Hannah Howell (19 page)

“He is gone. Let it be,” Sarah told him. “We have been married only a week. How will it look if you race off to the wilderness now?”

“They cannot laugh any harder or louder than they do already,” Thomas replied, and poured himself a brandy. “They have seen me fail at the hands of that lout from the frontier. He has done what those cowards in town could not do, and they savor my defeat.”

“You imagine that the laughter is a great deal
louder than it is. It will all be forgotten soon anyway. You have the people here so afraid of you, they will quickly cease to chuckle now that he has left.”

“I will never forget it. Every time I look into a mirror, with every throb inside my head, I remember it. That bastard took Clover away from me. He stole my stallion, and interfered with my revenge on Grendall, and he beat me—twice. No one makes a fool of me like that. No one. That bastard will pay and so will Clover. I will make her dearly sorry that she scorned me for that lout.”

“Well, you can damned well do it on your own.”

Thomas looked at Sarah. “What? My dear wife refuses to help me?”

“Yes, she refuses. I will not go to that wilderness just so you can have revenge. If you want it so badly, go get it yourself.”

He went to the settee where she lounged and touched her cheek. “He refused your favors. Do you not want to make him pay for that?”

“If he was right at hand, I might, but he is not. He is hundreds of miles away. And he was most insulting that day. I see no wisdom in traveling hundreds of miles to offer him a second chance to slight me.”

“Fine.” Thomas finished off his brandy and set the glass on a side table with a snap. “Stay here. But do try to act with some discretion while I am gone.”

Sarah shook her head as he strode from the room. When Thomas had realized he had failed to kill the horse or murder Ballard, he had behaved like a madman. Still she had thought that once Ballard was gone, Thomas’s ravings would cease. When Thomas discovered that his nose would never be straight again, his fervent need to make Ballard pay dearly
for each and every defeat had only increased. He even blamed his sick headaches on his broken nose and Ballard, conveniently forgetting that he had had them long before Ballard MacGregor had arrived in Langleyville. Sarah considered Thomas’s obsession with Ballard not only mad but also stupid. She did not think Thomas would survive a third confrontation between the men, especially if he did anything to hurt Clover.

As Sarah stood up to pour herself a brandy, she heard the front door slam. She moved to the window, saw hulking Big Jim Wallis get into the carriage with Thomas, and grimaced. They were united in stupidity, she mused as she took a sip of brandy. She cursed the day Thomas had met Big Jim at the Sly Dog and discovered that they shared a common bond of hate for Ballard MacGregor. As the carriage pulled away, Big Jim’s three dirty friends riding behind it, she felt certain that she would never see Thomas Dillingsworth alive again.

She wondered if widows really had the freedom they were rumored to have.

Clover set the basket of eggs on the kitchen table and frowned at her hands. The chickens were as reluctant to give up their eggs as the cows to relinquish their milk. She moved to the sink, poured some water into a bowl, and washed her badly pecked hands. Although she did everything just as Molly told her to, there always seemed to be one chicken who was ready and waiting to make her pay dearly for the eggs.

She dried her hands, shaking her head. For one month she had been in Kentucky struggling to learn,
but she seemed to be making little progress. Her first attempt to churn the butter had produced cheese. Her second attempt had been better, but, as with so much of the other food she made, it was too salty. When she had tried to milk the cows, not one of the obstinate beasts would give up a drop. Clayton had shown a real knack at the chore, and even liked to do it, so she had gladly relinquished it to him, but she knew she would have to learn sometime. About the only thing she had done right was to add plants to the kitchen garden, or at least she thought so. She could not be sure until the garden began to yield something. And she had made some new gowns for herself and her mother, she mused as she looked down at her simple blue gingham dress. She could not consider that a big achievement, however, since she had already known how to sew.

She sighed and moved to the pile of dirty laundry. This was the first time she would do the washing without Molly’s supervision. She carried the laundry onto the back veranda, hefted the washing tub down from the pegs on the wall, set it on a sturdy table, and filled it with hot water.

