Merline Lovelace (12 page)

Graciously, Mary invited Julia into her parlor. After plying Suzanne and her own brood with cookies made of hardtack softened in water, then baked with a honey glaze and sprinkled with coarse brown sugar, she suggested the youngsters go to the lean-to to play.

“What I have to say is not for their ears,” she explained calmly when they’d dutifully filed out. Pouring a fresh stream of tea into a rose-painted china cup, she added milk and sugar and handed it back to her guest. Wondering what in the world the laundress wanted to talk to her about that occasioned such formality, Julia sipped the sweetened brew.

“M’second boy, Patrick, told me of your plan to bring the Sioux into the classroom,” the older woman said when she’d refreshed her own tea. “It’s not for me to be sayin’ what you do, don’t y’know, but I wonder if you’ve thought on this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s plenty o’children in your class who’ve lost fathers to the Sioux and Cheyenne, including three o’me own.”

“Patrick and Sheila’s father was killed in action?”

“No, their father was my second husband, damn his soul. He drowned in his own vomit after pourin’ a gallon o’whiskey down his throat. It was my first who took a Sioux arrow through the neck at the Battle of Yellow Gorge, back in ’59.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No, and how should you?”

Mary’s reassuring smile faded. Memories put shadows in her faded blue eyes.

“He was with Company D, 3rd Infantry. They’d been ordered from St. Paul to Fort Wadsworth, on the Minnesota River. I was six months along and travelin’ in an ambulance wagon at the rear of the column with the rest o’the women. An early storm hit and caught us in the open. Bitter cold it was, with snowdrifts up to the men’s chests. The third night out, two of the mules froze where they stood. On the fourth day, the Sioux attacked our column. Me husband only had time to pass me his pistol and warn me to keep low in the wagon before he went down.”

The airless heat inside the neat quarters dewed Julia’s skin under her layers of clothing, but Mary’s quiet recital chilled her to the bone. She could almost feel the snowy cold on her face, almost hear the shots and screams of the wounded.

“I laid there all that day, coverin’ my babies as best I could with my body. The Sioux weren’t no match for army carbines, don’t y’know, but they rallied long enough to drive our boys back.”

With a faint rattle of china on china, she set her cup in its saucer. When she met her guest’s gaze again, her eyes held a bleakness that stilled Julia’s breath.

“We had to retreat to higher ground and leave the dead and wounded where they lay. Two privates bur
rowed a tunnel through the snow that night and managed to drag six o’the wounded back behind our lines.

“When the battle was over and we claimed the rest o’our men’s bodies, I almost didn’t recognize me own husband. They’d taken his hair, o’course, to hang from a coup stick. They’d also cut out his tongue, ripped open his belly and severed his hamstrings so he couldn’t talk, eat or walk upright in the next world.”

“Dear Lord!”

Julia had read of these atrocities. Eastern newspapers had published bloodcurdling accounts of attacks on wagon trains and isolated outposts for decades. Every traveler who headed west was warned by wagon masters and trail guides that they risked the same fate. Hearing the details of an Indian attack from a woman who’d experienced them firsthand, however, wasn’t quite the same as reading about them in the newspapers.

“I’m not sayin’ our troopers haven’t taken some hair themselves on occasion,” Mary said. “And I’ve heard of some would brag about skinning a papoose. It’s not what I or any decent soul would hold with, mind you, but you can understand why we don’t want our children learnin’ the ways of the Sioux.”

Julia felt compelled to offer a token protest. “Yet Little Hen and other children from the tents attend class and learn our ways.”

“That’s as it should be,” the laundress said with a logic that wasn’t open to argument.

Colonel Cavanaugh echoed Mary’s sentiments when he summoned Julia to his office the next day, but used far less restraint in both his language and his remarks. Julia’s ears burned by the time he dismissed her with strict orders to keep to the books supplied by the Army and not contaminate the children by teaching them the ways of “heathen red devils.”

With Andrew out on patrol, she had no one else to turn to on the matter. By the time he returned four days later, she’d abandoned the idea. She was to remember the colonel’s scathing remarks in the weeks to come, though.

For as matters turned out, it wasn’t Julia who contaminated the children on post, but a toothless, leather-skinned mule driver by the name of Jackdaw Bill. He stumbled into Coffee’s Hog Ranch some three miles from Fort Laramie one evening in early August, already falling down drunk and roaring for the big-breasted whore who’d given him such a good jiggle when he’d passed through last year on his way to Adler’s Gulch.

