Christy Page 7

  Within a half hour, their way illumined by moonlight, the Qualtrough wagon took its place among a dozen others in front of Jake Vigil’s magnificent house. Even in Virginia, the structure would have roused comment, with its leaded windows, sweeping veranda, and towering front door. Light gleamed through spotless glass, and the sounds of merriment and plenty spilled out into the night.

  Christy drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to collect herself. In truth, however, Caney’s earlier comment echoed in her mind. I reckon that bed’s mighty cold of a night, if there’s no love to fill it.

  Love, she scoffed, gathering her skirts after Trace had helped her down from the wagon. It was a fickle emotion, at best, dispensed by whimsical gods to the favored few. And what good had it done her mother, loving two men, both of whom had betrayed her in one way or another? No, indeed, there was no sense at all in placing too great a store by something so fragile and so fleeting.

  Head high, shoulders squared, Christy walked resolutely toward the light and music. Toward the shining future that she had imagined for herself and for Megan, long ago, during those first terrible nights at St. Martha’s school and many, many times since.

  The inside of the house was beyond grand, with its gilded moldings, marble fireplaces, costly furniture, and mirrors fit to rival Versailles. Crystal chandeliers shimmered overhead, the flames of their candles flickering magically in every draft.

  Jake Vigil greeted each of his guests personally, not excluding Christy, and it seemed he held her hand just a little longer than he had Bridget’s. His hazel eyes held a quality of wonder, as though he saw only her and hadn’t even noticed the grandeur around him.

  The music was provided by Mr. Hicks and several friends, and the object of Caney’s affections must have sensed her presence, for he raised his head, heretofore bent over his fiddle in concentration, and favored her with a brief, shy smile. That was enough for Caney; she was off to pursue the courtship.

  Christy was startled back to attention when Mr. Vigil took her hand and placed it in the curve of his arm.

  “You’ll be wanting supper,” he said. “The dining room is this way.”

  On the contrary, the last thing Christy wanted was food; she was far too worried about turning a corner and running into Zachary—when, precisely, had she begun to think of him as Zachary instead of Mr. Shaw or the marshal ?—but she meant to make significant progress toward a successful marriage that evening, and if eating when she wasn’t the least bit hungry was a part of it, she would endure.

  “This is a splendid house,” she said. “I must admit, I’m surprised to see such furnishings as these in a place as remote as Primrose Creek.”

  He frowned, but pleasantly, and led her toward a wide arched doorway. Beyond the threshold, people were gathered around a table that should have sagged, it held so many dishes. There were hams, a joint of beef, and mountains of fried chicken, along with all manner of sweets. “We’re not so remote,” he answered pleasantly. “San Francisco is only a few days from here in good weather, and there’s talk that we’ll be linked to the railroad soon.”

  The mention of San Francisco served to remind Christy of her mission, to send her sister to that great city, or one like it, for an education and a spectacular marriage. And that was a good thing, because she nearly collided with Zachary the moment she and Mr. Vigil stepped into the room.

  He gave a slow whistle at the sight of her, Zachary did, and his eyes danced with mischief. Just then, someone drew Mr. Vigil away on some errand, and she was left with the man she least wanted to see.

  “Go away,” she whispered, snapping open her fan and waving it somewhat frantically back and forth under her chin.

  He grinned, took in her gown, her carefully dressed hair, and the tasteful application of rouge on her mouth. “By all means,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to keep you from your work.”

  Chapter 4

  I wouldn’t want to keep you from your work.

  Christy stared up at Zachary, aghast. Mr. Vigil’s party spun at the edges of her vision, a dizzying whirl of color and sound and motion. Despite a deep personal aversion to violence of any kind, she was hard put not to slap the marshal across the face with enough force to set him back on the worn heels of his boots. “I beg your pardon?” she managed at last.

