Upon a Midnight Clear Read online

  Turning, Cole gave her that little smirk again. "I see. Now let me guess, Mrs. de Longe. You think you are just the person I need."

  Kathryn gave him a very sweet smile. "Mr. Jordan, I hope your horse steps into a hole and you fall and break your neck. Good day, sir." As she firmly shut the door behind him, she heard his laughter.

  "Mother, you have gone mad," Jeremy said when he heard what she had done. "You should have taken the money and we could have left this horrible place. Zachary is incorrigible. And the father is as bad. I've heard that—"

  "Jeremy, you are not to repeat what you've heard about either of them. Zachary Jordan has no mother, so we must be forgiving and—"

  "I have no father," Jeremy said and there was the unmistakable tone of jealousy in his voice. "But that fact has yet to excuse me from any misbehavior."

  "Jeremy, my darling, you have been blessed with a mother who is sane and sensible and loves you very much. That poor child has had no one except a man who lives under the illusion that every woman on earth is dying to spend her life with him. He is vain and arrogant, not to mention ignorant of the simplest courtesies and—" She broke off because Jeremy was staring at her oddly.

  "Come on," she said, picking up one of the cases at his feet. "Let's see if we can find someone to tell us where his rooms are, so we can live as far from him as possible."

  Jeremy grabbed the other bags and started to follow his mother up the stairs. "And a room that we can put a padlock on."

  "I think that was just Mr. Stewart's little joke," Kathryn said as she paused on the landing, looking at the two hallways in front of her, one branching right, the other left. With her free hand she ran it along the surface of a table, then frowned as her hand came away dirty.

  "I don't think it was a bad idea," Jeremy said as he followed his mother down the right corridor, his shoulders pulling under the weight of the bags. "Really, Mother, a padlock could be quite an asset"

  Kathryn was opening doors, looking inside the rooms, then clucking in disgust. It was obvious that the house had once been beautiful, but now neglect had been allowed to make the rooms almost uninhabitable. Dirt and dust were everywhere. In one bedroom there was a mouse nest in the feather pillow on the bed. One bedroom's window had blown open, and it looked as though it had stayed open for days, because the floor and the surrounding furniture were damaged severely.

  When Kathryn opened the door at the end of the corridor, she said, "Ah," in such a way that Jeremy came to peer over her shoulder. He could see that this was obviously his bedroom, as Jeremy thought of the man who had made his mother so unhappy. There were clothes and dirty boots slung everywhere. A pile of socks that looked as though they hadn't been washed in years were heaped by the door.

  With thumb and one finger extended, Kathryn picked up a sock and held it aloft. The toe was worn through. "Disgusting," she said, dropped the awful object, then shut the door. "Come, Jeremy, we will move into the opposite end of the house."

  "Where does the other one sleep?" Jeremy said under his breath as he followed his mother's swift footsteps.

  Kathryn didn't say anything, but she silently thought that poor Zachary could probably sleep in town in one of those… those houses, for all his father knew.

  "Mother, you must rest. And you must admit defeat."

  Kathryn ran the back of her hand over her sweaty brow, pushing the fallen hair out of her eyes, and looked up at her son. She was on her hands and knees scouring the kitchen floor, which she was sure hadn't been washed in the last ten years or so. "Darling, if I had ever admitted defeat I would have been hanged for kidnapping long ago and you would be living a life of leisure with your father."

  At that Jeremy smiled and sat down at the big pine kitchen table that now gleamed from his mother's efforts. ""You could always help me, you know."

  Jeremy picked up an apple from the bowl on the table and bit into it. "I am an O'Connor, you know. Blood of kings, that sort of thing."

  Kathryn threw her dirty rag, and it would have hit him smack in the face if he hadn't caught it midair then dropped it disdainfully on the floor. She got off her knees and lowered herself onto a chair near her son. "Jeremy, darling, what in the world am I going to do? Mr. Jordan will return in a day or two, and I haven't made any progress at all"

  For a moment she closed her eyes and thought back over the last several days, and involuntarily, she gave a bit of a shudder. Zachary Jordan was afraid of no one and nothing. There was nothing she could threaten him with that made any difference to him. She couldn't intimidate him with, "I'm going to tell your father," because he knew very well that his father wanted her to fail—if for no other reason than to be able to say, I told you so.

  She had talked to Zachary twice to try to persuade him of the value of an education. Like his father, he had just laughed at her, then turned away and left the house.

  She had tried to make a home for him. Well, truthfully, maybe she had tried to make the Jordan house into a home for her and Jeremy, but Zachary lived there too. It seemed that Cole Jordan only had male employees, and cleanliness was not something they considered important. Neither was good food. They fried everything in lard, poured it onto platters, then put them into the middle of the table.

  For her and Jeremy's own health, she had started cooking for the two of them and young Zachary, who, she quickly discovered, had an appetite that matched the size of him. And of course Kathryn couldn't cook in a kitchen as filthy as that one had been, so she'd cleaned it. Then she'd cleaned two bedrooms for herself and Jeremy, and since their rooms turned out to be next to Zachary's, she cleaned his too, even sending the sheets out to the Legend laundry.

  "There is nothing I can do to force him to study."

  "Too bad you can't starve him," Jeremy said as he bit into his apple. "The boy eats as much as the town blacksmith, who, from what I hear, might be his father as well as any other man. And he certainly likes those shirts you had ironed."

  Days ago Kathryn had stopped correcting Jeremy's unpleasant comments about Zachary because she'd found out that his jealousy was stronger than her attempts to inhibit him. No, she wasn't worried about Jeremy; her concern was Zachary. How did she get him to agree to be her pupil? She had figured out that that's what it would take with Zachary because he was too willful to be forced to do anything he didn't want to do.

  "You can see that he looks just like Cole Jordan," Kathryn said, her chin resting on her hands and thinking about what Jeremy had just said. She might not have been able to get Zachary to open a book, but she had made inroads into other parts of his life. Who would have thought that such a grubby little boy would actually be a hedonist?

  Over the last few days Kathryn had seen the pleasure he had taken in putting on freshly washed and ironed shirts. She'd seen him flick a speck of dust off his newly polished boots. Maybe she couldn't get him to want to learn geography, but she'd had no trouble getting him to bathe.

  And Jeremy was right about the food. The first night when she and Jeremy had sat down to a dinner of roast chicken and tiny vegetable tarts, Zachary had scoffed and ridiculed the meal even as he was filling his plate. That night Kathryn had been past exhaustion and she had snapped at him, "Either you mind your manners and act like a gentleman or you eat in the bunkhouse with the men." After that Zachary had quietly sat down across from Jeremy and had watched everything Jeremy had done and imitated it perfectly.

  At least I taught him something, Kathryn thought. Then, suddenly, her head came up and she stared, wide-eyed, at her son. "What did you say?"

  "That the town blacksmith could have been his father. I was told that his mother—"

  "Jeremy, you must stop listening to gossip. No, what did you say before that? Something about food."

  "Oh. I said it was too bad you couldn't starve him into submission."

  "Yes," Kathryn said as she stood. "That's it. Jeremy, I want you to go into the bunkhouse and get the dirtiest sheets you can find."

  "The men don'