And just like that, Jared was consumed with the woman who had bewitched him so many years before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Ho there, girl, where are you riding so fast?”
Cherry looked over her shoulder, startled, and then stood in the stirrups, reining back Galahad. The pony shook his head against the bit; he was having too much fun galloping flat-out to want to stop now. But the man waving his arm at her looked as if he wanted to talk to her, and Cherry didn’t know so many people in this district that she could afford to just ignore folks. Since she had made up her mind to make a go of things with neither her allowance nor Jared, she had realized that she was going to need the help of the community whenever possible. Whether that was accepting hospitality, like she had done with Matt and Patty, or bartering fancy work for practical work, as she had with Mrs. Thompson when she realized that she simply wasn’t keeping up with a rapidly-growing Edward’s clothing needs, Cherry had taken a great deal of effort to shed her reclusive ways and be as friendly to the other residents around Bradshaw as possible.
That thought in mind, she jogged Galahad back towards the man. He was about fifty years old, she thought as she drew close, wrinkled skin leathery from the harsh sun, with a fur-lined coat drawn close to his chin to keep out the prairie wind and a fur hat pulled down over his ears. He took off the hat as she drew near, and she waved at him: no, no, put it back on.
He just waited, hat in hand, nodding at her suggestion. She noticed a hand-cart at his side, filled with all sorts of hardware. He was building something. A fence, perhaps, or even a shanty. She didn’t recognize him, so he might have been a new man on the prairie, out to see his claim for the first time. He must be in some rush to make sure it was done before the snows set in.
“Good day to you, sir,” she called, pulling up Galahad a short distance away. She wasn’t so foolish as to ride right up to a strange man, however set her mind might be on friendliness.
“Good day,” he replied. “That’s a fine pony you have there.”
He had no particular accent, she noticed — a peculiarity of the eastern states, she thought. So he was from back east. “He is a fine pony,” she acknowledged, a touch of wariness in her voice. “I would guard him with my life.”
His eyes flickered from her face to her hip, and he surely saw the outline of the little pistol she kept there — another lesson from Matt. She couldn’t quite use it yet, but it was there to make her look dangerous. But the man only chuckled. Then he burst into laughter. “Oh, excuse me ma’am,” he chortled. “But you are a frontierswoman for sure, if you think I’m going to try and swindle your good pony. So suspicious! I commend you for it. No, no, I was only admiring.” He held up his hands so that the belt of his trousers, bare of any weapon, was plain to see. “I am just a plain farmer, although I admit I am in want of a good horse myself.”
“He’s not for sale,” Cherry said suspiciously, uncertain of where the man was going with this conversation.
“No, no, I would never dream of offering… I can see you are that fond of him! My mule is lame and without him, I am on foot today. I only wish my horse was so nice as yours. I am in want of a man to train him to saddle.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Back there, at my claim. I have a shanty, and a barn, and a good horse I bought from my cousins in Kentucky. Too good a horse for the likes of me. He can pull a wagon when he has a mind to, which he rarely does, but he’s scarcely saddle-broke, and I’m no horse trainer.”
Cherry considered the man for a moment. He looked like a nice enough sort, and she liked the sound of his voice, so clean and even after the squawks of New York and the intermingling foreign brogues and drawling accents of Bradshaw’s Babel of residents. Almost English, his voice. Almost like home. “Does he buck, or nap, or rear?” she asked thoughtfully.
The man shook his head. “Oh no, he’s a good horse; he just has no notion of what I want him to do. He goes until he stops, and then he stands and stares at me. He actually turns his head ‘round and looks at me, and we gaze at one another, befuddled, until I get off and lead him home. It’s a sad sight.” He chuckled a little. “We’re two fools together. The blind leading the blind.”
Cherry nodded. Inside her heart was singing, her mind was thanking God and all His angels. She had been sent the gift she had been hoping for. She didn’t even have to go looking for it. It had fallen into her lap.
