Merline Lovelace (4 page)

Making a valiant effort to hide her dismay, Julia swung back to the colonel. “How long before the lines are repaired?”

“Fort Smith will have to send out a patrol to find the break,” he grumbled. “They’ve got less than half a company present right now. It could be weeks.”

“Weeks!”

“Or months. The Sioux and Cheyenne pull down the wires as soon as we string them up.”

Still heated with anger, the colonel pushed away from his desk. “You’d best plan on an extended stay at Fort Laramie, Mrs. Bonneaux. I’m sure your husband—your former husband,” he corrected with a sneer, “—will do everything possible to make you comfortable.”

Color whipped back into his visitor’s cheeks. Her
mouth tight, she pulled on her gloves, mumbled a polite thank you and left.

Cursing under his breath, Andrew requested permission to withdraw. “If there’s nothing else, sir?”

The colonel let him wait for several ticks of the mantel clock before he nodded. “You’re dismissed.”

Old bugger. With a curl of disgust for the man’s petty games, Andrew turned and strode out. Gottlieb and the company clerk jumped to attention as he passed.

He caught up with Julia on Old Bedlam’s front porch. She was leaning forward, staring out at the dusty parade ground. Her hands gripped the porch rail as though its support was all that held her up.

“Julia…”

“Yes?”

The mask that dropped instantly over her face ate at his conscience. He’d loved this woman once, had hated her as well. Now he felt nothing but a nagging sense of obligation he couldn’t seem to shake no matter how hard he tried.

“Maria Schnell told me something of your circumstances.”

Her chin tipped. “Did she?”

Andrew hadn’t needed Maria’s worried confidence to confirm what the shrieking Gussie had already telegraphed to half the territory. Despite her silks, starched shirtfront and brave airs, Julia Bonneaux was as broke as any private the day after payday.

“We’re sending a squad up to reinforce Fort Smith. It’s just over the border in Montana Territory. Al
though it’s against army regulations, I could include a letter from you in with the dispatches, and ask the commander there to forward it to your husband with the next wagons going through.”

Surprise broke through her mask. “You would do that for me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We were married once. I suppose I feel a certain obligation….”

“Don’t!” she flung at him. “Don’t
dare
speak to me of what we once were. I gave you my heart, Andrew Garrett, but every smile you gave me, every word you spoke to me was a lie.”

“Not every word.”

He’d scattered enough grains of truth among the lies to keep from tripping himself up. He’d even tried to warn her that he wasn’t all he seemed.

“I told you there were things about me you didn’t know.”

“And I said I knew all about you that mattered.” Disgust convulsed her delicate features. “What a fool I was! A silly, headstrong fool, as my uncle was so fond of telling me.”

The mere mention of Justin Robichaud clenched Andrew’s hands. Too well he remembered how avidly the man’s gaze had followed his niece. Julia had been so young then, so damned vulnerable. Her mother had died at birth, her father a few weeks before her tenth birthday. Andrew certainly hadn’t intended to feel first pity, then a growing lust for the nubile young
female who teased and tantalized him. Nor had he anticipated the insane desire that grew within him to protect her from her uncle…and from himself.

He should have taken what she offered with every kiss, he thought angrily. He should have ravaged her mouth the way she ravaged his senses. Should have laid her back on a carriage seat or a sofa or the nearest bed. Lifted her skirts and plunged into her instead of giving her his name in a secret ceremony at a parish church, then risking everything to return for her weeks later.

“Don’t try to convince me that your conscience bothers you at this late date,” she said bitterly, breaking into his thoughts. “After all the lies you told me in New Orleans, you can’t care two jackstraws what happens to me now.”

“I don’t,” he replied with brutal candor. “But as long as you’re on this post, you’re the Army’s responsibility.”

“Army authority extends even to women?”

From the scorn in her voice, she had no idea the havoc an unattached female could wreak. Particularly a woman like Julia.

“
Especially
to women at isolated outposts like these.”

She turned away again, her gloved fingers gripping the rail. Andrew saw her throat work as she fixed her gaze blankly on the flagpole on the opposite side of the parade ground.

“What are your plans?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, more to herself
than to him. “I can’t impose on Maria Schnell’s hospitality indefinitely.”

“No, you can’t,” he agreed. “Henry Schnell’s one of the best men I’ve ever had the honor to serve with. He and Maria don’t speak of it, but he spends more than half his pay to supplement the meager store of medicinal supplies the Army provides his hospital. They’re as strapped as the most junior lieutenant on post.”

