Deep Purple (20 page)

CHAPTER 25

"
Y
ou're spoiling her," Catherine said. “Gifts for her birthday, Christmas, even the Feast of San Agustin. Jessie’s come to expect them from you, Sherrod.”

Sherrod lifted the two-year-old from his knee, where he had been bouncing her in the imitation of a hor
se ride. “She needs a pony, Catherine,” he said, his gaze lingering on the cherub-like child. “With Law’s yellow locks and your gray-green eyes, though they appear greener than yours, I admit the child is extraordinarily beautiful. However, it is your dimpled smile that charmed the beholder. But most importantly, she’ll never ride as well as you if you don’t put her on a horse.”

Catherine arched a brow. “
And I suppose her next gift will be a horse?” she asked, smiling.

“
If you had a place to keep the horse, it would be.” He paused, then added, “You do have a place to keep the horse, Catherine. Lucy has been dead six months now. And Jessie needs a father.” His words accelerated, as if he knew she would stop him. “With Abigail and Brigham away at school and Father getting feeble, the Stronghold is lonely. He took her hand and would not let her disengage it as she usually did. “Say you’ll marry me, darling.”

“
I’m already married, Sherrod,” she said, turning her head away.

He jerked her wrist, pulling her around
to face him. “Dammit, Catherine, don’t you think Law would be back now if he were alive? Nothing would keep him from you! I know, because I love you, also.”

The intensity in Sherrod
’s voice and his piercing gaze made her at last face the truth she had been avoiding. Her mind reviewed the years—how many, five?—since she had come to Arizona to find a husband. Now she was getting a second chance . . . not just any man, but a handsome, loving husband who also adored Jessie; not just a home but the fabled Stronghold.

Her decision to come west to the Arizona Territory had been a wise one. She had truly been blessed in those five years.

Her free hand came up to caress Sherrod's jaw. “Thank you, Sherrod, for what you're offering me. But Law asked me to wait. And if I have to, I’ll wait forever.”

Sherrod took Catherine out often, as often as he could come into Tucson. Elizabeth did not approve, of course. She pointed out that with Don Francisco bedridden following a heart attack, he was needed more than ever at the Stronghold. His mother was right, but, like his stepbrother, he supposed, he could not rid himself of his love for Catherine.

She continued to teach, even as her health dwindled, and she would not hear of him taking her to the doctors in St. Louis
. "They will not tell me anything, Sherrod, that any of the other doctors have not already told me,” she would say in that no-nonsense voice of hers. But he knew the malaria was damaging her heart and lungs.

He had to content himself with taking her and Je
ssie to the new open-air restaurant in the Carrillo Gardens for the novel dish ice cream, or to the Tivoli Theater when special acts came to the territory.

But most often Catherine asked him to drive her out alone into the desert, for her hacking cough emb
arrassed her when she was in public places. “I think there is nothing lovelier than the desert,” she told him. “Especially in the spring. Who could think that such a barren waste could produce such delicate blooms of beauty? And the sage—what a wondrous shade of deep purple!”

He would help her out of the buckboard, and they would sit quietly against a tree, usually a Joshua, if she could find one, and watch the sunset in all its glorious colors, more brilliant there on the desert than in any other place on
earth.

But by the fall, before Jessie
’s sixth birthday, Catherine had become so weak that he had to lift her from her bed into the wagon and carry her again to sit beneath a tree. She always took a handkerchief with her now. By the time the sun had set there would be the faint dark splotches on the material to match those last bright-red shafts of sunlight.

He pretended not to notice, for he knew she wanted no mention made of her dying.

Then one evening, when he had driven her out into the desert and settled her against the solid trunk of a Joshua, she mentioned her death herself for the first time. “I worry for Jessie. I know Sam and Atanacia would take good care of her, Sherrod . . . but they already have so many children—six, and another on the way. And then there is Cristo Rey . . . I want Jessica to know her heritage.”

She paused to cough spasmodically into her handkerchief, then continued, her voice more hoarse. “
I never told you, Sherrod . . . but your mother forced me to leave the Stronghold. She knew you were in love with me.”

He cradled Catherine in his arms so she would not see his surprise at the revelation. He would deal with his mother later.

Catherine grabbed at his hand now. “You must promise me that you won’t let your mother force Jessie to leave . . . as she did me.”

He caught her thin, bloodless hand to his cheek. “
I promise,” he rasped.

