“Well, Belle doesn’t have Bingo to go exploring on.”
Bazz grinned. “If Belle had Pegasus to ride she’d be no more likely to go exploring, Serena. She finds the prairies dull.”
“Dull! But things are happening there all the time! I noticed three new varieties of wildflowers on my way to the pond this morning—”
I broke off in confusion, knowing the pond was a sensitive subject for Bazz and not wishing to mention my encounter with Quinn, but I needn’t have worried.
“The only plants that interest your sister are those she uses in her concoctions, and she grows most of those herself.”
“That may be so, but I wager she knows at least as much about them as Ernest, and he’s a trained pharmacist!”
“Ernest?”
“Ernest Rogg. The man I mentioned last night ... the man I was to marry.”
Basil nodded. “Ah, yes. The pious apothecary. I, for one, am very pleased you didn’t.”
I glanced up at him under my lashes. Did I dare infer a more than friendly interest in me? Might he truly become my perfect gentle knight? Would I be the one to erase that shadow in his eyes?
He smiled and bent attentively toward me as if guessing my wonderings. But as his intent smile persisted, I sensed a hollow politeness animating it.
Quinn’s sneering drawl came uneasily to mind: You think I don’t know what’s going on up to the house? That candlelight he’d seen late at night, the scurryings in my dreams that I had ascribed to mice, could that have been Belle and Bazz, the one visiting the other? Shh, we don’t want Reenie to hear.... Having grown up together, almost like brother and sister, it was natural they might feel diffident, ashamed even, about revealing the .’. . mature turn their childhood affection had taken.
“You’re right of course about Belle and her herbs,” Bazz said, “but unlike your observations of the prairie flowers, her motives are practical. That healing salve of hers, for example, has buyers waiting on every ranch for miles around for every bit of it she whips up. She keeps a good store of it on hand in the cellar, and another batch is always in the making.”
“That’s not what she told Cobby!”
“Morning Star doesn’t pay for it,” he said tersely. “Come, Serena, no need to frown,” he added in a lighter tone. “Cobby’s so afraid of running out he always has a couple of extra jars tucked away someplace, and Belle knows it.”
I accepted Basil’s gentle reproof without comment. Faced with the possibility of real privation, it was no wonder Belle felt hard-pressed to store up every penny she could. I resolved not to pass judgment so quickly in the future. “What will you do about your piano, Bazz?” Surprised by my sudden change of subject, his eyes narrowed warily. “When you—we— leave Morning Star,” I amplified, realizing my thinking had run ahead of his.
“I hope to take it with me. If I leave it here, it’d be just like Quinn to chop it up for kindling some cold night.”
“You’re forgetting summer’s coming on, Bazz. There can’t be enough cold nights in the months ahead to drive even him to such a measure, and surely we’ll be settled someplace by fall.”
He shot a speculative glance at me. “No matter when we leave we have to make it through the spring first,” he said. “I don’t know how much truth there is in those awful stories Quinn told with such relish last night; but Morning Star’s always had trouble keeping Indian help here during this time of year, and since my mother died, we’ve had no other kind here at the house.” He nodded toward the dense vegetation in the stone-edged beds. “It’s the garden, I think. Being creatures of the prairie, they can’t understand why it grows like it does.”
Nor did I. No matter what Belle had to say about its sheltered location and the care taken with its feeding and watering, I couldn’t dispel the uneasiness I felt whenever I saw it. I recalled her boast about how early it greened up—unnaturally early for these parts. Mid-April, she’d said. Which was, I knew, the time of the vernal equinox when a bloody sacrifice, made upon the rising of the morning star, had fed and watered the crops once grown here with the blood, flesh and shattered bones of innocent children.
“... as the days grow longer,” Bazz was saying, “they do less and less around the house. Instead they shuffle out here to sit and stare for hours at a time. Sometimes, you can hear them chanting.” He grimaced. “Enough to make your skin crawl.
“Then one fine morning we come down to find they’ve gone.” He shrugged and kicked at a pebble. “Usually it doesn’t matter—there are always women coming through looking for work—but this year only Rita came back. There’s no knowing how long she’ll stay, and what with the packing and all....” He smiled wearily.
