A Lady in Defiance (12 page)

She eyed his hat and noted the embroidered military insignia.
“You were in the military?”

“Aye. The Royal Scots, an infantry regiment. I’ve kept a
fondness for the bonnet.”

“I hope we’ll get the chance to chat about Scotland
sometime.” Rebecca nearly bit her tongue off, aghast at her boldness, but she
couldn’t stop herself. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”

Ian’s eyes widened just a bit, then he smiled warmly and the
spirit of it glowed in his eyes. Rebecca felt her heart trip over itself. “I
would like very much to tell ye about my home. Perhaps at our next meeting I
could share some of my favorite books with ye about Sco’land’s history?”

“I’d like that.” Rebecca thought her voice sounded shaky and
kicked herself for it.

They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer then he
nodded and headed down the walk. Closing the door slowly, Rebecca heard him
whistling a lighthearted tune. As she made her way back to the kitchen, head
down, lost in thought, she wondered if she had imagined his lingering gazes and
attentive conversation. Was it all in her head? She was so old, surely he
couldn’t−

“My, my, my.” Startled by Naomi’s voice, Rebecca swung her
head up and saw her sisters standing in the kitchen’s entrance, watching her,
arms folded across their chests. Wearing a teasing smirk, Naomi nudged Hannah
in the ribs. “I think Rebecca has developed a sudden interest in Scotland.” But
the smile faded. “We just need to make sure he has better manners than Mr.
McIntyre.”

~~~

“Well, that’s the last of it.” Flushed and a bit sweaty,
Naomi dropped a box on the bed and looked around this warehouse space they
called their bedroom. After several steady days of unpacking, the second floor,
like the kitchen, was now peppered with piles of boxes. Hannah and Rebecca
stood amongst a grouping of open trunks and topless boxes. Hands resting on
their hips, their disappointment was plain. Naomi patted the container she had
just deposited. “This is a box of John’s shirts.”

The mention of his name dropped a palpable gloom on the
three. Desperate not to give in to the pain, Naomi forced herself to cheer up,
for her sisters’ sakes. “You said it yourself, Rebecca. We’ll just have to sew
her some clothes.”

Hannah’s face brightened. “I did find this…” She dug through
a trunk and came up with an arm load of powder blue muslin. “I bought this just
before Christmas because I wanted to make a few spring dresses out of it.” For
a moment, her face clouded, perhaps mourning the lost dreams of a future bright
with innocence.

Rebecca reached over and brushed the fabric with a loving
hand. “I’ll make you something nice out of it. You’ll be beautiful.”

A look passed between the two that Naomi almost envied.
Rebecca and Hannah had always shared a special relationship, especially since
the death of Rebecca’s daughter. Naomi knew she had no one to blame but
herself. She’d never been very good at letting her sisters in. She’d always
felt the need to
protect
them, like some kind of guard dog.

If she was their rock, then John had been hers. How she had
come to give him every inch of her soul, she would never know. Only with him
could she comfortably soften and show weakness. And now she was floundering,
drowning in uncertainty and grief. Her anger over their current circums¬tances
was a kind of anchor, steadying this swaying, rolling thing she called her
life…or so she tried to believe.

Deciding to delve into that at a later time, Naomi looked
around the room again. “I don’t recall seeing the sewing kit.”

Rebecca gasped and slapped her forehead. “Oh, no, it was with
the pinafores and baby clothes. I thought I was being so smart putting it with
them in case they needed altering.”

Naomi crossed her arms, unhappy with their next step. “You
know what that means then.”

Hannah hugged her material close. “We have to go out…down the
street…”

Rebecca grimaced. “To the mercantile. Dare we try the journey
without the marshal?”

“Yes.” Naomi straightened up, refusing to be intimidated by
this town. “We can’t expect him to be with us every second. It’s ten o’clock in
the morning. Based on the way this town revels every night, folks here probably
sleep till noon.” The steady sound of traffic and voices from the street be¬low
argued against that, but the volume was less than it would be later in the day.
“I wanted to look at the buck stove any way. We’re going to need some heat up
here and that one lonesome fireplace isn’t going to do the trick.”

