Читать книгу Bandera's Bride - Mary McBride - Страница 9

Mississippi, 1872

“Emily Russell, you are not leaving. I forbid it. Now, you put that suitcase down. Do you hear me? Put it down.”

“I do hear you, Dodie. You’re screeching like an owl, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if everybody in Russell County hears you.”

“You wouldn’t be doing this if your brother were here. After all Elliot’s done for you, too. How can you be such an ungrateful wretch?”

Emily shoved past her wailing sister-in-law, charged through the front door, and dropped her final piece of luggage on the verandah.

“There.” She shaded her eyes against the bright morning sun, searching past the long sweep of driveway toward the street beyond. “Now, where in blazes is Haley Gates? He promised me he’d be here by ten o’clock.”

“If I know Haley Gates,” Dodie muttered, “he’s probably facedown in the hay in somebody’s barn.” Then she reached for the leather handle of a carpetbag. “I’m taking this back inside.”

Emily jerked the bag away. “You’ll do no such thing. I’m going, Dodie. And that’s that.”

“To Texas!” The young woman threw up her hands. “Texas! Where you’ll be set upon by wild Indians. Maybe even scalped. Lord knows any savage would love to whack off those blond curls of yours.”

“I’ll be sure and keep my bonnet tied tight, then.” Emily peered down the street in the opposite direction. “I’ll scalp that Haley if he’s not here in two more minutes.”

Dodie sighed mightily, then sank into a high-backed wicker chair. “Elliot’s going to be beside himself when he gets back from New Orleans to find you’ve taken off like some thief in the night. You know that, don’t you? He’ll be furious. He feels so responsible for you.”

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning, Dodie, and I’m not a thief. I’m not a prisoner, either. At least not anymore.”

“A prisoner! What a spiteful thing to say, Emily, when all we’ve done is look out for your best interests since Mother and Father Russell passed away. Why, I’m sure those two must be fairly twirling in their graves right now, seeing what their foolish, dreamy daughter is up to.”

Emily almost laughed at that image of her prim and proper parents. But Dodie was probably right. If they knew what she was doing, her parents would most definitely spin in their shady little graves. As for being dreamy…Well, Dodie was probably right about that, too. But Emily wasn’t foolish. Not now, at least.

Dodie sighed again, louder and longer. “Oh, how I wish that nice Mr. Gibbons hadn’t gotten the croup and died. He was going to propose marriage, Emily. After all those years of being so shy and tongue-tied whenever he was around you, I simply know he’d worked up the courage to pop the question. I could see it in his eyes.”

“Perhaps,” Emily said. And she would have married Alvin Gibbons, too, she thought. She would have had to marry him, and then they would have lived unhappily ever after. Only now her longtime, flesh-and-blood suitor was dead and Emily was on her way to Texas to find a man she didn’t know in the flesh, but in letters. All those lovely letters.

“I’d like to scalp that no-good Price McDaniel for luring you away like this,” Dodie moaned.

“He didn’t lure me.” Emily almost laughed at her sister-in-law’s melodramatic despair. If anybody deserved to be melodramatic and despairing right now, it was Emily herself. “Price doesn’t even know I’m coming.”

“Well, that’s just fine and dandy. You’re traveling five thousand miles to see a man—a traitor, by the way—who may or may not even be there when you arrive.”

“It’s not five thousand miles. And Price is not a traitor. He did what he had to do, Dodie, to get out of that horrible Yankee prison camp. You know that.”

“He should have come home.”

Emily gave an indignant snort. “To what sort of welcome?”

They had had this argument before, a hundred times perhaps during Emily’s six-year correspondence with the self-exiled Price McDaniel. But what her sister-in-law failed to recognize was that, during those six years, Emily had fallen in love with the man. She hadn’t told a soul, though.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. She had confessed her love to Price in a ten-page, heartfelt letter she had written on New Year’s Eve, then sealed and mailed with such high hopes on the first day of 1872.

If you think me bold and brazen, dearest Price, then I am guilty as charged. Your Emmy loves you and would even be so bold as to propose a life together in the flesh rather just on paper. Send for me, Price. Oh, my dearest. Marry me.

His response had arrived, like clockwork, as all his previous letters had, and she had opened it with a brimming heart and trembling hands only to read his bitterly fond and conclusive farewell.

