Читать книгу Maggie And The Maverick - Laurie Grant - Страница 11

Bryan, Texas, January 1869

The stage was late. That was nothing new—it was always late—so the fact that it hadn’t arrived by noon, as scheduled, wasn’t what had Garrick Devlin fidgeting on the bench seat outside the Bryan Hotel, where the stagecoach always unloaded its passengers and their baggage. No, it was the thought of who was on the stage that had him checking his pocket watch every few minutes, raking a hand through his hair, then reaching into his pocket for his comb to repair the damage his fingers had done.

She had given him that carved-ivory comb, he remembered, for their first Christmas together as husband and wife. It was during the middle of the war, when finding money to spare for gifts and celebrations had been difficult. He had been home on leave from his regiment, so glad to be away from the sounds of shelling and the constant threat of death that he was sure his little corner of Texas was heaven itself. Of course, that leave had been two years before the minié ball had shattered his right leg just below the knee. When he had awakened in the field hospital to find out the army surgeon had amputated what was left of his lower leg, Garrick knew that heaven was just a fable. It didn’t exist.

And now she was coming back, according to the letter she’d sent. Cecilia, the wife who had once loved him enough to save her scarce pennies to buy him that comb for Christmas. The same woman who had fled in horror the morning after he had come home from the war, hobbling on crutches, his right trouser leg pinned up so it wouldn’t flap in the breeze.

Hell, he wished he was a whole man so he could get up and pace. But he was damned if he’d give the old graybeards loitering across the street in front of the saloon a show. He despised his awkward, dragging gait, even now that he’d gotten the wooden leg made by the Hanger Company and he’d been able to abandon the hated crutches in favor of a cane.

It seemed he was not to escape their attentions, however, for a moment later one of them came shuffling across the street and hailed him.

“Howdy, Garrick. Mighty fine day fer January, ain’t it?”

“I suppose so,” he muttered, wishing the old man would take the hint and go away.

“Yore gittin’ around mighty fine, mighty fine indeed, yessir,” the old man said approvingly, nodding in the direction of Garrick’s wooden leg. “Y’kin be right proud.”

Right proud that a seventy-year-old man walked with more grace than he did? Garrick purposely leveled a look at the old man that would have frozen a Texas lake in midJuly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, sir,” he said. Maybe if he disappeared into the hotel for a few minutes the old man would go back across the street to rejoin his cronies.

However, just then the distant sound of galloping horses and creaking wheels announced the coming of the stage.

“Yore meetin’ the stage?” inquired the old man, apparently unaffected by Garrick’s glare. “Who’s comin’ t’visit? Anyone I know?”

There was no way Garrick wanted the likes of this elderly busybody present in the first moments of his reunion with Cecilia. He prayed for the ground to open up and swallow the garrulous old fool, but it seemed God wasn’t listening to such mundane requests today.

He shoved a hand in his pocket and came out with a coin. “Here’s two bits,” he growled. “Go and buy yourself a drink, okay?”

The old man cackled, acknowledging that he was being bought off, then retreated to other side of the street just before the stagecoach rounded the corner.

This was it, Garrick thought, as the stagecoach driver reined in his team in a cloud of dust in front of the hotel. In a moment or two he’d be face-to-face with his wife, the woman who had once fled his home and his bed. What had caused her to write him and say she was coming home again now, after being gone more than three years?

Lord, he wanted to believe it was because Cecilia had discovered she loved him—loved him enough to realize she’d done wrong by running away, loved him enough to come back and be a wife to him. He knew it was hard to look at him—a man who, was not whole anymore, whose right leg ended in a clumsily closed stump right above the knee—but if they truly loved one another, they could work their way past that, couldn’t they?

Then the stagecoach door was being thrown open and Garrick’s heart seemed to surge into his throat, choking him with its runaway rhythm. A man stepped out and turned to assist a lady behind him.

Cecilia? No, the woman was black haired, not blond like Cecilia, and from the tender look she and the man exchanged, it was probable they were married. Then another man exited, a drummer by the looks of him, and then, finally, a woman appeared.

It was not Cecilia. The woman was elderly, with gray hair and a lined, pinched face, and she was holding the hand of a small boy.

Alarmed, Garrick looked behind her, hoping that the cramped, shadowy interior of the coach miraculously held one more passenger. There was no one there. Had Cecilia missed the stage? Would there be a telegram coming, explaining that circumstances had held her up for a day or two?

The woman had stepped down into the street, and was now picking up the boy and assisting him to the ground. Then she turned around and squinted at the crowd. Garrick saw her fasten her eyes on his cane and then step decisively forward.