“I’ll train your horse for you,” she said boldly. “Send him to me, and I’ll have him right for you by spring.”
The man lifted his eyebrows. They were bushy, grey and white things, and when he raised them up and waggled them a little, they looked like shaggy caterpillars. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect that as your reply.”
Cherry only smiled.
***
Patty looked out of the front window every time she heard hooves on the road into Bradshaw. The ground was hard, frozen in places, despite the lack of snow, and she was worried about Cherry, out on her foolish rides. Foolish, that was right! She’d seen Cherry riding out there, hell-bent for leather like some kind of cowboy. She couldn’t imagine what satisfaction Cherry was getting out of it; Patty herself liked to go on a nice quiet ride, see the scenery, watch the birds, that sort of thing. But to go tearing around the countryside at all speeds and all weathers! That was some kind of foolish. She turned around and faced Little Edward. She’d taken to calling the boy Eddie. Little Edward was too high-falutin’ for such a sweet, mischievous little farmer’s son.
“Foolish,” she told Eddie, who was talking gibberish to the china shepherdess from the mantlepiece. Patty had taken it down and put it on the low side-table next to the divan so that Eddie could admire it. He wasn’t allowed to touch it and he knew it, but Patty stayed close by whenever her pretty little lady was anywhere near her sweet little boy, as she called the two of them. She knew what a temptation that round-cheeked little shepherdess was to a toddler.
“Foosh,” Eddie replied placidly. He smiled up at her, angelic blue eyes sparkling.
“Foosh,” Patty confirmed, taking him in with a hungry look. “I would like a whole passel just like you, do you know that?”
“Foosh,” Eddie stated, and went back to the shepherdess. “Foosh,” he told her.
Patty nodded. Then she heard hooves and looked back outside. There was the foosh woman herself, and she was… Patty stared… leading another horse. Leading another horse? What on earth…? Patty rushed from the room, scooping Eddie up onto her hip as she went.
Cherry was dismounting next to the barn, the reins of both horses in her hands, when Patty came out, an old coat of Matt’s flung over both her and Eddie. “Patty,” she said pleasantly. “Edward, love!”
Eddie clapped his hands. “Ride!” he announced.
“Not today, darling, it’s growing bitter cold,” Cherry told him. “And look, I must put this new horse away. Isn’t he lovely!”
Eddie and Patty looked. Patty could see that the horse was lovely — tall and slender where Galahad was squat and round, a shining dappled bay who didn’t seem to have enough coat for the cold winter that was upon them. He was no frontier horse, she could see that much. “Cherry, where on earth did you find that horse?”
Cherry laughed. “He belongs to a Mr. Henry Wallace, who has just come out here from Maryland, by way of his cousins in Kentucky. And this beautiful thing was their going-away present to him, or his discounted price was, anyway. So dear Mr. Wallace came to the Dakotas with not a plowhorse, but a racehorse. And I am going to train him into a riding horse, while Mr. Wallace finds a team more suitable for breaking sod.” She stood away from the bay horse and drank him in for a moment; Patty could see the rapture in her eyes at the sight of the horse. “Isn’t he just magnificent? Breaking sod would be a travesty, to say nothing of the damage it would do his legs.”
Patty was uncertain what made a horse magnificent if it couldn’t do the work that needed done. This must be one of the quirks of being a genuine
lady; after all, however Cherry tried to fit in, she was still an aristocrat, with foolishly useless aristocratic quirks of temper. Liking a horse that couldn’t stand up to hard work was just one of those quirks. “He’s certainly beautiful,” she acknowledged at last, because that couldn’t be denied. As beautiful as a butterfly, maybe, fragile and useless for anything but admiring. “I hope Mr. Wallace is paying you,” she added daringly. It was her business, she told herself. That was her barn Cherry was leading that great beast into.
“Oh, very handsomely,” Cherry said complacently, and turned to walk both horses into the barn. “And a portion of it goes to Matt for renting the stall. So we all get something out of it.”