Someday I hope you can forgive me for misleading you. Dearest Emmy, I will not write again.

That evening she had wept on Alvin Gibbons’s shoulder, and he—suddenly not so shy—had consoled her gently, if not a bit too thoroughly, just two weeks before he sickened and died.

“For God’s sake,” Dodie exclaimed now. “You barely knew Price when he was here and you haven’t heard a word from him in months. How do you know he’s still in Texas? How do you know he’s still alive? Or that he even wants to see you?”

“I know,” Emily lied, when what she knew was only that she had to leave. Today. Now. It wouldn’t be long before everyone in Russell County knew that she—poor Emily, the dreamy spinster, the maiden lady whose shy suitor had passed away three months ago—was going to have a child.

Haley Gates had a tendency to spit when he talked, in part from his habit of dipping snuff and in part from the absence of front teeth, so while Emily sat beside him on the wagon seat, she was glad he kept his face forward and his eyes on the backsides of his mules. She was glad, too, that he had lapsed into silence after an hour-long discourse on who was up to what in Russell County. The man took extraordinary pleasure in pawing through almost everybody’s dirty laundry. Almost everybody. Her own secret, she supposed, was still safe.

But if he said one more time just how brave she was for going out West alone, Emily couldn’t decide whether she was going to hit him or to ask him to turn the wagon around and take her home. She didn’t feel brave. She felt sick and scared to death.

Even so, there was no going back. Her decision wasn’t based so much on the scandal her family would have to endure or her own sorry future as a fallen woman, but on the pitiful prospects for a child born out of wedlock in an unforgiving community.

She glanced at the unfortunate man beside her. Haley Gates was nearly forty years old, but tongues still wagged about his illegitimate origin, and more people than not referred to him as Sally Gates’s bastard boy.

That wouldn’t happen to her child, by God. He or she was going to have a chance in this unforgiving world. Emily meant to see to that, no matter how sick or scared she felt. No matter how ashamed she felt for closing her eyes that night and pretending Alvin Gibbons was the man she loved, that his hands were Price McDaniel’s hands, that his kisses were the ones she craved, and that he loved her as desperately as she loved him.

“…friends or kinfolk?”

With a jolt, Emily realized that Haley had been speaking to her and she hadn’t comprehended a single word he’d said. She apologized.

“Oh, that’s all right, Miss Emily. A mind tends to wander on a pretty day like this.” He spat, this time intentionally, over the side of the wagon. “I was just asking who you planned on visiting in Texas. I didn’t know any Russells had ever left the county.”

“Only my uncle Randolph,” she said. “And he went east to Washington, D.C.”

“So you’re visiting a friend, then?”

“Yes. A friend.”

What did it matter now, telling Haley the truth? she wondered. Knowing Dodie’s proclivity for gossip, she was certain the entire Ladies’ Aid Society already knew her destination. And if the venerable LAS knew, then everybody in seven counties was sure to know within a week.

“I’ve been corresponding with Price McDaniel,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could. “He chose to stay out West after the war to raise cattle. And he’s cordially invited me to visit his ranch.”

Haley took one hand from the reins in order to scratch his head. “McDaniel. McDaniel. That doesn’t strike any particular bell.”

“Well, he’s been gone for quite some time. He had no sisters or brothers, and his parents passed away several years ago. They lived in that big white house on Solomon Street.”

“Oh, those McDaniels.” Haley slapped his knee. “I remember them, all right. Why, I even helped tote all that furniture they shipped to Texas.”

“Yes. I remember, too.”

What Emily remembered was slipping an envelope into a drawer of an enormous walnut desk, and then a month later being surprised by a thoughtful reply, written in a bold and quite masculine hand. The tone of the letter had been serious and almost poetic, which surprised her even more, because her memory of Price had been that of a laughing and rather cavalier young man, given more to pranks than poetry.

How the war had changed him, she had thought at the time, and then with each successive letter, she found herself increasingly glad that the callow youth she recalled had been forged into such a strong yet gentle man.

Then, month by month, letter by letter, Emily had fallen in love. It had been her distinct impression, even her devout belief, that Price’s feelings for her were of an equal depth and weight. Dear Miss Russell had long ago been replaced by Dear, then Dearest Emily. The second to the last letter—the one to which she had responded with such candor and passion—had begun My Dearest Emmy.

