Marrying Stone (2 page)

Meggie felt a strange wonderful expansion in the area of her heart… which took up beating at a faster pace. She felt a strangely queer notion of welcoming home. She'd been waiting for this handsome stranger all her life, and he'd finally arrived. It was magic.

As she stood there, staring mutely, the prince, his dark brown eyes curious, gazed at Meggie. She trembled. Beyond that, she couldn't move.

The prince apparently recognized her predicament. In a movement as graceful as a lady at a dance, he swept his hand-plaited straw panama from his head and bowed deeply.

"J. Monroe Farley, miss, of the city of Cambridge in Massachusetts, the Bay State, at your service."

Meggie fluttered slightly and tried to copy his elegant manners.

"Margaret May Best, sir, of Arkansas." Her words were so breathy they came out almost as a sigh. She held her hand out to him.

When he grasped her fingers gently in his own and bent over her hand formally, she gasped aloud.

He looked up at her curiously. His brown eyes seemed puzzled behind his spectacles.

Meggie glanced toward Jesse for help, but her brother seemed unaware of her befuddlement. Meggie cleared her throat.

"I lament you find me in poor habiliment, sir," she said in her gentlest and most refined tone. "I had not foreseen wayfarers this morn."

The young man's eyes widened and he chuckled.

Meggie's brow furrowed. Certainly she didn't look her best, but she'd just apologized. Still it was clear that the fancy young man was amused. Her cheeks reddened. "I am working, I—I suppose I do look rather a sight."

The prince's expression sobered immediately. "Indeed not, Miss Best. I am delighted to make your acquaintance and deeply regret that my appearance was untimely."

From the tips of her bare toes to the top of her untidy hair, Meggie was dirty and tattered. But the elegant young man standing before her spoke in a way that sounded as if he were addressing a great lady. He was a foreign prince for sure, but he sounded nice. She liked his voice, she decided. She liked it very much. She gave the stranger a long, slow smile of approval.

"I invited him to take dinner with us." Her brother Jesse abruptly shattered the strange flowery haze that had settled around Meggie's heart and temporarily clouded her thinking and judgment.

"What?" Meggie glanced at the city man. He nodded in agreement. She wanted to scream in frustration. "Dinner?"

Her brother nodded.

Meggie couldn't believe her bad luck. The most handsome man that she had ever seen in her life, the prince of her dreams, had finally come to rescue her from her lonely tower, and she was about to drive him off before they were properly acquainted.

The gentleman must have sensed her dismay. "I wouldn't wish to intrude," he said politely. "Perhaps your brother's invitation was given out of turn?"

Meggie raised her chin. She was caught. Jesse had invited the man. There was nothing to do for it. He wouldn't have a chance to know
her
before he knew her cooking. But, so be it. Maybe—oh, please heaven! she pleaded—maybe today, for once, her meal would turn out fine.

"Mr. Farley, don't give it a thought," she said loftily. "My brother's word is as good as any man's on the mountain."

"But I wouldn't wish to be a burden."

"Nonsense, it's our Christian
duty
to feed the homeless and hungry at our door."

Young Farley raised an eyebrow. "I'm not exactly homeless, Miss Best. But I do admit to being hungry."

His expression was neither charming nor coaxing, but actually quite matter-of-fact. Still, though she fought against it, Meggie felt herself slipping into the flowery trance once more.

The stranger reached into the depths of his gray tweed trouser pocket and pulled out a fancy Moroccan leather boodle book. "I can pay, of course," he said easily. "Whatever you think a meal might be worth."

Meggie stared at the fat, city-man wallet that he held so casually. Not only handsome and refined, her prince was rich!

"Your money is not needed here, sir," she told him. "It's our pleasure to make you welcome."

Farley nodded graciously. "You might want to reconsider, it's all genuine U.S. currency, not a wooden nickel in sight."

"The Best family does not take charity or need money to feed a hungry stranger." She wanted to assure him of the high principles of her family. "If you wish to take dinner  with us"—she considered for a long minute—"then you can help Jesse split cordwood."

The prince was momentarily taken aback, then nodded. "It would be my pleasure, Miss Best." His smile was polite and friendly. "Especially if it means a meal prepared by your own hand."

Jesse snorted. "You better not hope for much. Meggie ain't the best for cookin'."

Meggie held her temper though she was tempted to reach over and box her brother's ears.

Farley only smiled diplomatically. "It takes a man far from home to be able to appreciate home cooking," he said.

Meggie sighed.

With a romantic tune on her lips, stars in her eyes, and the memory of his warm, citified voice still in her ears, she hurried to the house, pigs forgotten.

Once inside, she had only a minute for a lovelorn sigh before she noticed a distinctly unpleasant smell, like old shoes left too near the hearth.

"Dad-burn and blast!" she snapped. Hurrying to the fireplace she yanked the crane, pulling the pot of limas away from the fire. The beans were scorched a half an inch deep. She glared at the half-burned mess in dismay. Now, what was she going to serve the stranger for dinner?

