“I suppose it never occurred to me that God might be in the potato business. Did He make the spuds rot, do ye think?”
“He didn’t stop it.”
“No. So let’s blame Him, shall we? And in the doin’, blame Him fer all else as well. Sunshine, flowers in spring, the existence of one wee lass named Cassandra.”
Luke closed his eyes. “You’re a merciless bastard, aren’t you?”
“I leave it to God to be merciful. But a bastard, I’m not. Me mum was a good, God-fearin’ woman, much like the wee lass ye married. Stars in her eyes, and a smile to light up a room.”
“Is Cassie…is she all right?” Luke asked in a raspy voice. “She left here in her nightclothes and bare feet, with that lunatic father of hers. It was raining, for Christ’s sake.”
Father Tully dragged in a weary breath. “If ye mean, did I get her some clothes and see to it she’d have some food, yes, she’s all right. But that does no’ mean the heart has no’ been ripped from her breast. They went off to take shelter in their mine, God bless ’em.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“I said His blessed name meself a few times as I watched ’em straggle away. Not a nickel to their names. All they had was a few ragged blankets that I gave ’em and some pots to cook in. It’s a fine mess ye’ve made of things with yer schemin’, Luke. A fine mess, indeed.”
With an audible swallow, Luke whispered, “I’d cut off my right arm to undo it all, to have her back!”
“Milo might settle for yer balls.”
Luke flopped a shirtsleeve over his eyes. “Hell, why not? I’ll probably never get it up again anyway.”
“And why might that be?”
“Because every goddamned time I look at another woman, I’m going to see her face. You should’ve seen her eyes, Father. When Milo told her…you should have seen her eyes.”
“Oh, I saw ’em, right enough. All the light snuffed out, her face as pale as wax.”
Luke couldn’t breathe for a second. The muscles along his throat snapped taut, grew distended, and choked off all his air. “I—I never meant to—to hurt her.”
“I know ye didna, lad. It goes wi’out sayin’. The question, as I see it, is how can ye go about fixin’ things.”
“I’ll do anything.”
“Yet ye do no’ love her?”
“Love! It’s nothing but a word. I’d give up everything I own, buy her the world, set her family up in high cotton for life. Anything…just to have her back. Isn’t that enough?”
“Must it always come back to yer money, Luke Taggart? Is it so difficult fer ye to see that there are some things ye canno’ buy or take?”
Luke turned his head to see that the priest had risen to his feet. “How, then? Tell me how to get her back, Father. I’ll do it in a heartbeat. Just tell me!”
Filled with sadness, the priest’s gaze settled on Luke. “I will no’ lead ye by the hand to get her back, lad. Ye’d only break her heart ag’in. Ye must find the way yerself and learn it well, so ye ne’er repeat the same mistakes. But I will tell ye this much: the secret does no’ lie in this grand house or wi’ all yer money.”
“What, then?”
“Ye must learn to give of yerself.”
“How?”
“That is for me to know and ye to find out.”
Tully picked up the whiskey bottle to take one last swig. He shuddered as the liquor burned a path to his stomach. Then he turned and moved back to the door. At the threshold, he paused.
“’Tis oft said that there’s nothin’ like a bit o’ good Irish whiskey to cure what ails ye. I caution ye not to take that old adage too much to heart. Ye’ll not be findin’ what ye seek at the bottom of that jug, lad. No answers, fer sure, and definitely no lass.”
“Thank goodness I ain’t got a chair,” Khristos said cheerfully. “If I did, the legs’d sink in the mud!”
Forcing a smile, Cassandra glanced over at her little brother, who sat huddled on a rock she’d moved near the fire for him. As rocks went, it was reasonably suitable as a seat, save for the jagged edge right in its center, which apparently jabbed Khristos in the bum no matter where he chose to sit. Her own rock wasn’t any better, but unlike Khristos, she didn’t mind the discomfort. It took her mind off other hurts.
Waving a hand to clear away the smoke, which trailed up from the small fire and hovered like a fog bank at the ceiling of the tunnel, Cassandra said, “Thank goodness I’m not wearing a fine silk gown. It would be ruined by the smoke smell.”