As if satisfied, Catherine
’s hand relaxed, and she closed her eyes. He was afraid she had died, so shallow was her breathing. But she opened her eyes again and said in what was hardly more than a whisper, “You know, Sherrod, Jessie asked me if death hurt.”

He knew Catherine had something she wanted to say, and he asked, “
What did you tell her?”

“
I told her that it was probably a quick little pain. Like a cactus spine in the finger.” Her voice drifted lower, lighter, so that he had to bend his head nearer to hear her words. “I couldn't tell Jessie that sometimes one even looks forward to death’s sweet pain . . . to the release of the emotional pain . . . the pain that has tormented me a hundred times more than . . . the malaria.”

But it wasn
’t malaria’s effects that were killing her, he thought. It was a broken heart. Beyond death, he knew, that’s where she would find the release she was looking for. That's where she would find her beloved.

But where would he find his beloved? Too soon Death would steal her from him. He enfolded her more closely against him, as if to withhold her from Death
’s talons. Dear God, but he loved her! Tears streamed silently down his cheeks as she began to speak again, slowly, painfully. And he was glad they both were looking ahead and not at each other.

“
You know . . . when I first came here . . . the landscape looked as unreal to me as plants on the moon . . . now it’s a part of me. Did you ever see the night-blooming flower, Sherrod?”

He was too choked to speak, and she continued, unaware of his agony. “
No, I don’t suppose you ever did,” she murmured. “I’ve only seen one once myself.”

His arm tightened abou
t her waist. Her hair was damp where his head rested above hers. “The sky . . .” Her breath, her words, were no more than the mere flutter of a butterfly’s wings. “It’s really quite beautiful, isn’t it . . . streaked with purple that way?”

Through shimmeri
ng eyes he watched the sunset change through its rainbow of colors before he allowed himself to look at her. How beautiful she was, her soft lips parted, her long lashes lying like fans on her cheeks. There was an iridescent quality in her emaciation.

With
an anguished cry he realized he was alone on the desert, and he buried his face against her breasts and wept.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

PART  I I

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

CHAPTER 26

1880

"
A
hh, please, woncha?" Bob Merckle pleaded. “Just once around the rink with me, huh, Jessie?”

Impatiently Jessie knotted the ties of her left roller skate, showing more of the booted ankle than was permissible, to the breathless delight of the teenage boy on the splintery bench beside her. He had sli
cked back his hair from the middle with pomade in honor of this monthly occasion, when Jessie Davalos came into town with her uncle. Three more boys, just waiting for the thirteen-year-old tawny-haired beauty to come onto the floor, skated aimlessly about the newly constructed rink with the rest of the crowd.

Jessie sighed and rose to her feet. “
Maybe later. Bob. I just want to practice skating on my own for a while, all right?” She rolled out onto the floor without even waiting for his reply and with a petulant grimace managed to forestall the other boys who hastened to catch up with her.

The floor was jammed with Tucson society trying desperately to remain erect. The rink had opened only that spring at Levin's Park, but the novel idea caught on as quickly
as the sailboat rentals on Silver Lake had five years earlier. People jostled for position on the floor. The enormous room was a din of children’s shouts, feminine squeaks, and male laughter.

Jessie found it almost impossible to enjoy herself. She loved th
e freedom her skates offered, but the noise, the people shoving, and always the ogling of the boys and men—she felt hemmed in, imprisoned. Yes, all in all, she much preferred the wild freedom of horseback riding.

Maneuvering around the couples locked arm i
n arm, she looked for the sight of Brig's dark head. Jumping jackasses, don't let him be skating with the prissy Fanny Roget! But, of course, he would be. Fanny’s parents were staying at the fashionable Omodorf Hotel, there from Denver to do business with Uncle Sherrod. Fanny’s father, some sort of a silver tycoon, wanted to discuss a mining venture, and Brig was stuck with the simpering young woman.

She saw Brig then. His arm was around Fanny
’s hourglass waist, his dark head bent near hers as they skated just ahead of her. Fanny turned her face up at Brig’s and laughed at something he said, and Jessie wanted to pull out the young woman’s bright-red hair by its roots. The way Brig smiled that slow, warm smile—he certainly didn't look stuck with Fanny Roget.

