Darkness at Morning Star Page 3

  “I’d like to deliver you in one piece, iffen you don’t mind.” Cobby Hawley’s tone was as fierce as his grip.

  Startled, I pulled myself back up and folded my hands in my lap. “I’m sorry if I alarmed you. You see, I’ve only read about the prairies, and the early settlers ... well, most of them weren’t very complimentary, although considering the hardships and illness and loss they suffered, I guess that’s not too surprising ...” I hesitated. My companion offered no comment. “What I’m trying to say is, I had no idea it was so... so...” I flung my arms wide, momentarily at a loss for words. “Beautiful!”

  Cobby looked at me sideways again, harder and longer this time. “Suits some,” he mumbled around his pipestem.

  Which meant it suited him, I decided. I wondered whom it didn’t.

  Groups of slow-moving cattle had begun to dot the landscape, strange, rough-looking creatures unlike any I was familiar with from the prosperous dairy farms back East. Strange, too, were the barbed-wire-wound posts fencing the prairie equivalent of pasture land, one small stretch of which seemed as big as the entire town of Jericho. I couldn’t imagine what kind of wood could produce those smooth-skinned, square-cut, honey-colored lengths.

  The wagon slowed as Cobby turned off the main traveled road, and a closer look at the posts that marked the turn revealed the reason for my puzzlement.

  I pointed to one in amazement. “Stone posts?”

  The track we were now on led along the edge of a low declivity at the bottom of which were clumped the same rough-barked trees I had seen earlier. Cobby jerked his head in their direction and removed the pipe from his mouth. “No trees, ‘cept for them cottonwoods. Rot out in a season. Plenty of stone, though.”

  The descending sun, slanting in from the west, blinded me as the wagon mounted a long, slow grade crisscrossed with cattle and game trails. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and as we topped the rise I could see far ahead a spine of rock arching sinuously out of the prairie’s green skin like the coil of a huge serpent. Set to one side, farther than the upthrust rock’s shadow could be thrown was an impressive structure built of the same stone as the posts I had remarked upon earlier. It glowed like wild honey in the late-afternoon light.

  Cobby shifted beside me. “That be Morning Star.”

  I had envisioned a simple, weathered farmhouse with chickens scratching and clucking in the front yard. This looked worthy of peacocks. “It’s a wonderful name, isn’t it!” I said. “There must be a romantic story to go with it.”

  I looked over at Cobby expectantly, but his frown told me that by now I should have known better. He clamped his yellowed teeth tighter than ever around the well-grooved stem of his pipe. We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  The wagon rolled to a halt in front of a horseshoe-shaped dooryard. Arrived at through miles of flowing prairie grasses, the contrast was unsettling: massive rough-hewn stone pillars marched sentry-like around its perimeter as if to contain the huge purple trusses of the lilacs exploding in astonishing profusion behind them. Flanking the entrance to the house and reaching almost to the roofline was a taller, stouter pair of pillars with curiously slitted caps that gave them the look of helmeted warriors. But before I had time to wonder what menace they had been intended to guard against, the wide iron-bound wooden door opened, and a young woman, her hair a wealth of red-gold ringlets, ran out to greet me.

  “Reenie!” she cried, holding up her arms to me.

  “Welcome to Morning Star!”

  I slid down off the wagon seat, heedless of barked shins and snagged petticoats. “Oh, Belle,” I whispered as I embraced her, “I missed you so.” She smelled sweetly of powder and rosewater, and suddenly conscious of my travel-weary self, I backed away, holding her hands in mine. “Oh, my goodness, let me look at you.”

  She had changed. Not only was her hair ringleted and its blondness more strawberry than silver, but the rounded voluptuousness of her figure made me self-consciously aware of my slimness. I still looked like a girl; Belle was a woman.

  To my surprise the envy in my thoughts was expressed in her voice as she brushed her fingers across my cheek. “Your skin is still like porcelain, Reenie. The Kansas sun and wind has taken a right fearful toll of mine.”

  It was true, I realized regretfully. The fine-grained complexion we had shared had coarsened, and the lines radiating from the comers of her eyes unfairly aged her; but she had roses in her cheeks and a pleasing golden glow.

  “I’d trade my porcelain for your bloom of health, Belle.”

