Magic and the Texan

by Martha Hix

  Exactly how much more was she?

  Her lovely hair recalled a question, one that nagged too often. Why didn’t it curl? Why didn’t a lot of things add up? Like why she hadn’t squawked about the padre. Like why she’d written about blue eyes. This was not a stupid woman. Not the sort to be blind to the color of her own eyes.

  Jon Marc couldn’t quell his nosiness. It’s not suspicion. It’s curiosity. “Why doesn’t your hair make little curls at your earlobes, as it does in the tintype?”

  “Sir, don’t you know about curling irons? Ladies use them all the time, especially before they sit for a photographer. A lady does seek to look her best for posterity.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Guess I don’t know much about ladies,” Jon Marc admitted slowly.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know much about ladies? Your letters were sensitive and sentimental. Every woman yearns for such. I’m surprised you don’t know that. But maybe you do. Did you make jest with your remark?”

  “I’ve lived a lonesome life, Beth honey.”

  She laid the brush aside. “You’ve been in company with women, surely.”

  “This may be the frontier, but it’s not a monastery. There are ladies in La Salle County. None of them were for me.”

  “You were at war,” Beth reminded him.

  “War is for men.”

  “Not every moment.”

  “It was for me.”

  Beth gave up on that line. “What about the ladies who weren’t ‘for you’?”

  He quit the settee and walked to the chair next to the rocker. “They’re all señoritas.”

  “Good Catholic girls.” Beth began to plait her hair. “Like Terecita.”

  “Terecita López is nothing to me. You know that.”

  Jon Marc wanted off the subject of women. He wanted off it. Bad. Clamming up might save a lie.

  He went for diversionary tactics. “Did I tell you about the Mexicans who settled brush country? Most of them pulled out when the Anglos got claim to the disputed area between the Nueces and the Grande. This is the last part of Tejas to become Texas.”

  “Did any of the grandees stay here?”

  “One or two. And a nest of Mexican bandits.”

  Beth wasn’t a woman to give up. “I should imagine they have daughters and granddaughters.”

  “They go to Mass at Santa María.”

  “You found nothing attractive in the Mexican women?”

  “Some of the prettiest ladies in Texas attend that church,” he answered honestly. “Rest assured, not a one is as pretty as you.”

  “Jon Marc O’Brien, you’re thirty years old. Surely you’ve courted at least one lady!”

  He fidgeted. And knew that he and Beth were nearing an area best left unmentioned. “I’ve never courted anyone but you.”

  “Are you saying you’ve never had a lover?”

  Beth gasped at her own question. Eyes rounded. A flush blossomed in high cheekbones, a sure sign of embarrassment, even before she gave an even more telling one: covering her mouth with the fingers of both hands.

  Several seconds passed before she said, “How very crude. Forgive me!”

  He assumed it wasn’t easy for a virginal plum like Beth to speak of the carnal.

  “There’s nothing to forgive.” He then said something he felt in his heart, even though he knew it invited trouble. “A couple needs to be frank. What good would come out of muzzling our mouths?”

  “Nothing.” Gazing downward, she picked at a pleat of her skirt and moistened her lips. “I have a case of curiosity. Will you humor me with candor? Are you . . . untouched?”

  A mantle of silence dropped. Jon Marc rubbed fingertips across his lips. Squirmed. This was the moment of reckoning. If he told the truth, he would lose Beth.

  Just when Bethany decided the conversation had gotten interesting with Jon Marc, he again plunked down in a hideous chair, saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t speak too frankly, us not married. Embarrasses me is what it does.”

  That was another thing. When was he going to set a date?

  First, Bethany needed an answer to her question. “Sir, we must move past embarrassment. I’m not without some knowledge of the animal kingdom. My father spent his lifetime in the cattle business.” When he wasn’t drunk. “I know how calves are made.” Beth Buchanan had said similar words, somewhere between Fort Worth and Waco. “You needn’t be shy with me.”

  The oil lantern flickered, popped. Jon Marc sat straighter. He twitched his lips. Squirmed again.

  Bethany felt somewhat guilty for putting him on the spot. Somewhat. “Are you untouched?” she repeated.

