“How noble you are to bear up under your fate as the sainted mother, whose relationship with her son is poisoned by the evil witch! The citizens of Alta will all say it is so, the same who cast spells against me.”
She shook her head. “Don’t rage, girl! The spiteful cat needlessly shows her claws against a dead mouse. I say I am only an old woman who has lost a son.”
“You'll get no pity from me. You have brought this folly on yourself by creating an evil division.”
“I have done nothing. You are the evil one, and your audacity is not to be borne.”
“You asked for it,” I panted. “Now, will you please leave my grandfather's property?”
The next moment, I was sorry for having allowed my siren nature to howl, also for having recklessly thrown down the gauntlet. But it was too late to retreat. Mother Brighton looked me up and down with her cold, brown eyes.
“God has been unjust in letting you stand here and insult me, Cassandra. I will go and leave you to Him, after I’ve spoken one more word. I fear my son’s happiness does not lie on this side of the grave. He has ignored much good advice by marrying you on a whim. You stand on a collapsing precipice. Do not ever give Nicholas cause to doubt you, or you will rue the day. If you show my son one half the temper you have shown me today, you’ll find out that though he appears to be mild-mannered as a child, he can be hard as steel.”
Earlier that morning, the Widow Brighton had called in Thomas from weeding her garden. She told him she had heard her daughter-in-law was expected at Mill's Creek, and she intended to pay a call on her. As she turned aside, she said, half to herself, “I received a note of thanks from Clare about the coins, but I haven't heard a word from my son. Such rude behavior isn't like him. Something must be wrong.”
Thomas then burst into tears and was forced to report the incident of the gambled coins to his employer.
“So Drake has all the coins?” the Widow demanded.
“I-I-I don't know, ma'am. I think so. I told him one bag was Clare's and the other belonged to Master Nicholas. Drake said you should have give one bag to Mrs. Brighton by rights.”
“So Cassandra has them all! Just as I thought! Get me my horse, Thomas, and make sure you ask God to forgive your terrible sin in your prayers. Gambling will take you straight to hell.”
“Y-y-yes, ma'am.”
Poor Thomas had no way of knowing the information he had reluctantly given to his employer was itself misleading…
On the night of the gambling party, after Thomas had gone stumbling into the darkness, Caleb Scattergood had come out of shadows and challenged Clare's husband to play for Clare's coins.
Drake had mentioned nothing about the half of the legacy that belonged to Nicholas, as he felt sure of winning. The battle was fought hard, but in the end, victory belonged to the ice man. Gnashing his teeth, Drake turned over Samuel's coins to the man who loved his wife more than he did and stomped off.
Caleb's victory was doubly sweet, giving him an excuse to visit Clare the next day. Not knowing one sack belonged to Nicholas, he presented the two sacks to Clare. She stood up on her tiptoes and bestowed a sweet kiss on the deliverer.
Caleb did not wash his neck for weeks afterward. Nor did he mention the gambling games to anyone.
After the bitter interaction with her mother-in-law, Cassandra quickly left Mill's Creek and took her horse at a gallop to Bulette.
Her premature departure left Horatio heart-broken, while Captain Vye privately attributed her behavior to the impetuousness of newlyweds.
“Didn't think Brighton had it in him,” he muttered to himself.
In her tiny cabin, Cassandra waited for her husband's homecoming and plotted. Hearing Nicholas shout to his horse outside the door, she started to run out to greet him, as she always had done before. Then she stopped and waited. As Nicholas came through the door, she began to weep bitter and copious tears.
“My darling love! Are you hurt? Tell me what's wrong.”
“I've seen your mother. We'll never speak again.”
“Why?” he asked, feeling a strong pang of disappointment. Often during the day he had wondered, Has she gone to see Mother? Are they getting to know one another?
“Well, I—I hardly remember. We can't see each other again. That’s all I know.”
Of course she remembered every word.
“Why can't you?” he urged.
