Twin of Ice Read online

  “I really don’t see why we have to go with Leander,” Blair said to Houston who sat quite straight on a white brocade chair. “I haven’t seen you in years and now I have to share you.”

  Houston gave her sister a little smile. “Leander asked us to accompany him, not the other way around. Sometimes I think you don’t like him. But I can’t see how that could be possible. He’s kind, considerate, he has position in the community and he—.”

  “And he completely owns you!” Blair exploded, jumping up from the bed, startling Houston with the strength of her outburst. “Don’t you realize that in school I worked with women like you, women who were so unhappy they repeatedly attempted suicide?”

  “Suicide? Blair, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have no intention of killing myself.” Houston couldn’t help drawing away from her sister’s vehemence.

  “Houston,” Blair said quietly, “I wish you could see how much you’ve changed. You used to laugh, but now you’re so distant. I understand that you’ve had to adjust to Gates, but why would you choose to marry a man just like him?”

  Houston stood, putting her hand on the walnut dresser and idly touching Blair’s silver-backed hairbrush. “Leander isn’t like Mr. Gates. He’s really very different. Blair”—she looked at her sister in the big mirror—“I love Leander,” she said softly. “I have for years, and all I’ve ever wanted to do is get married, have children and raise my family. I never wanted to do anything great or noble like you seem to want to do. Can’t you see that I’m happy?”

  “I wish I could believe you,” Blair said sincerely. “But something keeps me from it. I guess I hate the way Leander treats you, as if you were already his. I see the two of you together and you’re like a couple who’ve lived together for twenty years.”

  “We have been together a long time.” Houston turned back to face her sister. “What should I look for in a husband if it isn’t compatibility?”

  “It seems to me that the best marriages are between people who find each other interesting. You and Leander are too much alike. If he were a woman, he’d be a perfect lady.”

  “Like me,” Houston whispered. “But I’m not always a lady. There are things I do—.”

  “Like Sadie?”

  “How did you know about that?” Houston asked.

  “Meredith told me. Now, what do you think your darling Leander is going to say when he finds out that you’re putting yourself in danger every Wednesday? And how will it look for a surgeon of his stature to be married to a practicing criminal?”

  “I’m not a criminal. I’m doing something that’s good for the whole town,” Houston said with fire, then quieted. She slipped another hairpin invisibly into the neat chignon at the back of her head. Carefully arranged curls framed her forehead beneath a hat decorated with a spray of iridescent blue feathers. “I don’t know what Leander will say. Perhaps he won’t find out.”

  “Hah! That pompous, spoiled man will forbid you to participate in anything dealing with the coal miners and, Houston, you’re so used to obeying that you’ll do exactly what he says.”

  “Perhaps I should give up being Sadie after I’m married,” she said with a sigh.

  Suddenly, Blair dropped to her knees on the carpet and took Houston’s hands. “I’m worried about you. You’re not the sister I grew up with. Gates and Westfield are eating away at your spirit. When we were children, you used to throw snowballs with the best of them but now it’s as if you’re afraid of the world. Even when you do something wonderful like drive a huckster wagon, you do it in secret. Oh, Houston—.”

  She broke off at a knock on the door. “Miss Houston, Dr. Leander is here.”

  “Yes, Susan, I’ll be right down.” Houston smoothed her skirt. “I’m sorry you find me so much to your distaste,” she said primly, “but I do know my own mind. I want to marry Leander because I love him.” With that, she swept out of the room, and went downstairs.

  Houston tried her best to push Blair’s words from her mind but she couldn’t. She greeted Leander absently and was vaguely aware of a quarrel going on between Lee and Blair, but she really heard nothing except her own thoughts.

  Blair was her twin, they were closer than ordinary sisters and Blair’s concern was genuine. Yet, how could Houston even think of not marrying Leander? When Leander was eight years old, he’d decided he was going to be a doctor, a surgeon who saved people’s lives, and by the time Houston met him, when he was twelve, Lee was already studying textbooks borrowed from a distant cousin. Houston decided to find out how to be a doctor’s wife.

  Neither wavered from his decision. Lee went to Harvard to study medicine, then to Vienna for further study, and Houston went to finishing schools in Virginia and Switzerland.

  Houston still winced whenever she thought of the argument she and Blair’d had about her choice of schools. “You;’re going to give up an education just so you can learn to set a table, so you can learn how to walk into a room wearing fifty yards of heavy satin and not fall on your face?”

  Blair went to Vassar, then medical school, while Houston went to Miss Jones’s School for Young Ladies where she was put through years of rigorous training in everything from how to arrange flowers to how to stop men from arguing at the dinner table.

  Now, Lee took her arm as he helped her into the buggy. “You look as good as always,” he said close to her ear.

  “Lee,” Houston said, “do you think we find each other . . . interesting?”

  With a smile, his eyes raked down her body, over the dress that glued itself to her tightly corseted, exaggerated hourglass figure. “Houston, I find you fascinating.”

  “No, I mean, do we have enough to talk about?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “It’s a wonder I can remember how to talk when I’m around you,” he answered as he helped her into his buggy, and drove them the six blocks into the heart of Chandler.

  Chapter 2

  Chandler, Colorado, was a small place, only eight thousand inhabitants, but its industries of coal, cattle, sheep, and Mr. Gates’s brewery made it a rich little town. It already had a telephone system and electricity, and, with three train lines through town, it was easy to reach the larger cities of Colorado Springs and Denver.

  The eleven blocks comprising downtown Chandler were covered with buildings that were almost all new and built of stone from the Chandler Stone Works. The greenish gray stone was often carved into intricate patterns for use as cornices for the Western Victorian style buildings.

  Scattered outside the town were houses in varied styles of Queen Anne and High Victorian. At the north end of town, on a small rise, was Jacob Fenton’s house, a large brick Victorian structure that until a few years ago had been Chandler’s largest house.

  At the west end of town, just a short distance from the Fenton house, on the flattened top of what most citizens had once considered part of the mountains, was Kane Taggert’s house. Fenton’s house would have fit into the wine cellar of the Taggert house.

  “The whole town still trying to get inside the place?” Blair asked Houston as she nodded toward the house barely visible behind the trees. That “barely visible” part was large enough to be seen from almost anywhere in town.

  “Everyone,” Houston smiled. “But when Mr. Taggert ignored all invitations and extended none of his own, I’m afraid people began spreading awful rumors about him.”

  “I’m not so sure all the things people say about him are rumors,” Leander said. “Jacob Fenton said—”

  “Fenton!” Blair exploded. “Fenton is a conniving, thieving—.”

  Houston didn’t bother to listen but leaned back in the carriage and gazed at the house through the window at the back of the buggy. Lee and Blair continued arguing while he halted the carriage to wait for one of the new horse-drawn trolley cars to pass.

  She had no idea whether what was said about Mr. Taggert was true or not, but it was her own opinion that the house he’d built was the most beautiful thing she