Читать книгу Blackstone's Bride - Bronwyn Williams, Bronwyn Williams - Страница 7

The paneled door closed quietly behind Jedediah Blackstone, shutting out the noise of the lobby just down the hall. Jed had asked for a room on the third floor, but the hotel had already been full when he’d checked in three days earlier. Something to do with politics, this being the state capitol, the clerk had said.

Crossing to the window that looked out on one of Raleigh’s busier streets, he cast his mind back over the past few hours. Had he left any loose ends untied? The property had been identified on a large plat on the wall of the land office. The deed had been signed both by him and by the agent representing the railway company, the signatures duly witnessed. The money had been disbursed as he’d requested, the largest portion going directly into his new account at the bank in Asheville, with only enough held out to cover his traveling expenses, which would be minimal, considering the way he intended to travel. And he still had forty acres left over.

For another few days—a week, at best—he could consider himself a rich man. Hardly in the same category as a man like Sam Stanfield, the man who’d had him beaten, branded and run out of Foggy Valley eight years ago for daring to court his daughter—but wealthy enough to keep the bastard from foreclosing on George’s farm.

Looking back through the years, Jed had to admit he’d done a damn sight more than court the girl. Not that that had kept Vera from marrying the same sunovabitch who had branded his ass all those years ago.

“Ancient history,” he told the pigeon pacing his windowsill. He had too many more important matters to deal with now to waste time crying over spilt milk that had long since soured. Up until George had wired him about the loan Stanfield was about to call, Jed had been in no hurry to sell the property he’d won in a poker game. Hadn’t even known exactly where it was at the time, only that it was worthless as farmland, therefore good only for what the past owner had used it for—to try and parlay it into something of value.

But before he could find another big stakes game, he’d heard about the railroad’s plans to move farther west, and the same week he’d had a wire from his half brother, George Dulah, describing the mess he was in.

Jed had been in Winston at the time on a meandering trip that would have eventually fetched him up right on the edge of the continent. He’d had a hankering to see the ocean, now that he’d read about it in the encyclopedias. The Atlantic, at least. He had a ways to go before he got to the Ps.

Instead, he’d headed for Raleigh, where the railroad land office was located. He had taken a room, had himself a bath, dressed the part of a gentleman and set forth to convert the deed he’d won into enough cash money to haul George’s ashes out of the fire.

It had occurred to him later that he might have done even better if he’d held out longer, but time was too short. So he’d named a price that was enough to cover the amount of his half brother’s loan with any interest Stanfield might tack on, then added enough to cover his own traveling expenses.

When George had first written to him about the drought that had nearly wiped him out, Jed had offered to go back to Foggy Valley and help out on the farm. He’d been flat broke at the time, but he figured another strong back and a pair of willing hands wouldn’t come amiss. George had assured him he didn’t need help, and that he’d be able to pay off the loan once he got to market with his beef and tobacco.

So Jed had moved on, heading gradually eastward, and continued doing the things he’d enjoyed most: gambling, womanizing and reading encyclopedias. He’d always liked women, ever since he’d discovered them. For reasons that passed all understanding, they seemed to like him, too—a big, rough, uneducated guy who was better known for his skill at cards than any skill on a dance floor.

Before he’d heard from George, he’d been enjoying life, taking it as it came, getting ready to move on to fresh hunting grounds. His half brother had sold his cattle to a drover and come out slightly ahead, but three weeks before the tobacco market opened, his tobacco barn had burned to the ground with the year’s crop of burley inside, forcing him to borrow money from the only man in Foggy Valley in a position to help him.

Sam Stanfield. Moneylender, rancher, politician—the man who now owned all the land between Dark Ridge and Notch Ridge. In other words, the entire valley except for the farm that had been in the Dulah family for three generations. According to George, Stanfield was ready to take possession of the Dulah farm, too, unless George could come up with the money to repay the loan, including the wicked rate of interest the old pirate charged.

“Not this time,” Jed muttered, dragging his saddlebags out from under the bed. He took off the coat he’d bought especially for the closing in an attempt to look more like a gentleman than a rambling, gambling half-breed bastard with a brand on his behind.

Dressed in Levi’s, his old buckskin jacket and his favorite boots, Jed crammed everything else into his saddlebags. As he’d already settled up with the slick-haired kid at the front desk, all that was left was to retrieve his horse from the livery and he’d be on his way.

He would have headed directly for the train station but for one thing. Sam Stanfield’s name was not entirely unknown even as far east as Raleigh. Even in the state capitol, Stanfield had friends that kept him informed and Jed wanted his visit to be a surprise. Stanfield had to have known in advance that the railroad was getting ready to make another move, which was why he’d set out several years ago to gain control of as much property in Foggy Valley as he could by driving honest farmers off their land.

