently of his playmate. Alone with her memories, she could keep her love for Edward alive and present in her thoughts at all times, something she was newly resolved to do. And that was all she had left of him; was it any wonder that she wasn’t willing to give it up? Was it any wonder that she tried to tamp down those dangerous feelings for Jared? The very kisses that they had shared were disrespectful to Edward.

  She had never expected that it would take a resolution to stay faithful to her memory of Edward.

  The truth was, Cherry did not like to admit to he
rself that she was beginning to forget his face.

  She smoothed her dress; the wine-colored calico with its little sprigs of ivory was plain, but pretty. The ivory lace around her throat was rescued from a much older, much finer gown that had not survived homestead life, and the colors set off her golden hair beautifully. She touched the knot at the back of her head, making certain all her hair was in place; it had been windy on the ride in and her bonnet had been shaking violently atop her head. But no, she thought, peering into the dim little mirror atop the bureau, she looked fine.

  Little Edward was chortling in the parlor; she could hear him making himself adorable to Patty, and Patty laughing back at him. Patty would make a lovely mother, Cherry thought absently. She had a heart of gold, and she would do anything for her friends. And Matt would be a sweet, if not particularly clever, father. She imagined the little house overflowing with children in a few short years, necessitating additions, extra bedrooms, the ever-present scent of pine and the curls of shavings tracked in on boots, and felt a squeeze of jealousy tighten her chest. But it was no use feeling jealous; she had had her Edward, and now she did not, and that was the end of that discussion, wasn’t it?

  Then she heard deep voices alongside Little Edward’s and Patty’s, and her heart stopped altogether. Her heart that had been buried deep in England, that treacherous organ, made its presence known when she heard Jared’s voice.

  With numb fingers, she turned the brass door-handle and went down the hall, towards the sounds of the tea party.

  ***

  Jared had known what he was getting himself into when he agreed to Patty’s invitation. But that didn’t stop him from reeling at the sight of her like a man drunk, tripping backwards slightly as his heart leapt and his head spun. She was so beautiful, so damned beautiful. She stood uncertainly in the doorway like a mirage in the desert, tremulous and nervous, one hand still poised upon the door handle as if she was still trying to decide if she should enter or turn and seek her escape, and all he knew then was that she couldn’t go. He went across the room, crossing the snug little parlor in three leaping strides, and put a hand upon her wrist, where he should not have trespassed.

  “Mrs. Beacham,” he rasped, voice husky, throat dry. “It must have been a chilly ride in. Come sit by the fire.” And he drew her into the room, his hand burning on her skin, and she followed meekly, her footsteps light on the bare boards, so light compared to the heavy tread of his boots clapping upon their fresh surface! She let him show her to a chair by the fire and only then, when she was seated comfortably, did he relinquish her slim wrist and and stand by the chair, gazing down at her, feeling utterly foolish and flummoxed and without any idea what to say or do.

  He realized, after a moment, that Matt, Patty, and Little Edward were all watching this performance with absorption, and that he had made a spectacle of both himself and Cherry. Oh dear Lord, the things they must be thinking right now. He cleared his throat, anxious to say something, anything, that might get a conversation going, help them forget how very oddly he had behaved towards the still-silent and white-faced Cherry, but he couldn’t think of a damn thing. A log broke in a shower of golden-red sparks in the fireplace; the noise seemed deafening. Everyone jumped.

  Matt was the first to break the silence. “Well now, Jared, and here I am, a married man! All the fun is over now! I guess you’ll have to go Galveston alone this winter after all. Sorry about that.”

  Either Matt realized nearly immediately that he’d said the wrong thing, else Patty pinched him viciously in order to explain to him that he’d said the wrong thing: both would have explained the sudden look of pain that twisted his face and then disappeared. But it was Cherry’s look of shock that twisted Jared’s gut. Why had he ever said he was going to leave for the winter? He’d just been talking crazy talk. He wasn’t going to leave, not now.

  Not with Cherry here, turning his world upside-down.

  Jared tried to laugh it off. “Oh, all that hot air. I’m just pining for some warm air when I think of all the snow and blizzards comin’ after us in just a month or two.”

  “Blizzards so soon?” Cherry’s voice was reed-thin. “But it is only September. Surely winter is not going to set in next month.”

