Mountain Laurel

  They evaded the bees, but they were soaking wet with icy water. When Maddie started to scold him, he grinned and held up a fistful of honeycomb. Unfortunately, it was honeycomb that was covered with angry bees.

  In seconds they were swatting at bees, Maddie trying to keep her balance as she danced at the end of the chain linking her to ’Ring. But, no matter how many bees attacked them, ’Ring still hung on to that comb.

  Now they sat together by the big fire that ’Ring had built, huddled in their wet clothes. There was nothing else to wear, nothing to cover themselves with if they should remove their clothes. And there were no hot drinks to warm their insides.

  “I’m sorry that I got you into this,” ’Ring said. “If I’d been more alert last night, that man wouldn’t have been able to—”

  “It’s all right. Even my—” She had been going to say that even her father had been ambushed a few times, but she refrained herself. “It’s not so bad. I’ve had a good time today. It’s taken my mind off my problems.”

  “Laurel,” he said softly.

  Maddie drew in her breath sharply. She wasn’t going to ask him how much he knew, because he obviously knew more than he should. “I’m tired and I’m cold. I think I’ll go to bed.” She started to stand up but then the chain rattled. She’d almost forgotten it.

  He stood with her. “You’d be safe in your tent now under half a dozen blankets if it weren’t for me.” He looked down at her. “You want to go back in the morning? We can be there by this time tomorrow and we can get these cuffs off.”

  “I…I don’t know,” she said, and she really didn’t know what she wanted to do. He was the most confusing man. “Why couldn’t you have stayed that man I first met? I really hated that man. The way you put your foot on the stool! And that horse of yours trying to eat my coach! Oh, damn you, why did you have to change?”

  He smiled at her. “I didn’t change. You thought you knew me and you didn’t, that’s all.”

  She moved as far away from him as she could get. “I can’t figure out who you are. Are you the man Toby talks about or are you that dreadful man I first met?”

  “A little of both, I guess, and maybe a few more besides that.” His voice lowered. “What does it matter what kind of man I am? In a few more days you’ll go back east and you’ll probably never see me again.”

  She looked away from him. “Yes, that’s true.” She imagined going to John and telling him the truth as to why she’d had to go west and sing and hoping that John would forgive her and be her manager again. She looked back up at ’Ring and thought of pearls in soup bowls and silk dresses created by that new man, Worth, and somehow it didn’t seem like a very fulfilling life.

  Suddenly, Madame Branchini’s words echoed in her head: “You can have your music or you can have a man. One or the other, not both.” So far it had been easy to choose.

  She shivered at the first drops of rain and clasped her arms about her chest, dragging ’Ring’s arm with her.

  “Come on,” he said, and swept her into his arms and carried her to the overhanging rock ledge. She sat to one side while he used the steel and flint to start a fire on the dried grasses that he’d earlier brought to the ledge, and within minutes he had a fire going. She sat and watched him as he fed deadfall to the fire and soon had a blaze.

  At last he sat back, then opened his arms to her. I shouldn’t, she thought, I really shouldn’t, but she went to him just the same and he held her tightly. “We do fit together,” she murmured.

  “What were you thinking about just now?” he asked, snuggling his chin onto the top of her head.

  “You,” she said sincerely.

  “I’m glad. I’m glad that you’re at least able to see me.”

  “How ridiculous. I’ve always seen you. From the first moment that I saw—”

  “No, you haven’t. You decided what I was that first moment, and you haven’t changed your mind yet. You thought I was, let’s see if I get this right, a pompous, overbearing know-it-all.”

  “You are, you know.”

  “No more so than you are.”

  “Ha!”

  On the far side of the ledge the rain came down in cold, heavy sheets, but inside there was a fire and her clothes were beginning to dry, and even the wet parts that were next to him were beginning to feel much warmer.

  “It’s odd to think that I’ve known you only a short time,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ve known you forever. I remember the first time I sang at La Scala. It seems to me you were there, telling me that I’d do a good job, and then you kissed me on the forehead before I went onstage.”

  She snuggled against him. “Why do you think I feel this way? No one else has ever made me feel this way. Even as long as I spent with John, as much time as I spent with him, I always distinctly remembered a time when I didn’t know him.”

  “Do you really not know how much alike we are?”

  “I can’t see that we’re alike at all. You can’t sing, we’ve proven that, and there doesn’t seem to be much else to my life except singing.”

  “That’s exactly what makes us alike. You said that my childhood must have been spent outside in the sunshine, and in a way it was, but not in the way you mean. I started working in my family’s business when I was twelve. I was making major decisions by the time I was fourteen.”

  “Oh,” she said sadly. “Were you very poor? Did you have to quit school?”

  He smiled. “Just the opposite. Have you ever heard of Warbrooke Shipping?”

  “I think so. I think I may have traveled on some of their ships.” She turned to look at him. “Warbrooke? Isn’t that the name of the town where you grew up? Do you work for them?”

  “My family owns Warbrooke Shipping.”