  Belle laughed and hooked her arm through mine. “Health is for horses, Reenie. It’s all right for a lady to be healthy, but she shouldn’t ever look it.”

  I was astonished. “But Mother Rogg always said—”

  “Your Mother Rogg don’t live in Kansas, I take it?”

  I burst out laughing. “Heavens, no! Nothing like it!”

  “Well, then! You see, out here a woman can be one of three things: if she’s lucky and has her wits about her, she can live like a lady. That’s what I intend to go on doing.”

  “What are the other two choices?”

  “Hardly choices, Reenie, just what most females end up as: workhorse or whore.”

  I didn’t know what to say; I wasn’t used to such plain speech from a woman or prepared for the hardness in Belle’s voice. At that moment, however, Belle beckoned to a stolid, dark woman who had appeared seemingly from nowhere and instructed her to take my bag inside.

  “I reckon you’d like to wash up a bit, darling,” Belle suggested tactfully, as she ushered me into a large entrance hall hung with musty tapestries. It had the look of the English manor houses Malcolm Wilcox had carefully detailed in the sketchbook he always took on his travels, and which I never tired of looking at with him. I had no way of knowing if these hangings, too, were genuinely old, but the dust looked the accumulation of decades, if not centuries. The baronial effect was disturbed, however, by boxes piled here and there along the stone walls and the large, dirty Indian rug lying askew on the, floor.

  “Come on down when it suits you, Reenie, and we’ll have a late tea. Supper’ll be late, too, I’m afraid. I expected Bazz back by now, but this way we can have a nice long gossip, just the two of us, so shoo! Off with you! Sooner unpacked, sooner down.”

  I leaned forward to dart a grateful kiss on her cheek before turning to follow the woman who waited passively at the foot of a flight of broad stairs, my bag clutched in her brown hand. I turned back to Belle. “What’s her name?” I asked in a whisper.

  Belle shrugged. “I haven’t a notion. We call her Rita. Sometimes she answers to it; sometimes she doesn’t. She comes and goes, never staying long enough for it to matter very much.”

  I wondered at her acceptance of what must have been an unsatisfactory situation, but, given my lack of experience with household servants—servants of any kind, for that matter—I dismissed it from my mind. There were too many other, much more interesting things to engage my curiosity.

  The woman deposited my bag beside my bed and departed wordlessly, her dark eyes as opaque and expressionless as pebbles. Had she understood my request for water? Should she have helped me unpack? I shortly discovered, however, that a pitcher of water was standing, covered, on a washstand I had not at first noticed, and the putting-away of the contents of my portmanteau hardly required assistance. I arranged my cherished books, left to me by Malcolm Wilcox, along the bureau top under its mirror., and in front of them set out my modest assortment of grooming tools.

  As for my clothing, although the wrappers I had chosen to bring with me were suitable for the overland covered-wagon travel I had read about, they were hardly up to the standards of either Morning Star or, judging by the pretty yellow, flowered-sprigged dress in which she had greeted me, Belle’s. When I lifted them out, my choices seemed even more dispiriting than I remembered: gray cambric and a faded blue-and-white calico. The least drab was a two-piece brown-and-white-striped cotton sateen I had trim
med myself with a collarette of Irish embroidery. Fortunately, the other pair of shoes I had brought were also brown, rather new, of a nice quality of kid.

  I folded the gray and the blue into a bureau drawer—they were hardly worth hanging in the narrow, white-painted wardrobe—and laid the brown-and-white on the bed, whose brass bedstead was in need of polishing. Guiltily, I traced the tarnished curves with my finger.

  Would Ernest ever find someone willing to share the brass bed he had bought for us? Probably, I decided. There would always be a girl grateful for a nest of her own, no matter how grudging its feathering. Wishing the poor thing well, I sighed and turned to the washstand to perform the ablutions neglected for so long. The cool water was wonderfully refreshing, and the crisp pungency of the lavender water I had impulsively purchased at a pharmacy near my Chicago hotel was, I assured myself, worth every penny of its shocking cost.

  Revived, I changed into my last clean set of undergarments and walked toward the two large windows commanding a wide view to the east. I would enjoy being wakened by the morning sun, and I wondered what bird songs would greet me at its rise.

