Mountain Laurel Read online

  “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