Halfway Home, page 10
Not for the first time, Sara wished her mother had lived long enough to advise her on the things every woman needed to know. About men. About love. About the mysterious marriage act.
The party lasted well into the night. Sara didn’t. A fiddler had been engaged and played doggedly, but the noise level was such that Sara doubted if many people appreciated his efforts.
Sipping warm cider punch, Sara stood beside the elderly woman who had come in on the stage with her twelve-year-old grandson and watched the goings-on. Two shingle-getters fresh from the swamp, filth and all, danced a knee-lifting jig, sloshing ale from their tankards with every step.
Sara, desperately tired, searched the room for her husband. If he had any plans to leave on the morning stage, why then, he should consider getting a night’s rest.
Ever since Jericho had kissed her, she had been thinking about her wedding night and what was soon to happen. Sara was innocent; she was not entirely ignorant. She had heard hushed whispers among her married friends so that she had some notion of what went on between a man and a woman after they were legally wed. Not the particulars, but enough to suspect that she wouldn’t much care for the marriage act.
However, she was legally wed now, and facing an onerous duty, she would just as lief put it behind her and get on with the next step in her plan, which included settling into her new home and making arrangements to send for Maulsie and Big Simon.
That was what was important, she assured herself—not a few moments of discomfort and embarrassment, which was how her friend Carrie in Illinois had described her own wedding night.
At a table over near the edge of the room, Jericho pretended to concentrate on his cards. He was a fair hand at the game—nothing special. It took all his skill, not to mention a considerable sum of money, to allow Ricketts to win just enough to keep him playing.
And to keep him drinking. The old sot was already three sheets to the wind. Jericho dealt him the queen he needed and hoped to hell he was too drunk to even pick it up.
“Need m’ spec-tickles,” the old fool mumbled.
“No you don’t, what you need is another drink.” At Jericho’s nod, a waiter refilled both glasses. The man must have a hollow leg. He had put away enough to fell an ox, yet he showed no signs of passing out.
It was Jericho’s intention to drink the fool under the table for the simple reason that, legal or not, he couldn’t bear the thought of those thick, none-too-clean hands on Sara’s body.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
“Wha’s ‘at? Bees? Where?” Archibald looked around wildly, then blinked and said, “M’woman. P’int her out to me, will you, boy? Can’t see a blame thing through all this confounded smoke.”
There was nothing he could do about it, Jericho told himself. Sooner or later—if not tonight, then tomorrow night—Ricketts was going to bed his wife.
Archibald struggled to his feet, raked a fistful of money off the table, crammed it in his pocket—spilling even more of it on the floor—then staggered away. Watching the old fool weave his way through the crowd in the general direction of the Carolina wing, Jericho reminded himself that no matter how he was feeling at the moment, he had more serious matters to consider than a newlywed couple celebrating their union.
When Smithers had not checked in by supper time, Rafe Turbyfill had set out to find him, missing the festivities. Likely they would all be riding in before midnight—Rafe, Smithers and whatever lowlife Smithers had coerced into seconding him. The meeting was set for break of day. In which case, Jericho told himself, he might not be around much longer to worry over who was bedding his Sara.
Not his Sara, damn it. Rickett’s Sara!
With a heavy sigh signifying weariness and any number of mixed emotions, Jericho stood and stretched, his fingertips brushing the low ceiling. He might as well catch what little sleep he could. He had left word at the desk for Rafe to wake him an hour before dawn. Less than that and he might not be clearheaded.
More than that would allow him too much time to think.
Sara, damn your sweet soul, why didn’t you have sense enough to take what I offered you? It would have been a damn sight better than what you’re going through right now . . .
Chapter Eight
There was no way on earth Sara could have gone to sleep, although she was drooping with fatigue. It had been a strenuous evening.
She had had a strenuous week!
Sitting up in bed, she thought about her new status as a married woman. She tried to picture the home Archibald had promised her, with the garden his mother had planted. They had that, at least, in common. Gardening. And he was kind. If nothing else, he was kind.
And there was always the possibility, according to her friend Carrie in Illinois, that after consummating their marriage, she would find herself with child. It had happened to Carrie, whose daughter had been born precisely eight months and two weeks after her wedding.
A baby. Sighing, Sara drew her knees up under her chin and tried to picture her baby. He would be dark, of course, with thick black hair and molasses-colored eyes that could be wistful or sad, or a glint with laughter in turn.
It occurred to her that she had no idea what color Archibald’s hair had been before it had turned gray. His eyes, however, were blue. Really a lovely shade of blue, if somewhat bloodshot.
She thought of names for a son. James, like her father. Or Joseph. Or Jeremiah. That had a substantial sound to it. Or . . .
As the sounds of partying continued, with the occasional louder burst as the levee spilled outside onto the veranda, she thought about Maulsie and Big Simon and wondered how they were faring in her absence. Sara had left a note saying she was off to visit with a friend in Hampton, and that she would return in a week or so. That, she had hoped, would be enough to keep her two old friends safe and secure until she could make arrangements to get them away.
