The floor was jammed with Tucson society trying desperately to remain erect. The rink had opened only that spring at Levin's Park, but the novel idea caught on as quickly as the sailboat rentals on Silver Lake had five years earlier. People jostled for position on the floor. The enormous room was a din of children’s shouts, feminine squeaks, and male laughter.
Jessie found it almost impossible to enjoy herself. She loved the freedom her skates offered, but the noise, the people shoving, and always the ogling of the boys and men—she felt hemmed in, imprisoned. Yes, all in all, she much preferred the wild freedom of horseback riding.
Maneuvering around the couples locked arm in arm, she looked for the sight of Brig's dark head. Jumping jackasses, don't let him be skating with the prissy Fanny Roget! But, of course, he would be. Fanny’s parents were staying at the fashionable Omodorf Hotel, there from Denver to do business with Uncle Sherrod. Fanny’s father, some sort of a silver tycoon, wanted to discuss a mining venture, and Brig was stuck with the simpering young woman.
She saw Brig then. His arm was around Fanny’s hourglass waist, his dark head bent near hers as they skated just ahead of her. Fanny turned her face up at Brig’s and laughed at something he said, and Jessie wanted to pull out the young woman’s bright-red hair by its roots. The way Brig smiled that slow, warm smile—he certainly didn't look stuck with Fanny Roget.
Why did he have to be so damned handsome, with all his father's dark dramatic looks? And why did he have to be seven years older than she? Brig, at twenty, treated her as his little sister. It wasn’t as if they were really full-blooded cousins or anything. She had been in love with him since that first day she had come to the Stronghold when she was six.
Brig seemed to have always been there to take care of her—to pick her up the first few times she fell off the calico pony Uncle Sherrod had given her and brush the grass out of her hair; to help her in the middle of the night with the odious math; and to teach her how to handle a rifle. Elizabeth had protested vehemently to Sherrod about that, but on the next day Brig had merely carted Jessie another ten miles out of sight and sound and resumed pitching the beer bottles in the air for her target practice.
It had been deliciously wonderful being alone with him out on the range, feeling his arms about her shoulders, his breath fanning her cheek, as he demonstrated the rifle’s mechanics. Then the summer before, Elizabeth had put a stop to her riding out with Brig. “You’re getting to be a young lady,” the old woman had said, looking pointedly at the breasts that had just begun to develop on Jessie's coltish body. Under Elizabeth's hooded glare, she had felt dirty about her budding femininity.
But she would not be made to feel dirty about what she felt for Brig, whose own body burst now with manhood. That would be her secret.
Abigail must have suspected. That same summer Abigail married the Jewish merchant Ira Ritz. Jessie always thought of the man as Mr. Big Nose. The day of the wedding Abigail pulled her aside, handing her the basket of sunflowers that Jessie, as flower girl, was to carry. “You look lovely, Jessie.”
“I wish that I looked as lovely as you,” Jessie breathed, for to her the twenty-two-year-old bride was breathtaking, with the white lace and silk framing the soft blond hair and creamy skin. Jessie tugged at her own wild honeysuckle curls that tumbled in disorder about her shoulders. “I’ll never look pretty with hair like a horse’s mane and a body like a picket fence.”
Abigail laughed softly and hugged her. “You’ll be a raving beauty one day; far prettier than I, with your brilliant coloring.” Her smile faded then. “But Jessie, at your age a girl dramatizes everything. You fall in love with everything and everyone.”
“I’m not like that,” she had protested. “I just love the Stronghold and—”
“I know,” Abigail said, when Jessie’s lips clamped tight. “But there’s such a thing as ill-fated love. Did your tutor ever say anything about such lovers as Tristan and Isolde or Dante and Beatrice?”
Jessie shook her head. “Mr. Franklin never talked about stories like that.” The old tutor Elizabeth had hired for her, at Sherrod’s insistence, had stuck to the Latin tales of Caesar’s conquests.
Abigail’s voice lowered. “You don’t understand Grandmother Elizabeth, Jessie. Maybe it was because her love for my grandfather was ill-fated, but . . . but after you grow up, Jessie, go away. There’s a whole wide world out there. Go away. I’m going. I’m going as far from this territory as the Santa Fe Railroad will take Ira and me.”
