The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) Read online

  Now, sure, it was probably all that was left: the trains from the East had dropped off a steady stream of new homesteaders all spring. As soon as the snowmelt let them, the land offices sent out their wagons and riders to show off the land to the immigrants and failures and assorted hard-luck cases who had been studying their pamphlets on the Great Opportunity and the Breadbasket of America for the whole of a long bleak winter in the eastern cities, and lately fewer and fewer had been getting off at Bradshaw’s weathered depot, and more and more pale faces had peered out through the grimy windows as they went further west, to newer, rawer prairie towns, or even further, into the foothills of far-away mountains.

  Fact was, Bradshaw and its neighboring towns were all claimed up. This late-comer had just settled for the land no one had wanted, rather than head deeper into the frontier. Whoever claimed this piece wasn’t just a greenhorn, he was a coward and a fool, most likely. Not worth worrying about; he’d be back on the train east before the first snow fell, his wallet as empty as his belly and his pantry.

  But still Jared wondered about it. About him: the poor fool that had taken on the section. His conscience was eating at him. Wouldn’t do to let a neighbor starve to death without at least talking to the fellow and seeing what he had in mind. Might be he could convince the fellow to sell off his tools and his horses and get back on the train, east or west didn’t matter, on to some more promising piece of prairie or back to another box in another city. That would be a good deed, Jared supposed. And he was short on those.

  Mind made up, Jared swung the left rein against the roan’s skinny neck. The cowhorse resisted with all his mind and body, bulging his neck against the rein and pointing his nose to the left. Home was left. Oats were left. Jared gave him another boot in the ribs. “Git up,” he ordered grimly, and the roan decided that he wasn’t going to win this battle without the sort of energy he hadn’t expended since he was a half-feral two-year-old, newly roped and waiting in a high-walled corral for the strange two-legged creature to make his move. And there just wasn’t any reason for exercise like that. He turned his nose back to the right, as requested, and plodded up the much more overgrown trail along the dwindling creek-bed, heading resignedly away from oats.

  ***

  Little Edward stirred. His mouth, slack and sticky with milk, had fallen away from his mother’s breast. Both hands still pressed against her chest possessively, but she did not awaken and so neither did he. Cherry’s chest rose slowly and rhythmically, her resolute strength finally felled from the exhaustion of dawn-to-dusk days trying to put together the pieces of a successful claim, trying to patch up the drafts of the shanty before autumn’s bite arrived, trying to build a chicken coop and a goat-pen without hammering her fingers too badly, trying to determine where her wheat fields should be plowed for next spring’s planting, and, of course, trying to take care of herself and an eight-month-old baby, as well. All of these things on her own, with only the help of the silent Jorgenson girl, who arrived in blond pigtails each morning just as the tarnished brass mantle clock chimed eight times and impassively took the baby into her arms so that Cherry could head on outside and get to work.

  It had been three months of this, and Cherry could scarcely remember a time when she had not been bone-tired, chapped-fingered, and aching with bruises and crushed fingers. Her sleep was as deep as consciousness could sink; her little boy responded to her calm with an equally total relaxation.

  And then a strange horse whinnied, and the mule in his lean-to against the shanty replied with a bray that could wake the dead. Cherry’s eyes flew open as fast as her baby’s did.

  ***

  Jared scarcely knew what he was doing. His mind was spinning in circles. What in the — how in the — who in the — ?

  Of course he shouldn’t have been looking in the window of the shanty at all, except that he was worried no one was around, on account of the mule and the wagon put away neatly in the little shed that was meant to pass for a barn, which implied that the master of the homestead was in residence. But there was no one to be seen, not in the half-built chicken run, nor in the tumble-down goat-pen, not to mention the lack of both chickens and goats. And the young vegetable garden was looking pretty dead as well. Jared had a sudden vision of some boiled-collar city slicker lying dead at his kitchen table, a thief’s bullet through his forehead, or in disheveled repose upon rumpled bed-sheets, dead of diphtheria or some common fever, and he couldn’t help but hop off the roan, drop his reins with a stern admonition to “stand,” and go to peer in the open little window-hole of the shanty.