“No garden, no matter how peculiar, is about to scare me off,” I assured him in words pluckier than I felt. “I may not be as strong as Rita, but I’m a good worker. Even Mother Rogg granted me that much, and she wasn’t an easy woman with praise—except for the good Lord, of course, and sometimes I felt even He had to earn it.” I placed my hand on his arm. “We’ll manage, Bazz.”
He patted my hand. “Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, I’m sure we will.”
The sun beat hotly down on our heads. Realizing it must be nearing noon, asked Bazz if Belle was in the kitchen. “This morning it looked as if she’d been spirited away spang in the middle of her herbal preparations.”
He sighed. “The kitchen always looks like that. Drives anyone trying to actually cook there loco. Her door was closed when I came down, Serena. I don’t think she’s up yet.”
“Not up yet?” I exclaimed. Then, recalling the candlelit nocturnal activity Quinn had reported and my subsequent interpretation of it, I felt heat rise in my cheeks. I withdrew my hand from Basil’s arm. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go see if she’s all right.”
“Don’t be surprised if she takes on some,” Bazz called after me. “Belle’s not at her best in the morning.”
I resented his knowing this. How much else did he know about my sister? Cheated by circumstance of the life we might have had together, I determined to do all I could to make up for the time we had lost.
There was no answer to my gentle rap on Belle’s door. I turned the knob and peered inside. The curtains were still drawn. “Belle? Belle, are you awake?”
A rustling of the bed clothes was my answer, followed by a low moan.
“Belle?”
“Out, out, out! Rita, I swear to God I’ll put a knife to your greasy scalp—”
“Belle, it’s me, Reenie.”
“Reenie? Ohmigod, it’s still dark ...”
Belle’s voice, still thick with sleep, trailed off into a mumbled slur of words I was glad I couldn’t distinguish. As Bazz had predicted, she was not at her best. The air was close, smelling of stale perfume overlaid with an odor I could not at first distinguish until, upon opening the curtains, I noticed a sherry bottle on the floor, almost hidden by the folds of a lavishly embroidered coverlet which lay in tumbled disarray across the high, wide bed.
Belle rose upon one elbow, a protesting hand shading her eyes. A lacy cap covered her head; her face, deprived of her hair’s softening frame, had no defense against the pitiless midday light. “What the hell, Reenie!”
“It’s almost noon, Belle. I must talk to you.”
She groaned. “Give me a minute. I have to use the chamber pot and then rinse out my poor mouth. Tastes like Ouster’s army charged through it on the way to Little Big Horn.”
I nodded, and perched on the bed.
She looked at me pointedly. “It you don’t mind, Reenie? I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
Stung by her edged tone, I hastily retreated. When she invited me back in—it seemed hours later, but in fact was probably no more than fifteen minutes—she was a different person.
“Darling, I am sorry!” She smiled contritely and hugged me. She smelled of lavender, and the room, its windows now flung wide, had been swept clean of stale night air by the sun-freshened prairie bre
eze.
“Bazz warned you might be a bit cross.”
Belle, who had turned to a handsome mahogany pier mirror to arrange with expert little tweaks of her fingers the strawberry-blond curls cascading across her white shoulders, looked back at me smilingly.
“Cross as an old bear is more like it. Many’s the time I’ve growled at him when he’s brought me my morning coffee.”
“Would you like some now. Belle? You must be starving!”
She waved a dismissive hand as she crossed to her wardrobe to study its contents, her enviably rounded figure in enticing contrast to her demure white batiste chemise and drawers. “My poor stomach’s still having a hoedown with last night’s chili, Reenie. I had to get up twice in the middle of the night, and finally searched out the sherry to help put me back to sleep. I hope my pitter-pattering about didn’t bother you none.” She sighed. “Truth to tell, I haven’t slept well since Quinn came, and probably won’t until he leaves.”
So it was insomnia, not assignations, that accounted for those nocturnal candlelit excursions. “You should have wakened me, Belle; no reason you should suffer alone.”