Abigail had escaped with her merchant husband to the bright city lights of New York. But not Jessie. She would never leave. The Stronghold was her home. And Brig was her love.
In the press of the crowd she skated past Brig and Fanny. Fanny went sprawling headlong. Jessie continued on by. She felt ashamed of herself, letting her skate wheels get in Fanny’s way as they had. But then Fanny should know that was one of the perils of roller skating.
Jessie skated once with Manuel Drachman and twice more with Bob Merckle before the afternoon was over. Brig, with Fanny hugging his side, came for Jessie. “We'd better go,” he said, giving the Merckle boy only a cursory glance. “Father wants to be at the depot before the train arrives.”
“I’ll help you with your skates, Jessie,” the freckle-faced Bob volunteered.
Only then did Brig seem to notice the teenager. “She can do them herself, Bob. We’re in a hurry.”
Jessie fumed as she yanked the laces off the skate hooks. Brig was waiting at the door with Fanny. Though the couple was not touching, his head was bent over hers, his hand supporting his tall body on the wall above her head. When Jessie reached them, the two went on outside, talking softly, and she trailed along like . . . just like a kid sister!
Tucson’s chain gang was sweeping the dirt street, followed by the water wagon that sprinkled the rising dust, and Brig and Fannie were forced to wait for the convicts to pass. Jessie took the opportunity to slide a look at her competitor. Bright-red mouth, bright-red hair ... a point for Fanny. Small eyes . . . a point for herself. But Fanny’s bosom—at eighteen the girl had more bosom than Jessie would have if she lived to be a hundred. Score another point for Fanny, she thought grimly.
Brig took not only Fanny’s arm but her own to lead them across the street, and Jessie had to admit that this was better than nothing. At least she was with Brig. Near him. Touching him. Ahh, sweet torture. How old was Juliet when she fell in love with Romeo—thirteen or fourteen? Was her own love so hopeless, then? She darted another glance at voluptuous Fanny. No doubt about it. Her own chances looked dim.
She followed the couple several blocks past the maze of windmills that seemed to grow like rigid, branchless trees all over town. By running, the three were able to catch one of the mule-drawn streetcars that went as far north as the new university. But they were only going as far as Pennington Street’s new railroad depot.
The streetcar stopped several times more for passengers as the street filled with people on their way to the depot. Though it was still two hours until the first train would steam into Tucson, elated citizens were already gathering to welcome it.
Sherrod, along with Charles Poston, was to be one of the town officials who were to speak at the celebration. By the time Brig and Fanny, with Jessie in tow, arrived, the Sixth Cavalry band from Fort Lowell was on the platform along with a cannon. Sherrod was there, deep in conversation with Roget. As darkly handsome as Brig was, his father at forty-one was even more so with the distinguished silver to streak the dark-brown hair and the brooding cast to his face that added an almost spiritual refinement to his strong masculine features.
If Jessie loved Brig, she worshiped her uncle—as he had told her to call him and which unfailingly irritated Elizabeth. To Jessie he was larger than life. He rode out of the pages of her mother’s book by Sir Walter Scott. Uncle Sherrod was Ivanhoe (an older Ivanhoe, true), riding to take her, Rowena, away from the shabbiness of the jacale.
He had given her a new world there
at the Stronghold. Servants, a real bed (not the cornhusk one she had lain on in Tucson), food that mounded the table, though it seemed she could never eat enough nor put on weight, and, most important, an education.
But best of all, Uncle Sherrod had given her a family—cousins and grandparents, though she did not remember much of Don Francisco. A few times before his death the year after she came to the Stronghold, he had taken her on his lap, when his heart wasn’t bothering him, and told her stories of what it was like when he had first come to the Stronghold—of the fierce Indians that lurked outside the gates and the grass that was as high as a horse’s flanks then. And always he would tell her, you are your father's daughter.
Only Elizabeth had remained distant, ignoring her as if she did not exist. And Jessie knew it was not her imagination. She remembered clearly that first day Uncle Sherrod had brought her to the Stronghold. He had put her in a room that he told her used to be her mother’s and before that her Grandmother Davalos’s. It was such a nice room with hard floors and walls tinted the blue of a summer sky. Only the mustiness told of its disuse.
