The Pride of Hannah Wade (38 page)

“That’s an evasion, not an answer,” she retorted.

“I can’t help you make that decision.” Cutter unhooked his leg from the table’s corner and straightened,
his thick brows pulling together in a single line.

He came to the window and looked out for a moment, then turned to look at Hannah, conscious of the rawness of his emotions. “Do you want to leave?” he asked, too casually.

“No,” she admitted, and thought that he breathed easier, but it was difficult to tell with Cutter. He was too frequently poker-faced.

“You have to do what you think is right, Hannah—not what somebody else says.” Cutter swirled the liquid in his glass, then gulped down another swallow of it.

“Hannah.” Stephen’s voice came from the front parlor.

“I’m in the kitchen,” she answered him as Cutter moved away from the window and put the table between them. When Stephen entered and saw Cutter, he stiffened, displeased at finding the other officer in his quarters. Suddenly the room seemed very small to Hannah, with the two men filling it. “Some lemonade, Stephen?” She reached for the pitcher and poured some into a glass.

Stephen took it and sipped at the juice while watching Cutter finish his and set the empty glass on the table. “Thanks,” he said to Hannah. “It’s a guaranteed quencher for a thirsty man.” Then to Stephen, “Good hunting to you, Major.”

After Cutter had left, Stephen looked at her with grim disapproval. “What were you thinking, Hannah? Entertaining a man alone in our quarters. People have enough to gossip about now without you giving them more.”

“If they can make something out of a glass of lemonade, then let them,” she flashed. “Cutter is the only friend I have at this fort.” She set her unfinished glass of lemonade on the table with a sharp click and left the room.

They barely spoke to each other for the rest of the
day. That evening Hannah sat at the vanity table and pensively brushed her long auburn hair. Tattoo call lifted into the night’s stillness.

Her glance strayed to the unoccupied bed. The last time she’d seen Stephen, he was at the escritoire in the parlor. Her hand paused on a downward stroke of the hairbrush. This contention between them had to end, regardless of its source or her feeling of justification. She couldn’t let him go out on patrol tomorrow without making an attempt to patch things up. For too many nights lately she’d gone to bed without touching him, without talking to him at all. Tonight was not going to be another one of them.

Putting on her robe, Hannah left the bedroom and walked on slippered feet down the narrow hallway to the parlor. Stephen glanced up from the writing desk only briefly when she entered. She glided silently across the room to stand behind him and spread her hands over the tightly corded muscles in his shoulders.

“It’s getting late, Stephen,” she said gently. “Shouldn’t you be coming to bed?”

“Later.” His shoulders were rigid under the affectionate caress of her hands.

She hesitated for an instant, then slid her fingers into the thickness of his tobacco-brown hair at the nape of his neck. “Then I’ll wait up with you.”

Impatiently he caught at her hand and ended its fingering of his hair by dragging it down. “I don’t want you to wait up for me, Hannah. Now, please go to bed.”

“No.” She moved away from his chair and crossed her arms in a stubborn, determined gesture. “I’m not going to let you ride out of the fort tomorrow with this harshness between us.”

Her action accidentally pulled open the front of her robe and revealed the golden-tan flesh over her collarbones. When Stephen looked at her, his glance was
drawn to the exposed skin; irritation flashed across his ruggedly handsome features, thinning his mouth beneath the bushy mustache.

“Close your robe, Hannah,” he ordered curtly. “I don’t want to be reminded that you’re as dark as an Indian all over.”

“It isn’t something I can change overnight.” She pulled the front of her robe together and held it closed with her hand. “It will fade in time, Stephen.”

He laid the ink pen on the writing desk and, for a moment, cradled his head in his hands, his elbows propped upon the desk. Then he rubbed his hands over his face as if trying to wipe something from his mind.