  I turned, braced my arms against the wide stone sill, and regarded the spacious, high-ceilinged room with mounting pleasure. The furnishings were simple but well-built, and I was especially grateful for the large lamp, more than adequate to read by, on the bedside table. A bright, boldly patterned Indian rug—much cleaner than the one in the hall downstairs—lay on unpolished wooden floorboards; another, more finely woven, served as a counterpane. Tomorrow, after doing my laundry, I would fling both windows wide to clear the room of a lingering mustiness, polish my bedstead until it gleamed, and then, with Belle’s permission, cut a bouquet of those extraordinary dooryard lilacs to grace my bureau.

  I sighed contentedly and turned again, my breath fogging the cooling glass. Daylight was almost gone now; a slivered moon had begun its ascent. This landscape suited me. I was not a religious person, at least not to the pious degree Ernest had expected of me, but here on this sky-arched prairie, as clean and pure as the biblical land of Zion, I sensed the presence of God. My life thus far had been a pilgrimage of sorts, and I felt I had at last come home.

  * * * *

  I found Belle seated in a large alcove of the spacious parlor that opened directly off the front hall. Crude wooden furniture and Indian rugs waged a stylistic war with Victorian upholstered pieces, and through the crowded battlefield wound paths edged with discarded newspapers and periodicals. Except for the dust that lay undisturbed over all, it looked like a room that was either just being moved into or out of.

  “Reenie! Join me here in front of the fire. Cool nights are the rule here, well into June.”

  She had changed into a spring green, bow-trimmed costume which suited her sun-mellowed coloring well. Her glossy curls reflected the firelight. A silver tray, whose tarnish accentuated its elaborate chasing, sat on a low bench in front of the small sofa on which she sat. Instead of a teapot, however, it held a slender decanter and two small glasses, crystal from the look of them.

  “I thought, seein’ how late it’s got, sherry might suit you better’n tea.”

  I sat down beside her, plucking out the folds of my skirt as I searched for something to say. Would sherry suit me? I hadn’t any idea if it would or not, never having been allowed anything alcoholic. Even our communion wine had been grape juice. Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine, Ernest used to say....

  “Why, I think that might be very nice. Belle. But only a very little bit, please.”

  Belle slanted an amused look at me as she poured the amber liquid. I’m sure she guessed my lack of experience. She handed me a glass and then smilingly raised hers. “Together again, Reenie!”

  “Never to part,” I rejoined. I took a cautious sip. I returned my sister’s smile as the sherry’s creamy mellowness trailed warmly down my throat. “Now then. Belle, tell me everything! After Mr. Ross Cooper brought you here to Morning Star, then what?”

  Charlotte Cooper had lingered on for four years, Belle told me. “She suffered so near the end, poor thing.” Afterward, she helped with the general household chores, taking over as housekeeper when “that snappy old thing” left Morning Star six months later.

  “But you were only fifteen. Belle! How on earth could you be expected to cope with a big house like this by yourself?”

  “There was only Ross—Mr. Cooper—and Basil.” She laughed. “Men aren’t very fussy when it comes to housekeeping, Reenie, and there are always Indian women passing through looking for work.”

  “Is Basil the Bazz you wrote me about?”

  “Did I? I’d forgotten—”

  “As an afterthought. Something about a pony….”

  Belle’s brow furrowed. “A pony? I can’t imagine—” She shook her head. “Maybe Bazz will remember. He’s been away on business, but I expect him back tonight.”

  Whoever this Bazz or Basil was, I wondered why he would be able to explain something Belle had written to me. It was all very puzzling. I looked at Belle expectantly.

  “Basil is Lottie and Ross Cooper’s son,” she explained, correctly interpreting my expression. “We grew up together. Bazz is two years older’n me—than us,” she corrected smilingly. “We’re like brother and sister.”

  I felt a sharp pang of envy as I thought of the years wasted; the years in which the bond that should have been ours was established with somebody else.

  “You’ll like Bazz, Reenie ... he reads a lot, just like you always did. He’s a musician.”

  A musician running a cattle ranch? It seemed to me as unlikely a mix as the furnishings.

  Belle sensed my skepticism. “No, really, that’s his piano there, under that cloth.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Lordy, what a storm that provoked!”

  “When does he have time to practice. Belle? I would think running a ranch as big as Morning Star would take all a man’s time and then some.”