Elizabeth had come storming into the room, demanding of Uncle Sherrod what he was doing, bringing the Howard child into the house.
“She is not ‘the Howard child,’ Mother. She is Jessie Davalos, your husband’s granddaughter—and she has as much right to live here as Abigail or Brigham. I want that understood from this time on!”
That had been the first and only confrontation Jessie had with the old woman, but never since had she been comfortable in Elizabeth's cold presence.
Sherrod spied the three young people crossing the platform toward him and broke off talking with Roget to encircle Jessie's shoulders, drawing her next to him. “How was the skating?’’ he asked with a fond smile for the three young people.
Fanny looked up at Sherrod, smiling. "Marvelous.”
"Crowded,” Jessie said flatly.
Brig grinned at her and tousled her hair with his free hand. "That’s because half the boys of Tucson were there hoping to skate with you.”
She moved her head out of his reach. How could he treat her like such a child? Couldn’t he see she was no longer a little girl?
Sherrod cast a quizzical glance from his son to his niece. She was growing, too quickly. And despite the color of her hair, she reminded him too much of Catherine, with those eyes the cool color of English ivy and Catherine's smile that had enchanted him from the very first.
Jessie, of course, was more headstrong—an unbroken colt still, but nevertheless she had her mother’s strength of purpose. There were times when, watching the girl, being around her, got to be too much. Too great a pain. He saw Catherine in her smile, heard her in the laugh. At those times, he would make an excuse for business in Tucson. He would find Gay Alley and release with the “gray doves” there.
Perhaps he should have been more like Law. Instead of playing the gentleman, instead of doing what seemed right, he should have left Lucy and the Stronghold. He should have taken Catherine and made her his. But that he never could have done. She had been Law’s from the first. Neither of them had known it instantly, but he had.
As a young man he had envied Law and his restless, reckless ways. And it would seem he would envy him the rest of his life.
“Well, it looks like you’re going to have to put your hair up,” he told Jessie now. “I’ve just been telling Hugo you’re growing into a young lady and it’s time I sent you off to a finishing school in the States."
“Yes,” Roget said, peering down at Jessie through his monocle, “I was telling Godwin that Fanny here attended Lady Bertram’s in St. Louis. I can recommend it as an excellent finishing school.”
Fanny moved her myopic gaze from Brig’s face long enough to say sweetly, “It would do a world of good for you, child.”
She can’t wait to get rid of me! “I don’t want to go, Uncle Sherrod. I know everything I need to know for living at the Stronghold.”
“But you won't always be living at the Stronghold,” Sherrod said patiently. “One day you’ll marry and leave.”
“I don’t want to ever leave!”
Sherrod chuckled at her vehemence. “Well, it’s nothing we have to decide today. We'll talk about it later.”
But later never came.
As the small wood-burning engine, puffing clouds of black smoke from its funnel-shaped smokestack and drawing small wooden cars behind it, chugged into the station, as the cannon roared and the cavalry band trumpeted above the hysterical yells of the citizens, as Sherrod cracked the bottle of champagne over the engine . . . he clutched at his left arm and twisted forward to slump on the platform.
It was the end of his life and the beginning of a change in Jessie’s.
CHAPTER 27
Dead of a heart attack! Incredible, people said. Sherrod Godwin was still so young. But privately Jessie thought it was an old-young. He seldom had laughed, and the eyes had always seemed dolorous.
The Methodist Episcopal Church was filled for the memorial services. Men waited outside the church in the hot sun, hat in hand. The burial had been held the day after Sherrod's death because of the spring heat. But the memorial services were postponed a week for his daughter's train to arrive from New York.
The service was being officiated by an elder up from the Mormon town of St. David. A respectful hush lay over the throng. This was a Godwin being buried. All places of business were closed, including the saloons and gambling establishments. Never before had so many people assembled for a service. Outside, the bells of the San Agustín Cathedral could be heard crying their mourning. An American flag draped the altar.