  At last he said, “Fitz O’Brien, my grandfather of record, took me to a bordello to learn ‘the sweetness o’ lasses.’ I was sixteen. I didn’t take the ‘lass’ up on her sweetness.”

  “You’ve never been to a house of ill repute?”

  “One. In Laredo. Terecita’s old haunt. Didn’t stay.”

  “You’ve never tasted forbidden fruit?”

  He glanced downward, bashful as all get out. “Would I do something like that?”

  Of course not.

  Holding onto the rocker arms as if for dear life, Bethany had to swallow a groan.

  A virgin. For pity’s sake, the man was a virgin!

  “Hellfire and damnation,” Jon Marc muttered, reverting to his Calvinist upbringing. Had he out-and-out lied to Beth? No. But he’d led her to believe an untruth. How could he get out of the mess he’d made?

  Gathered up in the saddle, making a midnight check of the herd, Jon Marc groaned. A familiar voice cut into his thoughts.

  “¡Patrón!”The vaquero Luis de la Garza rode up, reining in. “The horses, they have broken out of the corral. It is too much for me and Diego. You must help.”

  It took two hours to round up the strays, a blessing in that Jon Marc didn’t have time to think about his lie. Work finished, he headed home, where light spilled from the bedroom window. Beth, awake. He ought to tell her the truth.

  As if choking life out of the reins, he turned toward the Nueces and walked León along the riverbank. Dismounted. Skipped a few stones across the water. “Damn Persia Glennie to hell.”

  After her husband choked to death on a chicken bone, that widow made a habit of finding ways to waylay Jon Marc.

  He’d been in San Antonio, ordering Beth a piano and feeling sorry for himself at Christmas—both from spending yet another holiday with no one to share it with, and from being perturbed at letters filled with poetry rather than a definite answer to his proposed April wedding date. He let Persia lead him astray. Twenty-nine years of celibacy, out the window.

  Up to that point he’d sworn to bring his own honor to the marriage bed. It hadn’t been easy, keeping his pecker in his britches, but he’d done it, until Persia and her cognac and the black mood of a forlorn hombre did him in. As he’d mentioned to Beth, only a hypocrite asked for purity when he couldn’t give it.

  “I’m a hypocrite. Dammit.”

  He now kicked a stone into the water.

  He’d lured a virginal bride here.

  He’d lied to her.

  The only way out was to hope that Beth would forgive him.

  He climbed back into the saddle to head for the house, again seeing that light in the window, a beacon that urged him forward. To honesty. Wait. Why should he ask for trouble?

  Beth hadn’t been frank with him, yet he hadn’t held dishonesty against her. But a little thing like eye color was just that, little. Confessing his sins was no small matter. She’d be done with him.

  Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe Beth had something to hide. Something big. A sin. Of the flesh?

  Did she have something he could bargain forgiveness with?

  Hellfire and damnation!

  How far had he fallen that he would trade off the one thing he’d spent a lifetime looking for?

  He needed help.

  That was when he took himself off to the church of Santa Maria. Re
aching the sanctuary, he let himself in the heavy wooden doors. Padre Miguel was nowhere to be found. Jon Marc lit an altar candle. Genuflecting in one of the pews, he asked for divine guidance.

  When he left, he knew what he must do.

  Tell Beth the truth.

  About Persia.

  About the other secrets that troubled him.

  But he’d wait for the perfect moment.

  Chapter Eight

  “Let not your heart be troubled,” Bethany whispered into the burrows of bed. Easy to say, not easy to do. How did one comport herself in the company of a virginal male of thirty?

  She needed help, training, and more. Thankfully, she’d found Miss Buchanan’s letters to Jon Marc, in a box under the bed. Read them, she must. By lamplight she scanned all fifty, particularly the ones composed in the six-month gap found in Jon Marc’s dispatches. Reading between the lines, Bethany detected hesitation on the Kansas beauty’s part. She’d packed these messages with poems, not plans.

  Heavens.

  These poems.

  They were flat wearisome. Bethany figured she’d never remember line after line of painted sunsets or blooming flowers. References to religion sent her to chewing a thumbnail. She repacked the envelopes and shoved their box under the bed.