~~~

Hannah walked behind Naomi and Rebecca, her eyes roaming all
over the town. The street was far less crowded than it had been on their
arrival. Still, she was impressed by the busy, but industrious, pace of
Defiance this morning. Everyone was doing something in a hurry: driving a wagon
at a no-nonsense clip; packing a mule with practiced efficiency; ham¬mering,
measuring and sawing with deliberation, or engaging in important, animated
conversations. The air positively vibrated with the sounds of squeaking wagons,
creaking leather, whinnying horses and boisterous male voices.

The folks who were up at this hour were hitting the day hard
and fast. Almost every one of them, though, took time to stare. Two painters
above them on a scaffold watched the girls boldly and one let out a catcall.
His partner tagged him forcefully in the gut and apparently lashed him with
some stern words. Immediately they went back to slapping paint on the
de¬fenseless building.

“At least they seem...” Naomi chewed her lip, “more reserved
today.”

Naomi and Rebecca told Hannah that on their first trip to the
mercantile they had been stared at with much more brazenness, until the cat
fight, of course.  Though today the men deliberately grazed the girls with
arms and elbows without so much as an “excuse me,” the unbridled bravado was
gone and the staring was more surreptitious. Had Mr. McIntyre been true to his
word and made it clear they were three women not on the menu in Defiance, Hannah
wondered.

As they strolled along, she decided she didn’t feel exactly
safe, but at least less threatened. Accepting that as good enough, she looked
ahead at the general store, two buildings up on the opposite side of the
street.  Smiling, she read aloud the sign painted on the store’s false
front. “Boot & Company. Meat market, storage, groceries, liquors,
cigars…Well, I guess that just about sums up the basic necessities, doesn’t
it.”

Rebecca chuckled. “All the comforts of home.”

Hannah followed her sisters as they abruptly crossed to the
other side of the street. Rebecca let Naomi pull ahead just a step, then looked
over her shoulder at Hannah. “I don’t think Naomi wanted to cross over from the
saloon−”

Her explanation was interrupted by a deep, silky femi¬nine
voice calling out to them. “Welcome to Defiance, girls!”

Squinting in the bright morning light, the sisters looked
across the street to the second floor windows of the saloon. Perched in the
sills, enjoying their morning coffee, four women stared down at them. Wearing
no more than camisoles, petticoats and rouge, they watched the sisters
intently, like a pride of lions planning a hunt.

A negro girl shifted as if to see them better, causing her
camisole strap to slide down, exposing a scandalous amount of flesh. “How do
you like our town so far?” she called, not bothering to replace the strap.

“Maybe we could get together sometime,” the woman sharing the
win¬dow with her added in a husky, Hispanic voice. “We haven’t met for our
monthly quilting bee yet.”

That was met with rich laughter from the negro girl, and a
red-headed girl sitting in the other window. However, the young woman sitting
with the redhead did not laugh. Hannah recognized her as the frail, skinny
blonde at whom she had waved the other day. She looked desperately
uncomfortable with the whole situation.

Rebecca smacked Naomi on the arm. “Don’t look at them. That’s
just begging for trouble.”

“And Lord knows we don’t want any more of that.” Naomi’s
reply carried a steely, sarcastic edge to it that concerned Hannah. Her sister
had sounded so cold and defiant.