She acknowledged his pronouncement with a single, stark nod. For an insane moment, Andrew was tempted to suggest she move into his quarters. The urge to protect her, to shield her and her daughter itched like a tick that burrowed into his skin. Damning himself as ten kinds of a fool for caring what happened to this woman, he offered the only other alternative he’d been able to come up with.

“One of our lieutenants is on detached duty with Custer’s 7th Cavalry at Fort Riley,” he said brusquely. “His wife gave birth a month or so ago and has no one here to help her. I could set you up in temporary quarters with her if you wish.”

The grudging offer scored what little was left of Julia’s pride. With all her heart, she longed to throw it back in Andrew’s face. For her daughter’s sake, she drew her tattered dignity around her and accepted with a stiff nod.

“Thank you.”

J
ulia held Suzanne’s hand firmly as they followed Private Rafferty along the dirt path that skirted the parade ground.

A blazing afternoon sun beat down on their heads and shoulders. The heat didn’t seem to affect the burly striker, buttoned up to the neck in his blue wool uniform. With his flat-topped forage cap tipped jauntily over one brow, he carried their trunk on a muscular shoulder and pointed out the various sights along the way.

As Julia had already discovered, Fort Laramie was a jumble of old and new, of wood frame houses, adobe barracks and tents, all laid out on a flat tongue of land. The principle buildings surrounded the parade ground, a rectangle of hard-packed dirt with a wooden flagpole planted midway down one side. The Laramie River curled around the perimeter of the post, providing natural protection from attack. A wooden footbridge spanned the sparkling river and gave access to
the buildings, tents and tipis on the far bank. Beyond the Laramie, rolling brown plains stretched as far as the eye could see.

There wasn’t a single tree in sight. Not one, on either the post or the plains. Wood for cookfires and construction, Private Rafferty informed Julia in his lilting way, had to be hauled in from the pine-covered slopes of the Laramie Mountains forty miles away.

“Wood detail ain’t what we jined up for, if you take my meaning, missus. Not at all the kind o’work suited for horse soldiers.”

Horse soldiers, he explained good-naturedly, “being the ones what sported the yellow cavalry stripe on their pants legs,” as distinguished from infantry red.

“The Sioux calls the infantry Walks-A-Heap,” Rafferty chuckled. “’N walk them boyos do!”

Julia tried her best to digest his running commentary during the short trek from the surgeon’s quarters to the row of frame houses huddled like hens on the edge of the windswept plain. There were three of them, constructed in a curious design Rafferty described as “Army duplex.” Like the headquarters building, the houses had two separate sides, each with a private entrance.

“Mrs. Lieutenant McKinney has the far hoose.”

“Do you always refer to the wives by their husband’s rank?”

The striker looked surprised at the question. “And
how else would we be showin’ them the proper respect?”

She had no answer for that. The Army, obviously, maintained a social structure even more rigid than that of the aristocratic Creole society she’d been born into.

At the thought of New Orleans, homesickness attacked her in a sharp, sudden rush. She could almost smell honeysuckle and jasmine spilling into air thick with humid heat. Almost taste the pecan-stuffed pralines that stuck to her teeth. Almost hear her father’s teasing as he tossed her high in the air, much to her squealing delight.

She’d been so happy as a child, so secure in her father’s love that she’d never missed the mother who’d succumbed to a fever just after her daughter’s birth. So pampered and spoiled despite the determined efforts of the Carmelite nuns who’d tried their best to eradicate her frivolity. Then her father had died and Julia had gone to live with her aunt and uncle in their mansion on LaFayette Street.

In the blazing heat of the June afternoon, shivers danced along her spine. She gripped Suzanne’s hand, fighting the memories, unable to stop them.

Her first few years at LaFayette Street she’d barely seen her uncle. He’d kept busy with his own sugarcane brokerage firm and the shipping lines Julia had inherited from her father. It wasn’t until the niece had begun to fill out her gowns that the uncle noticed her. Really noticed her.

Naive and foolish, she’d laughed off the unease
that prickled her skin whenever Justin’s dark eyes lingered too long on her face, her throat, her breasts. Then her gaze had collided with that of a handsome stranger across a crowded ballroom.

Julia’s heart thumped against the bones of her stays as the remembered strains of a waltz buzzed in her ears. How young she’d been. How unforgivably stupid.

Andrew had swept her into the waltz, later partnered her in a lively reel. He’d asked to escort her into the midnight supper, but Julia had retained just enough sense to laugh and say she was promised to another. Andrew hadn’t pushed…much to Julia’s secret chagrin. But he’d appeared in LaFayette Street the very next afternoon driving a smart, high-seated gig and caught her just as she was stepping out for a walk.