George had held out for as long as possible, but when he’d gone hat-in-hand to the bank in Asheville and been turned away, he’d had no recourse but to turn to the man he knew damned well would pull the rug out from under his feet at the first opportunity. The Dulahs might have settled the valley a hundred years before the Stanfields had come carpet-bagging down to the Carolinas, but tradition meant nothing to a man like Sam Stanfield.

Looking back, Jed could see the pattern all too clearly. Like looking at a hand of cards and foreseeing the way it would play out, he’d taken the news about the railroad’s westward push through the mountains and added to that the way Stanfield had started finding ways to lay claim to the entire valley.

So far the rails didn’t go anywhere near Foggy Valley, but Jed wasn’t going to take a chance that he’d be spotted and word would get back to Stanfield that help was on the way. By now he probably knew about the account Jed had opened in the Asheville bank, knew to the penny how much was in it. The fact that Jed’s last name was Blackstone, not Dulah like his half brother’s, might buy him some time, but not much.

Jed had a mind to travel the back roads. After eight years of wandering, seeking out card games to support himself, professional ladies for entertainment and public libraries where he could further his education, he was well acquainted with the back roads. In the central part of the state the old wagon trails were slowly being replaced by more modern road, but not back in the hills. There were places there where a man could drop out of sight and not be found for a hundred years.

Eleanor sat on her front porch and watched the sky grow light to the eastward. The only way she knew east from west was that the sun rose in one direction and set in the other. She didn’t know what day of the week it was—wasn’t even certain it was still April, for that matter. Her calendar was three years old, and daily, or even weekly, newspapers were only a distant dream.

Cradling a bone china cup in her callused hands, she tried to push away the remnants of the nightmare. She knew it by heart now. It never varied. She was trapped like a bird in a cage, being fed morsels of dried corn by people who spoke a foreign language. She would beg to be released—“Open the cage door, please!” she would cry. Might even yell it aloud, there was no one to hear. Sometimes she woke up with a sore throat, as if she’d been shouting for hours.

“Probably snoring,” she said. She had to stop talking to herself. It was no wonder her throat was often sore, the way she rambled on about everything and nothing at all.

The other day she had stood on the back porch and recited the multiplication tables all the way up to the eighttimeses, which was all she could remember. Except for the tens, of course, but that was no challenge.

Her coffee was cold. She hated it black, but they never brought her any cream, rarely even any tinned milk. Only buttermilk, and that was awful in coffee. She set the cup aside, oblivious to the contrast between the fine bone china with its pattern of violets, and the worn hickory boards.

“Three times three is nine, three times four is…”

She thought of the time one of her third grade students had stood before the class and gravely recited, “’Leven times one is ’leven, ’leven times two is toody-two, ’leven times three is threedy-three,” and on until Eleanor was red in the face from trying to stifle her laughter.

The entire class was in an uproar. She had barely been able to get herself under control, much less control twenty-three unruly youngsters between the ages of six and nine.

Dear Lord, what she wouldn’t give to be back there on the worst day of her brief teaching career, instead of stranded here in the back of beyond, in a cabin on top of a gold mine, a widow, an heiress—and a prisoner.

“I’ll have to try again, of course,” she whispered to herself, her two laying hens and the big, black-winged birds circling overhead. “Next time they won’t be able to stop me.”

Shouldering his saddlebags, Jed took one last look around the plush hotel room to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind, and then he opened the door. The livery stable was no more than eight blocks away, an easy walk if they hadn’t gone and made cement paths all over the damned town. Feet weren’t meant to walk on cement, but try telling that to one of these slick, gold-toothpick types that ran the place.

Halfway to the livery, he shed his coat and crammed it into his saddlebag. Hot as blazes, and here it was only April. Too much cement held the heat so that even after dark things didn’t cool off enough for a good night’s sleep. Time to get back to the mountains. Long past time, Jed told himself half guiltily.

McGee greeted him in his usual manner, by trying to take a chunk out of his shoulder.

“Meanest horse I ever seed,” said the boy who had the care and feeding of some dozen animals.

“That’s his name. Mean McGee. Call him McGee, though. Hurts his feelings if you call him by his full name.”

“I ain’t calling him nothing,” the boy grumbled, pocketing the money Jed handed over. How much of it his employer would ever see was between the boy and whoever had hired him. Jed had a fellow-feeling for any kid who chose to hire himself out instead of stealing to put food in his belly.