  She turned back around. “Oh, then I guess that makes you wealthy.”

  “Very. Does it make any difference to you?”

  “It explains your horse and your perfectly cut uniform and your education and having a servant like Toby.”

  He didn’t tell her how pleased he was that his wealth didn’t matter to her. Sometimes, where women were concerned, having money was a hindrance. Sometimes they saw the money and not the man. “Some servant he is.”

  “Tell me about Toby and why you think we’re alike.”

  ’Ring took a deep breath before he spoke. “You and I have been alone. I sensed it a few days after we met, but after you told me about your childhood, I knew you were as alone as I have been.”

  “But I have never been alone. I have always been surrounded by my family, and later I had John and a hundred social engagements. I have had far too little time alone.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Perhaps alone isn’t the right word. Different. You and I have always been different.”

  “I have been different, but I can’t see that you are.”

  “My father is a good man, a very good man. He has a heart of gold. He would give the shirt off his back to any man who needed it. He would give up his own life before he’d see one of his children harmed. But—”

  “But what?”

  “To be honest, the man has no head for business. He can’t sit still long enough to do the paperwork required to run a company the size of Warbrooke Shipping, and a sunny day is to him an opportunity to go fishing or go on a picnic with my mother.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad. Sometimes I wish I had more time to devote to pleasure.”

  “You can’t devote all your life to pleasure when there is a company like ours to manage. There are thousands of employees depending on us. What we pay them feeds their families.”

  “And your father forgot that?”

  “I guess so. Forgot or never realized.”

  “So that’s why you were involved in the company since you were a child?”

  “Yes, I don’t know how it happened. I was curious, and my father praised me whenever I did anything that helped him. It all seemed to have evolved rather gradually.”

&nb
sp; He smiled. “And then, too, like your gift for singing, I seem to have a gift for running a business. It was no problem for me to keep all the things in my mind that I needed to keep there. My father said I was like his father, that I was a true Montgomery.”

  “So you gave up your childhood to do a man’s job.”

  “Did you feel you were giving up anything when you were inside singing and the rest of the world was outside in the sunshine?”

  “No, I felt lucky and sad for them that God hadn’t given them the talent He had given me.”

  “I felt about the same. My mother hired a tutor for me and in the evenings I read with him and—”

  “Learned languages.”

  “Yes, I learned a few languages. I think I thought I’d use them when I visited all the exotic places I’d heard the men who sailed on our ships talk about.”

  “Your mother hired you a tutor and your father hired Toby as a different sort of tutor, didn’t he?”

  “Exactly.”

  She was thoughtful for a moment. “But Toby doesn’t take care of you, does he? You take care of him.”

  “More or less.”

  He didn’t seem to want to say more about Toby. “What made you give it all up and join the army?” she asked.

  “Two things: something I overheard and a woman.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this story. “Tell me,” she whispered at last.

  “One day when I was seventeen I was on board one of our ships. I had been inspecting cargo and talking to the men about the trip when I overheard one of the officers talking to the captain. The officer wanted to know how I could have such a responsible job. He said I was just a kid, what could I know. The captain made me feel good because he said that even though I was still a kid, I knew a great deal about the sea. ‘Haven’t you heard what they say about the Montgomery children?’ the captain said. ‘They aren’t born. When their father wants another one, he goes to the nearest pier, throws down a net, pulls it in, and takes out another brat. It’s a wonder those kids can walk. It’s a wonder they don’t have fins for feet.’ ”

  “That doesn’t seem a bad thing to say. In a way it’s a compliment.”

  “True, but as I listened to the two of them chuckling, I had a vision of my life. I knew that I’d run Warbrooke Shipping forever and that when I was twenty-two or three I’d marry a local girl—if I could find one who wasn’t already related to me—and then have some of my own children.”

  “Taking them from the sea?”

  “Wherever children can be had. I could see myself at fifty, having trained my children and now training my grandchildren to run Warbrooke Shipping. I could see myself at eighty, still planning how I was going to get away from Warbrooke.”

  “I see. And what did the woman have to do with making you join the army?”

  “About the time I heard the men talking about me, a friend of my mother’s came to visit her. The woman was in her mid-thirties, I guess, and at my young age of seventeen I thought she was an old woman. She was to spend a month with us, and for the first few days of her visit I don’t guess I even looked at her.”

  “What with lessons at night and working during the day, I don’t think you had time to look at girls. Did I tell you that I took my lessons in the evening also?”

  “Whoever taught you forgot your arithmetic,” he said.

  “My father was my teacher.”

  “That explains everything.”

  “Stop complaining about my father and tell me about your lady.”

  He smiled. “She was a lady. Anyway, a few days after she arrived, my brothers started coming down with the chicken pox.”

  “What about your sisters?”

  “Carrie wasn’t born yet and Ardis went to Davy’s house to stay. My mother wanted me out of the house, too, so I wouldn’t catch it, and she told her friend that she’d better return to her home. But there was some reason that she couldn’t return, I don’t remember what, her house was being remodeled, something. Anyway, she asked my father if she could see the way Warbrooke Shipping was run.”

