Читать книгу Sweet Sarah Ross - Julie Tetel - Страница 9

When the night gave a hint of surrendering to a new day, Powell stopped at a small tree-filled hollow he had found tucked in the shadows of the barren plains. Sarah’s leaden spirits lightened at the sight of a spring lazing in the middle of the hollow and ringed by rocks glowing white in the moonlight. Her thirst was stronger than her exhaustion, so she slipped down the rocky slope to splash her face and drink her fill. When she returned to what would be their campsite, Powell had heaped several arm-fuls of leaves beneath a tree, spread the half petticoat out upon them and offered her a bed. Without waiting for her thanks, he began to fashion his own bed of leaves about ten feet away from her.

She lay down on her back, sure she would never move again. It was a merciful torture to be lying there with every muscle in her body throbbing and quivering. She was only vaguely aware when Powell left the campsite, but she was acutely aware when he returned, for he seemed to be moving about far too busily for a man who had just trudged God knew how many miles on wounded feet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Gathering wood to build a fire.”

She felt a faint stirring of hope. “You have meat to cook?”

“I wish,” he said. “No, it’s rather that we have company.”

She groaned when she rose up on an elbow. “Company?” she echoed weakly.

“The prairie wolf. The one with the cropped ear.”

She groaned again when she sank back down onto her bed of leaves. “Let’s kill it and eat it.”

“That might not be so easy. Nor so wise.”

“I know it might not be easy, but why might it not be wise?”

He began to stack the wood to build his fire about five feet away from her. He paused at length before answering, “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

Her only feeling at the moment was of bare-boned existence. Breathing in. Breathing out. Body stinging with pain top to toe. Stinging, too, with the will to live. She worked sluggishly through the implications of his statement. “So, if it wouldn’t be wise to kill it, you must think it’s useful to us somehow.”

“Wolves have been known to stalk a man or an animal for miles, so I’m not saying he’s not out for our blood. It’s just that…” He trailed off.

“Did you know it was following us all night?”

“No. I sensed at different times that we weren’t alone, but he’s a clever one and didn’t show himself. He could have easily made a move on us at almost any point, but he’s kept his distance. Even now it was only by chance that I happened to catch a glimpse of the silhouette of his ear in the fading moonlight before he ducked into the bushes on the ridge opposite the hollow.”

“What’s the fire for, then?”

“To keep him at bay.”

“Just in case he was thinking of us as dinner, as I was happy to consider him?”

“Let’s just say that he might be waiting until we’re in a worse way than we are now before going in for the kill. After all, he has to rustle his grub as easily as he can with the least risk to himself.”

“If he has to wait until we’re in worse shape than we are now,” she said wearily, “then he must be in a pretty bad way himself.”

Powell brought the fire to life. “Exactly what I was thinking, Miss Harris.”

That revived her a bit. She raised herself back up on one elbow and saw that he sat squatted, balanced on his heels, and was tending the fire with a stick. She said, “That’s my fourth good idea. The first and second were for the trousers, the third for the razor.”

He looked up and met her glance. “Keeping score?”

“With a hungry prairie wolf stalking us, Mr. Powell, I’d like you to think that I’m more useful alive than as wolf bait.” She smiled faintly. “Not that I want to give you any bad ideas.”

The flickering light from the flames licked the sharpedged planes of his face and blued the unkempt black curls that spun around his head. Something about the way his eyes narrowed as they rested on her suggested that he was enjoying a private joke. His expression riled her enough to shake off her tiredness.

“Although,” she said, rising laboriously to her feet, “it seems you already arrived at that idea on your own.”

She moved toward the fire, plopped down across from him so that she was looking at him through the flames. Her bonnet was still tied around her neck, but hanging down her back. She picked apart the knot in the ties and pulled the bonnet off. After folding it in her lap, she attempted to finger-groom the tangles of her hair, which felt as wild and untended to her as the surrounding landscape. Her scalp was beginning to itch. She had a vision of paradise, and it was a hot, scented bath and a luxurious shampoo.