  Additional letters were scattered around her, most unopened, the unread correspondence having come from Louisiana and Tennessee. The unsealed ones were from Pippin O’Brien, apparently a youthful nephew. Why did Jon Marc treasure Pippin’s words but ignore the rest of his family?

  “Trouble,” she whispered. “There’s trouble in the O’Brien clan.” Scrutiny of one particular letter from the youth confirmed it.

  Dear Uncle,

  Great-granddaddy and the aunties agree to stay away from you, just like you asked.

  Yours, Pippin

  Bethany wanted to explore Jon Marc’s hurt, and try to heal it. Survival, unfortunately, was of the utmost importance. Miss Buchanan had flat-out said, “I’m pure of flesh.”

  There was no way Bethany could claim otherwise.

  “Let not your heart be troubled,” she repeated.

  Mrs. Agatha Persat had given such advice, saying it came straight from the Good Book. Bethany didn’t know whether to believe Someone up there looked out for the sheep of this earth, but He’d never done much tending the Todds.

  Bethany did, however, believe that if a spirit could ascend to heaven, Miss Buchanan was up there.

  “I wish you were here to advise me,” she said, as if Miss Buchanan were in the bedroom with her. “You were so wise.”

  They knew each other two weeks, the Beths. Fourteen days in which many people mistook them for sisters. They became sisters of the heart.

  As she had many times since Miss Buchanan was injured, Bethany cried for her sister and mentor. She wouldn’t cry for herself. That would be selfish. But wasn’t it greedy to lead a copper-haired rancher down the garden path?

  Bethany rose to sit at the bedside. “A virgin, Miss Buchanan. He’s a virgin! You couldn’t have known. He wrote reams, yet never said much about himself.”

  How she did yearn to know the source of his silence. If she could get past the marriage bed, she’d give whatever support he needed.

  “How the dickens am I going to handle the situation, when I have to account for my lack of purity? What am I going to do on the wedding night?”

  What was the use of bemoaning milk that refused to spill?

  He hadn’t once suggested setting a date, but surely their present impasse wouldn’t last forever.

  “I’m not going to succeed, at the rate I’m going. Like he said I must accept him, he must accept me as I am. Do you think he might?”

  When pumpkins turned to peaches.

  Moreover, if she admitted a lack of virginity, it would be a sin against the departed, a mark against the Buchanan name.

  How could she be more like Miss Buchanan?

  Bethany quit the bed to pace and clutch her arms, as if it were January. “I respect Jon Marc—even if he isn’t rich—and I want to be his, till death parts us. What am I going to do?”

  Miss Buchanan’s memory must suffer.

  Bethany lifted her eyes. “Wherever you are up there, my friend, please listen. Even if it spells disaster, should Jon Marc dislike the ‘real’ Beth, you must become the scapegoat.

  “I loathe sullying your reputation, but if I have any chance of a future with him, I must walk with my own shadow. It’s begun. It’s too late to back out. And it was your idea to start with, Miss Buchanan.”

  Of course, Bethany hadn’t argued too long. Broke and on the run, she’d sought a decent man. Hoot Todd.

  Fort Worth, a stop on several cattle trails, had disabused Bethany of the notion about her half brother’s decency. Trail drivers from brush country had spread stories of the outlaw. Those tales spread like a whirligig through town.

  Hoot Todd, even in absentia, frightened Bethany.

  When she took passage on the stagecoach headed south from the Trinity River town, the other passengers were Miss Buchanan and her soon-to-be-discharged chaperone. Miss Buchanan, thanks to correspondence with Jon Marc, added to Fort Worth gossip.

  Bethany had been beside herself, frantic.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she’d confided to Miss Buchanan, a day after Mrs. Wiley got into that strip-poker game. “I have no money to set up my own home.”

  “Why not secure a position as a tutor? You’re educated.”

  “Not that educated. I didn’t even learn to read until I was nine. My pa and I moved around a lot, you see. When we settled in Liberal, a schoolteacher, Mrs. Agatha Persat, saw that I had books and pencils and the opportunity to learn. Mrs. Persat even took me under her wing outside the classroom, to improve my verbal and social skills.”

