Night Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) (12 page)

      
Deborah fairly flew from her chair, half knelt, and threw her arms around his waist, burying her head against his chest. “Oh, beloved, no, no, never. I can't imagine my life without you, without our children and our home. My life is here with you, bearing our children and raising them, not crusading in Boston, no matter how worthy the cause. I love you, Rafael, more than anyone or anything on earth!” She raised her tear-filled eyes to his.

      
Rafe pulled her up onto his lap and held her tightly, his fingers tangled in the long silver hair that spilled down her back. “Oh, Moon Flower, sometimes when I think of all you've been through, all you had to give up—and now, being pregnant again—are you certain—”

      
She silenced him with a swift, fierce kiss. “Nothing could make me happier than this new baby. After all, Norrie's six. It's about time we had another one. I love my life and it is fulfilling—after all, I'm raising all our children to believe in the same ideals I do.”

      
He smiled crookedly. “Whether or not their hapless father does.”

      
“You can't deceive me, for all your airs of Creole male dominance. You only want your children to be happy. All I suggested to you was that Melanie has to find her own way. We can't make her into a conventional woman who'll choose marriage over her ideals. But who knows, maybe someday she'll meet a man like her father, who will be capable of learning to accept her radical ideas.” She took his face between her hands and kissed him lightly.

      
“Well, at least
some
of those radical ideals,” he echoed dubiously, returning the playful kiss.

      
Several loud childish squeals punctuated by a shouted command from an adult female interrupted them. Charlee Slade's voice carried from the front
sala
to the kitchen. “Sarah, hold on to Lee before he grabs that vase. Will, mind your manners and wipe your feet.”

      
Deborah flew through the dining room and across the hall into the front
sala
where the young woman was fussing with her six-year-old daughter's dress with one hand while slicking down a recalcitrant cowlick on her nine-year-old son's head with the other. The girl, a reedy little blonde, caught her wiggling three-year-old brother just as he reached up to topple a vase of wildflowers from a low bookshelf.

      
Charlee broke into a broad smile and turned to rush into her much taller friend's welcoming hug, children forgotten.

      
“Deborah, it's been too long! Jim's so busy with spring roundup that he couldn't get away, and he figured Rafe couldn't, either. He also couldn't abide my harping to go see you for one more day, so I offered him an alternative—that several of his best hands escort us here for a visit.” Charlee's cat-green eyes sparkled with devilment.

      
“Still leading poor Jim a dog's life, are you? Where's that moldy hunk of orange fur with the evil disposition?” Rafe took his turn hugging Charlee.

      
As the children took turns greeting Deborah and Rafe, Charlee replied, “Hellfire took off the minute the wagon stopped out front. An engagement with a mole—or are any of your female cats in heat about now?” she asked saucily.

      
In the midst of the excitement, Adam, Caleb, and Lenore burst into the melee from the courtyard, where they had been having a picnic breakfast. As soon as the adults induced Adam, at sixteen the eldest, to take the younger ones down to the corral to look at the new foals, Deborah, Rafe, and Charlee headed toward the kitchen.

      
“Have I got news for you! But first let me look at you,” Charlee said when they entered the sunny, spacious kitchen. She held Deborah at arm's length for an inspection. “Yep, you're definitely pregnant. Your last letter said the end of July, right?”

      
Laughing at her friend's rather indelicate tally of her due date, Deborah replied, “Yes, I think the end of July or the first of August. And as I wrote you, I'm feeling wonderful.”

      
“Reason I wanted to know,” Charlee began matter-of-factly, as she bit into a fluffy biscuit, “is that there's someone in San Antonio who's dying to see you. It's been, let's see, nearly eleven years, and in her words, 'Jeehosaphat! Scarce a letter a year gits through them damn-blasted mountains!’ ”

      
“Obedience is back!” Deborah's eyes widened with joy, then clouded over. “Oh, Charlee, Washington didn't—he isn't—”

      
Charlee laughed. “No, he wasn't so inconsiderate as to die like her first three husbands. He's with her. But you know Obedience. She took it into her head that eleven years was long enough being a fur trapper's wife in the Rockies, and she ‘plumb pined away fer a real city 'n' a soft bunk.’ So—”

      
“Her defenseless husband didn't have a chance,” Rafe said with a resigned expression. Both women burst into new peals of laughter.