  He looked mildly chagrined—and, unfortunately, breathtakingly handsome in his plain suit coat, cotton shirt, and trousers. He took her elbow in a light grasp, pulled her out of the center of the dining room and into a quieter corner. He thrust one hand through his hair, which somehow contrived to look perfect even though it was too long and mussed into the bargain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that—” He paused, and his jaw tightened momentarily while he struggled with some private emotion. “Christy, if you go through with what I think you’re planning on doing, you’ll be marrying a house, not a man, and ruining not only your life but Jake’s, too.”

  “I must say,” Christy sputtered, her fan still generating a furious breeze, “that you have your share of brass, and more, speaking to me this way. How dare you?”

  He took her upper arms in his hands then, firmly, but not in a way that was uncomfortable. “You know damn well what I’m talking about,” he rasped. “There’s something between us, for right or for wrong, for better or for worse, and I for one want to know what it is while there’s still time to do something about it!”

  Christy averted her eyes, unable to meet his gaze, unable to pull out of his arms. When she looked at him again, it was through a blur of tears. “Only fools marry for passion,” she said softly. Sadly. “For—for love.” Hadn’t she seen that for herself? Not once but twice?

  “No,” he countered in an outraged whisper. “Only fools marry for any other reason.”

  She thought of her home, with its dirt floor and chinked log walls. She might have been content once never to have anything more than that, if she had true love. Now, though, she knew how rare that was, and in point of fact, she would have preferred to remain unmarried, had she been given a choice. However, a lady without a husband was in a precarious position, not only socially but economically, too. The brothels and fancy houses were filled with women who, with out property or private funds or a man to provide for them, protect them—be he brother, husband, or father—had nowhere else to turn.

  “Christy,” Zachary said, with a gentle squeeze on her upper arms. “Listen to me. I’m not asking you to stop seeing Jake. I’m not asking you to run off with me, though I’ve got to admit the idea has a measure of appeal, for me, at least. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t hurry into anything as important, as permanent—”

  She straightened her spine, raised her chin, and stepped back. “You don’t understand,” she accused quietly, proudly. “You’ll never understand, because you’re a man, and you can get anything you want in this world if you’re willing to try hard enough.”

  “Not anything,” he corrected her. Then, with a look of defeat in his usually dancing, mischievous eyes, he offered her a broken smile, turned, and walked away, leaving her standing there in a corner of Jake Vigil’s opulent dining room, staring after him. She felt exactly as she had when she’d first realized that the South she’d known, beloved home, refuge of her heart, had been trampled into the ground. She’d lost virtually everything and everyone that was important to her—Granddaddy, her mother, her father and uncle, and the farm—oh, dear heaven, the farm, the most beautiful place on earth, hidden away in an especially verdant corner of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Now, oddly, Zachary Shaw seemed to be the greatest-loss of all.

  “Christy?”

  She turned to see Bridget standing beside her, her blue eyes troubled.

  “Is everything all right?” her cousin asked quietly when Christy didn’t speak.

  Christy bit down hard on her lower lip, then rummaged up a smile from the part of her soul where she kept a secret and ever-dwindling store of them. Oh, but she w
as so bloody sick of putting on a brave face, making the best of things, carrying on in the face of every trial. “Everything is perfect,” she said.

  Bridget looked skeptical, and a little annoyed, but she didn’t press the matter. It was plain from her expression that she had better things to do than try to coax the truth out of someone who did not wish to give it. “The fried chicken is excellent,” she said, lifting her china plate slightly to exhibit an array of sumptuous food. Then her gaze rose over Christy’s shoulder, and a warm smile spread across her face. “Here’s Jake now, with your supper,” she said. “I’ll just go and find Trace. Make sure he’s not talking politics with somebody.”

  She and Mr. Vigil exchanged brief pleasantries, and then Bridget disappeared into the crowd. Christy was surprised to find herself feeling almost as stricken as she had when Zachary Shaw had walked away.

  “It’s a nice night out,” Mr. Vigil said, reddening from the neck up in a slow flood of color. He was extraordinarily shy, Christy thought, with a certain fondness. “Maybe you’d like to take your supper in the porch swing?”