Things would be unpleasant, to say the least. Titus would be spiteful to them, but Noreen would temper the worst of his cruelty, because both knew that with Sara gone, there was nothing to keep the two freed slaves from leaving. And if they left, Noreen would be unable to afford anyone to take their place.
Outside in the hallway, a loud, irreverent toast to the bride and groom was followed by the sound of breaking glass. Evidently, the party was a huge success. Perhaps she should have stayed on a while longer, but after Archibald had told her that to be perfectly legal a marriage had to be consummated, she had felt less and less like celebrating. In spite of all her common sense, she wasn’t prepared for that. Not really. Companionship, yes. Shared interests, security—those were the things she had married for. But if consummating was what it took to make her marriage legal, then consummating was what she would do. After going this far, what choice did she have?
Unbidden came the thought that if it were Jericho waiting on the other side of that door, she wouldn’t be quite so reluctant. And it could have been. He had asked her.
Was she a fool, or merely too stubborn to stray from a given path once she had set out upon it?
Both, she supposed. Mostly it was pride. She had discovered that she had too much pride to let herself be married out of pity and some misguided notion of duty. Especially to a man who affected her the way Jericho did.
Mercy, what if she came to love him? Her heart would be broken when he left her, which he had every intention of doing.
Better the safe, sensible path she had chosen. At least her heart wasn’t involved.
The sounds of another fight breaking out on the grounds broke into her ruminations. Evidently her wedding celebration was still going strong. She shuddered, fingered the button on the high collar of her night shift and crossed her legs under the covers, trying not to think of the coming ordeal. According to her friend Carrie, it took less time than soft-boiling an egg and was just about as exciting.
Not that Sara was looking for excitement. All she wanted was to get the business over and done with. If she’d been looking for excitement, she would have—
Well. That was water under the bridge.
The rattle of the doorknob alerted her that the event she had been dreading was about to take place. Steeling herself to remain calm, she smoothed the covers over her lap and waited to take the final step toward legalizing her marriage.
* * *
Some twenty minutes later Sara lay on her back, staring up into the darkness while her bridegroom snored beside her. According to Carrie, the first time one performed the marriage act, it hurt like the dickens.
At least Archibald hadn’t hurt her—except when his bony knee had accidentally landed on her hand and bent her fingers backward into the mattress.
Had they made a baby? It hardly seemed possible that a few embarrassing moments of grunting, puffing, swearing, and fumbling about under her night shift could produce a brand-new human being. But that was more or less the way it happened with animals. A rooster would grab a hen’s comb in his beak, tread on her back for a few seconds until he fell off, and then, lo and behold—fertile eggs!
She couldn’t sleep. No matter how hard she tried, each time she closed her eyes, thoughts came swarming in on her like a cloud of midges—thoughts she had tried so hard to keep at bay.
How in heaven’s name can I spend a lifetime with this poor old man when all I can think of is Jericho and what tonight would have been like in his arms?
*
Sometime after midnight, long before the revelry had begun to die down, Jericho dragged a chair out onto the veranda, all the way to the far end on the Virginia side. There he spent the remainder of the evening brooding and drinking. He had looked for Turbyfill and Smithers’s party to arrive before now. What kind of a fool would expect to ride all night, walk directly out onto the field without a moment’s preparation, and come away the victor?
The kind of fool who had fought five duels and killed five men.
But then, was he any less a fool himself, Jericho wondered, to spend the night drinking and thinking about a woman—or rather, trying not to think about a woman—when he should have been resting? Or at least polishing his skills with a knife? He had spent countless hours practicing with a pistol, but when it came to dueling with a knife, he didn’t even know the rules.
If there were any rules. In the only official knife fight he could recall seeing, the opponents had been instructed to brace right foot against right foot, place left arms at their backs, and then have at one another. Which they had done until one of the pair lay bleeding on the floor, too far gone to continue.
A shudder of disquiet, not to say distaste, rippled the skin on his back. The night air held more than a hint of the winter to come, along with the pervasive smell of smoke and swamp.
It occurred to Jericho that if he could recall any prayers, this might be a good time to haul them out and dust them off.
He tilted his chair back against the wall, propped his feet on the railing and closed his eyes, willing his mind to stillness. Damn it, he was tired of brooding over the past. Thinking about the present was no better, and as for the future, it was always a gamble, any way you looked at it.
Trouble was, he had a feeling the cards were running against him.
Daylight was just cutting through the early-morning mixture of fog and smoke when Jericho awoke to the sound of clattering hooves and the squeak of an ungreased wheel. Yawning, he secured his hat on his head and prepared himself to meet his opponent, hoping Rafe would be riding in close behind Smithers’s rackety runabout.
The minute he stood, a ton of ballast stones came down on his head, reminding him that he had overdone it last night. Temperate by nature, he had tried without much success to block out the next few hours. Or perhaps the last few years.
It had been a damn fool thing to do at any rate. His neck was stiff and his head felt like a watermelon that had fallen off a wagon onto the cobblestones.
Blinking to focus his red-rimmed eyes, he searched the yard for Smithers’s rig. Except for a Dearborn, a dray and a gaudy peddler’s wagon that had obviously just pulled in, as it was still hitched to a lathered pair of bays, the yard was empty. There was no sign of either Rafe’s gray or Smithers’s blue roan.