While he waited for Fat Sarah to become available, he stood the troopers at the hog ranch to a round of drinks. Private Rafferty was among the blue-jackets who bellied up to the bar. In addition to downing several glasses of the watered whiskey, Rafferty pumped the mule driver for information about Adler’s Gulch. The trooper’s ears perked up when the mule
skinner admitted as how he’d come across a Frenchy by the name of Bonnet or Bonnville or some such.

By the time it was finally Jackdaw Bill’s turn with Fat Sarah, his bowels were churning from the bad whiskey. At least he thought it was the whiskey. Whatever the cause, he was sweating so profusely he could hardly keep from slipping and sliding right off the good-natured whore’s massive belly. He managed to get his jiggle, then stumbled back to the bar to drink away the rest of the night.

No one paid him the least heed when he lurched out of Coffee’s clapboard-and-tent establishment the next morning, hitched up his mules and dragged himself up onto his wagon. Dizzy and weak from the runs that had soiled his britches and kept him lurching to the privvy all night, Jackdaw Bill drove out of town. He made it as far as the Platte, where he stopped to take another squat and fell facedown in the muddy water. He drowned about the time Andrew went to inform Julia that Philip Bonneaux was dead.

A
ndrew crossed the parade ground, heading for the wooden building at the west end. A brisk breeze tugged at the flaps of his uniform jacket. The wind blew down from the north, carrying the first promise that the sweltering summer would soon end. Although the calendars showed it was just the first week in August, winter could descend at any time.

Snow didn’t usually blanket the blue bulk of Laramie Peak rising some forty miles away until October, but Andrew had learned the hard way not to try to predict the weather on the plains. Early storms had been known to howl down from the mountains as early as August or September, though, stranding hunters and travelers alike far from shelter. The weather played heavily on his mind as he mounted the steps of the wooden structure that housed the adjutant’s office, library and schoolroom. Julia would have to leave within a few weeks to avoid the dangers of winter travel if she decided to return east after An
drew told her what Private Rafferty had learned at Coffee’s Hog Ranch last night.

That “if” ricocheted around in his mind like grapeshot fired from a cannon. The thought of Julia packing up and departing Fort Laramie carved a fist-size hole in his chest. He’d lost her once to another man. He was damned if he was going to lose her again. This was hardly the time to tell her so, though. Right now, his task was to inform her that the husband she’d traveled so far to find had died in a barroom brawl.

His jaw set, Andrew strode past the adjutant’s office, acknowledging the orderly who leaped to his feet with a curt nod. His boot heels rang on the plank flooring and announced his arrival well ahead of his perfunctory knock on the schoolroom doorjamb.

Julia stood at the chalkboard Sergeant Schnyder had reblacked for her. She wore her cherry-striped silk skirt and a demure, high-necked white blouse with puffy mutton sleeves. The sunbeams slanting through the windows picked up the blue-black tint to the hair braided in its usual neat coronet. She glanced up when Andrew appeared at the door. A slight flush washed into her cheeks.

“May I speak with you a moment?” he asked. “Privately?”

“Yes, of course. Peggy, will you take the class, please?”

Mary Donovan’s oldest left her desk and came to the front of the room.

“Help the little ones with their letters,” Julia in
structed her assistant. “Those of you in fourth and fifth form may work on your compositions.”

A frowning Suzanne squirmed around in her seat to watch her mother leave. Andrew had made some strides with the girl during their sessions at the stables, but had yet to completely overcome her hostility. There was more than a passing possibility that now he never would.

“We can talk in the library,” he told Julia, standing aside to allow her to precede him into the room across the hall.

The scent of stale tobacco and musty volumes gave the place a stuffy, closed-in air. Hundreds of well-thumbed books lined the shelves, while month-old newspapers lay in a neat stack on the sturdy reading table Sergeant Schnyder had ordered constructed for just that purpose. This early in the day, the library was unoccupied, although a dozen or more bored, restless men would crowd into it after the evening meal.

Julia drifted to the table, rubbing one hand with the other nervously as Andrew closed the door behind them. When he turned to face her, a worried certainty darkened her violet eyes.

“It’s Philip, isn’t it? You’ve received word from him?”

“I’ve received word
of
him.”

He dragged off his broad-brimmed campaign hat, turned it round and round in his hands. The telling was proving harder than he’d anticipated during the
walk across the parade ground. Or maybe it was the waiting to hear what would come after the telling that corded his muscles.

