Mountain Laurel

  “And they sent you where you wanted to go?”

  “It wasn’t so difficult. All I had to do was demonstrate that I could ride a horse.”

  “And to think: Toby said that he had been hired by your father because you weren’t interested in women.”

  “Toby doesn’t know all there is to know about me. He complained that I wasn’t interested in the women available to soldiers. The forts are surrounded by places called ‘hog ranches.’ They’re named for the women who inhabit them and the women in them are as clean as their name implies. Everywhere in the army the men are dying of the pox. The only other white women a man sees are those brought in from the East, and they’re either the wives or daughters of the officers. You get into trouble with one of them and all kinds of awful things can happen.”

  “But Toby said you weren’t interested in the women he introduced you to.”

  “The first woman he ‘introduced’ me to in a little town outside Warbrooke was named Bathless McDonald.”

  “Bathless? What an odd name. It sounds as though she’s never had…”

  “She hadn’t. She bragged about never having had a bath in her life. She was quite pretty, but when she started sticking parts of her body in my mouth, I…ah, well, anyway, I found the experience less than enjoyable. I tried to explain to both my father and Toby, but both of them thought I was too finicky.”

  “Are you? Finicky, I mean?”

  “Very. I want only the best. The very, very best.” He tightened his arms around her and put his face in her neck.

  “Are you ready to go to sleep?” he asked after a while.

  She didn’t nod or give him any signal that she wanted to sleep, but her body was pliant as he lowered her to the cold, hard ground and wrapped her snugly in his arms. Maddie was far from asleep. She was thinking about the time she’d known him. Only a short time, but it seemed like a lifetime.

  She turned a bit in his arms so that she could look at him, look at the way the firelight played on his cheekbones. She thought he was asleep, so she brought her free hand up to touch his lower lip. He didn’t open his eyes.

  “I am beginning to love you, you know that, don’t you?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “You are beginning to take up as much of my thoughts as my music does.”

  He didn’t say a word, but she thought he smiled a bit. “Not many men love their rivals.”

  She wanted to ask him what he felt about her, but she was afraid of the answer. How could she love someone, especially someone like him? He was a man who needed freedom, a man who had no connections with the music world.

  “When do you get out of the army?”

  “Next year.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Go home to Warbrooke. My father needs me.”

  She sighed. And I shall go to Paris or Vienna or Florence, wherever people want to hear me sing. “Good night, my captain,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  ’Ring opened his eyes and looked at her for a long while before falling asleep. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be holding her. He’d wanted to since he’d first seen her. Making love to her could wait until she was sure about him, as sure about him as he was about her.

  By the end of the second day it seemed almost natural to Maddie that she should be chained to this man. They learned how to move together, how to give each other privacy when needed, how to talk and how to be silent.

  ’Ring’s stories of his family had awakened Maddie’s curiosity, and she began to ask him all about himself, about Warbrooke and the inhabitants. He told outrageous stories about his cousins the Taggerts, who, along with the Montgomerys, seemed to make up most of the town.

  He told her stories of the sea, stories of his ancestors that were handed down in his family like fairy tales. He showed her how to make knots with her corset strings, and when her hands got tangled up, he laughed at her and showed her again.

  Maddie kept thinking about what he’d said about her life having been lonely, and now she could see that it had been. As a child she’d never had time for a friend; her sister had been too busy with her paintings and she and her family had been isolated from other families. There had been Hears Good’s sons, but they came to stay only in the summer and then went to their own people in the winter. Her father and his friends had spent a great deal of time with her—all that Maddie could spare, but it wasn’t the same as having a friend her own age.

  They were lying on the soft, damp grass by the edge of the stream, their chained arms outstretched. “I never had a friend when I was a child,” she said.

  “Me neither. Just brothers.”

  She laughed, but he turned a serious face toward her. “But you still aren’t going to tell me about yourself, are you? Even about this father of yours, who is such a paragon of virtue?”

  She wanted to, wanted to very much, but she was afraid that if she told him one thing, she’d never be able to stop, and the next thing she knew, she’d be telling him all about Laurel, and there was no predicting what he’d do then. Would he be so protective of her that he’d forbid her to sing? Forbid her to continue on her tour? Tell her that he’d take care of everything from now on, including her little sister that might be killed in the fracas?

  When she said nothing, he turned away from her, his jaw set in a hard line. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’d tell you if I could.”

  “If you could trust me, you mean,” he said.

  “Would you trust me if the life of someone you loved depended on that trust?”

  He turned and looked at her. “Yes,” he said simply.

  She looked away from him, knowing that he was telling the truth. She sensed that he’d tell her anything she wanted to know about him or his family. “But then, you’re big enough and strong enough to keep me from doing whatever you don’t want me to do, aren’t you?”

  “I am smart enough to think that the woman I love has sense enough to do what’s right,” he snapped.

  Maddie didn’t have time to take in what he’d said before he rolled to his feet and pulled her up.