She shouldn’t have climbed into the gig and wheeled away with him for a stolen afternoon. Her maid had been scandalized. Her uncle, when she returned home, had been coldly furious. Even more so when Andrew called on her again the next day, and the next. Finally, her uncle had forbidden him to call at the house ever again, but by then it was too late. Fool that she was, Julia had already tumbled headlong into love.

Memories flooded into her, one after another. The stormy afternoon Andrew had told her he had to leave New Orleans. Her passionate avowal that she’d wait for him, forever if necessary, no matter what her uncle
said or did. The grim cast to Andrew’s jaw at the mention of Justin Robichaud. The hurried marriage at St. Lucien’s. Her despondency the long weeks he was gone, and her joy when she received his note saying he was coming for her the next night.

Her devastation when she’d learned of his betrayal, and heard the crack of her uncle’s pistol shatter the night.

“Mama!”

Blankly, Julia stared down at her daughter.

“You’re hurting my fingers!”

With a jarring thump, she returned to the reality of a dusty outpost on the edge of a vast sea of emptiness.

“I’m sorry,
ma petite.
”

She had herself once again in hand by the time they turned onto the board walkway leading to the front porch. Suzanne clutched her precious doll to her chest. Eyes wide under the brim of her bonnet, she took in the wraparound porch, tall shutters and tin roof.

“Are we going to stay here, Mama?”

“For a while.”

The girl’s footsteps dragged. A mulish expression her mother knew all too well settled on her face. “I don’t want to.”

“After weeks of traveling on that sooty train and then in the Hottenhelder’s wagon, I should think you’d be happy to sleep in a bed that doesn’t move for a little while.”

Suzanne dug in her heels. “You said we were going to find Papa.”

“I’m going to write to him, darling, and tell him where we are.”

“You wrote to him before and he didn’t answer.” Her lower lip began to tremble. “You said we were going to find him.”

Her heart wrenching, Julia drew back her skirts and dropped down on one knee. Suzanne adored Philip, and no wonder. He’d spoiled her atrociously from the first day he’d lifted her from her cradle. For all his other faults, Philip Bonneaux was a loving father.

“We’ll find him,
ma petite,
or he’ll find us. It just may take a little longer than we thought.”

“I don’t want to stay here.” Tears welled in the child’s chocolate-brown eyes. “I want to find Papa, like you said we would. I want to live in our own house in Mobile, like we used to.”

Aching over the way her daughter’s world had shifted under her dainty feet, Julia could only smile and try to rally her spirits. “We talked about this, remember? You know Mama had to sell the house to pay the bills. Now no more silliness, if you please. Let’s go meet Mrs. McKinney.”

Tears swimming in her wide, reproachful eyes, the girl tucked her hand in Julia’s once again. She was still sniffling when they climbed the steps and waited while Private Rafferty rapped on the front door.

The woman who opened it a moment later stood a good six inches shorter than Julia. Wild tendrils of
orangy hair sprang from the bun piled haphazardly atop her head. With a pat for the red-faced infant squirming against her shoulder, she smiled a relieved greeting.

“You’ll be Mrs. Major Garrett. I heard you were comin’.”

Embarrassment added to the flush of heat on Julia’s face. “My name is Bonneaux,” she corrected stiffly. “Julia Bonneaux.”

The woman’s carroty brows arched. “What’s this? Do I have the story wrong aboot you and the major, then?”

“Yes, apparently you have.” All too aware of the trooper and the five-year-old ranged on either side of her, Julia summoned a strained smile. “Perhaps we may take our conversation inside, where we can be more private?”

“Oooch, I don’t know where me head is! It must be this heat, and the baby frettin’….”

Thumping the infant gently on the back, the diminutive woman led the way inside. Julia saw at a glance the quarters were far more sparsely furnished than those of the Schnells. The parlor was empty except for a black, potbellied stove. The dining room beyond contained only an assortment of unmatched chairs and a low table made from a box with U.S. Army Carbines stenciled on the sides. Her stomach sinking at the stark emptiness, Julia reminded herself that a lieutenant couldn’t aspire to live as well as a post surgeon.

“Are you sure we’re not putting you out, Mrs. McKinney?”

“Oooch, I should have introduced myself, now shouldn’t I? I’m not Mrs. McKinney. I’m Mary Donovan. M’husband’s the sergeant major o’Lootenant McKinney’s company. I just came over to help his leddy by mindin’ her baby for a bit. Now that you’re here, Mrs. Major—er, Mrs. Bonneaux—I’d best be gettin’ back to me laundry tubs.”