All eyes in the church were trained on the Godwin family, who sat at the front. But rather than on the grieving matriarch, Elizabeth Godwin, or the heirs, Brigham and Abigail, and her husband Ira, the gazes were directed on Jessie Howard. Or was it Davalos? There was so much gossip that one never knew what the real facts were, who Jessie's father really was.
It was not just the mystery about the girl that caught the imagination. There was the promise of her wild beauty, though to look at her at that moment, sitting between Brigham and the rigid Elizabeth, one would have doubts about that promise. She was really too tall for a child her age. And the tawny hair fell about her shoulder blades like a lion’s mane. Not at all the ladylike prettiness of the young lady on the other side of Brigham, Fanny Roget. Only the pale-green eyes thicketed by black lashes lent any immediate relief to the wrathful-looking creature.
An ungovernable child, certainly, though Elizabeth Godwin never did say so in such terms on the occasional trips she made into Tucson. But then Elizabeth was not the kind to complain. The way she had been made to endure her husband's bigamous love affair with the Davalos woman would have been enough to drive a weaker woman to her grave. But not Elizabeth. The fact that she had survived the Davalos woman's death, her daughter- in-law’s, her husband’s, and now her son's was testimony to her endurance.
And then Elizabeth was so charitable, taking in the Spanish woman's bastard grandchild. Her husband’s own illegitimate grandchild A wicked strain ran through the Davalos blood. And it would show up in Jessica Davalos! Time would tell.
The memorial service was at last over, and Jessie stood stiffly at Brig’s side as the mourners filed past the Godwin family to pay their respects. Her face was bleached beneath the suntan. In spite of the loss Brig felt at his father’s death, he sensed the greater need of his cousin. Thirteen was too young to have death come knocking so many times.
In the moment of respite that followed, his hand slipped to her side to squeeze her chilled fingers reassuringly. “It’s all right, Jessie.”
She glanced up into the face pale with its own grief, a face that looked like a dark angel’s. “You won’t leave me, will you, Brig?”
“Not for a long time. Not until you’re ready to leave yourself and go out to find a husband.”
He had misunderstood. “But I don’t want a husband,” sh
e said, staring now straight in front of her, too proud to let him see what was in her eyes. “I don’t want things to change.”
Brig sighed. “But things do, Jessie. You’re old enough to know that. But our friendship won’t change, I promise.”
Roget and his wife, who looked to Jessie an older, plumper version of Fanny, accompanied the Godwins as far as Ronstadt’s stables. Elizabeth thanked the Rogets politely for their support in the time of bereavement, and Fanny hugged Brig tearfully. Jessie turned away and climbed in the spring wagon’s back seat.
On the long trip back to the Stronghold, Elizabeth sat beside a grave Brig, who drove. Her lips pressed tightly against her clenched teeth. In the back, sitting with Jessie, was the stolidly silent Ira, and Abigail, who talked fitfully, as if trying to keep back the tears with conversation.
“I so wanted Father to see his first grandchild,” she said, her voice cracking.
Ira patted his wife’s shoulder with a clumsy hand. “It’s all right, Abbie. You’ll bear a child yet.”
“But the doctors give so little hope. Three times now . . .” Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she took her handkerchief from one of her cuffs to blow her nose.
“You’ll have to take to your bed for the full nine months then,” Elizabeth said, turning to fix her granddaughter with stone-gray eyes. “There can be no shirking of duty, Abigail. There must be children to keep the Stronghold going.”
Privately Jessie thought that Elizabeth made the Stronghold sound like some biblical stone idol that needed a blood sacrifice to be propitiated. And it wasn’t! Behind its impregnable walls Jessie found warmth and security. Inside those walls were found treasures not to be found in any of the other homes throughout the territory.
Oh, not the tasteless Victorian bric-a-brac that seemed to clutter the drawing rooms she had occasionally visited with her uncle and Brig, but real objets d art that Uncle Sherrod had purchased for his wife those last years of her life—the Waterford glasses and Spode and Sevres porcelain, the antique blackamoor statue, and the first piano in the territory, the Chickering grand piano. And Lucy had added items that reflected her own elegance and good taste—the five-piece Aubusson salon suite, a pair of Queen Anne shepherd’s-crook armchairs, and a Venetian three-panel folding screen
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