  Christy drew a mental deep breath and smiled

  with bright resolution. “That would be lovely,” she said. She resisted an urge to look around for some sign of Zachary and took the plate from Jake’s hand, fearing he was about to drop it on the Persian rug.

  She was, in fact, aware of Zachary’s gaze as she passed through the parlor with Jake. She could feel his regard through layers of fabric and flesh, muscle and bone. No force on earth could have made her seek him in that moment, and yet she was weak with the desire to do exactly that. Skye, too, was watching, her gaze fixed on Jake.

  As Christy had noted on her first visit, the Vigil mansion was surrounded by a gracious veranda. On the moonward side, in the soft light from tall windows, the white bench swing swayed ever so slightly in the evening breeze. Although she was nervous, Christy knew she was perfectly safe in Jake’s company, and she willingly took a seat at his bidding, her supper plate held carefully in her lap.

  Jake joined her, his significant weight causing the wood and chain supports to complain a little. He did not meet her eyes but instead admired the spatter of bright silver stars winking in the sky. The clean scents of timber and freshly bathed and barbered man mingled pleasantly with those of party food and night air.

  “It’s been a long time since a pretty woman like you came through Primrose Creek,” Jake said after a period of awkward silence. Even now, as he spoke, he didn’t look at her but concentrated on the spectacular sky and the obviously painful task of courting. “A man gets lonesome. Begins to wonder why he’s worked so hard, built himself a fine house—”

  Christy waited, unable to speak and certainly unable to eat. She wanted to bolt to her feet and flee, but she remained. She had set her course, and she meant to follow it.

  Jake cleared his throat. The poor man looked miserable, there in the lace-filtered light from the parlor windows behind them. “Things happen fast out here, ma’am,” he said, and his voice was still gruff despite his efforts to the contrary. “What might take a year or two back east, well—what I’m trying to say is—”

  Christy might not have loved Jake Vigil, but she certainly liked him. She was a good judge of character, normally, and all her instincts told her that this man was kind, honorable, and generous, as well as wealthy. He possessed all the qualities she sought in a husband—or, at least, most of them.

  She took his hand, letting her plate rest untouched on her thighs, and encouraged him with a squeeze of her fingers.

  “What I’m trying to say is, I’m the sort of man who needs a wife. I don’t drink much, nor gamble, nor chase after women. I’d never beat you or force—force myself on you—” He nearly choked on this last, poor man. Christy’s bruised and cautious heart warmed a little more. “I’ve got no debts to speak of, and plenty of money to provide for you and for our children. I’d like—” He swallowed, made another start. “I’d like your permission to court you proper, with an eye to our getting married soon as it’s decent.”

  It was Christy’s turn to swallow. This was what she’d wanted, what she’d aimed to achieve, but she had expected the matter to take longer and perhaps to be just a little more challenging. “You’re welcome to come calling, Mr. Vigil.”

  He took her hand now and squeezed gently. “Jake,” he said gruffly. “Please call me Jake.”

  She managed to look at him. “You know hardly anything at all about me,” she said. “We’re strangers.”

  He surprised her by raising her hand to his lips and brushing a light kiss across the backs of her knuckles. She felt nothing at all, though she knew that the same gesture from Zachary would have infused her with heat. “I’m an honest man,” he said. “I’m thirty years old, and I’ve never been married. Never had the time. I thought when I built this house and ordered all those fancy things from San Francisco to fill it up, well, it would be like having a real home. What I learned was, it takes a wife to give a place life, and— in due time, of course—I’d like us to have a family.”

  Christy wanted a husband. She wanted a lovely home, too, and she definitely wanted children of her own. Jake, a fine man, had just declared his very respectable intentions, and yet she felt more sorrow than joy. Zachary’s words in the dining room pulsed in her heart. You’ll be marrying a house, not a man, and ruining not only your own life but Jake’s, too . . .

  She would not ruin Jake’s life, she promised herself in that moment, nor her own. Her devotion, if not precisely genuine, would be unfailing and, in the spirit of Holy Scripture, her husband’s heart would have cause to trust safely in her. “Yes,” she said, practically forcing the word off her tongue. “Of course, we’ll have children.”

