Daughter of the Sword (24 page)

Rolf invited the performers to a late meal, which he'd arranged for ahead of time. Melissa, sitting on one side of him, prettily returned his champagne toasts, though Deborah, Thos, and Sara drank milk.

“I hear you received a most fascinating sketch pad from the other Mr. Hunter,” Melissa said to Deborah. A shawl draped loosely around her did nothing to conceal the molding of her legs beneath the silk. “Do please bring it by, my dear. I'd like to see what he discovered on the way to Santa Fe.” She gave a limpid sigh, smiling at Mr. Montmorency, now scrubbed till his freckles shone, and obviously entranced by her. “Such intriguing men, artists, but highly undependable, I fear.”

Rolf snorted. “Undependable? Dear madam, you don't know my brother! All discipline, control, and duty! He should have stayed in the army and would to God that he had! I could have made this trip then without his shadow over me even when he's in California!”

“Dear Rolf! Is it so hard to be a younger son?”

“I don't mind that. What hurts is being a younger brother!”

Melissa laughed softly. “To someone like Dane, I can see that it might.” Her wide blue eyes slipped to Deborah. “But he
is
gone, and you seem to be most adequately filling his place.”

“That's right,” toasted Mr. Montmorency. “Here's to constant lovers!”

“It's late.” Deborah pushed back her chair and rose. In that moment she almost hated Melissa, with her sweetly mocking innuendos.

Rolf glanced at his ornate gold watch. “
We had
better be going. I told the boy at the livery stable to have the sled out front at eleven o'clock sharp.” Rising, he made a careless gesture to the waiter. “Please see that these ladies and gentlemen have everything they want, and I'll settle with you tomorrow.”

“Everything?” queried the waiter, glancing at the champagne.

“Everything,” Rolf said carelessly. He bowed to the performers. “My compliments once more for a most spirited entertainment!”

He escorted Deborah out to a chorus of thanks and good wishes. The horses were waiting, jingling their bells. Rolf gave the boy a coin and helped Deborah in while Thos assisted Sara.

“You've got style!” Thos said with an admiring wistfulness that grated on Deborah. “You do everything smooth and gracious as a lord!”

“Money helps,” Deborah couldn't keep from saying.

Sara sputtered into her lap robe.

Thos said, “'Borah!”

But Rolf laughed. “Why, Miss Deborah, I'm glad to hear you say that. It betokens the first faint emergence of realism I've detected in you! If it thrives, who knows what may happen?”

Snow crunched under the horses' hooves. The moon possessed the silver rolling prairie stretching to where it melted into the crystal night. If only Dane were here.…

Rolf cast her a grimly merry look. Disconcertingly, he said, “He's not here, my sweet. But I am. And I have for you the most elegant present you can imagine.”

“I'd prefer that you didn't give me presents.”

“But I prefer to.”

“If it's too fine or costly, I can't accept it.”

“It cost almost nothing. You might say it was a labor of love.”

Deborah gave up the joust. She stiffened as Thos leaned forward and said eagerly, “Did you hear what some people were saying at intermission? Fiddling Williams, that rascally pro-slave judge, sent two Free State men to jail in Fort Scott. Montgomery got together a rescue force. John Brown turned up and was for burning down Fort Scott, but Montgomery just wanted the prisoners loose—and he got 'em! Captured Fort Scott and broke out the Free Staters.”

“Then it's all over,” said Deborah, relieved.

Thos shook his head. “Not by a long shot! Brown's going to invade Missouri!”

“What?”
she demanded.

“Well, he's getting men together—going into Missouri to bring out slaves, maybe horses.”

“Helping slaves get away's one thing; taking horses is plain stealing!”

“Doggone it, 'Borah! Brown'll sell the horses to help escaping slaves get north and on their feet!”

“It's still stealing.”

Thos gave a grunt of exasperation. “That's like saying killing in war's murder!”

“Some people say it is, though I think it may have to be done.” Deborah thought of the Bowie knife under her mattress, the frightening responsibility she'd undertaken when accepting it. She clenched her hands as she tried to reach the twin she loved and feared for. “Thos, you may have to do something awful because of what would happen otherwise, but you don't have to pretty it up and pretend it's good or heroic or anything but plain, ugly have-to!”