      
“You never met her husband, obviously,” Charlee replied. “Wash Oakley would fill that door and could pull those cottonwoods out back from the ground like garden carrots! They've taken over the boardinghouse for me, and I have to say I'm relieved.”

      
“I thought Mrs. Raufîng was doing a splendid job with it,” Deborah responded.

      
Charlee let out a disgusted snort. “She was until old Cy Witherspoon up and married her and had the temerity to forbid his wife to work!”

      
“Imagine that,” Rafe said innocently.

      
Deborah fixed him with a mock glare. “Just so you remember, darling, the only reason I sold the boardinghouse to Charlee in the first place was that we live too far away for me to oversee it.”

      
Charlee added, “Bluebonnet was close enough for me to keep an eye on it when Gerta Raufing was managing it, but when she left I needed someone else. Who better than Obedience? After all, it was her place before you took it over, Deborah.”

      
“I can't wait to see her. Oh, Charlee, has she changed much? Oh, how silly of me—you never met her before she left San Antonio.”

      
“She and Wash are just settling in and have a lot of work to do fixing up the place. He's adding a whole new wing on to the east side—four more rooms. The city's grown so much since your last visit, Deborah, you'd scarcely recognize it. You can imagine how amazed Obedience and Wash are with its size. We have a new soap factory on Laredo Street and a Dr. Heusinger has opened an apothecary shop on Main. The new courthouse and jail are finished. Oh, and a fascinating old man named Clarence Pemberton has begun a new newspaper, the
San Antonio Star.
Tell me you'll go back with us for a visit with Obedience. She's so eager to see you!”

      
“Oh, I'm dying to see her, too,” Deborah said, looking over to Rafe.

      
Coming up behind her, he placed his arms around her slim shoulders. “Not until after the baby's born, Deborah. You're less than four months away from delivery. It's not safe to travel so far.”

      
“I went to Austin for the statehood ceremonies when I was six months pregnant with Sarah,” Charlee reminded him.

      
“Austin is only seventy miles from San Antonio and Jim was with you. We're nearly two hundred miles away. Quite a difference,” Rafe countered. “And Jim was right to assume I can't go with Deborah now because of spring roundup here. It's just too dangerous in her condition,” he said with finality.

      
Melanie had heard the squeals of the children and Deborah and Charlee's noisy reunion but was oddly hesitant about coming down. At times Charlee was shockingly outspoken, even what Grandpa's Boston friends would call vulgar, but Melanie liked that about her. However, Charlee had always been Leandro Velasquez's special friend. Melanie remembered that day in Austin at the statehood ceremony when she had watched Lee and Charlee together, almost like sister and brother. Charlee and Jim had named their youngest child after the outlaw.

      
“And that's what he's become,” she sniffed, “an outlaw wanted for two grisly murders in a barroom brawl.” Still, in the quiet of the night Melanie had often tossed and turned in her solitary bed, recalling a handsome dark face with piercing jet eyes and a slashing white smile: her first girlhood crush. Though five years had passed, she could still remember the devastation she had felt in Austin when she found out he was married.

      
Banishing all the uneasy feelings about Lee Velasquez from her mind, Melanie headed downstairs to greet Charlee and her children. Just as she neared the kitchen door, Melanie overheard her father's pronouncement regarding Deborah's traveling while pregnant. Looking at her mother's swollen body, she thought angrily,
No man will ever have that kind of hold on me—to make me a prisoner of my own body.

      
Charlee caught sight of Melanie in the doorway and turned to give her a hug. “At least one full-grown member of this family is only as big as I am,” she said, hugging Melanie.