“So how do you do it?” she asked, nodding toward the flames. “Make a fire, that is.”

His lips curved up in the barest suggestion of a smile. “So that you’ll know how to make one after you’ve thrown me to the wolf?”

The suggestion took her aback. “You think I’m capable of that?”

Noting her surprise, he replied, “Well now, it seems I’ve given you a bad idea. But it might have been one that would have come to you eventually, given the right set of circumstances.”

She wasn’t a bit tired now. She didn’t know which danger had alerted her senses more, the one stalking them outside the campsite or the one she felt hovering above the circle of the fire.

“You have experience with Sioux women,” she said, hugging her knees to her chin and arranging her skirts around her feet, “which gives you an idea how a white woman might behave outside the conventions.” She rested one cheek on a knee. “Does that mean you won’t tell me how to make a fire, so that I have to depend on you for food and warmth?”

He shook his head slightly as if to dismiss this absurd, yet not so absurd, discussion. Then he slipped his hand inside his trouser pocket and tossed something over to her. The sparkle of the small objects in the firelight brought her head up. She sat back reflexively so that she was cross-legged Indian-style, and two stones fell in the trough created by her skirts spread across her knees. She picked up the chunks and looked at him in question.

“Iron pyrites,” he explained. He withdrew several more pieces from his pocket and showed her how to strike them to achieve the desired result. “Starting fires from sticks is a tedious business, so I was happy to have found these rocks as we walked along the riverbed this past evening. Keep them. You never know when you’ll need them.”

While she untied the strings of the reticule at her waist in order to slip the rocks inside, she considered the unpleasant possibility that they might be separated. She was about to ask which one of them should carry her valuable scissors, but before she had a chance to pose the question, he tossed another object over to her. The next thing to land in her lap was one of the strips from her petticoat, bundled into a ball, which, she discovered upon opening it, contained a bunch of berries.

“Dinner,” he said.

She was catching on to his ways. “So that’s what you were doing all the time we were walking next to those bushes. I thought you had chosen the route to offer us protection from attack.”

“That was part of it.”

“You were harvesting the berries as we walked,” she said, recalling that she had glimpsed in his hand an occasional flash of metal in the moonlight. The razor’s tilted blade would not have been exposed enough for the task, so he must have used the scissors. “I hardly noticed what you were doing, just as I hardly noticed you gathering the bits of iron pyrite as we walked along the riverbed. You were able to bend down and pick them up without breaking stride.”

“Which is why I’m still alive.”

She decided that he had more useful ideas for her scissors than she did. Instead of asking for them back, she inquired, “What kind of berries are these?”

“The bitter kind,” he warned her. Then he opened the bundle he had prepared for himself and began eating.

She did the same. Having been forewarned of the taste helped cut the effect of the bitterness. “Not so bad,” she said, munching slowly, fighting the ravenous impulse to gobble, savoring every sour flavor.

“Tell me,” he said, “what else you have in your bag.”

She sighed. “Pins and needles and thread. A few coins. How I regret not having equipped myself more completely! When I think of all that I left behind in the wagon—”

“Better not to think of it.”

“Yes, well, the needle and thread can still be useful. I was thinking that I should repair the rent in your shirt so that it doesn’t look as if it was robbed from a dead man—in the event anyone should notice the tear and care about it. I could embroider something over it, you see, to disguise it.”

“You like to embroider?”

“Not at all! It drives me to distraction, but I can do a respectable bird or two, and I even have the right colors for an oriole.”

“An oriole?” She shrugged. “A Baltimore oriole. It’s the first embroidery pattern little girls learn where I’m from. After the alphabet, of course, and the usual flowers.”

“That’s right,” he said, his voice low and lazy, “you’d rather be in Baltimore. Do I assume that’s where you’re from?”

She heard his questions as conversational, a way to fill the spaces of time that were as empty as their stomachs. She hesitated over her usual impulse to pretty up her background, but the coziness of the campfire, which contrasted with the vast ocean of emptiness around them, prompted an honest response.