“You just don't understand!”

“I do. Thiefing's thiefing, killing's killing, and why they're done doesn't make them glorious.”

“That's right,” confirmed Sara. “Men are always thinking honor, big name, fighting. Women think about an empty bed, children without fathers, winters with no food, no one to care for the aged.”

“Seems to me women like uniforms,” thrust Thos. “They flirt and fall in love with soldiers even if they do an about-face, weep and wail, and don't want them to go to war!” He made a sound of disgust. “Women want it both ways! A strong fighting man who'll stay home for their sakes and plow or have a business!”

Even Deborah and Sara had to laugh at that, but when Rolf spoke, his tone was scathingly serious. “Most women may be like that, Thos, but your sister isn't! She's a stern judge, like her Old Testament namesake, and has no patience with hot blood. According to her lights, El Cid was a brigand, Roland a fool, Siegfried a bully, Julius Caesar a disaster, and knights errant a plague of grasshoppers consuming the labor of honest peasants! No use in waving pennants or banners at her—she'd use them for babies' diapers or scrubbing cloths!”

That stung, though perhaps because there was truth in it. Deborah remembered the flag waving high and free on the Fourth of July and her eyes misted. To her, in spite of everything, it stood for liberty, for faith in man, for justice. For these, she'd given up her love; for these she'd taken the knife; for these she'd die.

“I might wrap a baby in the flag if there were nothing else,” she said, “or use it to bind up wounds. But it means as much to me as it does to any man.” She turned on her brother. “And I still say, Thos, that—”

“Thiefing's thiefing!” he groaned. “All right! Maybe I won't take horses.”

“Thos, you won't join those raids across the border! That's what we hated the Missourians for!”

He turned provokingly gay. “If Sara won't marry me soon, I may do a lot of things!”

“Hush!” blurted Sara. There was a laughing scuffle. At the end of it, she said desperately, fondly, “What can we do, Deborah? One week Thos says we can't marry because he'll probably have to go to war. I want to marry him then. The next week he wants to marry, but I say no, your parents won't like it. And besides, how can I marry white, desert my people? We turn like those new machines, those windmills!”

Deborah reached back and squeezed her friend's small, capable hand. “It's a time of shifting winds, but it won't always be this way.” Pray that it won't. “And you know we'll all welcome you into the family. Mother and Father know you and Thos have been keeping company for months. Most couples would've been married long ago!”

“Really?” murmured Rolf. “Surely, Miss Deborah, you and I've been publicly together for the same length of time. Am I to take it that your reputation will be compromised if we don't marry?”

Aghast, Deborah stared at him. Because he'd never directly asked her out, because she went so Sara and Thos could, she'd never, incredibly enough, realized that people would assume Rolf was courting her.

Keeping company for pure amusement's sake was frowned upon. When a couple started being seen together frequently, it was expected to lead to marriage. People could and did change their minds, of course, but a young man who had a succession of attachments became known as wild and was banned by the parents of respectable girls, while a woman who repeatedly gave her swains “the mitten” acquired a reputation as a jilting Jezebel.

All this shot through Deborah's head, but she was more annoyed than dismayed once she faced the undeniable fact that, in community eyes, she most certainly was being courted. “I'm not that worried about my reputation,” she said fiercely. “The only man I want to marry is Dane. He'd understand perfectly how this has been!”

“I wonder if you do,” mused Rolf.

Deborah ignored that. “Don't hurry,” she advised Sara. “But don't wait all your life, either, because you're afraid you might be wrong. If you make a mistake, you can usually recover. But if you never try, what can you do?”

They were drawing up at the smithy. Eyes shining in the moonlight, Sara hugged Deborah. “You—you'd want me for a sister-in-law?”

“You are like family, whether you marry my harum-scarum brother or not!”

“Oh, stop talking like a matriarch of the tribe!” growled Thos. “You're exactly two minutes older than me!”

He took Sara to the cabin. While he was gone, Rolf watched Deborah, but she, feeling his gaze, afraid to meet it, stared over the dazzling blue and silver snow and at the ghostly trees along the river.

