And One Rode West (38 page)

“I wasn’t angry, Christa.”

“I—”

“I know, Christa. My God, what kind of a wretch do you think me? Nathaniel has covered my back for years. He’s one of my best friends. Did you think me so low that I wouldn’t defend him myself?”

“But it wasn’t just for Nathaniel. It was for him and for Tyne and Janey and for so many other people. I’ve never heard anything so incredible as her attitude! She’s a northerner—”

Hell, yes, Jeremy thought, Clara Jennings was a northerner. Christa didn’t understand that many of the men and women in the North had never seen Negroes, just as many men and women in the North didn’t understand that more than half of the southern boys in the Confederacy had never owned a slave in their lives.

“The war has been won,” he said quietly, staring at
the dark canvas above them, “but real peace and freedom will probably take decades.”

“Jeremy—”

She broke off.

Jeremy rose up on an elbow. She was trying to apologize, and to thank him. It was a unique experience.

And if he reached for her, she might even respond. Out of gratitude.

But tonight he was weary. Riding out to the scene of the Comanche raid had sickened his spirit, and he was tired.

And he wanted more than gratitude from his wife. He didn’t want her paying off any imagined debts. He wanted magic again. The kind he had touched last night.

“Go to sleep, Christa,” he told her.

He sensed the stiffening within her once again. He turned his back to her, closing his eyes tightly.

She smelled like roses, sweet and delicious. Her hair fell in a cascade of ebony silk, enough to entangle him straight to hell and back. When he had come in, she had been so incredibly beautiful, curled upon the chair, innocent in her sleep, all her defenses down. She had appeared so vulnerable. He had wanted to take her into his arms. Cradle her. Love her.

The scent of roses still teased his nose.

He clenched his eyes more tightly shut. Not tonight. There would be no battles fought, no peace discovered. He did not have to have her. He had warned her that she was not irresistible.

Then why did her scent haunt him so? Why did he long to turn to her? Bury his face against her neck and the sweet-smelling silk of her hair and forget the frontier and the death that stalked it.

He grit down hard on his teeth.

Who am I taunting? Her? Myself?

The answer was easy. He was the one in torment.

But then, he was the one who had so foolishly fallen in love, lost his heart.

And still he lay there, angered by his torment, his back to her.

Pride. What a foolish vice. She lay beside him. She had waited for his touch. And just last night, it seemed, they had evoked the angels when they had made love.

Damn his pride. He would hold her again.

At last he turned, yet when he did, it seemed that she slept again. He felt her breathing, slow, deep, and easy. It was very dark. He smoothed some of the hair from her face and felt her cheeks.

They were damp.

Christa crying? She didn’t cry. Camerons didn’t cry. The men or the women. She had told him so. She had cried wretchedly and alone before leaving Cameron Hall, but not a tear had appeared in her eyes since. She was fierce, she was strong.

“What in hell is this we have made for one another?” he whispered softly aloud. He slipped his arms around her and pulled her close against him, holding her as she slept. His hand fell beneath her breast. Her back lay against his chest, his hips curved around her derriere.

The ache of his desire was not eased.

But something within his heart was. She slipped beside him so easily. Curved against him naturally.

It was good just to hold her.

Last night she had felt their child moving. There would be a new life created. He shuddered, remembering Jenny.

Jenny had died. With all his strength, he had to protect Christa. He had brought her to Indian territory. He should send her home.

But he could not send her away. He could only keep her safe. By his life, he silently vowed to do so.

He pulled her more tightly against him. He smoothed back her hair.

The night passed on.

Somewhere, a wolf howled.

In time, he slept.

Seventeen

Long, seemingly endless hours of rain and very hard travel kept Christa from seeing much of Jeremy over the next several days. Despite the rain they held a steady pace, and although he seemed not to choose to share any of his important decisions with her, James Preston was polite enough to always keep her abreast of what was going on. Captain Clark had moved on, being one of the messengers of the West, so he was no longer around to entertain them. But many of the other men were very kind, and despite her words with Sherman, they didn’t seem to hold anything against her. Sergeant Jaffe had pointed a few men out to her, and to her surprise she learned that they had been wearing gray uniforms until just a short time ago. “Oh, we’ve an interesting army out here now, ma’am, that we do. A tough one! Half of these fellows have just spent four years shooting at other white men. They aren’t going to bat an eye when they raise their guns to shoot at red men.”

Christa didn’t find that much of an encouraging thought. From the little that she did know about her husband, she knew that Jeremy was often appalled by the way his own army dealt with Indians. She knew that the reason he was so determined to move on was
that he wanted to reach, occupy, fortify, and hold Fort Jacobson before harsh weather fell upon them.