As she began to scrub the clothes, she looked out over the land Ballard was so proud of. The delicate blooms of the bluegrasses were fading now. A few of the trees that ringed Ballard’s property and shaded the house still held lingering blooms while the others were filling with leaves. It was a beautiful place and she could easily understand Ballard’s love for it. Everyone was out in the field, working hard to see that the crop was planted in time. The corn was in and they were planting the other crops. They were
nearly finished and the constant work would soon ease a little, at least until it was time for the harvest.

A deep-throated yowl startled her and she turned to see a large yellow tomcat sitting on the veranda railing. She had discovered that Ballard had a soft spot for the many farm cats. He did not spoil them so badly that they grew lax in containing the vermin which attacked the grain, crops, or food stores, but he did treat them well.

“And he treats you best of all, right, Muskrat?” She smiled faintly as the cat meowed. “You are such a clever cat, maybe I can teach you how to clean clothes.”

The cat stared at her for a moment, then started to wash himself. Clover laughed, shook her head, and began to scrub at a stain on one of Damien’s shirts. She suspected Molly had some clever way of getting it out, but she did not want to go and ask her. It seemed to Clover as if she was forever asking Molly how to do things. It must make Ballard all too aware of how ignorant she was.

Neither was her mother learning very much, simply keeping an eye on the twins and occasionally assisting in simple tasks, but Clover found little comfort in that. No one expected or needed Agnes to do much, for she had spent every day of her forty years being cared for. And her mother had not offered to be Ballard’s partner for life.

After setting the scrub brush aside, Clover held up the shirt she had been diligently working on and groaned. She had certainly gotten the stain out. Now there was a shredded hole where the stain had been. Clover was not sure she could even mend it. A good hard scrubbing was clearly not the way to get
a stain out of a fine linen shirt. She muttered a few well-chosen curses under her breath and gave a soft screech of surprise when she heard an all-too-familiar masculine chuckle.

“Hello, Ballard,” she muttered.

Feeling a deep blush heat her cheeks, and not wanting to add to his amusement, she did not turn to look at him. It never failed, she thought crossly. Whenever she did something foolish, Ballard appeared to witness it. When he reached around her and poked his finger through the hole in Damien’s shirt, she had to bite her lip to keep from cursing again.

“Ye have a wee bit more strength than ye kenned, lass.” He slipped his arms around her waist and kissed her neck. “Dinnae frown so, loving. It takes time. I mangled a few clothes meself when I first took up doing the washing.”

“Yes, but you are a man.”

“I dinnae believe lasses are born kenning how to wash clothes or scrub floors.”

“Or how to cook,” she muttered as she wrung out Damien’s shirt and set it aside, hoping that when she calmed down a little, she would see away to mend it. “Is the planting done already?”

“Most of it. The others can finish what little is left, and I have come in for my reading lesson.”

“Oh, Lord, is it that time already? It seems I am behind in my work—as always. Just let me rinse these and put them on the line to dry.”

She did not refuse Ballard’s help when he offered to empty out the soapy water and get her some clean, for she had begun to doubt she would be able to heft the tub. As he dumped the dirty water on the kitchen
garden and refilled the tub, Clover tried to decide what to do for his lessons. She was no teacher, but he was a fast learner. Clover began to fear that she would fail Ballard there as well.

He noticed her frown as she rinsed the clothes and wrung them out. “If ye have too much to do now, Clover, I can come later for my lesson.” He leaned against the rail and scratched Muskrat under the chin, eliciting the tomcat’s deep purr.

“I have no more work than you have, Ballard. I can do that,” she protested when he began to hang the clothes on the line.

“So can I. No sense in me just standing about watching ye. The quicker the job is done, the quicker we can get to the lesson.”

When they were finished, he tipped the rinse water onto the kitchen garden as well, hung the tub back on the wall, and escorted her into the house. She hurried up to her mother’s room for a copy of
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
It was a lot harder than the twins’ readers, but Ballard had already mastered those little books and she had no secondary readers. As she set the almanac on the table between them, she watched his eyes widen slightly.