Apparently desperate to avoid being part of another street
spectacle, Rebecca shoved Hannah and Naomi into the store, to the parting tease
of, “Let’s have tea and crumpets tomorrow. We’ll bring the crumpets!”

~~~

What is a crumpet,
Rose wondered as she watched the dark haired
gringa
quickly shut the door behind her sisters. She didn’t really care enough to ask,
but Iris told her anyway from her perch in the other window.

“I don’t know exactly what a crumpet is, but I had an
Englishman a few months back who said he loves’em and they shouldn’t be eaten
with any¬thing but Darjeeling tea.”

Lily, the negro girl, sitting in the same window with Rose,
looked at her Latin co-worker and rolled her eyes. “I keep telling Iris to pay
less attention to the customers and just do her job, but she never listens…at
least not to us.”

“Well, I’m impressed that she could remember the word
Darjeeling.” Daisy’s mousy opinion, offered from the other window, grated on
Rose’s nerves. The little wretch
always
had something nice to say,
whether it was true or not.

Rose heard Iris smack something, probably her thigh, and
explode with laughter as bawdy as her fiery red hair. “You are a daisy, Daisy.
You always see the silver lining, unlike these other wenches.” Iris leaned into
the room so Rose could see her mildly disapproving expression.

Rose waved her away, bored with the discussion. She had
watched the
gringas
go into the store and wondered if she should go get
a look at them. McIntyre had told everyone to leave them alone…but there was no
harm in just looking.

Chapter
10

A fairly heavy crowd of men in search of a liquid breakfast
did not prevent McIntyre from seeing Emilio slip in. He wouldn’t have paid him
any attention except for the fact that the boy headed upstairs instead of to
his own room. Puzzling only a little over Emilio’s destination, he went back to
adding entries to his ledger, but with an uneasy tickle in the back of his
mind. As if by some sixth sense, he looked up a few minutes later to see Emilio
come back down and quickly ease his way out the front door.

Irritated, McIntyre bounced the pencil between his fingers.
Emilio did his best to avoid Rose. Her temper was like a loaded gun with a hair
trigger and the boy was her favorite target. So why would he be seeking her
out…?

When Rose, Lily, Iris and Daisy, mostly dressed, followed
close on the boy’s heels, he knew something was awry. He dropped his eyes to
his ledger again, but listened to the girls whisper as they attempted to leave
without drawing attention to themselves. A few of the men in the saloon greeted
them; they hushed them up with stern whispers and slipped outside.

Curious now, McIntyre rose and went to his window. Moving the
lace curtain aside, he watched Rose and her cleavage-baring entourage march
across the street and invade the mercantile. He frowned, wondering what he was
missing. Probably nothing, he told himself, returning to his work. He didn’t
have time to babysit everyone in town. He picked up his pencil and started
writing again.

Once in the store, the sisters were pleasantly relieved to
find it empty of customers. Rebecca and Hannah wandered over to the sewing
section and started perusing buttons and bolts of cloth. Naomi strode to the
back of the store to appraise two stoves on display. The proprietor, an
astonishingly tall, balding man, who compensated for the lost hair by sporting
a huge beard, shoved a pencil into his black apron and hurried over to her.
“Because of the crowd, I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself when you came
in the other day.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Luke Boot. Mr. McIntyre told me
to help you ladies get anything you might need.”

“I’m Naomi Miller.” She shook his hand and nodded towards her
sisters, introducing them by name. The girls greeted him from the other side of
the store then fell back to studying buttons and a book of patterns.

“I heard you’re gonna need several stoves,” he told her
turning back to the display. “Are you going to put one in every room or just in
the suites? One in every room is gonna be a big order.”

“Yes, but we haven’t made that decision just yet. I’d like
one for our sleeping quarters now, such as they are. As soon as I see the final
blueprints from Mr. Donoghue, I will place an order. How long will they take to
get here?”

“Well,” he scratched his head, apparently figuring the ins
and outs. “It usually takes about six weeks to get supplies in from San
Francisco. Give or take.”

She peeked at the tag hanging from the buck stove and gasped
over the inflated price. Annoyed, she stepped over to look at the cooking
stove, a beautiful, modern appliance with double ovens, six burners, glossy red
paint and white porcelain fixtures on it. It shined like a new penny and Naomi
was impressed. “How much for both stoves?”