by Shirl Henke
“I never thought I'd live to see the day you'd bestow everything on Anthea's bastard. Good God, Father, he's a damned red-skinned savage!”
“Since you and that Virginia belle you married haven't seen fit to provide me with any white grandchildren, I have no choice in the matter! Besides, I will hardly be leaving you destitute.”
“God damn you, you pious old hypocrite—you'll be sorry for this!”
“ ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!’ ‘Honor thy father!’ You will not blaspheme in this house ever again, nor rail at me!” Jeremiah boomed. Burke slammed the heavy oak door on his way out, storming down the hallway, oblivious of the figure huddled on the floor in the darkness.
Chapter Five
For several hours Anthea simply remained in a fetal position curled up in the deep shadows of an ornately carved kast. He had left the house. Yet her terror would not let go of her. Finally, she became aware of her surroundings once more. And she remembered what she had just overheard.
Chase was being forced to marry a society girl hand-picked by her father. Her son would be chained to this terrible house and the curse of the Remingtons for the rest of his life. All because of her. She had brought him here to save his life when he was a child. Would that act now cost him his soul?
I cannot allow him to do this thing because of me. He must be free to leave this place and never return.
Slowly, like a woman twice her age, she unfolded her arms and legs, feeling the pinpricks of restored circulation as she walked very stealthily into the library. First she must write a letter to Chase. That would be the most difficult part. After that, the rest would be so simple...and welcome...
* * * *
Chase and Stephanie rode in stiff uncomfortable silence. Mercifully the distance from the restaurant to her home was a short one. When he escorted her to the door, she would have quickly fled inside had he not detained her at the top of the porch steps.
Stephanie felt his hand on her arm and tried to pull free. She was desperate to reach the privacy of her room and release the torrent of tears held in check for so long. But his grip was as firm as his voice.
“I never thought you were a coward, Stevie.” She stiffened in outrage and tried again to break away. “Look at me,” he commanded, cradling her jaw in his other hand. The jewel-bright glitter in her eyes tore at his heart and he cursed himself for seven kinds of a fool. “I do love you and I do want to marry you,” he said simply.
“Not as much as you want to leave Boston and rejoin your father's people, Chase. You don't want the onus of the Remington name. Marrying me would tie you to it more tightly than caring for your mother ever has.” She waited a beat, some tiny part of her hoping he would deny it.
But he did not.
Instead he muttered a frustrated oath and swept her into his arms, kissing her fiercely, possessively. She started to resist, then surrendered, letting him savage her mouth with the blistering passion she had come to crave so hungrily. Good-bye, Chase.
Chase felt her melt against him, returning his passion with an unpracticed ardor that was a far more potent aphrodisiac than all the skillful wiles of women like Aggie or Sabrina. When he was near her he could not think...but he could feel. Ah, could he feel!
Their embrace was sheltered by heavy wooden rose trellises casting black and white shadows on the lovers as the moon peeked in and out of cloud banks. Both of them spoke more eloquently with their eager young bodies than they could with words. Finally Chase's team grew restive and pawed at the cobblestones, snorting impatiently. The sudden noise from the street echoed up and down the silent residential neighborhood, bringing them out of their magic world of sensation. A chill spring wind swirled around them as they broke apart.
“I love you, Stephanie,” he repeated again.
“Good-bye, Chase,” she repeated aloud, slipping from his grasp like a wraith, vanishing into the darkness beyond the massive front door.
When Chase finally neared the Remington mansion, it was well past three a.m. He had driven around aimlessly, stopping in several of the less respectable haunts he frequented, drinking more than he should have. But he could not seem to get drunk. After the waterfront tavern closed its doors, he realized how feckless it was to attempt drowning his pain in liquor and turned the phaeton toward home.
Home. Had he ever had one since his father had been killed and his mother had been forced to bring him to this hellish place? Rounding the corner, he saw lights burning in all the windows of the big ugly stone monolith. It looked like a sinister black jack-o'-lantern squatting in pale moonlight.