“Why not ask your mother why she insulted me? Oh, Nick, it was too humiliating and hideous! She asked me if I had accepted a gift of money from Clare's husband.”
“No! Why would she say such a thing?”
“I don't know. Her accusation couldn't have been clearer.”
“She would not treat you so without a reason. I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it, Nick. It is so.”
“Cassandra, there must be something else. Tell me exactly what she said.”
“Never mind. We both said words that can never be forgiven. And…and…if you are taking her part, that would be just too much for me to bear!”
She threw herself into his arms, still weeping. From the corner of her eye, she watched her husband's face for a propitious sign. Perhaps this was the moment she had been waiting for, the moment when he might be most receptive to hearing the case for leaving the district. Finally she stopped her crying and spoke out impetuously.
“Oh, Nick, do say you will take me to San Francisco and get me away from all this! I don’t care how humbly we live there. You can go on with your plans for a school, and I will help you as much as you like. My grandfather will invest in whatever business you start. Oh, Nick, do agree. It will make me so happy. Will you say it now, my love?”
Here was her bald statement of what she wanted. Cassandra was flushed. There were huge, pleading tears in her topaz eyes. It was now or never. She reached out both hands and drilled a brilliant current of pure willpower into her husband's watery, hazel eyes.
Immediately he turned his back, deflecting her powers. It must also be said that a siren's power may be defeated by a man who has made up his mind to be stubborn on a particular subject. When he next spoke, his expression was unyielding. “I gave up on that idea, Cassie, long ago. I never led you to expect such a thing.”
“But it is the twentieth century, Nick. Surely I have a voice in the matter?” She asked the question in her most winsome, reasonable tone. “Now I am your wife and the sharer of your fate, I think I should have a say as to where we live.”
“Well, certainly you do. But there are things beyond the pale of discussion. This is one of them, and by mutual agreement, I thought.”
“I am very sorry to hear that, as—as—you are terribly mistaken, and I am so d-d-desperately unhappy here!”
She left the room in her best Sarah Bernhardt imitation, shoulders drooping and tears spurting. Then she wiped her eyes and sank down on her bed, chewing on the bitter leaf of an unusual defeat and brooding over the sudden turn of events.
Surely, she thought, he will change his mind. I've just begun to make my case, and if I have to, I will use my powers again to get us out of here.
Nicholas remained unsettled in his mind that night, on several accounts. He now realized the rift with his mother was more serious than he had thought. Even worse, he saw for the first time a deep chasm lay between his hopes and expectations, and those in the bosom of his bride. But, though he loved it, San Francisco was simply too dangerous a town for him to live in as a married man, and he was determined to change his career, which would most easily be done here.
The mystery of the silver coins was soon solved.
Having heard from her distraught aunt enough about the unfortunate encounter with Cassandra to piece everything together, Clare ignored her doctor’s counsel and paid her cousin Nicholas a visit one late afternoon. She bestowed on him his sack of silver and advised him to write to his mother immediately. As Cassandra was out walking, the cousins embraced the rare opportunity for a frank discussion.
“They are both too hotheaded,” said Nick dismally.
“Look on the bright side, cousin. We both received our legacy. You need the money.”
“I would rather have lost the money twice over than have this happen.”
“That's the trouble with you, Nick. You don't realize how most people feel about having nice things around them. Increasingly, you seem to live in a dream world.”
Without consulting with his wife, Nicholas put his silver coins into his savings toward opening a school in Alta, which he would name in his father’s honor. He penned a short note to his mother, thanking her for the silver coins and mentioning nothing else.
It seemed to him that more than enough had already been said.
Widow Brighton cried over her son's chilly note, seeing her secret goal of reconciliation had not been furthered. She bitterly blamed Cassandra for the continuation of the impasse.
During the nights, Nicholas drove himself to exhaustion, reading and studying far into the small hours, pushing himself onward despite a growing discomfort in his eyes. He had resolved to press on with his studies even harder than ever. He must open his school and move his wife into more suitable lodgings. This much he would accomplish, even if it killed him.