  When he’d seen what was really inside, his jaw dropped.

  Of course she was beautiful; even Jared, hard-shelled and cold towards all women, had to admit that. Her hair, in a loose braid over one shoulder, was gilt-colored, like ripened wheat, like the sun-bleached prairie in autumn. Her features, though taut and red with sunburn, were perfectly proportioned: a slim nose, high cheekbones, plump rose-colored lips, arching eyebrows one shade darker than the tantalizing gold of her braid. And that calico dress, so plain with its dark blue background and simple pattern of little red flowers, might not ordinarily have enhanced the round curves of her body… but since it was lying open in the front, with that white globe of a breast exposed for all the world (for just Jared) to see, the pattern and cut was certainly not a factor.

  He had not seen a woman’s body in a very long time. He hadn’t thought he wanted to. But the fabric of his trousers, suddenly painfully tight, suggested otherwise. Jared’s body and Jared’s mind were not in agreement on the question of sex. He clenched his fists at his side and tried not to think about the other breast, the one he couldn’t see, the rest of the woman, the bits he couldn’t see, outlined all too clearly by the clinging folds of fabric.

  And did the sleeping babe make the woman all the more luscious? Jared tried not to think so. But he couldn’t help but look at the scene with another kind of longing, removed from a young man’s hot sexual desire: he was no young pup, out to sew his wild oats; he was a man feeling himself aging without children, a man who had once dreamed of a family and a ranch and a riot of sons and daughters pouring out of his front door to meet him of an evening, a man who had once seen a belly rounding and thought it was of his own seed and his own love and his own desire, and found himself sadly mistaken. The sleeping baby pressed against this woman’s chest only served to tighten the constriction in his chest, the hard knot of desire and longing in his throat. We’ll call him Andrew, for your father, he’d said, and she’d laughed and said “You’re his father, you can choose his name.”

  The memory hammered away his desire; he scarcely saw the slumbering woman and child anymore, consumed instead with the woman who had laughed and turned away from him. He squared his jaw, creased his forehead, clenched his eyebrows, looked generally like a person in a fit of rage, perhaps inclined to go insane with an ax, and then that damned roan whinnied, like a fool, and the mule in the lean-to brayed back.

  Her eyes flew open, and when she saw the shadow in the shanty window, she screamed.

  ***

  Red Indians. That was her first thought, once she got over the initial moment of shrieking terror, hands clutching Little Edward against her chest, heart nearly bursting with rapid-fire thuds. The Red Indians had come to scalp her.

  Then the face moved, jumped away from the window, and she saw the wide tan brim of the Stetson, that funny hat cowboys liked to swagger about in. Red Indians didn’t wear Stetsons. She was certain of that. She had never seen one in person, thank heavens, but all the magazine illustrations assured her that Red Indians wore eagle-feather headdresses.

  This was a white man. A cowboy? Another homesteader? A claim-jumper? The last thought gave her pause. A claim-jumper was surely just as dangerous as a Red Indian. There had been stories… she had heard them during her few trips into Bradshaw, buying beans and pickles at the general store, lurking behind the shelves of dusty iron tools while she listened to the goss
ip at the counter. Women alone were the most at risk from these thieving murderers, and there were some men who sent their wives back east, or into Bradshaw to stay together in a house, huddled together for safety in numbers, while the men labored alone on the claims.

  But there was no one more alone than Cherry, with no husband at all.

  Her hands tightened on Edward, and the baby, awakened and alarmed by his mother’s trembling body and the braying mule a few feet from their heads, raised his own voice and began to weep with the frustration of good sleep lost. The hat moved furtively away from the window, and through the howling cries Cherry distinctly heard a man’s voice call: “Sorry ma’am.”