“Have you heard about the Medary Ball in Lecompton on Christmas Eve?” he asked. “It's a cotillion party at the American House to honor the new governor. May I take you?”

It was his first direct invitation. She took it as a kind of testing. “Thank you, no,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I—I never realized before what people would be thinking.”

He said “roughly, Are you afraid of that—or that it might come true?”

Thos came back before she could answer.

xi

Thos brought in a wild turkey, which was, the day before Christmas, basted over a pan to catch the drippings while mincemeat and pumpkin pies took turns baking in the Dutch oven. When the turkey was nearly done, Thos maneuvered it off the spit into the pan, and before it finished cooking on the grate, Deborah stuffed it with cornbread seasoned with drippings and onions.

Mother had stayed home that day to help with the cooking and have her hair washed. She leaned over the tub placed on a bench while Judith soaped her thick, soft brown hair and Deborah poured slightly heated rain water over it till it squeaked and shined.

Judith rubbed it as dry as possible and worked out the tangles with painstaking care, a task that had always been Deborah's. Mother's hair was fine, hung to her hips, and she was so tender-scalped that getting all the snarls out was time-consuming; still, Deborah felt a bit excluded and just a tinge jealous, feelings that she sternly rebuked. If Judith remembered her own mother, she never mentioned her. It was likely they'd been parted long ago. Terrible for human beings to be treated like stock animals!

“Shall I wash your hair?” Deborah asked Judith. “There's plenty of soft water. We'd best use it up before it gets messy from sitting in the barrel.”

When Judith smiled, which was seldom, her face changed from taut, tigerish beauty to glowing, hesitant sweetness. “That be good, Deborah. Got to wash your hair, too, so we'll all look nice.”

“Good grief!” cried Thos, reaching for his sheepskin vest. “Soap, vinegar,
three
women prinking! I'm going out to chop wood!”

But that night after supper—the festive meal would be dinner after tomorrow morning's church service—when the family gathered around the pianoforte to sing carols, Thos seemed to be watching his mother and sister with unusual attention, as if he were really seeing them, not taking them for granted. The women had tied up their fluffily unruly hair with ribbon: Mother's blue, Judith's green, Deborah's yellow.

“You all look so pretty tonight,” he said as the notes of “Joy to the World” lingered. “I'll remember this forever.”

“Cross your heart?” Deborah teased in their old twin fashion.

“Cross my heart.” He smiled, but there was a seriousness about him that troubled Deborah. “If Sara were here, it'd be absolutely perfect.”

Mother rounded on him with surprising energy. “Well, why isn't she here?” You know she's welcome! She could share Deborah's bed, go to church with us tomorrow, and spend the day!”

“She could?” Thos sucked in his breath. “I'm going to the smithy tomorrow, but if I'd known—”

“You might have asked.” Mother's tone had an unusual edge, and her gaze was reproving. She glanced at Josiah, who cleared his throat.

“Your mother and I have been wondering, Thos, why you don't ask Sara to be your wife. We'd be grievously disappointed if it's because she's Indian.”

Thos jumped, as if branded, going first red, then pale. “Father, how could you think that?” he demanded in a high, strained voice. “I
have
asked her, even though I know it's not fair because of the way it looks like war.”

Deborah put her hand protectively over Thos's wrist. She said with a chuckle, “Besides, Sara's not terribly eager to mix her Shawnee blood with white!”

That rocked the elder Whitlaws. Judith struggled with but couldn't repress what would have been a giggle in anyone else. Josiah and Leticia looked at each other and exchanged rather shamefaced smiles. “We're sorry, Thos,” said Mother, reaching up to touch his cheek. “You
are
young and perhaps you should wait, but do bring Sara over tomorrow and let us start getting better acquainted.”

“I—well, that's something else I've got to tell you!” Thos shoved back his auburn fleece and swallowed hard. “I have to leave tomorrow, go straight on from seeing Sara.”

“Leave?” cried Deborah.

Mother and Father seemed too shocked to speak for a moment. Then Father spoke carefully. “What do you mean, son?”