  Shame heated Bethany’s face. Disappointing the schoolteacher hurt the worst. Agatha Persat had been kindly, friendly, motherly, but her strict moral code, and her protégée’s lack thereof, had killed their friendship.

  “Sounds as if you have enough training,” the dark-haired miss from Kansas commented.

  “One needs references for the noble work of tutors.”

  “You did leave a mess, Miss Todd. It’s worse than . . .”

  “Worse than what?”

  Blue eyes got trained on a spot outside the window. “Worse than being browbeaten. I yearned to take the veil, but Father objected. He wanted me married, and well. When he became ill, I agreed to leave the convent. Just short of my vows.”

  “Your heart doesn’t beat for your fiancé?”

  “How could I love a man I’ve never met?”

  “Oh.” Bethany forced her mouth not to drop. “Well, your father is in his grave. Can’t you do that veil thing now?”

  “It’s too late. I promised my hand to Mr. O’Brien. He would grieve, should I disappoint him. So I won’t.”

  “You’re an exemplary woman.”

  “Enough about me. We were discussing you. If you don’t feel comfortable with tutoring, you could take a job as a servant.” Tucking a curly lock of hair behind her ear, the Buchanan miss smiled. “It’s respectable work.”

  “I’ve been subservient. And ridiculed. It got worse after my father was arrested, accused of robbing a church. Anyhow, I loved Pa. I believed in his innocence. We had no money to hire any attorney, much less the best in the area. But the best offered his services.” Tears trailed Bethany’s cheeks. “Oscar Frye promised to defend Pa ... if I’d become his mistress. I had no choice. It was my Pa’s freedom at stake!”

  Placing a handkerchief into Bethany’s trembling fingers, Miss Buchanan let her do the talking.

  “It got worse. Oscar insisted I work as a servant in his home, so his wife wouldn’t get suspicious of how he got paid. You cannot imagine the indignities I suffered, serving Mrs. Frye by day, servicing Oscar by night. Then—From the witness stand, Pa confessed. My sacrifice was for naught.”

  “Poor dear,” Miss Buchanan said, al
l heart.

  “Losing the case infuriated Oscar. He stomped over to Pa’s cabin. His wife followed. It was a terrible scene. Then she told a friend, who told a friend, who told a friend. It didn’t take much to organize the outraged. Even Mrs. Persat got in on it. They burned my belongings.” Bethany would never forget the castigation in the older woman’s face. “Then the sheriff threatened the painted ladies, said if they helped me, he’d toss them all in jail.”

  Bethany sat back against the squabs, the coach wheels hitting a rut that matched her disquieted heart. “The part of me that hadn’t already died over my disgrace died that day. It didn’t have much to do with being drummed out of a town I hated anyhow. I lost everything. My virtue, my honor. I’m nothing.”

  “Oh, Miss Todd. You unfortunate girl. I believe, in the proper element, you’d live as Caesar’s wife.”

  “If I had a chance, just one chance,” Bethany uttered, dreaming of a fresh start. “It seems I am simply unlucky. When I left Liberal, I thought my father’s son by his first wife might help me get established in southwest Texas. He can offer no more than what I’m running from. Disgrace. I wish I’d never written Hoot Todd. Would that he didn’t know to expect me.”

  “You’d best steer clear of him. He’s quite horrid.”

  “I have no other choice.”

  “If I were you, I’d take whatever chances came my way.”

  Skeptical to the marrow, Bethany said, “I don’t think you’d do that. Not you.”

  “I am not you. But if I were, I’d do it. A desperate lady must go to whatever lengths to survive. Thrive. Prosper. It’s only sensible.”

  “You’re right,” Bethany said in a shallow tone.

  Several moments passed before she was asked: “What is it you’d like to have? Say, if you were given three wishes.”

  “A husband. Children. And land. Land is power. When you own a piece of this earth, no one can take it away from you. No one can run you off, if you’re entitled to stay.”

  “Unless you don’t pay your taxes,” Bethany’s traveling companion had interjected. “There’s always a price to pay . . .”