A sudden premonition of dread tightened in his guts as he whipped the team into a fast trot and reined in on the front drive in back of Dr. Walters's battered old brown buggy. An ashen-faced butler held the door open for him. “What's happened, Amos?” he asked the elderly black servant.
“I'm so sorry, Mr. Chase.”
He knew. Bounding up the stairs, he raced toward the tower room where the doctor was conversing in hushed tones with Jeremiah as Anthea's maid, Verity, sobbed, quietly comforted by one of the cook's helpers. Several other servants, all in their robes and slippers, stood about, whispering behind their hands, their eyes round with shock.
“Where is my mother?” Chase asked the doctor without preamble.
Walters turned from the haggard Jeremiah to his enigma of a grandson. The physician's myopic brown eyes would not meet Chase's fierce black ones. “Your mother has passed on, Mr. Remington. It really is for the best. She's not been coherent for some time. That's why—”
“She was healthy enough yesterday,” he snapped. “How did she die?”
Both the doctor and Jeremiah stood frozen like statues for an instant. The reverend recovered himself first. “There's been an accident. The Almighty has seen fit to take her.”
Chase knew, yet he could not bear for it to be true. “Just how did your veho god see fit to do it?” he asked harshly.
Jeremiah bristled at the irreverent question but the doctor replied hastily, “Somehow in the night she slipped from her room while the servants were sleeping—”
“It's my fault, Mr. Chase,” Verity blurted out, interrupting Walters. “I should’ve heard her.”
“Nonsense,” Walters admonished, then turned back to Chase, not unkindly. “Miss Remington has been in a mostly vegetative state for months. There has been no need for restraints for at least two years. No one expected her to awaken and wander out of the safety of her room in the middle of the night. She was, of course, quite disoriented in the dark. I'm sure that's how she fell from the widow's walk. How she ever found her way up the stairs in the dark is a mystery in itself.”
“The widow's walk?” Chase echoed in amazement, picturing the narrow deck around the third floor dormer in the west wing. “That's clear across the house. Why the hell would she go there...?” His voice faded as the reason came clear. The widow's walk's heavy wrought-iron railing was waist high and quite sturdy. “She jumped, didn't she.” It was not really a question.
“Certainly not!” Jeremiah replied, his tone oddly strained. “She would never imperil her immortal soul by committing suicide, no matter how far gone her mind.”
The old physician looked far less convinced of the issue but wisely kept any comment to himself, adding only, “When she fell the noise of her body breaking a dried branch on the oak out front raised one of the servants. Otherwise no one might have found her until morning.”
“Where have you taken her?” Chase asked in a toneless voice.
“In here, sir,” Verity said, wringing her thin, work-reddened hands, leading him into Anthea's tower room. “She didn't suffer, sir. At least there's that blessing. The doctor said her neck broke in the fall.”
Anthea lay in her bed, with her hands folded across her waist. She looked for all the world as if she were asleep, if not for the slightly odd tilt of her neck. The rotten oak limb must have broken her fall.
When he heard th
e old man and the doctor step into her room, he turned with the look of a cornered animal glittering in his black eyes, wounded and dangerous. “Get out! Leave me in peace with her!”
Jeremiah started to protest, but in a surprising reversal of roles, the quiet little physician took the big man's arm and guided him out, shaking his head. The reverend did not protest as Walters closed the door behind them.
Chase knelt beside the bed on the step stool she used to climb into it. How small and frail she seemed lying on the plush coverlet. He touched a wisp of grayed yellow hair, tucking it against her ear gently. “At least you can go to my father whole, not disfigured,” he murmured. The Cheyenne believed that a person who was maimed in death went forever afterward carrying that physical stigma. She had plaited her hair in the Cheyenne fashion and dressed in a loose red silk robe which Chase had bought her last Christmas. It was the nearest thing she had to Cheyenne finery. Jeremiah had burned her doeskin wedding dress as soon as they arrived here.