“From a farm just east of Baltimore,” she said. “It’s at North Point on the Chesapeake. I have many friends in Baltimore, though, and often go into town for one reason or another.”

“And now you’re on the road to Oregon,” he observed. “What did your family grow on the farm?”

“Years ago—well before I was born, that is—it was tobacco. When the Maryland farmers were undersold in that market by the Virginians and Carolinians, the profit seemed to be in the staples, corn and kale and the like. More recently…”

He finished her statement. “More recently there was no profit to be had in anything.”

She stared into the flames and watched a succession of miniature jewel gardens grow and die. It was pointless to deny the obvious. No one left a home when it was comfortable or a business when it was profitable. The original colonists hadn’t been landed gentry or moneyed merchants when they had left England, and their descendants weren’t fat cats leaving the East, either. The word depression had been circulating in The Baltimore Register with ever more frequency, along with installments from Samuel Parker’s guidebook to the Oregon Territory.

It had taken only a recent letter from Laurence’s wife, Cathy, reporting on the success of their apple tree farm out west, for Morgan and Barbara to decide that they had worked too hard for too long to have so little. Before Sarah knew it, the Harris family was packed up and ready to go. They were the first in their neighborhood to leave the old soil for greener pastures, but every farmer and shopkeeper in and around Baltimore had heard the enticing reports of the Oregon climate and the timber.

Sarah was of a mind to tell Mr. Powell that she had not been obliged to undertake this journey because she was poor. Oh, no! Mr. Powell should know that she had a very fine trust fund on which she could live in the style she deserved and which had been provided her by the widow of her father, the illustrious General Robert Ross of the British army.

Now, Mr. Powell didn’t need to know that she wouldn’t come into the money before she was twenty-five. Neither did he need to know that Mrs. Ross had threatened to close the account after those catty British “ladies” had tried to ruin Sarah’s reputation when she had visited Mrs. Ross two years before. And he certainly didn’t need to know that Morgan and Barbara had refused to borrow a penny against the future of that money and that their refusal hurt her in a peculiar sort of way. She knew, however, that to say any of this would leave her open to embarrassing questions.

She looked up and repeated, “No, there was no profit to be had in anything.”

If she thought she was going to avoid embarrassing questions, she was mistaken. Powell, who was thoughtfully chewing his berries, asked next, “You’re traveling with your sisters, no?”

“That’s right. I have two.”

“Older? Younger?”

“Both younger. Helen is sixteen and Martha is fourteen.”

“Which makes you—”

“One and twenty, Mr. Powell.”

“Hmm. I see.”

There was something in the way he said, “I see,” that made her think he saw nothing at all. She knew what he was thinking, and it was exactly what that hateful Mrs. Fletcher had said when she had met Sarah. Upon inquiring about Sarah’s age, Mrs. Fletcher had smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I see, my dear. You must have suffered a disappointment in love. No? Well, why else would a woman of your age be accompanying her parents to begin a new life on the other side of the continent?”

Sarah could restrain her vanity no longer. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Powell,” she said, “that I turned down a very good—no, an excellent offer of marriage hardly more than a month ago, and so you needn’t think that I came on this trip because…because I was unable to situate myself or anything of that sort!”

Her vanity was hardly appeased when Powell asked, “Why didn’t you find a way to stay with one of the many friends you have in Baltimore, if you didn’t choose to be traveling now?”

Because none of her friends had turned out to be true friends. After Sarah had turned silly William down, she found that the doors to the houses of Olivia and Isabelle and Claire didn’t open so readily or so widely for her anymore. Never mind that they were as stuck-up as they were rich. And they had been jealous of her from the start. Oh, yes, jealous.

She said primly, “I don’t like to impose,” and had to swallow her pride to see the smirk of understanding cross her companion’s stubble-darkened face. It was difficult to determine which was the more unpleasant circumstance to bear at the moment: her exhaustion, her hunger, the memory of being so thoroughly snubbed, or the company of this impossible man.

“And you, Mr. Powell?” she asked, gathering together the tired remains of her dignity. “What brings you to these inhospitable parts?”