Khristos drew his frayed wool blanket more snugly around his narrow shoulders, his small body shuddering. “Thank goodness it ain’t hot,” he said. “We’d be thirsty, and it’s a fair walk to haul water.”
“Thank goodness we’ve got a bucket,” she replied distractedly, “for otherwise, we’d be walking back and forth to the creek with a cup.”
Khristos, warming to the game, dreamed up another reason to be thankful, but Cassandra scarcely heard him. Her mind drifted away with the smoke as she gazed into the feeble flames. Without an ax for cutting firewood, they’d gathered the wet bits of wood from the hillside, and the warmth, meager though it was, truly was a blessing.
One hand fisted tightly around her beautiful diamond wedding ring, Cassandra couldn’t help but think of the man who’d given it to her. Luke. His name had once moved through her thoughts like a lilting song. Now it had the ring of admonishment.
She couldn’t recall a single word that had passed between her and Luke that didn’t seem humiliating now. I had more intimate games than chess in mind. Oh, God, he’d paid for the use of her body, she realized with quivering shame. Do you understand the term “wifely duties”? Those are the sort of duties I’ve hired you to perform. In the end, he’d actually made her his wife, all simply to have her in his bed. Her cheeks burned when she thought back and realized how dumb she’d been, believing that their first night of intimacy might have made her pregnant. Luke hadn’t completed the act that night, but he’d played her along, like a trout he was hauling in on a line, so she would marry him before she learned the truth about him from her papa and Ambrose.
The clothes. His unfailing kindness. The money he’d spent on Khristos. His care of Lycodomes. Even her wages. She’d sold herself to him and hadn’t even realized it. I love you, Luke. I love you so much. Never once had he said the words back to her, not even during their wedding ceremony. Every time he’d touched her, he’d thought of her as a costly possession, a plaything, according to her papa.
Even so, pictures of Luke kept flashing in her mind, and a part of her yearned to run back down the mountain, to return to his house and fling herself into his arms, to beg him to tell her it was all a horrible misunderstanding, that he’d never intended to shame her like this. She couldn’t help but remember the tender look in his eyes, the gentleness of his hands when he made love to her. How could all of that have been a lie? And, if it had been, why had Luke married her? According to the terms of the contract she signed, he needn’t have bothered.
Her papa claimed Luke saw marriage as yet another way to own her, that that was how a man like Luke saw things. To him, women meant little more than a piece of horseflesh and were accorded even less respect. Luke Taggart was a conscienceless rake, plain and simple. He’d wanted her, so he took her.
“What do you think, Cassandra?”
Jerking back to the moment, she stared blankly at her little brother, the diamond slicing cruelly into her palm as her fingers closed more tightly around it. “About what, Khristos?”
Her brother gave her an impatient look. “About supper. What kind of food do you think Papa will buy?”
“Something fine, I’m sure.” Cassandra stared out the mouth of the tunnel at the dreary, wet hillside. Rain slashed at the mud and pelted the leaves of the bushes. Soon that rain would turn to snow, and the drifts would mount taller than a man. With all their possessions in a storage shed somewhere, Papa had not even a rifle for hunting, and soon whatever deer
still remained in the mountains would head for low country. “Some salt pork, I’ll bet, and probably some beans.” She flashed her younger sibling another stiff smile. “We’ll make corn patties, too.”
“Mmm. I like corn patties.”
Cassandra focused on Khristos’s pale face. “Are you hungry, Khristos?”
“A little.”
Slipping the ring into her skirt pocket, she pushed up from the rock. Gathering the gray wool blanket close around her shoulders like a cloak, she went to rummage in the gunnysack of items Father Tully had given them that morning. “There are more biscuits,” she said, striving to sound cheerful.
“Only one.”
“Well? There is only one of you.”
“What about you?”
As she clutched the edges of the blanket, Cassandra suddenly remembered her mama’s shawl, which she’d left behind at Luke’s. The loss of it filled her with grief, yet she couldn’t contemplate returning to Luke’s for it. The thought of facing him was more than she could bear. “I’m not hungry, Khristos.”
“I’ll split it with you.”
“No,” Cassandra said lightly as she thrust the biscuit into her brother’s grubby little hand. “You eat it. I’m still full from breakfast.”