With that, she passed the infant to Julia, adjured Rafferty “not to be standin’ around like a lump o’stone,” and swept out with a promise to return after first call for retreat to see how they all fared. The trooper deposited the humpbacked trunk and followed her out a few moments later.

Julia stood in the hallway, holding the red-faced baby in her arms. Sweat trickled between her breasts. Suffocating heat pounded at her temples. The enormity of being stranded so far from home, totally dependent on the kindness of strangers, threatened to overwhelm her.

She would have loved to indulge in a hearty bout of tears, but they were a luxury she could no longer afford. Cradling the infant in the crook of her arm, she tweaked one of her daughter’s honey-brown curls.

“Let’s go meet the baby’s mother, shall we?”

Victoria McKinney fussed even more than her fretful infant and resented strangers living in her house.

She didn’t express her sentiments in so many
words, but they became quite clear over the course of the next few days. Only too conscious of her own precarious situation, Julia swallowed her pride and held her tongue. But the holding became more and more difficult with each hour spent in the pallid, unhappy woman’s company.

“I shouldn’t have left New York,” the young wife complained to her reluctant guests the third night of their stay. She sat at the box that served as a table, picking at the unappetizing fare on her plate. “My father owns a bank, you know.”

“Yes,” Julia replied, gritting her teeth, “you’ve told me.”

Several times, in fact.

According to Victoria, most of the officers’ wives came from wealthy, urban homes. Many, like the lieutenant’s wife, found life without servants to wait on them and cooks to prepare their meals unendurable. A few hardy ones like Maria Schnell considered living on the frontier an adventure. Victoria McKinney, Julia had discovered, considered it a penance.

Adjuring Suzanne to eat her dinner and not tease the baby tucked in a cradle made from another crate, Julia sawed at her boiled beef. Although the monthly rations for married officers included two cans of peaches, one can each of oysters, tomatoes, peas and corn, and a half pound of dried mackerel, those treats were saved for precious occasions like birthdays and holidays. All other supplies had to be purchased from the sutler’s store at exorbitant prices, when they could
be had at all. As a consequence, the standard daily fare of the women and children at Fort Laramie mirrored that of the troops—bacon, beans and beef.

“Papa warned me not to marry William,” the morose young mother confided. “He told me the smart uniforms and fancy dress balls at West Point were no measure of the life I’d lead on the frontier. I should have listened to him.”

“Well, you’re here now and you have a comfortable house,” Julia replied with determined cheerfulness. “I’ll help you make curtains, if you like, and perhaps put up some shelves for your books or pictures.”

“There’s no point to it.” Disconsolately, her hostess stabbed at her beans. “William’s the junior lieutenant on post. We’ll get ranked out of these quarters when another officer senior to him arrives, just as we did at Fort Riley. We had to live in a tent then for almost six months.”

Julia bit down on the impulse to tell this whining young woman that she wasn’t the only one to lose a home. Her chest ached whenever she let herself think about the house she’d sold to pay Philip’s gambling debts.

“Finish your beef,” she said instead, in much the same bracing tone she would use with Suzanne. “Then I’ll serve you a bit of custard.”

“Custard!” Alarm brought Victoria straight up in her chair. “Never say the sutler got in some eggs! Surely you didn’t charge them to our account?”

“No, of course not.”

Julia had learned during her own travels the astronomical cost associated with transporting perishables like butter and eggs over hundreds of miles of prairie in a jolting wagon.

“I used Mary Donovan’s recipe,” she assured her worried hostess. “All it calls for is six tablespoons of cornstarch, boiled nice and thick and flavored with a bit of sugar and extract of lemon.”

Thank goodness for the Irish laundress, Julia thought as she spooned the soupy mixture into bowls. True to her word, Mrs. Donovan had come by each day to check on Mrs. Lieutenant McKinney, as had Maria Schnell and several of the other officers’ ladies. The officers’ wives were polite enough, but Julia felt the weight of their curiosity and silent disapproval in every glance.

They didn’t know what to make of her. Divorce was too scandalous a topic to discuss in polite company, and a marriage that wasn’t really a marriage was outside their comprehension. They treated Julia with civility, but, except for Maria Schnell made no overtures of friendship.

Nor did Mary Donovan, if the truth be told. Invariably cheerful, the sergeant major’s wife was careful not to cross the line between laundress and lady. Thankfully, she was also a wealth of information and practical tips, having lived on the frontier for almost a decade now. The custard, Julia thought, was one of her best.