“The U.S. government. I’m a surveyor.”

The vision of a precise surveyor jarred against her continuing image of him as a man-beast. She was surprised into asking, “Your studies in surveying informed you of how to trap and skin a rabbit and how to build a fire from sticks and iron pyrite?”

He shook his head. “A year of being in the field has done that for me.”

“Nevertheless, I don’t suppose when you chose such a…a respectable profession that you ever imagined finding yourself captive to bloodthirsty Sioux squaws.”

“I’ll admit,” he said, “that I never imagined the surveyor would be regarded as the Indians’ worst enemy.”

“How so?”

“The hunters they dislike. The pioneers, too. But the man with the magical instruments who looks at their land—just looks!—and works for the Great White Father back in Washington…this man they hate. And, perhaps, rightly so.”

“Speaking of the Indians,” she said, looking nervously over her shoulder into the blackness, “I’m wondering whether this fire, as useful as it is for scaring away the hungry animals, might not alert any unfriendly humans to our presence.”

“Right again, Miss Harris, and I’m none too pleased about still finding myself in Sioux country. So before I set about making the fire, I gave a couple of owl hoots, since to the Sioux, the hoot of an owl is the sign of death.”

“That was you?” she replied, amazed. She had heard an owl a while back and, unlike a Sioux, had been comforted by the familiar sound of it. “You seem to have learned a lot of skills in a relatively short time.”

“Since boyhood I’ve been able to hoot well enough to get answers from owls.”

“Where are you from, Mr. Powell?”

“Everywhere, Miss Harris, and nowhere.”

Thereafter the conversation didn’t flourish, and she was inclined to think that they were protected as well as could be expected from their predators, whoever and whatever they might be.

After a while, Powell got up and left the campsite. Sarah felt a leap of panic at his departure and had to suppress a desire to ask him if she could accompany him. After all, he hadn’t followed her when she had had occasion to disappear once or twice behind a bush during the course of their long walk, nor had he said a word about it. Still, it was dead of night, the prairie wolf was stalking them, and this was Sioux country. She glanced at his bed of leaves and thought it was distressingly far away from her own bed. However, to suggest making his any closer to hers was unthinkable.

So she drew herself away from the fire and fairly crawled back to her bed. She lay down on her back, intending to turn on her side, but once down, she couldn’t move another muscle to turn over. She was captive to the leaves, imprisoned in a body that was not dead but not fully alive, either. With every sense stretched well beyond tiredness, she lay there with her eyes open, her gaze lost in the snarls of the wood and leaves above her head.

The shadows hidden in the branches mingled with the sneaking glow of the dying fire to create weird mind pictures of prairie wolves, of Sioux warriors with feathered arrows cocked in drawn bows. Of William down on one knee, taking her hand in his, begging her to be his wife. Of the flick of her wrist, that one, brief gesture containing both her surge of triumph and her loss of desire to ever see him again. Of English aristocrats paying her extravagant compliments in darkened corners and then pawing her breasts. Of hoot owls.

The next thing she saw were the sun’s rays breaking through the branches above where she lay. She sat straight up, draining the blood from her head. She was woozy from bad dreams and the realization that the sun was already well up in the sky. She ached everywhere in her body, but mostly in her heart, and when she looked around and saw that Mr. Powell’s bed of leaves was empty, her aching heart nearly failed her.

She wanted to call out for him, but didn’t dare. A moment later she was glad she had kept quiet, for she saw fresh sticks neatly laid for a new fire a few feet away from the previous night’s fire. At the base of Mr. Powell’s tree she spied a folded white shirt, a pair of moccasins, her laceless ankle boots, a laced pair of men’s boots, a few rolled-up strips of white cotton and the torn shawl, atop which glinted a small object she recognized as her scissors. Relief sloshed through her, and she was able to conclude that Mr. Powell was at the spring, most likely bathing.