“Private Rafferty came to see me this morning. He was off duty last night and spent a few hours at Coffee’s. While he was there, he talked to a mule driver who spent last winter in Adler’s Gulch.”

Julia’s breath hissed in. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she waited.

“Rafferty asked him about your husband.”

Her worried eyes dug into him like needle-sharp spurs. Hellfire and thunderation! There was just no easy way to do this.

During his time in the Army, Andrew had written dozens of letters, delivered countless last messages to wives and parents. He should have found the right words of comfort over the years. Instead, the news seemed to come harder each time he delivered it.

“The mule driver told Rafferty he remembered a Frenchified faro dealer at the Bucket of Blood Saloon named Bonnet or Bonnville or something like that. He said he was a sharp man with the cards.”

Julia’s nervous hands stilled instantly. Pain flooded her eyes. “Philip swore before he left he wouldn’t gamble any more. Those were his last words to me.”

“Julia…”

Andrew took a step toward her. A sad resignation replaced the pain, halting him in his tracks.

“I didn’t believe him,” she said softly. “I wanted to. Fool that I am, I wanted desperately to believe
Philip. I should have learned the lesson you taught me all those years ago.”

He deserved that, Andrew acknowledged silently, although admitting as much sure as hell didn’t make the gall any easier to swallow.

“According to the mule driver, your husband’s gambling days are over,” he said quietly. “A drunken miner claimed he pulled a card from his coat sleeve. The miner shot him through the heart.”

“Mon Dieu!”

Wrapping her arms around her waist, she turned away to stare blindly at the leather-bound volumes. Moments crept by with only the faint clip-clop of horses on the parade ground outside to disturb the musty silence.

Andrew stood with his hat fisted in his hands. The need to comfort her tugged at him, yet he knew any condolences would sound as false to her ears as they would to his own. He couldn’t pretend to be sorry she was free of a man he’d never met. Nor could he deny that her freedom made no difference to either of them. Still, he wasn’t prepared for the stubborn tilt to her chin when she swung back to face him once more.

“Philip never cheated at cards in his life. If he had, he might have won a little more than he lost.”

“The mule driver didn’t say he cheated, only that a miner thought he did.”

“Whatever the circumstances, I don’t believe he’s dead.”

“What?”

“I
won’t
believe it,” she corrected, “until I see proof with my own eyes.”

“How the devil do you intend to obtain that proof? Press on to Adler’s Gulch to view his grave marker…assuming there is one?”

“If I must.”

“For pity’s sake, Julia! You haven’t heard from him in over a year. Now you’ve received confirmation of sorts that he was killed. Would you drag Suzanne across three hundred miles of Sioux and Cheyenne territory to stand on her father’s grave?”

Her chin tipped up another notch. “Don’t dare to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, or what I should or shouldn’t believe! I once saw you lying in a pool of blood. I believed my uncle when he told me you were dead. I refuse to believe secondhand tales about Philip.”

“Secondhand tales?” Fury rose hot and fast in Andrew’s chest as the implication of her words sank in. “Do you think I made up this mule driver? Or that I would lie to you about your husband?”

“I don’t know what to think right now,” she shot back, “although…”

“Although what?” he asked dangerously.

“We both know you’ve lied to me before.”

If she’d grabbed an ax handle and beaten him over the head with it, Andrew wouldn’t have felt the blows any harder than that one. He stalked forward, his anger exploding like grapeshot in his veins.

Julia’s bruised heart welcomed the rage she saw
blazing in his eyes. She deserved his anger, and worse. Far worse. As long as she lived, she’d never forgive herself for her spurt of relief upon hearing that her agonizing uncertainty about Philip’s whereabouts was over at last.

Or for her sudden, guilty realization that she was free to love again.

Guilt had made her lash out at Andrew. Guilt now held her stiff as a poker while he fought to control his fury.

“This isn’t the time or the place to say what needs to be said between us,” he ground out. “But it will come, Julia. And soon.”

“This is as good a time or place as any. Say whatever you wish to me.”

“No, you need time to—”

“Say it, Andrew! Straight out. No lies. No shading the truth.”

For a moment, she thought she’d goaded him into loosening the rein he held on his temper.

“You need time,” he growled again. “We’ll talk later, when our emotions have cooled.”

His words rang in Julia’s head for the rest of that long, heart-wrenching day. Somehow, she finished the morning’s classes and composed herself during the noon break, but the afternoon passed in a blur of worry over what to tell Suzanne about her father.