“I fear I have nothing between the boys’ little books and this. ‘Tis not as difficult as it looks,” she assured him.

He moved to sit on the bench next to her. “I am just not sure I agree that I have gone beyond those wee readers.” He frowned as he thumbed through the almanac.

“You certainly have. In fact, I think you know those little books by heart now.”

“Weel, let us set to it then. We only have an hour. I
dinnae want the others to catch me stuttering over these new words.”

Clover sat quietly, gently advising him when he stumbled over a word. Ballard needed little more than supervision, for he had quickly learned his letters and how to sound out the words. As he read through a dry piece on crops, her thoughts drifted to everything she still had to learn and how little she had really mastered.

She still lacked the ability and confidence to prepare a meal completely on her own. It was not difficult to scrub the floors and tables, but her muscles still protested such hard work. The boys were doing a great deal better than she was, adapting to their new life with an ease and enjoyment she dearly wished she could share. Everyone assured her that she was improving a little more each day, but she was not sure she believed them. Although she truly liked Molly and deeply appreciated the woman’s patient instruction, there were days when she almost resented Molly’s skills, for they made her look even more incompetent.

Ballard slipped his arms around her waist and lifted her onto his lap, abruptly yanking her from her thoughts. “I do not believe this position will facilitate your reading,” she said even as she draped her arms around his neck.

He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “Ye can talk like a wee princess, cannae ye? And ye were nae listening.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. You need so little help, I am afraid my thoughts wandered. From now on, I think we can just have a short practice reading and then move on to something else—like your writing. The
time you are able to steal from your work is too precious to waste on things you have already learned.” She murmured her pleasure when he kissed her, slowly and gently until her passion began to stir to life.

“Aye, I do need to improve my writing.” He started to unbutton the bodice of her gown. “But I dinnae feel inclined to be tutored just now, leastwise not in reading and writing.”

Clover gasped and covered his hand with hers. “Ballard, we are in the kitchen. Anyone could come in and see us.”

“Then we had best go somewhere private,” he said as he stood up, keeping her in his arms.

“Ballard,” she cried in a halfhearted protest. “‘Tis the middle of the day and we have work to do.”

“Newlyweds are expected to be, er, distracted.” He started up the stairs.

“Distracted, is it? I call this shirking.”

“Weel, lass, I intend to have a verra enjoyable shirk afore the noon meal.”

She blushed, but also laughed, infected by his passion and good humor. Suddenly she too relished the thought of stealing away from work to enjoy the desire that flared so hotly between them. She traced the shape of his ear with her tongue and kissed the hollow behind it, laughing when he hastened his strides, nearly running the last few feet to their room. He kicked the door shut, gently tossed her onto the bed, and sprawled on top of her. She laughed again.

But at the realization of how light it was in the room, a hint of embarrassment crept over her. “Ballard, ‘tis very bright in here.”

“Are ye feeling shy before your husband?”

“Less and less,” she admitted with a faint smile. “But could you draw the curtains?”

“Then I willnae be able to see ye,” he said, but he got up and pulled the curtains together just enough to lessen the sun’s glare.

Ballard returned to her side and kissed her. The slight change in lighting was clearly enough to ease her embarrassment and he found it a comfortable compromise. He distracted her with his kisses as he eased off her simple gown. Her increasingly responsive movements against him told him that she had discarded the last of her modesty. He stripped her to her thin chemise, then shed his own clothes, smiling faintly when he saw that she had already begun to unfasten his shirt.

He respected Clover’s modesty but was glad to see her relinquish it. Soon he would try something more daring, perhaps making love in some place other than their bed. He ached to look at her without the constraints of clothing or shadows.

He slid his hands along her legs, catching the hem of her chemise and slowly easing it up her body. He smiled as he slipped it over her slim hips and paused to kiss her taut stomach. Clover had insisted earlier that there was no red in her hair, but the curls at the juncture of her thighs were a bright coppery color. One day soon, when she was not so easily flustered by his blunt talk, he would point that out to her.