  “Get up,” he said angrily. “We need to gather firewood.”

  “What…what did you mean by ‘woman you love’?”

  “You heard me,” he growled, picking up some damp deadfall and shoving it into her arms.

  “I don’t think I did. Maybe you should repeat it. In fact, I’d like a lot of things repeated, like all that about virgins and my left foot.” She was smiling at him, and inside she felt light and joyous.

  “You can’t hear when it suits you and yet you remember everything your father has ever told you. I hope I get to meet this man someday. I’ll look down at him and say, ‘Mr. Worth, I—’ ” He broke off and looked at Maddie, his eyes wide.

  “Worth?” ’Ring’s eyes widened more, the piece of wood suspended in midair.

  “My name?”

  When he spoke, there was wonder in his voice. “You said that your mother said, ‘Jeffrey, I want you to go east and get a teacher.’ ”

  “Yes. So?” She was acting innocent, but she knew where he was going and it felt good to have her father vindicated.

  He looked at her in awe and there was reverence in his voice. “Your father couldn’t be Jefferson Worth, could he? The Jefferson Worth? The man who wrote the journals?”

  She smiled at him so sweetly. “Yes, he is.”

  ’Ring could only look at her. Jefferson Worth was a name of legend, a name like George Washington and Daniel Boone. Traveling with but a few other men, he had explored most of America before it was America. He’d kept journals, made maps. His observations were all that was known about some of the Indian tribes that the white man’s greed and diseases had destroyed. He wrote about the animals and their habits, made sketches of the strange plants that he saw on his journeys, wrote about rock formations and hot springs.

  “I read his journals when I was a kid and my little brothers still want to be Jeff
erson Worth. Is he still alive? He must be an old man now.”

  “Not too old and very much alive. His journals were published when he was just thirty years old, the year after I was born. My mother was the one who saw that they were published. Had it been up to my father, he would have thrown them in a box somewhere and left them.”

  “Imagine that. Jefferson Worth.”

  She couldn’t resist getting him back for all the things he’d said about her father. “Broad shoulders. Carries pianos around on his back.”

  “I imagine he could do so.” ’Ring’s eyes had a distant look in them. “You once asked me where I learned to sneak about so quietly. It was from Jefferson Worth’s journals. My brothers and I used to pretend to be him and his men. I was always Jeff, my brother Jamie was Thomas Armour, and—”

  “Thomas would like that.”

  ’Ring shook his head. “I can’t believe that these men are still alive and that I’m here with Jefferson Worth’s daughter. What was the Indian boy’s name? It was something odd. We used to fight over who got to play him.”

  “Hears Good.”

  “Right. He named himself that after your father took him east and he had an operation on his ears.”

  Maddie smiled. The story was as familiar to her as though she’d been there with them. “He was deaf and my father took him east. After the operation he said in sign that he was now to be called Hears Good. Up until then he’d been called No Hears.”

  ’Ring was smiling, remembering. “And there was a woman, too, wasn’t there? Your father took the first white woman into the territory. She was to paint pictures of the Indians.”

  “Yes.”

  “My father bought one of her watercolors. It’s of a tribe I’d never heard of, but he and his men spent the winter with them.”

  “Probably the Mandans. Smallpox nearly wiped them out two years after she painted them.”

  He paused, thinking. “One of my Taggert cousins always played the woman, but there was something that we used to do to her that used to make her furious. What was it? It was something from the journals.”

  “I would imagine one of you played Hears Good and stole from her.”

  “That’s right. How could I have forgotten? Hears Good, because he was deaf, had never been able to steal because he couldn’t be quiet enough. But when he could hear he practiced his stealing on the woman painter. If I remember correctly, she got awfully angry.”

  “But she got him back, remember?”

  “No. I can’t think what she did.”

  “One night after a strenuous day of traveling when Hears Good was hard asleep—he was only about twelve, you know—she sneaked up to him and stole everything he had, including his loincloth. When he woke up in the morning he was stark naked and everything was gone.”

  ’Ring smiled. “That’s right. I bet my cousin would have loved to pull that off, but she never did. But my brothers and I constantly sneaked around and stole what we could from each other. Wasn’t there something that happened in the end that made the woman forgive Hears Good?”

  “Yes. My father and…the woman and Hears Good were separated from the others and a band of renegade Apaches up from the south came to spend the night with them. My father didn’t trust them, and it was a scary night. The three of them rode out early the next morning and the Apaches chased them and shot at them.”

  ’Ring’s face lit up as he remembered. “But Hears Good…”

  Maddie smiled back at him. “Hears Good had practiced his stealing during the night and had stolen all their bullet molds. They had powder and lead but no way to make bullets. The three of them were able to get away because Hears Good had become such a good thief.”

  ’Ring laughed. “I guess over the years those journals have become like a myth to me. It’s difficult to believe that those things actually happened. Where are they all now? All the men who traveled with your father?”