“You must be Garrick Devlin,” the woman informed him, her gaze piercing as it rose to his face.

Apprehension had turned his spine into a rod of ice, and the foot that was no longer there throbbed like a toothache. “Yes,” he admitted uneasily. “Who might you be? And where’s Cecilia, my wife?”

The old woman shielded her eyes against the bright winter sunlight. “I’m Martha Purdy, Cecilia’s neighbor. She couldn’t come. She sent this little feller instead.”

Garrick’s eyes lowered to the boy, who was standing in the street gazing up to where Garrick stood on the plank walkway in front of the hotel. The boy looked absolutely terrified and was clinging to the old woman with both hands.

“I—I don’t understand…” Garrick felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Why couldn’t Cecilia come? And who’s the boy?”

The woman snorted again, then shrugged her shoulders. “It’s kind of a long story, mister. Better if you read it in this here letter she sent,” she added, pulling a wrinkled and much-folded piece of paper from her reticule and holding it out to him. “You can read, cain’t ya?” she asked, squinting up at him.

“Of course I can read,” Garrick snapped.

“No need to take offense, mister—I cain’t read,” she said equitably, then looked about her as if searching for something. “Johnny, lookit that puppy over yonder,” she said, pointing to where a small mongrel dog lounged in the shade of the bank awning several yards away. The dog had spotted the boy and was thumping its tail against the wood planking. “He looks like he likes little boys. Why don’t you go say howdy to him for a minute?”

She waited, hands on her hips, until the boy had gone over to pat the dog and was out of earshot, then she turned back to Garrick. “I dunno what Cecilia wrote, exactly, but I kin tell ya this here boy is yore son—yores and Cecilia’s.”

Her last sentence hit Garrick like an blow to his gut.

“My.s-son? But that’s impossible! He couldn’t be!” He felt his face burning as the woman stared at him while he sputtered. “It’s one of her tricks! That boy is no son of mine! Whose bastard is she trying to pass off as mine?”

The old woman drew herself up. “Mr. Devlin, I’ll thank ya to soften yore tongue a bit. Don’t you call that sweet little innocent boy no nasty names.”

He lowered his voice. “I mean to say, she left—we didn’t.” He stopped, thunderstruck. “Oh, Lord, there was just that one time.it isn’t possible, is it?”

He didn’t know he had spoken aloud until the old woman chuckled at his discomfiture. “Well, sir, I’m a widow, so I guess I’m qualified t’tell you it only takes the once.”

Garrick froze, remembering the day he’d come home from the war, just before Lee surrendered at the Appomattox courthouse. His brothers weren’t home yet, but his mother and his sister had put together a family celebration out of the meager food supplies they had. Cecilia just kept staring at him—at his pinned-up trouser leg—her eyes wide with fright in her pale face.

Later that night, when they’d gone up to the bedroom they shared in the Devlin family home, he’d tried to tell her how much he had missed her, how hers had been the name on his lips when the doctor, after giving him a little whiskey for an anesthetic, had hacked off the shattered lower portion of his leg. Shyly, he’d kissed her and asked if he could make love to her.

He had never had to ask before. She’d always been eager to participate in the marital act—almost too much so by Victorian standards, but he’d always loved her for it.

She’d told him to blow out the lamp—she who had always been excited to see the passion in his face. And then she’d just lain there, still as a marble statue and just as cold, and let him exercise his husbandly rights.

He’d been careful to be gentle and had tried not to touch her leg with the bandaged stump, but as he was withdrawing from her and preparing to lie on his back, the foreshortened leg had brushed her shin.

Cecilia had gasped as if revolted, and had then begun to cry, turning away from him and hugging the far side of the bed. He’d tried to comfort her, to apologize, but she’d just ordered him, in a tight little whisper, not to touch her again.

Garrick hadn’t slept until dawn was paling the skies, and he was pretty sure Cecilia hadn’t, either. When he’d finally awoke midmorning, Cecilia had gone. Later he learned she had not only left the farm, but had taken a stage heading south.

And over there, petting the friendly dog, was the result of that night, he realized. He stared at the boy, whose face he could see in profile.

His son. But suspicion remained. “When was he born?”

“I dunno the exact date,” the woman admitted with a shrug. “You read this here letter. She probably told you in it.”

He accepted the wrinkled, folded piece of paper as one might accept a dozing rattlesnake. But before he unfolded it, he paused. “All right, supposing he is my son…why now? He’s what—three years old? Why is she sendin’ him to me now?”

“Read the letter,” the old woman said. “There’s more to this here tale, but she said ya was to read it first.”