  He smiled at her at long last, and she wished with all her soul that she might love him, that some benign force, dancing by on the scented breeze of a spring evening, would cause her truly to adore this shy, gentle man. “We’re agreed, then?” he asked.

  She nodded, looked away, then down at the plate of now-cold food resting forgotten on her lap. She had not eaten since breakfast, and yet she knew that one bite would send her dashing for the bushes.

  The morning sunshine was like a spill of silvery fire on the waters of the creek, and Caney, crouched on the bank and busily scrubbing a pair of worn-out muslin bloomers, fairly pinned Christy to the trunk of a giant ponderosa pine, so intense was the look in her brown eyes. “That’s just plain whorin’,” she said, in her forthright way. “I’ll have no part of it, Christy McQuarry. Mind you remember that. You go ahead with this lame-brained scheme of yours, and I’ll move on without lookin’ back. Leave you to simmer in your own brew. Don’t you think I won’t, neither.”

  Christy, equally busy with a set of much-mended linen sheets, was tired of defending her decision. “You wouldn’t leave Primrose Creek,” she said, a little peevishly. “You’ve set your heart on marrying up with Mr. Hicks, and it appears that he means to stay right where he is.”

  “I can be married to Mr. Malcolm Hicks and still pick who I wants to socialize with, Miss Snippetybritches. And don’t you go thinkin’ you can sweettalk me into keepin’ house for you. I ain’t about to do that. No, sir. I’ll go on across the creek there and do for Trace and Miss Bridget and them babies, show you what’s what.”

  Christy had secretly hoped to persuade Caney to come to work for her once she was Mrs. Jake Vigil, and she hadn’t given up on the idea. Still, the idea of Caney abandoning her and Megan for Bridget brought stinging color to her cheeks and a flash of temper to her eyes. “Why don’t you just go right on over there now,” she replied, bluffing shamelessly, “if that’s how you feel?”

  A short, vibrant silence descended, and Caney relented first, if grudgingly. “Miss Megan needs me ’round here, since her own flesh and blood—you— don’t have a lick of sense!”

  Christy swished a soapy pillowcase in the water with perhaps more industry than was strictly necessary. After her marr
iage to Jake, she and Megan and Caney would live in a lovely, spacious house, where they belonged, where they were wanted and cared for and, most of all, safe. They would never want for anything again. Why couldn’t Caney see that? Why couldn’t Megan?

  It galled Christy that Caney, whose opinion she valued above ’most every other, did not approve. “You’re a free woman,” she said tautly. “You may certainly do whatever you want.”

  Now, Caney looked more despondent than angry. “You ain’t gonna change your mind, neither, are you? I swear I’ve seen bulls with thinner skulls than you got.”

  Christy merely shook her head. No, she wasn’t going to change her mind. She sought her younger sister out with her eyes, found her carrying buckets of water uphill to the lodge for cooking and washing up. Megan had already fed the mules and worked several hours in the garden, and although she did not seem unhappy, Christy could imagine only too well how years of such drudgery would steal the hope from Megan’s heart, the spark from her green eyes, making her old and frail long before her time.

  Christy could not bear the prospect, neither for her sister nor for herself, nor for the children she hoped to raise in a loving and unshakably secure home. The sort of life they’d all had before their world was torn apart.

  “Let the girl find her own way,” Caney said softly, evidently having followed Christy’s thoughtful gaze. “The good Lord’s got a plan for her, same as everybody else.”

  Christy’s jaw clenched, unclenched. The Lord. She’d seen His plans before—for her granddaddy, for her mother, for the South, for the farm generations of McQuarrys had labored to build. She wasn’t about to trust Him with something so vitally important as her younger sister’s fate—or her own, for that matter. She held her tongue, however, for she knew the subject of God and His doings was of utmost importance to Caney; the other woman would rise up fierce as a fire-breathing dragon if roused to defend her beliefs.