Why did he have to be so damned handsome, with all his father's dark dramatic looks? And why did he have to be seven years older than she? Brig, at twenty, treated her as his little sister. It wasn
’t as if they were really full-blooded cousins or anything. She had been in love with him since that first day she had come to the Stronghold when she was six.

Brig seemed to have always been there to take care of her
—to pick her up the first few times she fell off the calico pony Uncle Sherrod had given her and brush the grass out of her hair; to help her in the middle of the night with the odious math; and to teach her how to handle a rifle. Elizabeth had protested vehemently to Sherrod about that, but on the next day Brig had merely carted Jessie another ten miles out of sight and sound and resumed pitching the beer bottles in the air for her target practice.

It had been deliciously wonderful being alone with him out on the range, feeling his arms about her shoulders, his breath fanning her cheek, as he demonstra
ted the rifle’s mechanics. Then the summer before, Elizabeth had put a stop to her riding out with Brig. “You’re getting to be a young lady,” the old woman had said, looking pointedly at the breasts that had just begun to develop on Jessie's coltish body. Under Elizabeth's hooded glare, she had felt dirty about her budding femininity.

But she would not be made to feel dirty about what she felt for Brig, whose own body burst now with manhood. That would be her secret.

Abigail must have suspected. That same summer Abigail married the Jewish merchant Ira Ritz. Jessie always thought of the man as Mr. Big Nose. The day of the wedding Abigail pulled her aside, handing her the basket of sunflowers that Jessie, as flower girl, was to carry. “You look lovely, Jessie.”

“
I wish that I looked as lovely as you,” Jessie breathed, for to her the twenty-two-year-old bride was breathtaking, with the white lace and silk framing the soft blond hair and creamy skin. Jessie tugged at her own wild honeysuckle curls that tumbled in disorder about her shoulders. “I’ll never look pretty with hair like a horse’s mane and a body like a picket fence.”

Abigail laughed softly and hugged her. “
You’ll be a raving beauty one day; far prettier than I, with your brilliant coloring.” Her smile faded then. “But Jessie, at your age a girl dramatizes everything. You fall in love with everything and everyone.”

“
I’m not like that,” she had protested. “I just love the Stronghold and—”

“
I know,” Abigail said, when Jessie’s lips clamped tight. “But there’s such a thing as ill-fated love. Did your tutor ever say anything about such lovers as Tristan and Isolde or Dante and Beatrice?”

Jessie shook her head. “
Mr. Franklin never talked about stories like that.” The old tutor Elizabeth had hired for her, at Sherrod’s insistence, had stuck to the Latin tales of Caesar’s conquests.

Abigail
’s voice lowered. “You don’t understand Grandmother Elizabeth, Jessie. Maybe it was because her love for my grandfather was ill-fated, but . . . but after you grow up, Jessie, go away. There’s a whole wide world out there. Go away. I’m going. I’m going as far from this territory as the Santa Fe Railroad will take Ira and me.”

Abigail had escaped with her merchant husband to the bright city lights of New York. But not Jessie. She
would never leave. The Stronghold was her home. And Brig was her love.

In the press of the crowd she skated past Brig and Fanny. Fanny went sprawling headlong. Jessie continued on by. She felt ashamed of herself, letting her skate wheels get in Fanny
’s way as they had. But then Fanny should know that was one of the perils of roller skating.

Jessie skated once with Manuel Drachman and twice more with Bob Merckle before the afternoon was over. Brig, with Fanny hugging his side, came for Jessie. “
We'd better go,” he said, giving the Merckle boy only a cursory glance. “Father wants to be at the depot before the train arrives.”

“
I’ll help you with your skates, Jessie,” the freckle-faced Bob volunteered.

Only then did Brig seem to notice the teenager. “
She can do them herself, Bob. We’re in a hurry.”

Jessie fumed as she yanked the laces off the skate hooks. Brig was waiting at the door with Fanny. Though the couple was not touching, his head was bent over hers, his hand supporting his tall body on the wall above he
r head. When Jessie reached them, the two went on outside, talking softly, and she trailed along like . . . just like a kid sister!

Tucson
’s chain gang was sweeping the dirt street, followed by the water wagon that sprinkled the rising dust, and Brig and Fannie were forced to wait for the convicts to pass. Jessie took the opportunity to slide a look at her competitor. Bright-red mouth, bright-red hair ... a point for Fanny. Small eyes . . . a point for herself. But Fanny’s bosom—at eighteen the girl had more bosom than Jessie would have if she lived to be a hundred. Score another point for Fanny, she thought grimly.