  Belle’s smile faded. “It does. Cobby Hawley was Ross’s foreman, so for the time being he’s in charge—until Quinn takes over.”

  “Quinn?”

  The corners of Belle’s mouth pulled down, and the soft light in her wide-spaced blue eyes took on a steely glitter; but before she could speak, a brisk tattoo of footsteps approached us rapidly across the stone-flagged entrance hall.

  As Belle turned away from the fire toward the door, her glossy, ringleted head became itself a leaping flame in the shadowy room.

  “It’s just what we feared, Belle,” said an angry male voice from the doorway. “That bastard breed’s got us over a barrel and—”

  “Bazz!” Belle leaped up, her hands fluttering protestingly. “Mind your tongue! Whatever must Serena think!”

  A tall, slim man traced the path to the fireplace with the easy grace of youth. He kissed the cheek Belle presented, but his eyes—they were very pale, but whether blue or gray I could not tell—were fixed on me. A slow smile revealed the gleam of white, even teeth.

  “Serena! Can it really be you? Belle’s chattered on so about you I feel I know you already!”

  He reached out a long, slim hand. Automatically, I extended mine, which he first warmly grasped and then, to my utter surprise, lightly pressed to his lips. A lock of hair the color of tarnished copper fell forward to softly brush my knuckles. It was a gesture I might have thought pretentious; instead, given the warmth of the smile that accompanied it, I found it... charming. I had never met a charming man before. Ernest had pronounced charm untrustworthy in a woman and unmanly in a man. As I stared up into those elusively colored eyes—sensing nothing either alarming or effeminate—I noticed a glimmer of quiet amusement. I felt his hand gently detach itself from mine. I colored hotly. I hadn’t meant to cling: he must think me a very simple miss indeed.

  “Do you really have a pony for me?” I blurted.

  Belle and Basil burst out laughing. My hands flew to my mouth. I sounded like a spoiled child! What on earth had gotten into me?<
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  “No more sherry for you, sister dear,” Belle said with mock sternness as she poured a glass of the amber liquid for Basil.

  “Oh, dear, I am sorry,” I said.

  “You needn’t be,” Basil said. “I find you just as delightful now as I’m sure I will in the morning when I introduce you to Bingo. She’s a sweet little creature. A true little Indian pony, too.”

  “Not one of Quinn’s Appaloosas, Bazz!” Belle cried. “He won’t take kindly to that.”

  Basil frowned. “If I worried about everything Quinn didn’t take kindly to, I’d never do anything at all, would I? But no, it’s not one of Quinn’s. Cobby knew of this one. Belonged to the youngest Flagler girl. After she died, her parents couldn’t bear seeing the animal around the place.”

  “Please. Who is Quinn?”

  Belle and Basil looked at one another. “She’ll have to know sooner or later,” Basil said quietly.

  Belle sighed. “Quinn is Bazz’s half-brother. His father sired him on his way back from the California goldfields. Took a fancy to a woman he met somewhere along the way, and after Bazz’s mother took to her bed he’d ... well, every so often he’d...”

  Basil took up Belle’s faltering tale. “What your sister’s finding hard to say is that whenever the lust built up in Paw, he’d go back to his whore. She was half-Comanche, which makes Quinn not only a bastard but a breed as well.”

  Basil fell silent and stared broodingly into the crackling fire. I looked up at Belle, trying not to show the shock I felt. She stood with her hands folded tightly together. Anxious lines creased the space between her brows. Obviously not all of the story had been told.

  “Bazz’s grandfather owned a big ranch just to the north and east of here,” she began. “His mother was an only child, so after her parents died, the two holdings were joined. When she died, Ross brought Quinn to Morning Star to live—Lottie wouldn’t hear of it while she was alive, not after—”

  Basil waved an impatient hand. “That’s not important now, Belle. What is important is that Quinn and my father were at each other’s throats from the moment he arrived here, and within two years Quinn lit out for Nebraska, where he was taken on by a big spread owned by an English syndicate. I guess they found some good in him,” he conceded grudgingly, “because four years later he was made line boss, then top screw. The word that got back to Paw about Quinn didn’t make him like him any better, but he couldn’t resist throwing Quinn up to me all the time, either. ‘That Quinn’s sure a chip off the old block,’ he used to say.”