Realizing that the old woman wasn’t going to make it any easier, he gave up and unfolded the letter, holding it so that the bright noon sunlight made it easier to read.

Dear Garrick, I know I hurt you when I ran away. It was awful of me to treat you that way, after all you had been through in the war, but I just couldn’t help it. I guess I wasn’t strong enough and good enough to be the wife you deserved, and I’m sorry about that, but I just couldn’t be someone I’m not. I’m trying to make it up to you now by sending our boy. I know you won’t believe he’s yours, and I don’t reckon I blame you, but his birthday is New Year’s Day, 1866—which, if you count back, is nine months after you came home. I named him John Garrick. I know you hate me now, Garrick, and you have a right. But if you ever loved me, I hope you’ll be good to our son. I know he’ll be better off with you.

Cecilia

He read it through twice before lifting his eyes from the paper.

“It tells me his name and his birthdate, but it doesn’t tell me what I asked you. Why now? She’s had him for three years. Why is she sending him to me now? What’s she up to?”

The woman looked uneasily at the boy, then back at Garrick. “Bigamy, that’s what. I’m sorry to be the one t’tell ya that, but it’s the truth.”

“Bigamy? She’s married to someone else?”

“That’s what bigamy means, don’t it?” the old woman responded, adding a regretful tsk, tsk. “Yup, she’s Miz Cecilia Prentice—has been ever since soon after she showed up in Houston in ‘65 and started workin’ at the hotel. Pretty as a picture, she was. Men flocked ‘round her like flies around a picnic. It warn’t a week afore Will. Prentice up and married her and cut out the competition.”

“But she was—is,” Garrick corrected, “my wife! We were never divorced! How did she explain, uh, being in the family way to her new ‘husband’?” He felt his face flush; one didn’t discuss such delicate issues as pregnancy with a lady, even one who had brought him the news that his wife had committed bigamy.

The old woman chuckled again, a sound Garrick was growing to heartily detest. Nothing they were talking about was funny.

“Who knows? It’s the oldest trick in the book, fobbin’ off some other man’s child on a husband, ain’t it? You’d think a feller wouldn’t be dumb enough to think that big healthy baby was his, come early, but I reckon he was, ‘cause he used to be proud as a banty rooster of him,” she said, nodding toward the boy.

“’Used to be?”’ Garrick echoed. “What happened?”

“There was an accident…they was comin’ home from a barbecue one night. I was keepin’ the child for ‘em. A storm blew up and lightnin’ was flashin’, and the horse got skeered and run away with them. The shay overturned and Mr. Prentice was thrown clear, but Miz Cecilia, she was trapped under a wheel. She was hurt bad, and it looked like she might die on the spot. Anyway, I reckon she was afeered for her immortal soul, ‘cause she confessed to will Prentice that that boy wasn’t his.”

“Did she.did she.?” Garrick couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

“Did she die?” Martha Purdy finished the question for him. “No, but she’s been bedridden ever since. I take care o’her every day, her an’ the boy. Prentice told her he wouldn’t keep the boy under his roof any longer, not now that he knew the brat wasn’t his.”

Garrick felt his jaw drop as nausea churned in his stomach. He could no longer feel the burning hostility that had flamed up only moments ago toward Cecilia. Now he could only think of the cruelty Prentice had shown to the boy and his injured mother.

“I’ll keep the boy until his mother—” he couldn’t bring himself to name Cecilia just now “—recovers. Then I imagine she’s going to want to leave that sorry excuse for a husband, who won’t even keep the child he thought was his ever since he was born. And you can tell her that if she’s willing—” He was about to say that he’d take her back.

“Mr. Devlin,” the old woman interrupted, “you don’t understand. Cecilia ain’t gonna recover. Her back was crushed in the accident. She’s paralyzed—cain’t move from her waist down. She don’t hardly eat, and she gets weaker every day. She ain’t gonna make old bones, Mr. Devlin. The only way she’s gonna leave Prentice—” she glanced around, to make sure the boy was still entranced with the dog “—is by dyin’. And I don’t reckon it’s gonna be too long. She jest seemed t’lose what little will to live she had left when Prentice said the boy had to go.”

Garrick felt as if he were in the middle of a nightmare. This couldn’t be happening!

“But she wrote me that she was coming herself!” he protested. “She didn’t say anything about a child!”

The old woman sighed. “Mebbe she thought you wouldn’t take the boy iffen you’d knowed he was comin’, an’ mebbe she thought you wouldn’t turn him away once you seen your son’s face.”

Just this morning Garrick had been full of nervous but happy anticipation at seeing Cecilia again—and now she was dying?