“Nonsense!” she said briskly, presenting me with the sleeve of a pretty yellow dimity dress to button for her. “No reason for you to suffer, too.”
“It’s Quinn Cooper I came to talk to you about. I met him—that is to say, our paths crossed—out at the pond this morning. He said some things ... and, oh, Belle he hinted at worse....”
Belle went very still. She turned away from me abruptly and began making her bed. As she tugged the coverlet into place I could see her hands shaking.
“Oh, Belle!” I blurted. “I’m sorry if I—”
“It’s all right, Reenie!” Her voice was tight and muffled. She swallowed hard, folded her betraying hands together and sat down at the foot of the bed. She inhaled deeply, her eyelids drifting shut; when she looked at me again there was purpose in her blue eyes. “I’m all right now,” she said, beckoning me to sit down beside her. “Knowing Quinn, I can imagine the bees he set loose in your bonnet.”
I nodded, too miserable to speak.
“About me and his paw?”
“It’s not so much what he said as what he implied. I thought you ought to know so you could stop him from spreading such shameful tales.”
“Me? Stop Quinn?” Belle laughed. “Not hardly damn likely! Besides, you’re prob’ly the only one in these parts who didn’t already know.” She reached out to pat my cheek. “I hoped to spare you that, but Quinn ... well, he’s never been known to spare anybody anything.”
“Are you saying you and Ross Cooper were ... lovers?” The novelty of speaking of a relationship of this kind almost overtook my shock. “But... he was married!”
Belle reached out to pat my hand. “Reenie, Reenie, what an innocent you are! Ross Cooper wasn’t the kind of man to content himself with one woman, especially not a skin-and-bones little sparrow like Lottie, gone to seed hardly before she finished bloomin’. He had himself a half-breed fancy woman— Quinn’s maw—before he got married, then I came along, lookin’ fresh as a prairie rose. He figured me bought and paid for, in a manner of speakin’, and he just couldn’t keep his hands off the merchandise.”
“He was supposed to protect you, not bed you!”
“Protection was the farthest thing from that man’s mind, from the very beginning. At first I was just s’posed to tend to Lottie. She wasn’t bedridden yet, and I helped her with the herbs. I liked that ... still do. But later, when she wasn’t fussin’ over Bazz, she was forever lyin’ herself down and callin’ for me to either open or close the curtains in her room, tidy her bed linens, or fetch wet rags for her headaches, wrung out and placed just so. Up and down, up and down, the whole livelong day.
“Ross left me alone the first three years—just getting shed of Lottie’s complaints contented him well enough. Then, the year I turned fourteen, he looked real hard at me one day, and that was that.”
I was appalled, as much by her matter-of-fact tone as the fact of a grown married man—a father!— turning a defenseless fourteen-year-old into his ... whore. I had hated Quinn for saying it; I hated his being right even more.
“Was there no one you could turn to? The wives of other ranchers? A preacher, maybe? Wasn’t there anyone ready to shame him?”
“Lordy, Reenie, these ranches out here are like little kingdoms: no one tells a king what to do, preachers least of all. The other women had troubles of their own: most of ‘em got married off to men they hardly knew when they wasn’t much older’n me, and when they saw me in town dressed in the finery Ross bought me, they was more jealous than anything else. Ashamed? Why, struttin’ through Ellsworth with a young thing like me on his arm, the other men watchin’ all hot-eyed, he did all but crow like a damn rooster.”
“Yet you and Basil are friends ... how can that be?”
Belle shrugged. “Bazz figured out soon enough that if it wasn’t me, it’d be someone else—you’ve heard that old saying, the devil you know is better’n a stranger? Besides, I took his paw’s mind off him, and—” Belle stopped abruptly. “No point in goin’ on and on about it. It’s enough to say Bazz and I came to an understanding.”
“Nothing more? I mean, you and Bazz never ... ?”
“No, Reenie, Bazz and I never.” She solemnly crossed her heart with one finger. “Ross would have killed him. Besides, I’m not his type. Now you, on the other hand....”