  “Winter is a long time here,” Patty said sympathetically. She jounced Little Edward on her knee thoughtlessly as she spoke; the toddler grinned maniacally as he bounced up and down. “I do wish you’d get your homestead packed up and come stay here for the winter. We’ve got plenty of room for you and Little Edward and your animals, besides. No one from the land office is going to say anything about that, not with you right here in town. And I’m just going to go crazy with worry if I have to think of you out there on that homestead alone when the big snows set in.”

  “Patty’s right,” Jared broke in suddenly. Cherry looked up at him with hurt eyes, but he plowed on. The thought of her trapped in that damn shanty, with snow piled up over the doors and windows, was too much. Even with him the nearest neighbor, there’d be plenty of snows too deep for him to ride or drive over to check on her. Or rescue her. “You need to move into town where you and Little Edward will be safe.”

  “Oh, is it really so dangerous?” Cherry burst out, her voice slightly annoyed. “I have known snow before. It does snow in England, you know. Sometimes quite a lot.”

  “You’ve never known anything like the snow up here in these parts,” Matt told her gently. “Take our word for it, Mrs. Beacham.”

  “We’re only thinking of your safety,” Patty continued. “We care about you, Cherry… and Little Edward! What if something happened to Little Edward? You know you have to put him first.” She pressed a kiss to his silky pale hair. “He would love it here with us; we will have a wonderful time. Why, every day can be a party! Just think what fun we would all have together, while outside it’s snowing and icy and inside it’s warm and we’re all by the fire, just like now!”

  Cherry sighed, and Jared could hear something like desperation in her voice when she spoke again. “Oh, you are all set to convince me!”

  Jared leaned forward then, face set and tense. “Cherry,” he said softly, startling them all with the intimate nickname. “We are not going to give you up. You can’t stay out there alone, and that’s all there is to it.”

  ***

  Cherry’s breath caught at the caress of her name in his voice. It was the way he murmured her name, that secret, forbidden name that only her very dearest friends had ever called her, which struck her, even more than his words, to her very core. And that wasn’t what she had wanted: this toe-curling, spine-tingling, stomach-twisting need. She had wanted to be alone, alone with her memories, alone with her remnants of Edward… and Jared was not going to let her.

  She felt a strange mixture of anger and thanksgiving.

  She looked up at him, at his intense blue eyes, and saw the firelight in his pupils, flecks of gold in the irises, and the lines on his forehead that showed he was deeply, truly concerned and invested in her safety. He cares for me, she thought, this is more than passion between two lonely people, and it was nearly with a sense of relief to admit to herself that she cared for him, too. This was more than desire.

  A sense of relief, yes, but tinged with anguish; she had buried her heart; she did not want to dig it up again.

  But hearts rarely pay wishes any mind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For all of that revelation, the relationship between Cherry and Jared still rested on a knife’s edge. Their story nearly ended. They were neither of them looking for company, after all. If Jared was lonely, he was still half-turned against all women thanks to the way Hope had treated him. If Cherry was lonely, she was still half-determined to stay in love with Edward’s memory. They were neither of them ready to turn their backs on old hurts and old loves.

  They were stubborn, they had that much in common. They were attracted to one another, but that wasn’t reason enough to give up all of their old prejudices and set aside a
ll their old intentions.

  It would have ended after that tea at Patty’s pine-scented little house, as they sat around the laden table and ate the fresh biscuits with the knife balanced in the boughten jam jar and the spoon still tilted into the bowl of white sugar, the fresh lumber around them gleaming yellow in the lamplight, silently weeping their amber beads of resin. They would have gone to their separate homes, perhaps riding together, perhaps not, but ultimately their paths would diverge and they would go home alone to their memories. It might have happened that way. It almost did. But little pebbles create great ripples, and so it did not.

  Mrs. Jorgenson cast the first pebble. Perhaps Mrs. Jorgenson and her girl’s stopping by on their way home from a trip to the store, and offering to take Little Edward home for the night in halting words of English that they were slowly learning, was simply a friendly gesture and not an incredibly fortuitous development.

  But what it meant was that both Jared and Cherry stayed much later at Patty’s than they had planned, right through dinner, and into the cool dusk of the early fall evening. They finally left after Matt’s persistent reminders that it was certainly going to rain that night — Matt fancied himself an amateur weatherman — and they made the walk out to the stables where Galahad and the roan were in the extra loose boxes (for the barn had been built in anticipation of many more horses, thanks to Matt’s thoughtless comment one evening, in the earshot of the hopeful Mr. Mayfield, that he might like to own a livery) munching at the golden stems of prairie hay, beneath a benevolent silver moon.