“I—I’ve got to go to her—see her,” he mumbled, looking wildly about for the stagecoach driver, hoping the stage was going directly back to Houston. He’d be on it if it was, never mind that he’d be leaving without a word to his family and with nothing more than the shirt on his back.

Martha Purdy reached out a hand, as if she knew he wanted to go find the driver.

“She don’t want you to come, Mr. Devlin. She told me to tell you that, iffen you was to say somethin’ about comin’. She don’t want you to see her like that”

He stared at her, and she looked him right in the eye. “I’m tellin’ the truth, Mr. Devlin. Please don’t go all that way fer nothin’.”

He nodded, feeling cold all over despite the bright sunlight. “You’ll stay…for a while? Just till the boy gets. accustomed to me?”

“I can stay for a coupla days, and that’s only ‘cos the stage won’t be back this way till then,” the old woman told him. “Sooner I get back, the better. Prentice said he’d take care a’ Cecilia till I got back, but that man don’t know nothin’ about nursin’. He’ll forget to turn her, to make her eat.”

The image her words engendered, of Cecilia lying helpless on her bed, made Garrick close his eyes in horror. And she didn’t even want him to help her. “All right. I—I’ll get the wagon.”

Again the woman laid a restraining hand on his wrist, studying Garrick. “Ya know, he does kinda favor you, Mr. Devlin. His hair’s lighter’n yourn, but the eyes—oh, yes, he’s your boy, all right. Just look at him.”

She bent over and called, “Johnny, tell the doggie byebye and come say hello to Mr. Devlin.”

Garrick watched as the boy gave the dog a last caress and obediently came back to the old woman. He was thin as smoke. Garrick knew his mother would say he needed “feedin’ up.”

“Johnny, this is Mr. Devlin. Turns out he’s yore real papa, and he wants to meet you. Don’t worry, he don’t bite.”

The child jerked around, visibly trembling. “How kin he be my papa if my papa’s at home?” he piped in a childish treble.

It was possible. The boy could be his son, Garrick realized, staring at eyes that were as blue as his own. The lad’s hair was lighter, but then, his mother was a blonde, so maybe that affected such things. But it was the mouth that made Garrick think maybe the letter hadn’t been a pack of lies, after all. The boy had sensed he couldn’t be sure of his welcome, and to Garrick, the stubborn set of his lips was like looking at his own mouth in the mirror.

Garrick knew he should kneel down, so that he wasn’t staring at the child from such an intimidating height, but although kneeling was possible with his Hanger leg, it was awkward at best. And he’d just as soon not frighten the boy any more than he already was.

“There was a mistake, Johnny. Everyone thought William Prentice was your papa, but this letter tells me I am,” he said slowly, nodding toward the refolded paper. “Your mama wrote it, and in it she asks me to look after you for a while, till she’s feelin’ better. I didn’t know I had a little boy till I read that letter, you know.”

“You didn’t?” The boy’s eyes grew rounder. “Why?”

Lord, what was he to say to that? “I don’t know, Johnny,” he said. “But I’m happy to meet you, and I’ll take good care of you, all right?”

Transferring his cane to his other hand, he extended his right hand to the boy.

The boy seemed to see the cane for the first time. He stared at it, then up into Garrick’s face, and seemed to come to a decision.

He dived into the old woman’s skirts. “I want my mama!”

Garrick felt his face flame. He hadn’t yet decided if he believed the boy was his son, but it was clear Johnny wanted nothing to do with him. Yet he could hardly turn away and leave him and the old woman to their own devices!

“Aw, don’t pay that no mind,” the old woman said calmly. “He’ll get over it. He’s plumb wore out from th’ long trip in that rattletrap box,” she added, nodding her head toward the stagecoach. “We’ve had our bones about shook outa our body. A good meal and a good night’s sleep and he’ll be right as rain in th’ mornin’.”

Garrick sighed. “We’d best be getting on out to the farm, then. My wagon’s just down the street.”

But the old woman wasn’t moving. “Mister, that little boy is hungry and thirsty. He’d do a lot better if he had some dinner now,” she added, with a meaningful glance at the hotel. “It’s been a long time since we et breakfast.”

Garrick lifted his eyes from the child’s back, suspecting Martha Purdy was thinking of her own stomach rather than the boy’s. Fortunately, he had been planning to take Cecilia into the hotel for dinner, so he had some money with him. He hoped he had enough left to pay for the woman’s ticket home, if Prentice hadn’t given her return fare.

“All right, ma’am, we’ll eat in there,” he said, gesturing toward the hotel door.