“When you came back to me, more than anything else I wanted Lutero caught so he could be punished. I kept telling myself that everything would be all right if only I could get my hands on him and make him pay for what he’d done to you. Now he’s in the stockade,” His voice was low and haunted. “And I have a face to go with the knowledge of what he did to you. I can visualize the two of you now.”

“Stephen, don’t do this.”

“Every time I look at you, I see him. Every time I touch you, I wonder if he has touched you the same way. You say that you hated him—you hated it.”

“I did!”

“No. If you had, you would have killed yourself before you let him do it.” He went back to the same line of reasoning, the same belief that had punctuated all their arguments.

“Death is very final,” Hannah reminded him. “And I wasn’t ready to die. I still had hope. I still expected to be rescued.” She paused, her mood suddenly turning bitter. “I hadn’t realized that rescue would mean I would be treated with cruelty and meanness equal to, any physical torture I endured at the hands of the Apaches. Because I was a victim, I’m shunned, ostracized,
and condemned by everyone I once considered my friend,”

“How do you expect people to react when you let yourself become some Apache’s squaw? You didn’t have any respect for yourself, so why should they respect you?”

“When an Apache thinks his wife has been unfaithful, he cuts off her nose. Why don’t you try that, Stephen?” she challenged.

“I think you preferred being his squaw,” he countered savagely. “You certainly aren’t happy with me.”

“No. No, I’m not,” Hannah agreed. “I expected you to be happy to have me back. I thought you wanted me, that you loved me. It was a miracle that I survived, and I thought you’d be as grateful as I was that we were together again. But I honestly think you are sorry I didn’t die.”

“You’d be better off dead. We’d all be better off if you were dead,” Stephen stated harshly. “We’d be spared all this humiliation and ugly gossip, all the scandal and recriminations. Sometimes, Hannah . . . sometimes I wish you had died. I loved you.” Past tense. “Now, when I look at you I see that Apache. His handprints are all over you. Everybody can see it.”

“If someone stole your horse and rode it, you’d ride it again when you got it back. Or if a thief broke into your house, you wouldn’t move out of it just because someone had been in it. Why do you despise me because I was assaulted?” Hannah couldn’t understand.

“You’re not a horse. You’re my wife. And a woman other men have used is soiled—her virtue is gone, and without it, there is nothing to respect.”

“I’m a whore; is that what you’re saying? You’re married to an adulteress?”

“Go to bed, Hannah.” Stephen abruptly ended the argument. “We will not discuss this subject again. Not
ever. In time, we’ll forget it. For now, we’ll put it behind us and never mention it again.”

Hannah felt very cold inside. She said nothing, simply turned and walked from the room. A great deal was behind them, gone and never to be retrieved, beginning with love and trust.

STABLE CALL FOLLOWED REVEILLE AT SIX O’CLOCK THE next morning. After the horses were fed and groomed, twenty of those from A Company were saddled and packed with field equipment. The newly risen sun laid soft pastel yellow and pink light on the collection of adobe buildings surrounding the parade ground as the troopers led their mounts into the rectangular area.

Along the edge of the parade ground, Hannah stood slightly apart from the other officers’ wives who had gathered to see the patrol off. On the field, Sergeant Hooker’s deep-toned voice issued a command, and the troopers began counting off as she watched Stephen and Lieutenant Digby approach Colonel Bettendorf and the officers standing with him.

Colonel Bettendorf issued some last-minute instructions and then the leave-taking ceremony began. Stephen and the lieutenant traveled down the line, shaking hands and accepting the well wishes of Cutter, Lieuten
ant Sotsworth, and the others remaining on post. When Stephen reached Hannah, an air of reserve cloaked him. He took her hand, holding it and managing to make her conscious of its lingering traces of roughness.

“Good-bye, Hannah,” he said.

Everything except that had been said last night, and she wondered if he realized that. “Good luck, Stephen,” she said with an equal lack of feeling, and watched him wheel away to join the patrol, followed by Lieutenant Digby. Her chest ached with anger and a bitter rage that was more the backlash of pain than anything else.