Khristos broke off a bit of the bread and stuffed it into his mouth, his blue eyes getting the contented look of a kitten suckling. Cassandra’s heart broke a little, watching him savor the taste as if he were partaking of fine food. When the biscuit was gone, what then? Her little brother’s belly would begin to gnaw, and she would have Luke Taggart to thank for it. Perhaps her family hadn’t had much before Luke had entered their world, but at least her papa had seen to it that they seldom felt hungry.
What if Papa and Ambrose found no work? Thanks to Luke, the Zereks were no longer exactly well-thought-of in Black Jack. Indeed, some of the miners undoubtedly hated them, believing them to be low-life claim jumpers, another circumstance Cassandra could lay directly at Luke’s door. Unless Luke made a public retraction, which she doubted he’d do, the shopkeepers who needed odd jobs done might turn her relatives away in favor of others begging for work.
Cassandra’s gaze became fixed on the biscuit Khristos held. The boy broke off another morsel and deposited it carefully on his tongue, careful not to drop a single crumb. In that moment, she knew she wouldn’t be able to bear watching him go hungry. Pressing a palm over her skirt pocket, she considered selling her wedding ring. The price she might get for it would keep them in food for a year. But no…if she were to do that, it would be the same as taking money from Luke, and that she would not do. Tainted money, that’s what it was. If she took anything from him, he would have succeeded in making her his whore, in essence paying her for services she’d rendered.
Lycodomes suddenly pushed up from where he’d been lying by the fire, his muddy plume of a tail swinging wildly. His splint, Cassandra noticed, was smeared with grime. The poor dog. No more comfortable, warm pallet by the Taggart kitchen stove for him.
“Papa and Ambrose must be coming back,” she told Khristos, indicating the dog’s welcoming wag with a nod of her head. “Lycodomes seems to think so, anyway.”
Khristos closed his small fingers over the biscuit. “I bet they’re hungry, and I’m starting to feel full. I’ll just save the rest of this for them.”
Knowing well that Khristos wanted the rest of the bread for himself, that his tummy probably ached for more, Cassandra blinked away sudden tears. This was love, she thought sadly. Not pretty dresses and lovely rooms that sparkled, but going without for others. Love. Luke Taggart didn’t comprehend the meaning of the word, which undoubtedly explained why he never said it.
“Cassie! Oh, God, Cassie!”
Raw with urgency, Ambrose’s voice floated up into the tunnel. Cassandra stepped to the mouth of the man-made cave to scan the hillside in search of her brother. When he finally staggered into view from behind a stand of brush, she saw that his ragged tweed coat was stained across the front with something blackish-red. “Hey, there, Ambrose!” she called, lifting a hand to wave. “Did you find work, then?”
His steaming breath forming clouds around his face, Ambrose staggered closer, then finally reeled to a stop some twenty feet from her. With one look at his features, Cassandra knew something was terribly wrong. She’d never seen her older brother so pale. His mouth worked, but for a second no sound came forth. He spread his hands, his blue eyes filling with tears. Cassandra glanced in mounting horror at his splayed fingers. They were covered with what looked like blood.
“It’s Papa,” he finally managed to say between panting breaths. “He’s dying, Cassandra. You must come quick!”
Suddenly Cassandra couldn’t feel her legs. “Wh-what?”
“Shot! A drunk. Came out of one of the saloons. Saw Papa. Started cursing him, saying he was a claim jumper. Shot him! From just a few feet away, he—shot him. Right in the chest. Doc-doctor Mosley—working on him now.”
Ambrose staggered, hugging an arm to his waist and bending forward slightly to fight for breath. “Hurry, lass. He’s dying, I think.”
Khristos came running from the tunnel. He stopped between Cassandra and Ambrose, whirling to stare up at first one of them, then the other, his eyes crawling with fear. “Papa?” he squeaked. “Our papa is dyin’?”
A broken, hoarse sound shuddered up from Ambrose’s chest. His face twisted, and his lips drew back to bare his clenched teeth. Then his broad shoulders began to jerk. “I-I couldn’t st-stop it. Saw wh-what was gonna happen, but I couldn’t stop it.”