“Lemme at ‘im, the horny ol’ sot!” bellowed someone from inside the wagon. The wagon lurched, leather springs creaking, and out tumbled a red-faced, red-haired and extremely pregnant harridan who looked bent on mayhem. She was waving what appeared to be a letter in one hand.
“You there,” she yelled.
“Who, me?” Jericho, still half asleep, blinked at her.
“No, you young fool, I was talkin’ to President Jackson! Come hold these here horses fer me while I go wrassle my man out o’ that crazy whore’s bed!”
By then, the livery boy was staggering out of the tack room, rubbing his eyes. Jericho quickly delegated responsibility for the winded bays and followed the waddling woman up the steps, across the veranda, barely managing to reach around her to open the heavy front door.
Some poor devil was about to catch what for. If there was one thing Jericho could use about now, besides a hair of the dog, it was a distraction of any sort.
The woman came to a halt in the middle of the lobby and planted her hands on her wide hips, her prominent belly lifting her faded calico skirt well above her ankles. She glared at the few late-night revelers sprawled drunkenly around the room, the few more who staggered out of the taproom, and the pair of drummers who appeared in the doorway of the common room.
“All right, where is he?” she challenged.
“Where’s who, ma’am?” inquired the night clerk, pulling on his coat with one hand and fumbling to hook his spectacles over his ears with the other.
She had a voice like a steam whistle. Thus it was no great surprise to Jericho when an assortment of nightshirted guests came spilling out of both wings, grumpily demanding to know where the fire was. Glaring at them all, the woman loudly expressed a warning that could be heard three miles down the canal, the gist of which was that if some miserable bastard didn’t trot his flea-bitten carcass out here this very minute, she would burn the place down around his ears and fry the lard off whatever floozy he’d been bedded down with.
It occurred to Jericho that the Jones sisters had left too soon. They could have dined out on this tale for years to come.
Watching the performance from just inside the front door, he found himself fueling vaguely sorry for the woman’s philandering husband. It was easy to see why, with such a wife at home, the poor wretch might be tempted to stray.
Jericho’s amusement, however, was short-lived when he spotted Archibald Ricketts elbowing his way through the crowded doorway, hastily ramming his shirttail into his trousers.
“Hush now, Ida Lou,” the peddler grumbled. “Things ain’t the way they look. I was just—”
“I know blamed well what you were just, you old fool! Ever’ time you sober up enough to find the flap of yer britches, you go chasing after the first bitch in heat that twitches her tail in front of your nose!”
Roughly two dozen pairs of eyes swung back and forth between the two contenders. Bets were placed. “Half eagle says the old battle-ax has ‘im hog-tied and outta here in two shakes of a coon’s tail,” offered a lumberman fresh in from the swamp.
“Got me a V-spot says he’ll land ‘er one on the chops,” challenged someone else.
“You see who that of sot was a-bedding down with?” demanded one of the three men who had tried to break into Sara’s room two nights earlier. “Whooee! Feller must be hung like Baily’s boar hog!”
Tightening her lips, Sara forced herself to ignore the crude remarks as she hurried down the hall after her brand-new husband. The way he had jumped out of bed and rushed from the room, she was afraid something dreadful had happened. A fire or a robbery—or perhaps that awful cholera epidemic that had started way up in Canada and worked its way south had broken out among the guests.
She burst into the lobby just in time to see her husband being grabbed by the ear by a fire-breathing female who was ranting loudly about no-good husbands who leave their wives and nine children to go sniffing after every hellfired strumpet that comes long.
Wives? Children?
Merciful saints, where was she going with Archibald?
“Wait!” cried Sara as she shoved her way through the crowd. “Archibald, what—”
It was Jericho who caught her by the arm and pulled her against his side just as the pair disappeared through the front door. He was holding a rumpled note that looked depressingly familiar. “Shh,” he said softly. “She’s his wife.”
“His what? Do you mean to tell me my Archibald is that woman’s husband?”
“Not to mention being the father of her nine children.”
“But—”
“Shh, we’ll talk about it later. Right now, I expect you could do with a restorative.”
But Sara didn’t need a restorative. What she needed was the answer to a very simple question. “But—but if she’s his wife, then what does that make me?”
*
Some twenty minutes later, Sara was huddled in the unbroken straight chair, staring blindly at the cold fireplace, when someone rapped on her door. “It’s not locked,” she said dully. What good would a lock do now? The damage was already done.
Early morning sunlight glinted on the dusty windowpane as Jericho let himself inside with a bottle and two glasses. “Drink this,” he said after pouring her a tot of brandy and another for himself.
Numbly, she took the glass, downed the contents as if it were a dose of salts and gasped for breath. Then, wiping her stinging eyes with the tail of her wrapper, she resumed staring at the cold hearth as fire blossomed in her belly. What was she going to do now? Merciful saints alive, she was ruined. All her plans—her sensible plans to make a home for herself and Maulsie and Big Simon—what would become of them now?
For all she knew, she might even be carrying Archibald’s child.
“Sara?”