“Me? But we’re identical twins! How could I be his type if you’re not?”
Belle tilted her head to one side; a faintly mocking smile played on her lips. “So we are,” she murmured. “I had almost forgotten.” The look in her eyes was unfathomable. She reached out to coil a lock of my hair around her finger. When she released it, it fell straight as an arrow. “Not a twist or bend in it,” she whispered.
“But you see, I know Bazzy,” she continued briskly, “and I can tell he’s got a soft spot for you.” She got to her feet. “I’ve got to do something about the herbs I left on the kitchen table last night... I could use an extra hand, Reenie.”
I wasn’t quite ready to let her go. “What about Quinn, Belle?”
“What about him?” she asked flatly.
“Well, you certainly aren’t friends.”
“Quinn doesn’t have any friends.”
I thought of Cobby—he was Quinn’s friend, or did Quinn just think he was? “Why did he leave here, Belle, that first time? I know about Bazz and the trouble at the pond—Quinn told me his version this morning—but there was something else. He refused to say what it was, and I wondered—”
“Did somethin’ happen between you and him this morning, Reenie?” She fixed me with narrowed, knowing eyes. “That smiling swagger of his got to you, huh? And now you’re wondering if maybe Bazz and me judge him too hard?”
Her sneering tone unsettled me—or was it the grain of truth in what she said?
Her expression hardened. “I’ll tell you why he left. He tried to rape me, that’s why! He sniffed out what was between me and his paw first time he saw us together, and if I was comin’ around to the bull, he saw no reason why the bull calf couldn’t have some, too.” She laughed. “I can guess why he don’t want you to know: no girl likes learnin’ she’s second best.”
I dropped my gaze, not knowing what to say.
“Shocked you some, have I? Well, let me tell you, Reenie, life on a ranch don’t allow for much nicey-nice talk. Girls like us, no one to look out for us, we’re kinda like furniture, used ‘til we wear out. If we’re pretty and smart enough to do what’s expected, maybe we get polished up and allowed to sit in the parlor, but we’re still property. I was Ross Cooper’s property; Quinn took me for common.”
She laughed, but there wasn’t any amusement in it. “Ross would’ve sooner forgave Quinn drowning Bazz than putting his spurs to me, so soon’s I threatened to tell, he took off. He smartened up some in the six years before he came back, but all you got to
do is look at that scrawny little breed he’s got in tow to know he’s still mean as a snake. You keep shy of him, Reenie, hear?”
* * * *
I was relieved when Quinn didn’t put in an appearance at supper that evening, and over a second cup of coffee, I asked Bazz about his music. His response was immediate, his pleasure at being queried disarming. He had been tracing the paths of traditional songs from east to west, he told me, recording the changes in the melodies and the new lyrics written to express new experiences and circumstances.
“You mean like that old English song, Green-sleeves? The choirmaster at my church back m Jericho told us the same tune was used for a Christmas hymn written after the Civil War.”
“Exactly! And take that old ballad, Barbara Allen. Why, practically every state and territory has its own version of that one. As for Yankee Doodle, did you know that’s been claimed by every nation in Europe?”
I could tell from Belle’s bored expression as we chatted she did not share our interest, but she perked up when Basil began to play.
“Do you happen to know this one, Serena?” The verse was unfamiliar, but as he launched into the jaunty refrain of Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet!, I clapped my hands with delight.
Basil sang in a clear, strong tenor voice, and he welcomed my soprano harmony with a smile of encouragement. We were well pleased with ourselves, and as I watched his hands gracefully coaxing melodic chords from his fine piano, the thought of them touching me, caressing me—he has a soft spot for you, Reenie— made me feel suddenly warm.
Thinking that a religious song might cool my blood, I asked Basil if he knew Amazing Grace.
“One of my favorites,” he said, “with lyrics as sweet and true as your pretty voice. Will you sing it for us?”
Flattered, I did, my confidence growing with each succeeding verse. By the third, I was in full voice, and the words, in the past sung so often they had all but lost their meaning, brought tears to my eyes.
Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come;
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