  “And your father turned her over to you.”

  “Yes, he did. I was really angry about it. I’m afraid I shouted at my father that I had work to do, hard work, and that I didn’t have time to nursemaid some old woman. And, besides that, she was a woman, what could she possibly understand about business?”

  ’Ring closed his eyes for a moment. “She heard me and she came marching into my father’s study and told me that she could keep up with me anywhere I went, and she challenged me to find one aspect of business that she, with her mere woman’s mind, couldn’t understand.”

  “And did she? Did she keep up with you and understand you?”

  “Oh, yes. She did in spite of the fact that I gave her such a hard time. When you’re seventeen and run a business as big as ours, it makes one—”

  “Vain? Self-centered? Full of oneself?”

  “More or less. It was a full week before I gave up and stopped trying to make her clean the Aegean stables.”

  “What?”

  “Your father forgot Greek fables too, didn’t he? I finally stopped making her prove herself to me, and we gradually became friends. I had no idea women like her existed. In my great wisdom I thought that all women were like my mother. My mother cares only for her family and nothing else.”

  “But this woman? Your friend?”

  “Her father had died when she was twenty-two. Up until that time, she said, she’d never had a thought about anything except the latest dress style or the latest present her most recent beau had given her. When her father died she found that he’d left her a ladies’ dress shop that wasn’t doing very well and a great many debts.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She said she had three choices. One was poverty, the second was to marry a man and let him take care of her and run what was left of her father’s business. But she said that none of the men she might have wanted to marry could run a business and she couldn’t bear the idea of living with any of the businessmen.”

  “And the third choice?”

  “To run the business herself. She said she figured that she was quite good at buying dresses, and all she’d have to do was buy a few more and sell them.”

  “And she did just that?”

  “Exactly. She said it was difficult at first but she managed, and by the time I met her she owned six shops and was doing very well.”

  “How did she influence you to join the army?”

  “I fell in love with her. Not real love. I know that now. But I found her fascinating. I had never before realized that I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My father was bored by business and he was pleased to leave everything up to me. My mother wasn’t interested, and my brother Jamie, who is two years younger than me, was always off sailing. My other brothers were too young to understand.”

  “And Ardis was with Davy.”

  “Yes, so my mother’s friend was the first person I had to share what I did with. And she was insatiably curious. She wanted to know everything there was to know, wanted me to show her everything.”

  “And did you? Did you show her everything?” Maddie whispered.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment. “On the day before she was to leave, we sailed out to one of the islands. We hadn’t gone far when a sudden squall came up and we were caught in it. For a while I was afraid we weren’t going to make it.”

  “But for someone born in the sea, it couldn’t have been too difficult.”

  “I guess not. We got to the island and we were drenched. There was an old shack on the place that an old hermit had once lived in, but he’d died a few years back so it was empty.” He paused. “We spent the night there.”

  “And did you make love to her?”

  He didn’t answer for a while. “Yes. Actually, she made love to me. At seventeen, and with a life like I’d led, I hadn’t had much to do with girls,
and nothing to do with women.”

  “Even with Toby’s help?”

  “Especially with Toby’s help.”

  “So, you spent the night with her. What happened then?”

  “In the morning we sailed back to the mainland and all the way back I planned our married life together.”

  “Marriage? But she was so much older than you.”

  “I didn’t care. I imagined a life with the two of us, both of us running Warbrooke Shipping and talking and…spending time together.”

  “But you didn’t marry her.”

  “No. When we got home, I fell asleep and when I woke up that evening, she was gone. I can’t tell you how betrayed I felt. She left me no note, nothing. I took it all pretty hard. I sulked and moped and snapped at everyone.

  “It was my mother who suspected what was wrong with me. I broke down and told her all my heartache and how I hated the woman for leaving me. My mother said that her friend had given me a gift and I was to take it as that. It took me a while, but I began to realize that she was right. My time with my mother’s friend had been something wonderful, and I was to take it as such.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “Once, years later, in New York.”

  “Did you make love to her again?”

  “Actually, I spent three days going over her accounts while she went out with a man twice my age. Nothing can kill romance quite as successfully as thirty-five dirty ledgers full of incorrectly added numbers.”

  Maddie smiled broadly at that. “So you didn’t love her anymore?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you haven’t told me how she caused you to join the army.”

  “After she left Warbrooke I heard the men talking about how my father fished his Montgomery brats out of the sea. I bet my mother wished that were true. She had a difficult time delivering the last child. Anyway, when I saw my life all laid out for me, I realized I didn’t want that life. I didn’t want to be eighty and still planning how I was going to get away from the responsibilities of the business. I could have climbed aboard any of our ships and gone around the world, but I decided I wanted to see the desert, and also I was sick of responsibility. I wanted to be one of the crew, not one of the bosses. I wanted to know what it felt like, that if things went wrong, it wasn’t my fault. So I joined the army as a private and applied for the western campaign.”