Khristos started to sob—soft, barely audible sounds. “No! Not my papa!”
The prized biscuit, their last scrap of food, slipped from the boy’s fingers and landed in the mud.
TWENTY-FOUR
Stone-sober from shock, Luke paused for a moment outside Doctor Mosley’s office, his trembling hand on the brass door handle, thumb poised to press down on the latch lever. Rain pelted the back of his head, the water falling in droplets from his hair to trickle in icy rivulets down his spine. Milo Zerek, shot. Pipps’s voice, as it had sounded when he’d delivered the news, kept whispering in Luke’s mind, the words too awful to comprehend. Cassandra’s beloved papa, a kindly man whose only real fault was to have chased a dream—that of finding gold and striking it rich.
It was a dream Luke, himself, had once chased, only he’d been one of the fortunate few to have actually captured it. Milo Zerek had stumbled upon something far less appealing than gold: a lying, cheating, conscienceless man who’d brought about his downfall.
This was Luke’s fault. All his fault. Luke Taggart, the mining magnate, was a heartless son of a bitch. He’d proved it well, taking Cassandra Zerek from the protective arms of her father. Now Milo Zerek lay dying, shot in the chest for a claim jumper.
Milo would die. Luke held no hope that the man might miraculously survive; that wasn’t in God’s giant scheme of things. Oh, yes…Luke finally believed in God. After living his whole life as an atheist, after all his sneering at Christians and their ludicrous, bleeding-heart moral ethics, he’d finally become a staunch believer himself. No doubts lingered in his mind, not even a niggling uncertainty. There was indeed a God, and just as Luke had feared the night of Lycodomes’s accident, that divinity had been hovering over his shoulder these twenty-nine years past, watching everything he did and keeping a tally. Now, as surely as the clouds wept precipitation, God was raining punishment on Luke’s head.
The worst punishment of all was going to be opening this door. Luke stared at the brass handle, cursing himself for a coward. He imagined the accusation he would see in Cassandra’s eyes, the unmitigated hatred. She would never forgive him for this.
He would never forgive himself.
When he finally gathered the courage to step inside, the waiting room was dim, just as he remembered. Only now the three worn, metal-framed chairs were occupied. Cassandra, Ambrose, and Khristos. Luke pushed the door closed and stared at them. They
stared back. Three sets of blue eyes, all the same shade of cobalt and glassy with grief. Faces as bluish-white as new-fallen snow in the dawn’s dusky light. Mouths pressed into thin lines. A silence that screamed.
Luke simply stood there, a condemned man facing his accusers. God, how he wished they’d say something—curse him, spit on him, anything but this awful quiet, so cold it felt frozen.
Luke was finally the one to break eye contact. Dropping his gaze to the floor, he groped for something he might say. There was nothing. “I am so sorry,” he finally whispered. “You’ll never know how sorry.”
No response, not even the creak of leather cushions to tell him one of them had moved—or even that they were breathing. Maybe they weren’t, he thought crazily. Maybe God had frozen this moment in time, and it was going to last forever. Luke Taggart’s own private hell.
“I…um…” Luke forced his head up, made himself meet their gazes. Even little Khristos looked back at Luke as if he despised him. “I know you don’t have any money. I’ll pay the doctor bill. What happened is—well, it’s my fault. And I should be the one to pay.”
“We Zereks don’t want your money,” Ambrose replied softly. “We want nothing from you. Now, please, if there is any shred of decency in you at all, Mr. Taggart, leave us to our grief.”
Luke’s muscles jerked involuntarily when Cassandra suddenly pushed to her feet. His heart caught when she walked slowly toward him with one hand outstretched. He reached out to her. As their fingertips touched, the years that yawned between Luke and his childhood seemed to dissolve, and he was once again a beggar boy. One morsel of affection, one whisper of forgiveness. He’d have dropped to his knees for either one.
“Cassie, girl,” he said on a shuddering breath, “forgive me. Please, forgive me.”
Those blue eyes he cherished—eyes that had once been sparkly with an inner glow—met his with blank hardness. No light, no laughter, no life. Just a curious nothingness, as if the girl he’d known and adored had vanished.