Sergeant Hooker reported to him. “Patrol ready, suh.” At the responding nod, his voice lifted to order, “Prepare to mount. Mount!”

In unison, the black soldiers swung onto their army saddles amid the sounds of legs slapping leather, horses grunting under the weight, and equipment clanking together. Amos Hill and three of his Apache scouts waited astride their horses in a formless group while the ranking corporal affixed the pole holding the company guidon into the socket of his stirrup.

“Right by twos!” Hooker sang out the call. “March!” The column rode out at a trot. They were scheduled to be back in less than a week. With the advent of hot weather on the desert, patrols were limited to a five-day stint to spare the men and horses.

The churned-up dust on the parade ground settled slowly onto the hard ground. Hannah stood in stiff resistance to the eyes she felt watching her. When she turned to go back to their quarters, the glances were quickly averted, the women’s heads dipping together to exchange whispered comments. She suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of reentering those dark, airless rooms. They wanted her to run and hide like some shamed child. She was suffocating under their stuffy, self-righteous moral judgments; she needed to breathe.

She changed directions, altering her course to head toward the stables. The air might reek there, but at least it would be with honest smells. She extended her muscles, feeling the stretch of her legs and the release of pent-up energy. Her heavy skirts wound about her legs and interfered with the reach of her stride, while their swishing rustle almost masked the footsteps approaching behind her.

“May I walk with you?” Cutter was beside her, matching her long stride.

“Are you quite sure you want to be seen with me, Captain?” She was conscious of the bite in her voice, and of the observing eyes along the parade ground although she refused to look in the direction of the other wives. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m something of a pariah at this fort.”

“I believe my reputation can stand it.” He ranged easily alongside her, like Hannah looking neither left nor right.

She heard the smile in his voice, but her blood was running too high for it to calm her. The stable area was astir with activity. New horses, purportedly green-broke when the army bought them, were being broken to saddle by the more experienced riders of the colored troop. Hannah swept past the dust-laden corrals where the grunts of man and animal filled the air accompanied by the reverberating thuds of stiff-legged bucking. When she came to the empty enclosure where the Apache prisoners had been held before being transferred to the agency reserve, she would have bypassed its ghostly reminders for the solitude of the high desert beyond, but Cutter stopped her.

“I can’t let you go beyond the fort’s perimeter. It isn’t safe, even in daylight, twenty yards from here.”

She offered no argument against his restriction as she swung back toward the pen of the former prison camp. Hannah crossed her arms, rubbing them with her hands
in suppressed agitation. Cutter observed the turbulent sweep of emotion animating her features.

“Do you know what it is I’ve done that is so wrong?” She turned on him, but Cutter knew she wasn’t asking for an answer. “I didn’t hide my head in shame. I walked among them with my head high. I didn’t grovel at Stephen’s feet and beg him to take me back. I went through hell and survived. That’s my sin. Now they all expect me to feel guilty because I didn’t kill myself. And I won’t!”

“No,” he agreed quietly. Her gaze fell to the yoked front of his uniform blouse and the army insignia on the brass buttons.

“I hate that uniform,” she insisted with vehemence. “I hate the duty it represents and its strict, unforgiving codes. ‘Death before dishonor.’ I did nothing wrong! Nothing! It isn’t fair.” Her raised fists pounded against his chest as her broken voice declared over and over, “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”

Impassively Cutter absorbed the force of her blows, letting her expend all the violent energy that had to lash out at something. When it was finally drained and she was left empty, he gathered her close. She stirred in brief resistance, then settled against him, burrowing her head against his shoulder. The hurt he felt in her made him ache. He gritted his teeth, damning those narrow-minded people for doing this to her.

His hands stroked her shoulders and back in comfort as her warm body pressed against him, penetrating the barriers that he usually kept between them. Bending his head, Cutter pressed his lips to the top of her head, then stayed to nuzzle the silken texture of her hair, and breathe in its fragrance.