For three nights they found high ground by the river when it was very late. The tents were not set up, and Christa spent the nights with Celia—and a parcel of the pointer puppies—in their wagon. By the fourth day the rain had abated. They passed a reservation of Indians, and Jaffe told her that they were Caddo Indians. They were “half-civilized” according to the sergeant, and Christa dismounted from her horse, intrigued and determined to buy whatever they were selling. One of the women was wearing a long cotton dressing gown in very pretty cotton. One of the men was adorned with a brightly colored kerchief about his head. A little child—very little, Christa thought, perhaps just a bit more than a year old—came running out and crashed into her legs. She laughed, a pain touching her heart as she thought of how he reminded her of her nephews and her niece. She scooped up the little boy and swung him around as she had once done so often with John Daniel and the others. The child, like any child—white, black, or red—let out a peal of laughter. The Caddo woman smiled slowly. Christa returned the child, and with Jaffe’s help pointed out what she wanted to buy. They would soon be into an area where the majority of the nearby Indians would be Comanche and Kiowa, and neither tribe was an agricultural one. They followed the buffalo and made war upon their enemies, and supplemented their diets with berries and forage off the land. From the Caddo she bought numerous vegetables.

A number of the men were there, too, buying what they could. Thanks to Jaffe and some of the other cooks, Jeremy’s men ate well, but army rations themselves were still rather sparse. A private in the army was paid thirteen dollars a month, Jaffe had told Christa. He was also allotted a weekly issue of salt
pork, dry beans, green coffee beans, brown sugar, soap, and wheat flour. They were supposed to receive fresh meat twice a week, but since they had been hunting quite successfully—and since the buffalo kill—they had done much better than that. As far as fresh fruit and vegetables went, they were on their own. Even a number of the men who were known to gamble their pay before they received it were carefully buying up corn and greens from the Caddo.

They had started up on the march again long before Christa heard from Celia that Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Jennings were back in Mrs. Brooks’s ambulance praying for Christa’s soul. “They’re very upset about the way you played with the Indian child,” Celia told her.

“You’d think they’d complain about the snakes and tarantulas instead of me for a while!” Christa muttered.

“Oh, they complain about those too!” Celia assured her, and laughed. Christa was glad of Celia’s amusement. She had taken to the hardships of the last days very well. She was becoming a very well-adjusted cavalry wife.

They traveled well over twenty miles that day and camped on the Washita River. Nathaniel and Robert Black Paw had set up her portable home, and she was brewing coffee just outside the tent when she paused. It was dusk, but she could see that a cavalry officer had come into the encampment leading a group of three Indians.

There was something different about them, and it gave her pause. She rose slowly from the campfire, staring at the newcomers.

The night was cool yet they wore no shirts. They were dressed in high skin boots and breechclouts. There were paintings upon their horses in red, and their faces were also streaked with the color. The lead rider was wearing a headdress created from the head
and horns of a buffalo. There was nothing civilized or tame about them. The very way that they rode seemed to speak of their freedom on the plains and of their fierce determination to cling to that freedom.

“Robert—” She turned quickly to her husband’s Indian scout.

“Comanche,” he said softly. He had been watching the newcomers too.

Her heart seemed to slam against her chest. “Why are they here? Were they captured? That can’t be, the way that they are riding. How do they dare ride into the camp like that?”

Robert shrugged. “They’ve come to see the colonel. For now, they’ve come in peace. You do not need to be afraid.”

She nodded. The Indians dismounted from their horses in front of the headquarters tent and disappeared within it.

Christa tried to settle into the tent but she couldn’t do so. There was little for her to do. Robert had caught a prairie hare for their supper and quietly told her that he would tend to the meal himself. The bedding was arranged, the tent was comfortable. Celia was alone at last with her beloved James, and she certainly wasn’t going to go pay a visit to Mrs. Brooks or Mrs. Jennings. Some of the other wives were very nice, but she only felt really close to Celia.

Nathaniel and Robert, ever concerned about her comfort, saw to it that after the long days of rain and mud the hip tub was brought in. She did relish her bath; she had felt almost as caked with mud as the earth itself.

She almost wished that Jeremy would come in while she was in it, since finding her in a bath tended to give him an urge toward action rather than conversation.

She was sure that she wanted to be held. To give in
once again. To touch that shining pinnacle of paradise that came even here, in the wilderness.

She was so nervous about the night to come, because she had barely spoken with Jeremy since he had returned from his ride out on the plain. He hadn’t touched her that night, and with the hardships of their ride, he had been a stranger since. It seemed that all she could remember was that he had called her “half-dead,” but she had surely given him all that she had to give.

She left the bath, dressed, paced the tent, then sat at the edge of the bed. Jeremy still hadn’t come. She leapt up suddenly. He was usually angry with her anyway—it didn’t matter much if he wanted her with him or not now that the Comanche party had come. She was longing to see the Indians who kept even the most seasoned soldiers on edge.

She threw a shawl around her shoulders and left her own tent behind, heading straight for the headquarters tent. Private Darcy was on duty outside of it.

“Ma’am—” he began, ready to stop her.

She waved a hand his way. “It’s all right, Mr. Darcy. I’m sure my husband won’t mind.”

Her husband would mind, but short of holding her back physically, there was nothing Darcy could do since she was on her way into the tent. She paused just inside the flaps, surveying the scene.

Captain Clark was the white man who had ridden in with the Indians. He was standing to the right of and just behind Jeremy. Two of the braves stood to the side of the desk. One of the Indians was speaking with her husband, and in an excellent English.

“It was just months ago when we gathered, thousands of us, Comanche, Apache, Kiowa, Pawnee, and more, on the banks of the Washita, hearing about the things that would be offered to us by the Great White Father of the Confederacy.”