He had promised his wife their stay in the tiny, dreary cabin would be short. It was now clearer to him, thanks to Clare, that their dreary surroundings must feel like an unfair penance to Cassandra for marrying him. He was determined to make her reasonable wish for a better home (but no other desire) come true.
Chapter Twenty-One
Misfortune Is Unbarred
August, 1901
Bulette, Wyoming
One hot morning, Nicholas woke up with a scalding pain in his eyeballs. Once he had had a similar problem in San Francisco and sought help from an “eclectic” physician, a doctor who prescribed homeopathic remedies.
Herbal compresses were tried for several days, with no effect. Then, over the objections of her husband, Cassandra rented a gig with her own money from old man Like's Livery Stable in Bulette. She drove Nicholas to Alta to see Dr. Huddleston.
The diagnosis was corneal abrasion.
Dr. Huddleston said, “Rubbing your eyes while reading and irritating the cornea with bits of ice that were lodged there is the probable cause.”
The prognosis was worse than expected. “You may ride outdoors in a couple of weeks, but not into the mountains,” cautioned Dr. Huddleston. “The higher altitude will aggravate your condition. You will have to wear protective goggles any time you are outside. And you must not read or otherwise strain your eyes, perhaps for as long as a year.”
At first Nicholas was kept totally indoors, in a room from which all light was excluded. He would have been in absolute misery if it had not been for Cassandra's playing her zither and reading books by the glimmer of a shaded lamp, for hours on end.
Two weeks wore on without Nicholas speaking of what was to happen to them. When Cassandra rode or walked out alone, her mind was focused only on the future. What if Nicholas should go blind? The turn of events made a gay future life in San Francisco seem very remote. Sometimes she wept on her solitary walks, wishing there were a way out of this dismal place, with or without her husband.
Lying in his bed in the cottage with little to do except stare at the ceiling, Nicholas thought mostly of his mother. He thought he would send for her, but then again he would change his mind. A stubborn stoicism was increasingly taking possession of him. Unlike Cassandra, he wasn’t afraid of being impoverished. A monk's life would suit him, and his night school in a cottage was still a possibility. And so, as time went on, his spirit was made stronger in an ascetic dimension that led him farther away from his wife's anxious focus on the practicalities of their future life.
Clearly, the two were “not on the same wave-length,” as we would say now. But had they ever been? The snare had been set and the man had fallen into it, but the unhappy siren now felt entangled and imprisoned in her own web.
Since the early autumn weather was mild, after a time Nicholas was able to ride or walk alongside Teddy through tracts of land and hillsides to the southwest and approaching the Brighton Grange. These outings became a daily routine.
One day Nicholas saw before him in one of the valleys near the Brighton Grange the gleaming of whetted iron. Advancing, he dimly perceived that the shine came from the tool of a hay-cutter.
When he got closer, he saw his friend Sam, barebacked, was at work cutting hay. Sam was glad to see Nicholas and also seemed exceedingly cheerful.
“What are you doing out here, Sam?” Nicholas asked.
“Making extra money for meself and me widowed mother,” said Sam, reverting to his Irish brogue. “I rake the hay that grows in the wilds on the field, then bundle it and sell it to ranchers. They are right glad to pay me for my trouble. There is more hay out here than one man can rake up in a decade, and the need for it on the ranches.”
“Very enterprising,” said Nick. “I admire that in a man.”
He patted the young man on his bulging, sweaty shoulder.
“Well, good day to you, Master Brighton. Give me best to the missus.”
“I will, Sam. Good day to you.”
Sam stuck out his hand, and Nicholas took the younger man's hard, rough palm in his own. He pressed it back fervently. Afterward, when he was riding home, a thought flashed through his mind of the two of them together, naked. Perplexed, he pushed the image aside. The young gold prospector in San Francisco was now a distant memory, but clearly temptation could occur anywhere, even in a desert, as it had to Christ. He must find work, an idle mind being the devil's workshop.
