Mountain Laurel Read online

  Toby shook his head. “I tell you, that family of theirs is strange. Their daddy told me once that sometimes in their family a girl’s born that can see things that are gonna happen. Not things that have happened, but things that haven’t happened yet.”

  Maddie held the warm cup in her hand and nodded. “I’ve heard of it. Sometimes it’s called second sight. I can’t imagine a fortune-teller in ’Ring’s family.”

  “Oh, they mostly keep it quiet. But whenever there’s one of them girls born, they name her Christiana. There’s one of them now, lives on the coast, not the Maine coast, but way out west. This one’s only a girl, younger than your little sister in there, but she once saved a church full of people from burnin’ or somethin’, so they know she’s got this ‘sight.’ ”

  “She knew that something was wrong?”

  “It seems that months ago she was playin’ with her dolls and she told her mother that her Uncle ’Ring was gonna be in trouble.” Toby smiled. “Her mother sent a man all the way across the country to tell the boy’s father, and the old man sent the youngster out here to help the boy.”

  Maddie drank her coffee. “So Jamie found his brother and followed him.”

  “When we was watchin’ you, ’Ring saw the kidnappers followin’ you, and he saw the Injun, and then he saw somebody else, couldn’t figure out how he fit into it all.”

  “And that was Jamie.”

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “So Jamie saw the two of us handcuffed together and decided to play robber, no, highwayman, and take ’Ring’s horse and other goods.” She was silent for a moment, thinking of all that ’Ring had known and she hadn’t. No wonder he had been so calm when the man took his horse; no wonder he hadn’t wanted to go after that precious horse of his. He knew it was safe with his brother. ’Ring had also known that they were safe as they camped for three days, since his brother was keeping watch over them. And also, ’Ring had had a key to the handcuffs all the while.

  She thought of the way he smirked at her when she’d been so afraid for him when he wanted to go after the robber. She thought of the fistfight they had pretended to have. ’Ring had known that she was not far from the camp and had been listening. She remembered being puzzled by the fact that she could not find any marks on him after his fight.

  She stood and looked down at Toby. Maybe she should be angry, but she wasn’t. Whatever he’d done, he had returned Laurel to her. “I’m going to bed,” she said, then turned and went inside the tent. She slipped into ’Ring’s arms and, in his sleep, he drew her to him. Maddie pulled Laurel to her and went to sleep.

  “Are you all right?” Maddie asked Laurel the next morning. They were alone in the tent, both of them sitting on the cot. “And don’t lie to me. I want the truth.”

  Laurel told of her experiences in a string of curse words and exclamations that, had Maddie been another woman, might have horrified her. But Maddie knew how Laurel had grown up. It wasn’t until Maddie had been away from her father and his friends, not until she’d been in the opera world for some time, that she realized what an unconventional childhood she had had. Her family had been isolated from other people, and her friends had been old mountain men. Instead of learning sewing and how to pour tea, like most young ladies, she’d learned to dress out a buffalo, to trap beaver, and how to bead buckskin. When she started to sing professionally, she realized that the only songs she knew were opera arias and a few filthy little ditties that Bailey had taught her. She could survive in the wilderness on her own but, before she met John, she couldn’t tell silk from canvas.

  Maddie smiled at her little sister and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I was worried about you.”

  Laurel looked at her sister with some awe. She didn’t remember her older, famous sister very well from the few short years that they had spent together before Maddie left, but Laurel had kept scrapbooks of everything that she could get about Maddie. There were posters and clippings and pressed flowers and every letter that Maddie had sent her.

  “They said that you needed me,” Laurel said. “I went to the men because they said that you’d had bad medicine.”

  Maddie smiled, for Laurel’s words took her aback.

  “I was froze fer you and that’s why I went with them,” Laurel said softly, her heart in her eyes.

  Maddie smiled and took her little sister’s hands in hers. “I was froze fer you too, but I couldn’t get there.” She touched her sister’s cheek again and realized how much “civilization” had changed her. In the civilized world, people didn’t admit that they were longing for someone else, or “froze fer,” as Laurel called it. No, in the civilized world people hid their feelings or lied about them. And when they were told that someone needed them, or, as Laurel said, had bad medicine, bad luck, they didn’t just drop everything to go help them.

  “I went with them,” Laurel said, her mouth in a tight line. “The man was a damned sky pilot, but he gave me some high wine and I went to sleep.” She looked at Maddie. “But he got his. He took a pill and dropped his robe.”

  Maddie’s eyes widened. A man pretending to be a preacher had taken Laurel and drugged her, but it seemed that he had been shot and had died. “Did you kill him?”

  “Naw, some vide-poche did it.”

  Maddie was glad to hear that one of the other bad men and not Laurel had killed the kidnapper. She hugged her little sister. “I’m just glad that you’re safe. You seemed to have given ’Ring a hard time.”

  Laurel pulled away to look at her sister. “He thought I’d believe him when he showed up at that house. Just expected me to go with him, like he was God Almighty Hisself.”

  Maddie had to pull Laurel to her to keep her sister from seeing her smile. She could imagine ’Ring telling Laurel what to do and how to do it, just as he’d first told Maddie what she was to do. “He tends to be like that,” Maddie said, “but I have hopes that he will learn. Were the kidnappers bad to you? Did they harm you?”

  “They tried to scare me, but I put a little buffalo tea in their food and that kept them away from me.”

  Maddie frowned. It was one thing to be brave, but another to be dumb, and putting urine in the food of kidnappers was definitely dumb. “Laurel, I think—”

  Laurel recognized the tone of an impending lecture when she heard it. “Speakin’ of buffalo tea, you got any food? I’m so wolfish I could eat whangs,” she said, speaking of the fringe on a mountain man’s garment.

  Maddie laughed. Her sister was fine, and even from the little of what she’d heard, she was beginning to pity the poor kidnappers. They were no doubt merely hired men, just as the man she’d often met in the woods said that he was, and they’d had no idea how to deal with a twelve-year-old hellion who put urine in their food.

  “Go on, go eat,” Maddie said, then, as Laurel started to leave, she caught her hand. “When you’re talking to the others, try to keep it clean. Otherwise they won’t understand you and you’ll shock them.”

  Laurel’s mouth turned into a grim line. “That…that man of yours, he…”

  “What did ’Ring do?”

  “He turned me over his knee, that’s what.”

  Maddie had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing. Her father had threatened to do just that whenever his daughters cursed, but he was much too soft-hearted and had never once been able to strike them. Their mother had not been so inclined though. “Just pretend you’re talking to Mother.”

  Laurel nodded. “I figured that out. What kind of men are these easterners? Are they men?”

  “Yes,” Maddie answered. “They’re men. Go on, get something to eat.” As Maddie watched her little sister leave the tent, it occurred to her that perhaps the reason she’d never been interested in the men in Europe was because they didn’t seem like men to her.

  She stood and brushed off her skirt. Yes, the eastern men were men, different from the men she’d known as a child, but definitely men.

  Later in the mor