Mountain Laurel Read online

“I think you’d better get back. You’ve had a hard two days and tomorrow you have a performance and—”

  “Turn around, I said.”

  “Miss Honey will be looking for you.”

  “Edith couldn’t care less if I started rolling down a hill and kept going.” She was still smarting from his comment about her lack of education. “If you don’t understand English, how about Italian? Distògliere il viso. French? Traiter avec dédain. Or maybe Spanish is something you understand. Dejar libre.” She was very pleased to see his puzzled look. That should teach him to denigrate her education.

  “Which do you want me to do? Turn around, turn aside, turn a cold shoulder, or turn something free.”

  He had translated all three languages perfectly. “You are a truly infuriating man.” She grabbed his arm and pulled on him. He was much too big for her to move if he hadn’t helped her, but she did get to see the back of him. He was covered with cactus thorns, some of them hidden by his cotton army blouse, but all of them embedded in his skin. There were more thorns protruding from his trousers, but the sturdy army wool had kept most of them from going through to his skin.

  “You’ve mentioned that before, about my being infuriating. I’m afraid that your languages don’t impress me. It might impress me if you had any idea what has happened to all the money you’ve earned over the years.”

  She used her fingertips to pull out a thorn. “Are you after my money?”

  “I can’t tell that you have any. If you have as little concern for what you’ve made in the past as you do for what you’ve earned on this trip, then I doubt very much that you do have any. Besides, it’s a tradition in my family that we take care of money. My father made me invest twenty percent of all my pocket money from the time I was three years old.”

  She pulled out three more thorns, but then his shirt got in her way and hid more thorns than it exposed. She pushed him at the waist. “Up the hill and take that shirt off. Money has never been a concern of mine. I want to sing. Singing is what matters, not money. The sound of the music and the appreciation of the audience is what matters in life.”

  He climbed the hill, her behind him. “You say that you’ll not always have your voice. What will you live on when you can no longer sing?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not something that has ever interested me much. Perhaps I’ll marry some fat, rich old man and let him support me.” They were at the top of the hill now, and he paused, turning to face her.

  “What about children?”

  “Take that shirt off, give me that tooth-picker of yours, and lay down on the ground. I want to get those thorns out.”

  He began unbuttoning his shirt. “You never thought about children?”

  In spite of the fact that he was acting as though the thorns weren’t bothering him, she knew they must be very painful. She walked behind him and helped peel the shirt off, moving the thorns as little as possible. “Is this a marriage proposal, Captain? If it is, I’m not interested. To sing I have to travel around the world a great deal. I don’t have the time or inclination to tie myself to a man. Nor do I want—” She broke off at the sight of his broad, muscular back, for it was covered with thin white scars.

  “Stretch out there on the grass,” she said softly, and when he’d done so, she ran her fingertip over one of the scars. “How did this happen?”

  “I ran into something.”

  “The wrong end of a whip? I didn’t think they whipped officers. And, besides, I can’t imagine you doing anything that could possibly get you into trouble. I’d think the army would give men like you medals—not whippings.”

  “I haven’t always been an officer,” he said as he watched her go to his saddle gear and remove his big skinning knife. “You planning to do some skinning?”

  She laughed at the nervousness in his voice, then cut a piece of greasy canvas from the bag containing the chicken and wrapped it around her thumb. “Be still,” she said, pushing at his shoulder as she knelt by him. “I’ve removed a few of these before, and I know what I’m doing.” She used the back of the knife blade against her padded thumb to pull the first of the many, many thorns from his back.

  When she’d cleared enough of his back that she could put her palm on it, she touched the scars. “For all your flippancy, I know how much pain a whipping like this must have caused you. I know something of pain.”

  He could hear the tears in her voice. “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for yourself? What do you know of pain or even hardship? An opera singer’s life isn’t full of what I’d call agony. What do you usually do? Sing all day? Or do you spend most of the time at your dressmaker’s?”

  “You know nothing about being a singer of my caliber. If you’ll behave yourself, I’ll tell you how I came to be a singer. I guess I was about seven years old. My father was helping some settlers. They were coming west to open a trading post and—”

  “In Lanconia?”

  “All I have to do to cause you great discomfort is wiggle one of these thorns. Now, be still and listen. There was a woman who was ill with this group of settlers, and her husband had been killed on the journey. She—”

  “Indians?”

  “No, actually, he’d been killed by a rattlesnake, if I remember correctly, but I’m not sure because, as I said, I was quite young. The other people with her were very annoyed at having a lone female with them, and a sick one at that, and, from what my father said, they let her know she was a burden to them. My father had no sympathy for them, as he thought all settlers were a nuisance and a plague on the earth. He—”

  “But then, your father was a settler too, wasn’t he?”

  “Are you going to listen or talk?”

  “I can hardly wait to hear more about your illustrious father.”

  “You should be honored. Now, where was I?”

  “With your father, a settler, being annoyed with more settlers coming in.”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, tweaking one of the thorns very slightly, “did I hurt you? I’ll try to be more careful, but if you don’t stop interrupting me, I may not remember to be gentle. Now, let’s see, I was talking about Mrs. Benson. My father thought my mother might like to have some company, so he brought the woman home, planning to take her back east in the spring. She ended up staying with us for four years, then she fell in love with some passing easterner and married him, but by then I had Madame Branchini.”

  “And she taught you opera?”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself. Mrs. Benson had taught piano and singing in the East and my mother thought it would be nice if she tried to do something with me, because I was awfully jealous of my older sister, Gemma. You see, my mother is an artist and my sister had inherited every bit of my mother’s talent. Even at five years old Gemma could paint and draw rather well, while I could draw not at all. I was jealous that my mother spent so much time with Gemma.”

  “So, your mother turned you over to the music teacher and immediately you started singing arias.”

  “No, I sang funny little popular songs and things my father’s friends taught me and—”

  “Songs about hailing the queen, that sort of thing? Are your father’s friends also dukes?”

  She ignored him. “No one thought much about my singing for years, then, one day, Mrs. Benson was looking through a trunk my father had found. It had been thrown from a settler’s wagon—the idiots take everything they own with them and then at the first rough place they have to start lightening their wagons.”

  ’Ring had seen some of the “rough” places. Ravines a hundred and fifty feet deep. “What was in the trunk?”

  “Sheet music. My father hauled it home because he thought maybe Mrs. Benson and I could use it.” Maddie pulled another thorn from his back and smiled. “In the bottom was a piece of music such as I’d never seen before. It was ‘Air des bijoux,’ you know, from Faust.”

  “Jewel Song,” he said softly, translating.

  “Yes, exactly.”

&nbs