Why not make hay? The idea made Nicholas almost giddily happy. He resolved to lose no time in beginning it. However, he would keep his activity a secret from Cassandra, because he feared it would, literally, be the last straw.
His secret activity was a new thread in a growing pattern of disconnection between Nicholas and Cassandra. Nor was the environment conducive to lovemaking. It seemed a knife lay between them in the marital bed. The composition of the knife was not steel; rather, it was his medical problem, dwindling resources, and their mutually exclusive visions of the future. Nicholas foresaw leading a rural school. Cassandra saw herself wearing ostrich feathers to the San Francisco opera.
Cassandra had foresworn the use of siren powers to prevail in the contest. As a human, she was up against a will as strong as her own. Try as she might to beguile him to see things her way, Nicholas remained obdurate. With her human reasoning aiding her, Cassandra next tried using sexual politics.
In their day, sexual relations was not considered a fit subject for a young woman to discuss with anyone but her mother. In Alta it was still the custom for women to marry as soon as they became fertile. As the population was scant, there was great pressure for newlyweds to multiply, and quickly. Certainly no one talked about birth control.
What passed for birth control in the early twentieth centurywas nothing like a pill. It was a clumsy leather sheath that chafed both parties and did an indifferent job at hindering conception.
Now, Nicholas believed both the sacred and natural justification for marriage lay in having children. Naturally, he assumed they would soon be pregnant.
One night, when he gently brought up the issue, Cassandra was ready with an answer. She tartly retorted that “having a child in the wilds of Wyoming in our precarious financial situation is out of the question.”
She added, “If you wish to continue having intercourse while we are living here, you must use a sheath. It will be different in San Francisco.”
When he started to assert an objection, she used his own words against him, saying it was “beyond the pale of discussion” to have sex without the sheath. Nicholas went off in a sulk. He personally abhorred the contraption. The ultimatum was her trump card in their struggle for supremacy, and
they both knew it.
After the line was drawn in the sand, personal conversations dwindled. Therefore Cassandra did not ask Nick where he was going one fine afternoon in August, when he hitched up behind Teddy a dray that was loaded with an raking tools, leather gloves and leggings, and a quantity of rope and twine. She did not recognize the items as supplies for a haymaker out on his own in the wilds of Hatter’s Field. Nor did she ask him what he had been doing when he returned home at the end of the day tired, but with a satisfied gleam in his shaded eyes.
Matters quickly grew more complex for Nicholas. Sam was a lonely man and eager for a friend. One day Nicholas caught him masturbating behind the horse. Instead of jeering at him, he stood beside him and did likewise; neither spoke a word, just buttoned their pants. When they were finished, they went back to work. A few days later, after the sun went down and when Hatter's Field was totally deserted, they became physically intimate, lying down and rapidly jerking each other off. Now there were two secrets Nicholas was keeping from his wife.
But then, one sunny day, after a morning of raking alongside Sam and whistling at his work, Nicholas found himself feeling unwilling to continue his secrecy—that is, on the nature of his daily work. After looking around to make sure they were alone, he kissed Sam on the lips, savoring the salty taste of the sweat on his upper lip. Then he left early for home, intent on coming clean with Cassandra about his new occupation.
On his coming up to the house, Cassandra called out to Nicholas from the window at the back of the cabin, where she was playing her zither for the benefit of the animals of the field. Nicholas eagerly went to her, with the single hope of hurdling the chasm of icy silence widening between them. Removing his protective goggles, he gazed into her eyes, as best he could, through the open window.
With a lisp, he said: “Darling, I’m sorry if I have seemed distant lately. The truth is, I am so much happier. If we were reconciled with mother, I would be a happy husband.”
A puzzled look furrowed her arched eyebrows and made her topaz eyes opaque. “But Nick, how can you say you are happier, when nothing has changed?”
The Siren's Tale Page 16