      
Just as she had done with Deborah, Charlee inspected Melanie and puckered her freckled nose. “Ugh, your mama wrote me you'd gotten some weird notions in Boston, but I never thought it meant you'd dress to hide all those terrific curves. Hell, six months pregnant I never had breasts that size!”

      
Deborah's face crimsoned even as she laughed. “Charlee, you'll never change!”

      
Melanie blushed nervously, all too aware of how men looked at her lushly feminine body. She had never liked it.
Except when Lee admired it
, a voice from nowhere cut into her thoughts. Squelching it, she said, “How are things in San Antonio?”

      
Charlee launched into a lengthy discussion about the city and all the exciting events of the past months. When she mentioned that a newspaper was being printed in San Antonio again and the publisher was from Massachusetts, Melanie's eyes lit up.

      
“What kind of paper? I mean, do they print stories from back east? About abolition?”

      
“Not much about that,” Charlee replied dismissively, “but the editor is looking for someone to write a column about social events. San Antonio has fancy dances, teas, political dinners—all sorts of things. He needs a reporter. Say, didn't your mother say you wrote some things for newspapers back in Boston?” Charlee looked from Melanie to Deborah, then over to Rafe, who scowled silently.

      
“I wrote for
The Liberator
,” Melanie replied with pride in her voice.

      
“A scurrilous rag that excoriated President Tyler and Congress for admitting Texas to the Union. Called it a victory for the 'slavocracy,' ” Rafe said with rising ire.

      
“Oh, we had a real argument over that one,” Melanie said. “But Mr. Garrison's really a lamb. Only his rhetoric is fierce. I set him straight about all the Texians who don't believe in slavery.”

      
“I can imagine you made an impression on him,” Charlee replied gravely.

      
Rafe snorted and Deborah smiled quietly.

      
Melanie's gold eyes were glowing now. “I'm a trained reporter. I could work for that paper. I've even helped with presses. Do you think the editor might hire me?”

      
“Wait a minute,” Rafe said, but Deborah placed a restraining hand on his arm.

      
“Rafael, if she could be employed as a ladies'-page reporter...” Deborah said slowly, her mind working swiftly.

      
Charlee immediately picked up on the idea. “Yes, of course she could get the job. I'm sure of it. She's a fellow New Englander—even if by adoption. And Obedience's boardinghouse would be a perfectly suitable place for her to live. Jim and I are close by. Why not?”

      
Two small smiling faces turned eagerly toward Rafe Fleming.

      
“Why go off to San Antonio? You just came home from four years in Boston. Your life is here, Melanie, with us,” Rafe said softly.

      
Melanie turned to her beloved father, then looked intuitively to her mother for support. “Papa, I've loved growing up on Renacimiento; but since I came home from school, I haven't fit in. I need to work—to do something with my life. I don't want to go back to Boston, even though I do love Grandpa and liked working for Mr. Garrison. But there are lots of things in need of attention right here in Texas—that is, if I was in a city, working for a newspaper where I could raise an audience!”

      
Deborah nodded. “Maybe this is the very thing we've been in need of, Rafael—a way for Melanie to strike out on her own and make new friends. After all, San Antonio is a large city, full of many interesting, educated...people.”
And eligible men.

      
Rafe looked at his wife, then to Melanie and Charlee. Shrugging in defeat, he said, “If it'll make you happy, princess, I guess your mother and I—not to mention your sister and brothers—will just have to get along without you!” He grinned as Melanie rushed into his arms with a squeal of glee.

Chapter Seven

San Antonio, 1852

      
“It's been so long since we were in San Antonio for a visit, I'd scarcely recognize your place, Charlee,” Melanie said as the two women rode up to the boardinghouse.

      
“Well, it's not my place anymore. I'll be making the final arrangements to sell it to Obedience and Wash this week. All these years I kept it and had other people run it for me as...as sort of a symbol of self-reliance, I guess.” Charlee paused thoughtfully.