  “Actually, my father was one of the men who traveled with Thomas. Thomas was the leader and older and more experienced than my father. But they all live with my father now, and I grew up around them.”

  “What were their names? Linquist the Swede who snowshoed in the winter and—”

  “Skied. Linq skis.”

  “Whatever. And the old man?”

  “Bailey.”

  “He couldn’t still be alive. He must be a hundred now.”

  “Probably. He looks old enough to be Toby’s grandfather, but then, he always has. My father said he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Bailey is only about twenty years old, but Bailey says that he’s been in the Rockies so long that the mountains were just hills when he arrived.”

  “And Hears Good? How old is he now?”

  “Hears Good is about forty. But, I don’t suppose he knows precisely, or cares.”

  “Does he live with your family too?”

  “Sometimes. He’s a blanket Indian.” At ’Ring’s puzzled look, she explained. “He’s what whites sometimes call a wild Indian. He doesn’t depend on the whites.”

  ’Ring nodded. That this boy who was his childhood hero should be called a “wild Indian” fit his image of what he hoped the man would become. “What tribe was he?”

  “Crow.”

  It took ’Ring a few seconds to react. “Crow?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, some pieces of a puzzle have fallen into place, that’s all.” He looked around at the trees and knew without a doubt that the Crow who’d helped him find Maddie was Hears Good. “He’s following us, you know that?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”

  “This explains a great deal, such as why you know so much about Indians and why you aren’t afraid of them.”

  “I’m afraid when I need to be. I just don’t hold the belief that an Indian man is overwhelmed by lust whenever he sees a white woman.”

  “And how did you come to that conclusion?”

  “From Hears Good. You see, there is no finer-looking human on earth than a Crow brave in his prime. Tall, strong, handsome, thick, heavy black hair, skin the color of—”

  “I get the picture.” It was exactly the picture he’d imagined of this man when he was wrestling his brothers to see who got to be the Crow brave, but he didn’t like to hear Maddie describing him. “What did Hears Good do?”

  “My father and the others felt sorry for Hears Good because, to the white man’s eyes, there is no uglier creature than a Crow squaw. They hated to see a beautiful, magnificent man like Hears Good with Crow women, so, my father thought he’d give Hears Good a treat and take him to St. Louis.”

  She paused. “My father had a brother who ran a trading post in St. Louis. It was through him that my parents met, but, anyway, Dad and Hears Good traveled to St. Louis. Hears Good was very impressed with the wonders of the city, but, as far as my father could tell, Hears Good never once looked at the white women in all their beautiful clothes. Although the women did look at him. Of course a woman can’t help but look at a Crow warrior when he’s in full regalia, and Hears Good is one of the finest specimens—”

  “I understand.”

  She smiled at him. “After they left St. Louis, my father asked Hears Good what he thought of the women, and Hears Good said they were a sad-looking group. He thought their tiny waists were awful, said they looked like ants, not women, and that a woman with a waist that small couldn’t work or bear children. He also thought their white skin and their sour-looking faces were ugly.”

  She laughed. “Hears Good also told Dad what he thought of the way white men treated their women, what with taking them off into the plains with no other family members nearby for the women to have for company. He thought the men treated their women like children, dressing them in tight-laced garments and making them work so hard and—”

  “I’ve seen the way the Indians make their women work. They use them as beasts of burden.”

  “That’s because it’s accepted that Indian men are worthle
ss.”

  “Explain that one to me.”

  “The man has to keep his hands free in order to fight, and to die if necessary while protecting the valuable one, the woman. The woman carries everything but she also owns everything. Trust me, no one works as hard as the white people. The Indians think we’re fools.”

  “Sometimes I agree with them. So, your Hears Good went back to his own people and his own women? I take it he didn’t think his own women were ugly.”

  She smiled. “My father asked his friend to describe a truly beautiful woman, and he did. She should be short and stout, thick-middled, have a wide, flat face with a wide, flat nose, and she should have long, thin breasts that reach her waist.”

  ’Ring took a long moment to look Maddie up and down, his eyes lingering on her bosom that even without the corset was full and upright. “I can’t say that I agree with him on that point.”

  Maddie turned away, blushing but pleased.

  As they started back toward the rock ledge, he said, “What happened to the woman? The painter?”

  “My father married her.”

  They turned and looked at each other and smiled. It seemed natural that they should have their lives so entwined, that as a child ’Ring should have played at being her father and that her father’s friends should have been his heroes.

  For the rest of the afternoon they sat by the fire and talked—or actually, ’Ring asked questions and Maddie answered them. It felt so very, very good not to have to pretend to be a duchess. Years ago John Fairlie, being the English snob that he was, had said that no one in Europe was going to want to hear an opera singer who was the daughter of a man who skinned animals for a living, so he’d come up with the idea that she should be a duchess from the tiny country of Lanconia. It had seemed sensible at the time, a time when she was so full of ambition and wanting more than anything in life to sing for people. It wasn’t until years later that she regretted her decision, for it seemed that she was denying her father and his friends.