  Oh, really! Sorry, was he? And was the Stetson-wearer really just some nosey neighbor, snooping around her homestead, waking her baby, and scaring her nearly to death? What outrageous behavior! Cherry’s jaw took on a forbidding tilt, demonstrating the same tight ferocity she had displayed when Lady Walsall had forbidden her to attend Edward’s funeral, when the doors of society were barred against her, when her cousin Mrs. George Braithwhite told her that she had no longer had a guest room to accommodate her but offered the kitchen chamber and a place in the staff of her Washington Square mansion. It was an altogether formidable look, and greater men than Jared Reese had felt a cold shiver run down their spine when it was turned upon them.

  She was up and out of her rocking chair before the Stetson could escape her view, and still buttoning up her bodice with nimble fingers, her left arm clutching Little Edward to her side. Of the trio, Little Edward alone seemed delighted by this sudden turn of events: things had seemed frightening when he first awoke, but the sudden swiftness of action by his ordinarily slow and always tired mother, the rushing swoop through the air as she shifted him to her hip and leapt for the shanty’s front door, was truly the best thing Little Edward could imagine, for he had his mother’s adventurous heart, and as yet knew not what calamity such a trait could bestow.

  Edward squealed with delight as he found himself propelled through the door and into the oven-heat of the prairie evening. But his pleasure did not register with the other two players on the wind-swept stage. The stranger was making for his horse with all speed, and Cherry was determined to give him a piece of her mind. She darted after the cowboy — he was surely a cowboy, in that weather-beaten Stetson they all wore like prizes of war, and in that plaid shirt and worn leather chaps — and as soon as she was close enough, snatched at his sleeve. He whirled around, his chest nearly touching hers with stunning swiftness, and she stopped abruptly, tilting her defiant chin up to meet his gaze.

  Then their eyes locked, and Cherry saw stars.

  For a brief moment, her rage faded; his dark-blue eyes were like the Atlantic waters after a storm, and they held hers with fierce intensity; she could not tear herself from his gaze. The very air seemed to crackle around them. Her breath caught in her throat.

  They stared at each other, speechless, until Little Edward squirmed and said “Baaaaaah,” to the cowboy’s horse.

  The cowboy started and then looked at Edward and laughed.

  Cherry found her breath again, and remembered that, charming eyes or no, this fellow had been staring in her window at her. Trespasser! Pervert! She glared at his tan face, so crumpled with mirth.

  “Whatever is the meaning of this?” Cherry demanded of the stranger, scarcely remembering to cover up her accent with the patched-together patois she imagined to sound like an American accent. She had no idea what a startling garble her voice actually sounded like.

  ***

  Jared, who just a moment ago had been having something like a religious experience in the strange woman’s eyes, now eyeballed her like a horse that’s seen a snake. What the hell had she just said to him? “Are you alright?” he asked, hoping she wasn’t taking some sort of fit. He had a brief vision of being left there alone with a baby and no one to care for it. What on earth would he do with it? He eyed the baby with some discomfort, which only seemed to egg the woman on. She definitely wasn’t taking a fit, he decided. That was a relief.

  “Filthy backwoods pervert!” the woman raged, now sounding like a West Indian who had spent several years amongst the Cajuns of the bayous. “How do you dare spy upon me?” (This sounded rather Scottish.) “I shall report you to the authorities!” (Now she slipped back into an accent he recognized as English, as if she had been sailing eastward this entire time.)

  “Wasn’t spyin’,” Jared muttered, as shame-faced as a boy caught with his hand in the jam-jar.

  “You were!” she insisted, and the toddler in her arms waved his hands to punctuate the exclamation.“Spying on me, common gutter-trash! I shall have you arrested!”

  “Now ma’am,” Jared began in a mollifying tone, feeling alarmed at the mention of bringing in the law. He’d managed to stay out of jail, but he’d bailed Matt out more than once and knew it wouldn’t suit him at all. The men in jails didn’t tend to bathe, and Jared had a sensitive nose. “Now ma’am, this is all a misunderstanding, and I’m mighty sorry for peeking in your window like that. I was just worried on account I didn’t hear no one around the yard. Folks can get hurt easy and you got to check on your neighbors from time to time.”