Glancing outside, she saw him in the cutting yard with Jesse. He was holding the ax as if it were a yard rake and was ineffectually jarring the sharpened blade against a big tough piece of half-dried spruce. Jesse's rhythmic chopping was interspersed with the stranger's thumps.

Meggie eyed him curiously. He was obviously not used to hard work.

"A
gentleman
prince," she whispered to herself with awe.

Quickly she looked about her for some substitute victuals. All she had was day-old light bread, and some dried venison for gravy, and sixteen quarts of piccalilli she'd put up the night before from some early tomatoes that were caught by the late freeze. The city stranger wanted a meal. Well, she'd fix him a meal that would go straight from his stomach to his heart. Right then and there, Meggie Best silently declared herself in love with J. Monroe Farley. And she'd do everything within her power to win him.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF

J. MONROE FARLEY

April 15, 1902

Marrying Stone Mountain, Arkansas

Became separated from my mule. Portmanteau and my belongings lost. The Ediphone is safe. Became ill. Have taken shelter with a local farming family.

AN INNOCENT-LOOKING, GLEAMING blue quart jar had started the trouble between Meggie and her prince.

"Is this a local delicacy?" Roe Farley had asked, gesturing to the open jar.

After a morning of cutting cordwood, his shoulders were achy and several nasty blisters had formed on his right palm. He had no idea that so much effort—and skill—was involved in chopping wood or he would never have volunteered. The noon break had not come a moment too soon and Jesse had sent him ahead to the house to have his hand tended.

The young woman beside him shrugged slightly as she gently rubbed sticky yellow salve that smelled of goldenseal and tallow along his palm. "It's just piccalilli. Folks around here eats it."

The young local female, to Roe Farley's thinking, was a rather nice-looking woman. Not pretty, of course, in the way that fine genteel ladies appeared, but neat and scrubbed free of dirt she had a certain earthy appeal. She was tall. At least taller than a woman ought to be, he thought. But she wasn't excessively thin. Her bosom was quite generous and her backside typically rounded for a descendant of Scotch-Irish peasant stock. Her hair was not as cornsilk-blond as her  brother's, but it was a silky honey color that hung down her back in a thick plaited rope. No, she was not a beauty in the fashionably accepted sense of the term, but he could well imagine one of the local Ozark backwoodsmen finding her desirable. And, of course, there were her feet. Long, feminine naked feet. As she padded across the dirt floor, her bare feet held some strange fascination for him. The ladies of his acquaintance would have died of embarrassment to have shown him so much as an ankle. The young woman walked with such confidence and unconcern, one would have thought she wore the most elegant of dancing slippers. Roe smiled. He liked her bare feet, he decided. And he liked her. Her touch as she tended his hand was sure yet gentle. It had been a long time since he'd felt a woman's touch and it was welcome.

He was still quite new to these sparsely populated Ozark Hills, attempting to prove his theoretical premise that, through their isolation, these mountain people had managed to preserve, in culture and song, traditions common to the British Isles more than two hundred years before.

He'd convinced the Harvard fellowship committee to allow him to spend the summer rooting out Irish and English ballads from the mouths of the poor, ignorant, isolated folks who lived in the mountainous regions of Missouri and Arkansas. As a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance musicology, he had done many sojourns in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, politically explosive Ireland, and the rocky barren coasts of the Hebrides. It was only recently that he sought to prove that the keys to Celtic musical heritage might lie closer to home. Accepting a fellowship, J. Monroe Farley was to be the first to seek the origins of Goidelic song among the Celtic descendants in the primitive wilderness known as the Ozarks.

He'd expected the task to be easy. He imagined that the locals would be so in awe of his curious recording machine—and so grateful for an opportunity to contribute—that he'd have all the stories and songs he could record before the first fall of leaves. Of course, he'd had a setback losing his mule. Who would have imagined that the lazy, slow-moving animal would suddenly jump and run at the sound of a prerecorded cylinder on the Ediphone?

And now he was here. Wherever that was. He gazed around him. The hand-hewn logs that formed the walls and the plain pine shutters that were opened to the breeze bore no relation to his living quarters near the Cambridge campus. He couldn't immediately recall the name of the specific hamlet, but he of course remembered the name of his hosts. The fellow he'd met in the forest, the girl's brother, was Jesse Best.

"Do you need help?" the voice had called out to Roe from the thick woods.

Roe had stopped, breathless, his legs shaky, and glanced around in surprise. He had not seen another soul on the narrow wooded path. But someone had called to him, and he looked around eagerly.

Actually, he was grateful for the excuse to pause for a moment. He considered himself to be in excellent physical condition, sparring regularly at Flanagan's Boxing Salon. But the climb, straight up the mountain, had been taxing. And he'd started out hungry. Now, he was not only sore and breathless, he was famished. After he'd given up on recapturing his mule he had begun to follow this narrow track in hopes that it led to some sort of civilization. He carried the small wooden trunk containing the Ediphone Recording Machine on his own back. Now halfway up an unnamed mountain toward a community he hoped existed, he found that such exertion was not particularly advisable for a hot spring morning.