Say You Love Me

Say You Love Me

by

Patricia Hagan

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ISBN: 978-1-61417-070-9

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Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Patricia Hagen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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Prologue

Texas, 1840

Violet held the infant to her breast, though it seemed a sacrilege, somehow, to offer milk intended for another baby.

But that baby is dead
,
a voice inside reminded her cruelly.
Born dead. She never got to draw the first sweet breath of life.

Violet looked down at the baby through a mist of tears. She was a week old, and precious as only one of God's earth angels can be. A downy fuzz covered her tiny head, promising a crown of sable black hair, and already her blue eyes had a lavender cast, which meant they would eventually be the same color as her mother's.

Violet felt the empty burning in her heart at the thought of how her own baby was buried before she even had a chance to hold it in her arms. Then just three days afterward, Violet's twin sister Iris had given birth. "Momma named us after flowers," Iris had declared, "and I'm going to do the same with my little girl. I'll name her Jacinth, which is what hyacinths are called in England." But Iris's husband Luke had immediately shortened the baby's name to Jacie, and Jacie her name would be.

Violet lifted her tear-streaked face to the sky as she knelt among the clumps of sagebrush with the infant in her arms. "Why, God?" she asked. "Why is it that Iris is always blessed with the bread of life, while I'm left with only the crumbs?"

There was no sound save for the infant feeding. Violet knew that God was not going to answer her. Not this time. Probably not ever. It was just something she was going to have to work out for herself, within her own tormented soul.

Even though it was early morning, the summer heat was smothering, and perspiration trickled from her every pore. But there was no shade to be had, and the sun's rays were searing. Violet could have stayed with the other members of the small caravan traveling from Georgia to Texas; they were camped in a grove of cottonwood trees beside a cool stream. But after the terrible things she had said to Iris, Violet had wanted to be alone with her misery and guilt, away from everyone.

It all started one morning when Iris remarked that Violet looked ill. "It's because you have so much milk in your breasts," she had said worriedly. "I'll let you nurse Jacie too, and—"

"Oh, you know everything, don't you?" Violet had lashed out at her. She lay huddled on a pallet in the back of their wagon, still weak and sore from the birth, in body and in spirit.

Iris knelt beside her holding the baby, though she was feeling weak herself. They had both delivered early, no doubt due to the ordeal of travel. "I know how you must feel, Violet. I can't imagine anything more heartbreaking than losing a child, but you have to let me help you. If you don't, you'll come down with milk fever, and you could die."

"You think I care?" Violet glared up at her. "Well I don't. I wish I was back there on the trail beneath that pile of rocks with my baby, because I don't have anything to live for now."

"You have Judd."

Violet lowered her voice to a whisper, for despite her despair, she did not want the others in the caravan to hear the embarrassing truth about her marriage. "Judd won't want me anymore when he finds out our baby died. You know as well as I do he wasn't planning on me coming to Texas. He was walking out on me and our marriage, till I found out I was in the family way."

"That's not true," Iris said, though she knew it was.

Violet got to her feet, her legs wobbly, all the resentment smoldering within igniting to give her strength. "It is true. Judd never loved me, and everybody knows it. It was you he wanted to marry. The only reason he proposed to me was because you were marrying Luke. Oh, yes, I knew about the gossip, how everybody said Judd married me because it was as close to you as he could get. I knew it that day twelve years ago when we had our double wedding on the porch. His hand holding mine was cold, and so were his lips when he kissed me, because it was you he wanted and always had been. It was always you. And he knew later that you could have given him the children he wanted, because you and Luke had four fine sons, while I couldn't conceive. And now you've got a healthy baby girl, and I've got nothing."

Violet paused to draw a ragged breath, not caring that Iris's face had turned ashen. In the past, in all those hurting years of growing up, Violet had swallowed her frustrations and kept the pain inside, but now, when her life had crumbled about her, she could hold back no longer. "We were twins," Violet reminded Iris coldly, "but not identical—oh, no, far from it. You were the pretty one. Dainty and pretty, just like Momma. But I took after Poppa. I was big and gangly—I even got his ugly hooked nose." She tapped her nose with a shaking finger. "You and I were never alike in any way. It was you the boys flocked after, while I was the one people said was destined to be a spinster."

Iris shook her head in protest, her silky black hair flying about her face. "You're wrong, Violet. You're not ugly. And in his way, Judd loves you. He's been good to you—"

"He never beat me," Violet conceded. "But he never really loved me, and when the years passed with no babies, I knew I'd just about lost him."

When the Panic of '37 finally hit Georgia, everybody started heading for Texas and the two square miles of land offered to any family brave enough to make the journey. Judd was the first to take off—without his wife. When he did come back he was wearing a shiny badge and bragging about how he'd joined the Texas Rangers. After trying to eke out a living on a fifty-acre dirt farm, Luke, too, decided the promise of over twelve hundred acres of land was too good to pass up. He and Iris made plans to follow Judd back. Violet was better off staying in Georgia, Judd had said. Being a Ranger would keep him away from home most of the time.