  “Well, you may be sure I will not be checking up on you in such a fashion,” she huffed, but her outrage seemed to be simmering down somewhat. She was distracted by something else. “And are you saying that you are my neighbor? In which direction?”

  “My place is to the south, just over —”

  “To the south! So you are the one who means to divert my water!” The woman sniffed derisively. “Oh yes, I’ve heard about the gentleman buying pick-axes and talking of irrigation canals! You talk too much, I’m afraid. I am considering legal action should you pursue such a course, I think it only fair to warn you.”

  “You can’t take me to court for irrigating my own fields,” he argued, clearly forgetting in his discomfiture that you should never argue with a riled lady. “And the headwaters are on my land. I think it’s clear I can do what I choose with the water.”

  “So you think you can just divert the stream and leave me to die of thirst, is that it?” The woman cast him a withering look, as if she looked upon him and saw something shriveled-up and foul, and he found himself at a loss for words.

  “Now ma’am,” he began lamely. “I don’t think — And wait — did you say you’re gonna take me to court?” His mind started to turn over. “Maybe I could talk to your husband when he’s around, maybe —”

  “I see what is going on here,” she interrupted icily, hitching up the baby on her hip. The motion popped one button free on her bodice, a button perhaps only half-secured when she’d come bursting out of the shanty to pursue him, and quite without meaning to Jared found his gaze fixed upon the patch of white that was gleaming from between the two pieces of faded blue calico, his mind’s eye helpfully supplying the rest of the round apple of a breast that he had seen just a few moments before, and his imagination began to construct other, even more pleasing images: the other breast, for starters, and then the smooth white slope of her belly, the darkling little shadow of her navel, the golden curls — yes, they’d be golden, to match that thick braid and those elegant brows — tufting in that lovely v of her legs —

  She was suddenly much closer to him and then she was leaning back her free arm and then before he knew what was happening, she was slapping him. He put his hand to his stinging cheek, astonished. She had actually slapped him. The pleasant picture he had been painting for himself fell face-down from the wall. “Why, you little bitch,” he heard himself say, as if from a distance. “I only came out here to advise you and your husband to get back on that train before you starve to death, but I guess I won’t bother now. Might be you starvin’ would do us all a favor.”

  Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened, her baby squirmed against a tight grip, and Jared reckoned he’d just said the meanest things he’d ever said to a woman. He actually felt a little asha
med of himself. You didn’t wish ill on a woman, or call her a bitch. It just wasn’t the way a man ought to behave himself. There was no harm in her slapping him, he had to admit that. He’d been ogling her like she was a showgirl and he got what he deserved. It was him who’d spoken out of turn and gone too far. And they both knew it.

  “I’ll be out of your way now,” he murmured, and turned to catch up the reins of the roan, who was watching him with pricked ears, as if he, too, was shocked senseless by the way Jared had just spoken to a lady. Jared felt his ears start to burn. There were only four other creatures alive on this stunted little homestead, as far as he knew, and all four were gazing at him with distaste and disbelief. Even the mule in the lean-to and the round-eyed baby were regarding him with studied silence.

  He and his neighbors were not going to be friends, that much was certain. He hoped they found someone they could rely on out here, though, or they really would starve to death come winter. This place wasn’t half good enough to survive the year, and the Dakota winters were no laughing matter.

  And a woman like that, too pretty by half: what was she doing out here alone, anyway? Jared shifted uncomfortably in the saddle and resisted a nearly painful urge to look over his shoulder. Too pretty by half, hah, she was stunning. Those eyes… a queer light blue, with a dark ring around them, like the sky in the spring. All he wanted was one more look… but no, he wouldn’t. Jared resolved to be strong. A woman, especially one with a temper like a snake’s, was the last thing he needed in his life.

  CHAPTER THREE