“You look at peace.” He stroked the pale dryness of her cheek, which for the first time in years seemed unlined and free of the fear and shame that had tormented her as long as she lived under the Remington roof.
His throat ached as he began chanting low and slow at first, the words coming back to him gradually from the past. It was a Cheyenne death song to send her on her journey up the Hanging Road to the Sky. As he chanted, he withdrew the knife he always carried from inside his jacket and made several diagonal slashes on his palms. The red of his blood dripped onto the red of her robe, blending with his tears.
When Chase had finished he stood up, dazed and disoriented, and began to walk to the closed door, but as he reached for the cold brass knob, a woman's voice, choking on a sob, stopped him. He turned quickly, startled to find Verity still in the room. Her eyes were round as she stared at his bloody hands. “What savages you must think we are,” he said in a neutral voice, not willing to explain himself further.
Hesitating only slightly, the old woman approached him, offering the envelope she had clutched in her hand. Tears streamed down her wrinkled cheeks. Swallowing them back, Verity whispered, “She's at peace now. Like you said, with yer pa.” She thrust the envelope at him. “When...when I woke up hearin' the commotion downstairs, this was beside my pillow.”
Chase took it gingerly in one bloody hand. His name was written on it in delicate spidery letters. Odd, he had no way of recognizing his mother's handwriting. He had never seen it before but he knew that it was hers. “Thank you, Verity,” he said quietly, then opened the door and walked out of the room.
One bloody handprint stained the polished brass knob black.
Alone in his room, Chase sat staring at the unopened envelope as he wrapped strips of white linen around his hands. Both Walters and the old man had been horrified at his self-mutilation. “Savages, chanting to heathen gods. ‘Thou shalt have no other god before me,’ saith the Lord!” Jeremiah had thundered. Nervously the doctor had offered to tend Chase's injuries but he had brushed them both away with no more concern than he would have given a swarm of gnats.
When he completed the hand wrapping, he took a swallow from the whiskey bottle on his desk, then opened the letter and read:
My dearest son,
When you read this I will have gone to join your father. Had I been of a stronger mental constitution I would have done so years ago that you might have returned to our people. Please forgive me.
I know you are being forced into an alliance with a woman the reverend has chosen. He boasted how it would tie you to the Remingtons irrevocably even after I was gone. This evil place would destroy you as it did me if you bound yourself to this woman. I give you your freedom.
Our people need your guidance. I have heard that the rails are coming onto the sacred ground. The buffalo will scatter and the Long Knives will try to herd all of the Cheyenne onto reservations. You have learned the spider ways, my son. Use what you know to help our people.
But before you go home, my son, I beg you to promise me one thing: Do not kill Burke. The Remington arm has a long reach. Spider law would take your life for his. That would not help our people. I implore you to heed my final request.
Remember me not as you see me now but as I was once in a happier time.
I love you.
Your mother, Freedom Woman
* * * *
Stephanie took the heavy velum envelope from the butler with thanks, then closed the door to her room, where she had sequestered herself all morning. She recognized Chase's bold scrawl addressed to her. After leaving him last night she had cried until dawn. Now, holding the missive in her hands, she felt a premonition of disaster. Best to sit down before she read it, an inner voice cautioned. She walked over to the windowseat where she had watched the sunrise. Suddenly gray rain clouds obscured its weak light, an omen of the sort of day it would be.
Stephanie sat on a fat steel blue cushion and carefully opened the letter as her heart thumped fast and hard against her chest. Her eyes were puffy and burned from her tears. She blinked, struggling to hold the paper steady as she read.
My dearest Stevie,
You knew me better than I knew myself. How does a young lady grow so wise at only seventeen? Please believe me when I say again that I do love you as I shall love no other woman. But you were right about my allegiance to my father's people, which would always have stood between us if I had remained in the world of the white man and we had married.
The Cheyenne were my mother's people, too, for in her heart she was more Cheyenne than white, and I am her son. Anthea, Freedom Woman, my beloved mother; is dead. Last night she made the ultimate sacrifice to free me from the Remingtons. Her final request was that I return to the Cheyenne to try and help them during the tribulations which lie ahead. I cannot in conscience do otherwise.