That one—the one with half its inked words dripping down the pages from her happy tears—was now wrapped in a lace hanky and tucked deep inside the reticule on her lap. Price’s other letters, tied with silk ribbons, a different color for every year, were secure in her leather valise. And although she had packed most of her clothes and other belongings for the trip to Texas, nothing really mattered but the letters that had come to be her most valuable possessions, indeed her only priceless worldly goods.

“All that furniture,” Haley murmured, shaking his head. “I sure do remember now that you mention it, Miss Emily. Wonder if all them dressers and desks and whatnots made it to Texas all right. Did you ever hear?”

Emily smiled wistfully. “The desk arrived, Haley. That’s all I know for sure.”

The levee in Vicksburg was crowded when they arrived later that afternoon. Haley’s mule-drawn wagon wasn’t the worst-looking vehicle at the steamboat landing, but it didn’t rank far above most of the produce wagons parked there. For one bleak moment, Emily felt that she had come down a peg or two in the world until she reminded herself of her fallen status and decided she was lucky indeed to even be able to afford a wagon ride, not to mention the passage she had booked on the Memphis Zephyr, whose smokestacks were already billowing with steam.

“I must hurry, Haley,” she said, clambering down from the wagon seat before he could come to her aid, then reaching for the valise that held her precious letters. “If you’ll carry my other bags to the gangplank, I’d be most appreciative.”

Emily hurried across the cobblestones to show her ticket to the captain.

He squinted at her from beneath the polished brim of his cap. “You traveling alone, Miss Russell?”

After she nodded, the man handed her ticket back, then lightly touched her arm. “I’ll keep a special eye out for you. Fine family, those people of yours. I’ve met your uncle, the legislator, on one or two occasions.”

“How nice,” she replied while thinking that her uncle Randolph would likely be the first to disown her in light of her condition.

“You give him my regards when next you see him, will you?”

“Indeed I will, Captain.”

“Is that your man with your luggage?” he asked, angling his head toward Haley, who was just then waging a losing battle with a small steamer trunk, a suitcase, and two carpetbags.

The captain gestured to one of his crewmen, a muscular man. “See that Miss Russell’s luggage makes it to her stateroom, will you?”

Then, after the captain turned to greet other passengers, Emily walked back to bid farewell to Haley.

He stood, gazing forlornly at the ground, the worn toe of one boot lodged between two cobblestones.

“Well, I guess it’s time for you to get on board,” he said. Then he looked up and gave her a wide but toothless grin. “I kinda wish I was going with you, Miss Emily. Out West, you know. Where things is all brand-new.”

“Brand-new,” she echoed, despite the lump in her throat, suddenly feeling far sorrier for Haley than she did for herself. “Well, come along then,” she said, surprising herself by how much she meant it. “Come west with me where things are indeed all brand-new.”

Haley toed the cobblestones again. “It’s tempting, Miss Emily. But there’s my ma back in Russell County, you know. She’s doing poorly, and I think she’d just plain up and die if I left her.”

Emily was so touched by the man’s loyalty to his mother that her eyes brimmed with tears. You’re a lucky woman, Sally Gates, she thought, and your bastard boy turned out to be your blessing, didn’t he? I hope I’m just as fortunate.

“Haley, I know I was only supposed to pay you six bits for the ride.” Emily dug in her reticule as she spoke. “But, here. I want you to take this.” She pressed a five-dollar gold piece in his hand.

“Aw, Miss Emily. That’s too much.”

The Memphis Zephyr’s steam whistle gave three long, shrieking blasts, nearly deafening Emily.

“I said that’s way too much,” Haley shouted.

“I must run or I’ll miss my boat.” She bunched up her skirts and began to hasten toward the gangplank, then called back over her shoulder. “You keep that, Haley. Buy something nice for your mama.”

“That’s awful nice of you, Miss Emily. You have a safe trip now and you enjoy all them brand-new things out West, you hear? When you come home, I hope you’ll tell me all about ’em.”

“I’ll do that, Haley,” she lied, trying to smile through her tears and waving from the deck while the steamboat’s gangplank rose as if it, too, were waving a long and last goodbye to Mississippi and everyone in it.