Within half an hour he was out of town, headed generally west. Hearing the sound of a distant train whistle, Jed grinned and gigged McGee into a reluctant trot. “That old sumbitch has got a big surprise coming, McGee. Yessir, he’ll blow like one of those volcanoes I was telling you about.”

He’d skipped ahead to the Vs and Ws last time he’d visited the library, knowing that it might be a while before he got to further his education, then leafed through the Z book, where he’d stopped to read about a striped horse. Damnedest thing he ever did see, but other than that, there wasn’t much of interest in the Zs.

They made fairly good time, stopping each night and bedding down in the open. It was cold, but it felt more like home. Over the course of his twenty-five years, Jed figured he had slept out more than he’d slept in. At least sleeping out in the open, away from towns, he didn’t have to worry about any miscreant—now, there was a fine word for you—creeping in and robbing him blind.

Three days later he stopped to buy cheese and soda biscuits and drink himself a real cup of coffee. He was in an unfamiliar area, but as the crow flies, it looked to be the most direct route to Foggy Valley. “What are the roads like to the southwest of here?” he asked the man behind the counter, who appeared to be roughly a hundred and fifty years old.

The old man shifted a wad of tobacco and spat through the open door, splashing the red clay a foot away from McGee’s big, splayed hoof. “Tol’able,” he said. “Old wagon road’s growed up some. Most folks takes the new road now.”

Jed would as soon avoid “most folks.” Surprise was his ace in the hole. One of them. If Stanfield knew money was on the way to pay off George’s loan, he would think of some way to stop it.

“Where will I find this wagon road? You say it heads generally southwest?”

“West-by-sou’west. Switchbacks aplenty once it gits into Miller territory. Wouldn’t go there if I was you. Rough country.”

Switchbacks didn’t bother him. Neither did rough country. “How much I owe you?”

The old man named a figure that was several times what the goods were worth, and Jed paid without comment. From the looks of the place, he might be the only customer all week. So far, his traveling expenses had amounted to a dish of chicken pie in Salem and the cigar he’d bought to take to George, to celebrate paying off the loan.

This time the nightmare was slightly different. This time Eleanor was buried under tons of earth, unable to claw her way free, unable to scream for help. She waited for the dream to fade, and then she whispered, “I am not helpless! I am intelligent, resourceful and…”

Trapped. Still trapped, despite her determination to escape, in a world that lagged a hundred years behind the times, held captive by a people who were obsessed by gold fever. A people who wrote their own laws and lived by them. A soft-spoken people who were distrustful of outsiders, even those who came into the valley by marriage, as Eleanor had.

They were her late husband’s family. Cousins to the nth degree, inbred, uneducated, a few of them even vicious, especially after sampling the product of their own illicit distillery.

Once her breathing settled down, she slid out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of cool buttermilk. Back home in Charlotte—in her other life—it would have been warm cocoa. Turning the glass slowly in her hands, she studied the pattern etched into the sides. It was one of only three left of the set of tumblers she’d brought with her. The matched set of china had suffered even more. Two days spent jouncing in the back of a freight wagon, no matter how carefully packed, was lethal on fine china and crystal.

The silver that had belonged to two generations of her family hadn’t even begun the trip. Instead it had been sold by her bridegroom to finance yet another piece of equipment for his damn-blasted gold mine.

His mythical gold mine. No matter how they might carve up the earth in search of a new vein, the Millers were deluding themselves, Eleanor was convinced of it. Just because sixty years ago, Devin’s grandfather had found a lump of pure gold and a vein that looked promising, staked a claim and brought in his entire family to dig it out, that didn’t mean there were more riches still waiting to be uncovered. It meant only that the Millers, her late husband among them, were seriously deranged when it came to the subject of gold.

And just as deranged if they thought they could hold her prisoner here until she married one of them, who would then control what they called “Dev’s shares.” His grandfather’s shares—the major portion of their elusive wealth.

A hundred shares of nothing was still nothing, but try and convince the Millers of that. She’d been trapped in this wild, forsaken place ever since Devin had been killed, and she still hadn’t managed to convince anyone that letting her go back to Charlotte would not bring the world rushing in to steal their precious gold.

Tomorrow night she would try again. After last night’s fiasco, they might not be expecting her to try again so soon.

Later that morning Eleanor looked around the cramped log cabin, taking inventory of what she would be forced to leave behind. There was little left now, certainly nothing she could carry away with her. Devin had sold practically everything of value she possessed, most of it before they’d left Charlotte. He had obviously thought that because she owned her own home and dressed nicely, she must be well-to-do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. She had inherited the house from the elderly cousin who had taken her in after her parents had died, and could barely make ends meet on her meager salary.