Cherry had been trepidatious about how Patty might take the news that she had brought home a stranger’s horse to train. Not so much Matt — Matt was sweet and just a little slow, and it wouldn’t be too much trouble to convince him of the value of boarding a horse for a little extra household cash. But Patty was going to question Cherry’s wisdom in taking on a man’s job like this, and Cherry didn’t blame her one bit.
She slowly led the horse into Galahad’s clean stall, irritating her pony, who stamped his feet in the doorway and pushed at her blocking shoulder, trying to get into his own home. “Stop, Galahad,” she snapped, and he quit his shoving, but she could tell his feelings were hurt.
Patty had followed her into the barn. “Why are you putting him in Galahad’s stall?”
“I don’t know what he knows yet,” Cherry explained, slipping off the horse’s headstall and leaving him to investigate his new surroundings. “I don’t want to tie him to the post and have him take off with the post still attached to his head. Galahad, now —” She backed the pony up and tied him to a ring on the wall. “Galahad can stand nicely and wait while I put straw in another box for him.”
“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Patty said dubiously. She was clutching Eddie close to her chest; Eddie was reaching out for Galahad’s brown-and-white mane, yearningly crooning “Poniiiiiiiie…” Like mother, like son, Patty thought irritably. “I don’t know if you ought to be taking on problem horses. Seems like a cowboy’s job to me.”
“Well, we are short on cowboys right at the moment,” Cherry said brusquely, picking up a bale of straw and tossing it into the empty loose box. She paused for a moment, astonished at the athleticism of the throw. When had she grown so strong that she could just fling bales of straw about? Independence, she told herself. This is independence. She snatched up the pitchfork. “Matt has given up the saddle for the workshop. And Jared has gone into hibernation for the winter. Like a bear,” she added, laughing a little. A bear with a sore head, who didn’t want to face up to his problems. Poor Jared! She could pity him, now that she had work and business to buoy her spirits. She began tossing straw around the stall with the pitchfork.
“So you’re a cowboy now?” Patty shook her head. “Lord! If anyone’d told me six months ago that the English lady would be hanging up her shingle as a horse trainer I’d have called him a liar.”
“Times change,” Cherry said with a grim little smile. “So must people.” She set the pitchfork aside and went for Galahad, tickling Eddie on the chin as she went by. “I must do everything I can to provide for this wee man. For I shall never give him up.”
***
“It will work this time,” Anne Braithwhite insisted. “I have laid out some hard truths that will not be easy for her to deny. She will come to heel, and soon.” She set a delicate china teacup down upon its saucer with a faint clink, and frowned down at the priceless service as if it had offended her with its audibility. A proper tea set would have held its tongue. “But I cannot say I am happy that you felt it necessary to travel here. I was perfectly capable of managing the girl on my own.”
The elderly gentleman sitting across from her, fitting his angular lines uncomfortably into a plush brocade wing chair, had the grace not to laugh. But he did quirk a fuzzy white eyebrow in her direction. “Capable, Anne? The girl fled from your home and traveled a thousand miles west with the child slung on her back like a common immigrant. I would have trusted that you could have talked some sense into her, instead of driving her away into the wilderness.”
That grated. Anne had tried with the girl, had she not? Even offered her a place in the household, when the little trollop would not do the sensible thing and go to some quiet place outside of the city to have the child, before coming back and trying to pull her life back together. “I made arrangements for her,” Anne argued. “The nuns in the Adirondacks, for heaven’s sake! Nuns! I wrote the letters, I made perfectly acceptable arrangements, I had everything all in line. Far more than what might have been expected of me. More, dare I say it, than what you and Louisa were willing to do for her.” Anne picked up her cup again and took another sip, to let give that dig time to sink in. Richard frowned, setting his jaw, and she nearly smiled at her success.