The sympathetic look on Mary Donovan’s face when she called at Julia’s quarters after supper settled
the matter. Rumors were already flying around the post, the laundress confirmed. Since it was only a matter of time until her daughter heard some version of the story, Julia knew she had to tell her.

As she’d expected, Suzanne took the news of Philip’s possible death with a storm of tears.

“No, Mama! No! Papa’s waiting for us in Montana Territory. You said we’d go there and find him.”

“I’m sorry,
ma petite.
”

“He’s not dead!” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “He’s not! He’s
not!
”

Julia held her in her arms and rocked her until she’d cried herself out and dropped into an exhausted sleep. Wishing she could do the same, she tucked the girl into bed and prowled about her quarters until guilt and wrenching doubts about the future left her too exhausted to think.

Thankfully, the next day was Saturday. With no school to teach, Julia spent the day with a red-eyed and tearful Suzanne. The next few days saw a steady progression of callers.

A solemn Little Hen and her mother brought a mourning gift of pemmican cake. Walks In Moonlight said little, but Julia appreciated both her gift and her soothing companionship.

The laundresses followed in her wake, one after another, offering awkward sympathy. Maria Schnell and the officers’ ladies came, as well. Even Victoria McKinney made the trip to Suds Row after tattoo one evening. Julia had just taken down her hair with a
thought to washing it when a baby’s squawling cry announced the latest visitor. Hastily, she rebuttoned the top buttons of her chemise and pulled her blouse back on.

Victoria’s false sympathy and curiosity to know Julia’s plans shredded her hostess’s nerves. The visit lasted less than twenty minutes. Ushering Victoria out with more firmness than courtesy, Julia walked down to the end of the row quarters and knocked on Mary’s door.

“Could Peggy come and watch Suzanne? I need to walk and think a bit.”

“O’course. Are you needin’ someone to talk to? I’ll get my shawl and come with you.”

“No, thank you. I—I just need to think.”

The early evening air carried a soft coolness. After seeing Peggy settled with a candle and her books, Julia grabbed her own shawl and walked along the riverbank. Bullfrogs sounded their deep, croaking chorus as she struggled with the guilt that still threatened to choke her.

Why couldn’t she grieve for Philip?

Why did she feel only this empty numbness?

Although she’d told Andrew she wouldn’t believe her husband dead until she saw proof with her own eyes, she knew in her heart he was gone. Knew, too, that he’d been lost to her for more than the two years since he’d left to find the fortune that always seemed just out of his reach. For all his charm and careless smiles when he was home, Philip’s gambling had
taken him away more and more with each passing year.

In his absence, Julia had been the one to deal with the angry shopkeepers and impatient creditors. And it was Julia who’d sold off their belongings, piece by piece, until nothing remained but her husband’s empty promises and grandiose schemes. Now even those were gone.

What should she do now? What
could
she do?

There was no going back to New Orleans. Or to Mobile. She had no family left to take her and Suzanne in, and Philip’s relations had cut him off years before Julia had met him. Nor could she go on to Adler’s Gulch. Despite her angry words to Andrew, she wouldn’t drag her daughter through three hundred miles of hostile territory to view a grave.

That left only here, she realized with a lump in her throat. At least for now.

She stood on the bank, chewing on her lower lip. Farther down along the river, the lights of the main post winked in the early dusk. The square, solid bulk of Old Bedlam rose above the other buildings and loomed against the purpling sky. Julia stood still and silent, staring at the golden light that spilled from its windows.

Night had blackened the sky when Old Bedlam’s front steps creaked under her feet. From her previous visits, she knew Colonel Cavanaugh’s quarters and offices took up the south wing. Andrew occupied two
rooms in the north. To reach them, she traversed a long, dimly lit central hallway that smelled of tobacco and boot polish.

Private O’Shea answered Julia’s tentative knock. The striker’s brows soared when he saw who stood on the other side of the threshold. She forced a small, polite smile.

“I’d like to talk to the major.”

“He’s upstairs with the other officers, missus. Will you come in and wait while I go fetch him?”

Nodding, she stepped inside. O’Shea snatched his uniform jacket from the back of a chair and scrambled into it before hurrying out.

Left alone for a few minutes, Julia glanced around curiously. Although the officers on the post held frequent parties and soirees in their quarters, she’d refused the invitations she’d received over the past months. She’d been too tired after bending over the tubs all day, for one thing. For another, the awkwardness of her situation had made her uncomfortable in social gatherings. Consequently, this was her first glimpse of how the bachelor officers lived.