But then, Devin hadn’t asked, and she certainly hadn’t told him how little a schoolteacher earned. The irony was that they had both been taken in. Devin’s charm had been no more genuine than her imagined wealth. Not that he hadn’t played his role well. Surprisingly well, considering his background. It would never have passed muster if she’d been more experienced. The proverbial old-maid schoolteacher, she’d been naive enough and flattered enough to swallow his line, bait, hook and sinker.

Looking back, she couldn’t believe how blind she had been. Not only had she invited a stranger into her home, she had practically begged him to make a fool of her. Loneliness was no excuse, nor was the fact that the day they’d met had been her twenty-fifth birthday and there’d been no one to help her celebrate. Cousin Annie had been dead several months by then. Her friends were all married, some with growing families.

The truth was, she’d been feeling like the last cold biscuit in the basket. Then along came Devin Miller, stepping out of the haberdashery just as she walked by with an armload of books. She had dropped the books; he had helped her pick them up, and almost before she realized what was happening he was courting her with flowers, candy and blatant flattery. And fool that she was, she’d lapped it up like a starving puppy.

Oh, yes, she’d been ripe for the plucking, her only excuse being that no one had ever tried to pluck her before. Which was how she came to be in a situation that nothing in her quiet, uneventful life could have prepared her for. Held captive by a bunch of gold-obsessed men—the women were almost as bad—who were convinced that any day now, they would all be rich as kings and never have to work another day in their misbegotten lives.

A place where women were considered chattels; education was the devil’s handiwork, and flatlanders—people from “away”—were looked on with suspicion bordering on paranoia.

Her first attempt to escape after Devin had been killed had failed simply because she hadn’t realized at the time that she was a prisoner. Couldn’t conceive of such a thing. She’d walked boldly down the crooked path to the settlement at the base of Devin’s Hill one morning a few weeks after his death, and asked if anyone was planning a trip to town, and if so, could she please ride with them as she needed to make arrangements to return to her home.

Her polite request had been met with blank stares or averted glances. Finally an old woman everyone called Miss Lucy had explained that as Devin’s widow—she’d called it widder-woomern—her home was up on Devin’s Hill.

For her second attempt, she’d waited until after dark and left a lamp burning in case anyone was watching. Sparing only a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness, she had hurried across the small clearing, her goal being to reach one of the outlying farms she’d seen only from a distance. Devin had once told her that they were not his kin, but they’d been allowed to stay anyway, as their families had been there for generations.

Allowed to stay?

At the time, she hadn’t understood the ramifications.

Now she did.

Like a thief in the night, she’d moved swiftly, slipping between gardens and outhouses, thankful for the moon that allowed her to avoid knocking over woodpiles or stepping in any unmentionables.

She’d made it past the first three houses, past two leaning sheds and an overgrown cornfield. Only a few miles to go and she would have been safe. Exhilarated to have gotten so far, she’d tried to plan—or as much as a woman could when she had no home, no relatives and no money.

As it turned out, all the planning in the world would have done her no good. Before she’d passed the last house, the one belonging to the Hooters, Varnelle and Alaska, whose mother had been a Miller, Alaska had stepped out from behind the outhouse, a jug of what Devin had called popskull in each hand and a grin on his long, bony face.

“Where you goin’, Elly Nora?”

She could hardly say she was going for a stroll, not when she was carrying all her worldly possessions except for her books, her china and crystal and the sofa that Dev had been planning to trade for a Cornish pump when he’d died.

“I’m going home,” she’d told him, knowing she wouldn’t be. Not this time, at least.

“Now, you don’t want to go nowhere. Poor old Dev, he’d be heart-broke, and him not hardly cold in the ground yet.”

By then her husband had been dead nearly two months. After the long, hard winter they’d just gone through, he was as cold as he was ever likely to get. “I just want to go home, Alaska. Back to Charlotte.”

“We can’t let you do that, Elly Nora.”

She’d been so crushed with disappointment she hadn’t bothered to argue, knowing it would do no good. Alaska had escorted her back to the cabin. Neither of them had said another word.

And then, shortly after her second attempt at escape, what she’d come to think of as the courting parade had begun. Even now, she could hardly believe it, but the bachelors of Dexter’s Cut, practically every one of them between the ages of eighteen and fifty, had waited three months to the day after Devin had blown himself up to try their luck with his widow.

She hadn’t laughed—it wasn’t in her to hurt a man’s feelings, not even a Miller. Instead, she had listened to their awkward proposals and then gently declined every one of them, praying she would never reach a point when she would regret it.