You have grown into an extraordinary woman who will make some very fortunate man a splendid wife. I regret deeply that I cannot be that man.
Be happy, Stevie.
Chase
Tears seeped unchecked from her eyes, rolling slowly down her cheeks and dropping onto the paper. With deliberation she took the letter and crumpled it in her hands. The heavy velum formed a small tight ball, crushed like her heart.
He had chosen. And his choice was as she had always known it would be...those savages over her. He said he loved her and perhaps he did, but not enough. Never enough. Never in her life had Stephanie Renee Summerfield been worthy of enough love. Only Aunt Paulina had truly cared for her and even she had deserted her niece in a premature death.
“I have no one,” she whispered in the empty room. The sound of her desolate words echoed in the gathering silence. Now she realized, after her night of stern resolutions and high-minded anger, that she still had held the faint hope that against the face of all reason, he would come back to her. Perhaps if Anthea had not killed herself—for that is what he must have meant by ‘‘ultimate sacrifice”—he would have.
But she knew, too, that keeping him that way would have been a hollow victory. The lure of the West, that land of endless sky about which he had spoken so passionately, would always hold him in thrall. And so would his father's people, the strange, savage Cheyenne who Anthea Remington had adopted as her own. What would make a white woman abandon every tenet upon which she had been raised?
A man like Chase.
But Chase was gone forever. Stephanie laid her head on her bent knees and huddled in the windowseat as a spring storm blew in, gray and angry, pelting the glass with splinters of sleet. She felt as if the icy shards were penetrating her heart as well.
* * * *
Spring finally arrived to stay. Daffodils and hyacinths bloomed and the skies cleared. The whispers over Anthea Remington's tragic death—which everyone knew was by her own hand, poor demented thing—were quickly eclipsed by the far more titillating rumors surrounding her scandalous bastard son. The half-breed heir to the Remington millions had simply up and vanished without a trace. Am
ong all Boston's upper crust, he had left behind only a string of angry cast-off lovers—and Stephanie Summerfield.
The gossips had instantly seized on Remington's squiring about that most unlikely young miss. Agatha Lodge sniffed that Stephanie was thin and drab, not to mention a boring bluestocking. Whatever had he seen in her? To further fuel the fire, the servants' grapevine circulated the story that a marriage alliance had been agreed upon by the Reverend Remington and old Josiah Summerfield. Then the prospective groom had fled, no doubt gone back to join those hideous red animals who were raping and pillaging across the plains. He was, after all, tainted with their inferior blood and nothing better could be expected of him, regardless of a Harvard education.
But Josiah Summerfield’s daughter was from pure-blooded Boston Brahmin lineage. Much better was expected of her, even if her late aunt had raised her a bit unconventionally. Had the unscrupulous libertine taken advantage of the girl? Perhaps that was why she'd agreed to marry a man like Chase Remington.
For the first few weeks after Chase left, Stephanie remained barricaded in her room, awash in the self-pity only the very young are capable of feeling, utterly unaware of the fustian of gossip sweeping Beacon Hill. Then gradually her natural resilience and the stubborn courage that had always been uniquely hers asserted itself.
She must get on with her life and forget Chase Remington. Surely by now thousands of miles away, he had forgotten her. Stephanie made her valiant resolution and emerged from her cocoon, ready to dazzle even the spiteful Agatha Lodge.
Ever immersed in his account books, the dour old Josiah took no notice of such trifling matters as gossip, even if anyone would have dared to broach such a subject to the sharp-tongued, sour-faced old merchant. When he was notified by the Reverend Remington that his errant grandson would not be fulfilling the marriage contract, Josiah had been annoyed still to be saddled with a daughter of marriageable age. Just as quickly he left her to her own devices and returned to work. He was confident that another suitor of good family would come along shortly, considering the huge dowry he was willing to bestow to settle the matter.