“The girl would not be spoken to,” Anne continued. “She would not agree to give up the child. She said that Walsall would never forgive her. And she said as much in answer to the letter I sent her, Richard. That Walsall’s son belonged with her. And,” Anne added with a touch of malice, “I do not doubt that Edward Walsall’s family would agree with her. I have not heard any interest from them in the welfare of the boy, although surely they know of his existence. I do not think they will be pleased to hear of his being brought up at Beechfields.”
Richard Beacham just shook his head dismissively. He had always been so with Anne — she knew he had never liked her, but she had never known why. She had been Louisa’s best friend, had stood beside her in the drawing room during that quiet little wedding so many years ago. Richard had taken Louisa to Fernsley afterwards, and she had been pleased at first, thinking it would be so pleasant to have her dear friend a close neighbor. But he had never liked Anne, and invitations to the gracious Georgian house at Fernsley had been much fewer than Anne would have expected. Snubbed and determined to repay the favor, she had gone back to London with her head high and not so much as a good-bye for the Fernsley Beachams. That had been the Season she had lost the Russian prince. It had not been her best year, Anne reflected. She had not been in the most commendable temper that winter, after Richard had come between her and her best friend.
“She will not think that Louisa is strong enough to raise a child,” Anne said suddenly. Indeed, the very thought had crossed her mind. Even the solicitor had brought it up months ago, when he first came to Anne with this outrageous request from the Fernsley Beachams. The entire reason they had enlisted Anne’s help in securing the boy was because their health would not permit such a trans-Atlantic undertaking. And yet here Richard sat in her drawing room. She could have been left well out of it, had she known he would be so impatient and imperious. A title was the last thing this pompous ass had needed. What a pity Cherry had not been born a boy!
Richard unfolded his long grasshopper’s legs and went across the gleaming parquet floors to the tall windows that lined the north wall of the drawing room. He pulled at the draperies and looked out of the window, at the brown leaves on the great spreading branches of the trees in Washington Square. “Louisa will be in better health when she is not so worried always about the boy. And he will not live at Beechfields, after all. There is a cottage already being fitted for him, and a nurse engaged. We are hardly without the resources to raise a child.” He paused. “I am a little surprised you do not offer to adopt the child yourself.”
Anne took a long, thoughtful pull of tea while she considered the reproof in his tone. Her generation of Beachams had not turned out to be the most fruitful of families. She was a childless widow, Louisa was a barren woman past child-bearing. Her cousin had been just as luckless: Charlotte herself was an only child. It would have been just as reasonable for her to adopt the child as it was for Louisa and Richard; more so, even, since they had been in England and the child had been here, in Anne’s own home.
She
decided that there was no reason to lie to a man who already disliked her. “I did not want it,” she said simply. “There was no reason for me to adopt the bastard child of my cousin’s daughter, was there? No more than there is for you,” she added sharply. “The child has no future in England, whatever you may say. What will you raise him to be, a merchant? A barrister? He is illegitimate and stands to inherit nothing but whatever money you should choose to settle upon him. The Walsalls have no interest in him and might even choose to make trouble for him. The younger brother is already married and looking to get into the family way, from what I have heard. Why not let this affair end without any more talk, Richard?”
Richard set his jaw. Stubborn man, she thought. Crotchety old mule.
“The child is a Beacham,” Richard declared. “He should be raised by his family.”
“He’s being raised by his mother.”
“Who is no better than she should be, and will only come to ruin! She will lead them both to starvation. Do you wish that on an innocent boy?”
Anne didn’t really care one way or another. She only wanted to wash her hands of the whole affair once and for all. And as Richard didn’t appear to be prepared to surrender his ideals, she was going to have to help him and be done with it. “It will take weeks for a reply to the letter,” she finally said. “Unless she sends a telegram. What will you do in the meantime?” She knew what he would say, but she dreaded it nonetheless.
“Wait here, of course.” Richard did not question his welcome in the townhouse. He was the head of the family, after all. Every Beacham would be happy to have him, or certainly have the good graces to pretend. “If we do not receive a reply, well, then we shall simply send someone after her. In person, you know. That is always a more convincing way to do things.”
The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) Page 21