Given that, she decided to wait for his return to the campsite before going to the spring herself in order to wash. The evidence of the newly laid kindling suggested that he might have found some meat to cook. She was so cheered by the possibility that she decided to make herself useful. She got to her feet and hobbled across the campsite to retrieve Mr. Powell’s shirt and her scissors. Then she hobbled back to her bed, sat back down, opened her reticule and began to mend the tear in the upper left front panel of Mr. Powell’s shirt.

She engrossed herself in her task and was, perhaps for the first time in her life, soothed by the activity of threading her needle, of setting tiny stitches, of snipping finished ends, of making inyisible knots. She saw the head of a delicate golden orange bird come to life beneath her fingers, sprout a wing, perch on the beginnings of a leafy branch. She let her thoughts roam where they willed. They fixed, pleasantly, on the happy reunion she would soon have with her mother and father and Martha and Helen.

Mr. Powell returned to the campsite. She didn’t look up at him, absorbed as she was in her handiwork. She heard the small sounds of him lighting the fire and the subsequent snaps and crackles of the flames. Presently the aroma of jackrabbit drifted over to her and brought a watering in her mouth.

“I’ve roasted meat on a stick for you,” Mr. Powell said to her at one point, “and placed it away from the fire on these rocks. You can have it when you’re hungry.”

“I’m hungry now,” she said, still not looking up.

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, “but you’re right not to hurry, since we can’t move out of here for quite a few hours yet.”

She was in her black threads now and began to place the beak. “Just like yesterday, then?”

He grunted his assent “The terrain in these parts doesn’t provide enough cover for us to travel during the day. I’ll do what I can to sniff out the trail of the wagons over the next few hours, but I’m limited in my movements because of that prairie wolf and my lack of a knife. Not to mention the Sioux.”

“I’ve got a bit of work left to do on your shirt,” she said, “and could probably spend the day embroidering, if I had enough thread.” She held his shirt away from her and regarded it critically. She turned the shirt toward him, then finally looked up. “You see—” she began, and got no further.

He was squatting down before the fire and balanced on his heels just as he had when she had last seen him, but there the resemblance between the Mr. Powell of last night and the Mr. Powell of this morning ended, and she wouldn’t have known him for the same man if she had not already heard his voice. When she looked up, he met her regard, and her overall impression of him now was that he was much younger than she had guessed, although she had not previously considered him old. She was frankly astounded to discover how thoroughly a shave could transform a man. His face wasn’t handsome—she wouldn’t go so far as to say that—but it was…compelling, in a masculine sort of way, all flat planes and clean angles.

His eyes were blue. She had noticed that right away, along with the fact that he was unusually sharp-sighted. But now that his blue, sharp-sighted eyes were focused on her in inquiry and no longer bloodshot, they had a quite distinctive effect. His hair was different, too. She wouldn’t call it precisely tamed, but he had evidently washed it, and it was still slicked back from his face and only just beginning to curl as it dried. Then there were his broad shoulders and his muscular chest, which tapered down to a washboard stomach. She had already discovered how strong he was, but she couldn’t quite understand why she hadn’t made a connection between that strength and the physique that matched it This lack of connection was all the more curious given the fact that when she had first laid eyes on him he had been naked.

At that she blushed and had the presence of mind to hold the shirt in her hands up in front of her face. She cleared her throat. “You see what I’ve been doing,” she tried again. “What do you think so far?”

He did not immediately respond. In fact, the silence was prolonged enough to give her time to recover her complexion and to peek around the side of the shirt.

He was staring open mouthed in amazement, but his expression was not that of pleasant surprise, nor did he seem particularly impressed with her unexpected skill with a needle.

“I asked you what you think, Mr. Powell.”

He closed his mouth, then opened it to say, “It’s a bird.”

“An oriole, yes. I told you so last night.”

“I didn’t think you were serious about putting it on the shirt.”

Any trace of embarrassment vanished. This was the Mr. Powell she knew. “It’s a rather fine start I’ve made, if I do say so myself,” she said sweetly, and fixed him with a well-practiced gaze that blended mild puzzlement with entreaty. “Do I take it that you have some objection to the improvement that I’m making?”