Brig took not only Fanny
’s arm but her own to lead them across the street, and Jessie had to admit that this was better than nothing. At least she was with Brig. Near him. Touching him. Ahh, sweet torture. How old was Juliet when she fell in love with Romeo—thirteen or fourteen? Was her own love so hopeless, then? She darted another glance at voluptuous Fanny. No doubt about it. Her own chances looked dim.

She followed the couple several blocks past the maze of windmills that seemed to grow like rigid, branchless trees all over town. By running,
the three were able to catch one of the mule-drawn streetcars that went as far north as the new university. But they were only going as far as Pennington Street’s new railroad depot.

The streetcar stopped several times more for passengers as the street fi
lled with people on their way to the depot. Though it was still two hours until the first train would steam into Tucson, elated citizens were already gathering to welcome it.

Sherrod, along with Charles Poston, was to be one of the town officials who were
to speak at the celebration. By the time Brig and Fanny, with Jessie in tow, arrived, the Sixth Cavalry band from Fort Lowell was on the platform along with a cannon. Sherrod was there, deep in conversation with Roget. As darkly handsome as Brig was, his father at forty-one was even more so with the distinguished silver to streak the dark-brown hair and the brooding cast to his face that added an almost spiritual refinement to his strong masculine features.

If Jessie loved Brig, she worshiped her uncle
—as he had told her to call him and which unfailingly irritated Elizabeth. To Jessie he was larger than life. He rode out of the pages of her mother’s book by Sir Walter Scott. Uncle Sherrod was Ivanhoe (an older Ivanhoe, true), riding to take her, Rowena, away from the shabbiness of the
jacale
.

He had given her a new world there at the Stronghold. Servants, a real bed (not the cornhusk one she had lain on in Tucson), food that mounded the table, though it seemed she could never eat enough nor put on weight, and
, most important, an education.

But best of all, Uncle Sherrod had given her a family
—cousins and grandparents, though she did not remember much of Don Francisco. A few times before his death the year after she came to the Stronghold, he had taken her on his lap, when his heart wasn’t bothering him, and told her stories of what it was like when he had first come to the Stronghold—of the fierce Indians that lurked outside the gates and the grass that was as high as a horse’s flanks then. And always he would tell her, you are your father's daughter.

Only Elizabeth had remained distant, ignoring her as if she did not exist. And Jessie knew it was not her imagination. She remembered clearly that first day Uncle Sherrod had brought her to the Stronghold. He had p
ut her in a room that he told her used to be her mother’s and before that her Grandmother Davalos’s. It was such a nice room with hard floors and walls tinted the blue of a summer sky. Only the mustiness told of its disuse.

Elizabeth had come storming into
the room, demanding of Uncle Sherrod what he was doing, bringing the Howard child into the house.

“
She is not ‘the Howard child,’ Mother. She is Jessie Davalos, your husband’s granddaughter—and she has as much right to live here as Abigail or Brigham. I want that understood from this time on!”

That had been the first and only confrontation Jessie had with the old woman, but never since had she been comfortable in Elizabeth's cold presence.

Sherrod spied the three young people crossing the platform toward him and broke off talking with Roget to encircle Jessie's shoulders, drawing her next to him. “How was the skating?’’ he asked with a fond smile for the three young people.

Fanny looked up at Sherrod, smiling. "Marvelous.”

"Crowded,” Jessie said flatly.

Bri
g grinned at her and tousled her hair with his free hand. "That’s because half the boys of Tucson were there hoping to skate with you.”

She moved her head out of his reach. How could he treat her like such a child? Couldn
’t he see she was no longer a little girl?

Sherrod cast a quizzical glance from his son to his niece. She was growing, too quickly. And despite the color of her hair, she reminded him too much of Catherine, with those eyes the cool color of English ivy and Catherine's smile that had enchant
ed him from the very first.

Jessie, of course, was more headstrong
—an unbroken colt still, but nevertheless she had her mother’s strength of purpose. There were times when, watching the girl, being around her, got to be too much. Too great a pain. He saw Catherine in her smile, heard her in the laugh. At those times, he would make an excuse for business in Tucson. He would find Gay Alley and release with the “gray doves” there.

Perhaps he should have been more like Law. Instead of playing the gentleman, ins
tead of doing what seemed right, he should have left Lucy and the Stronghold. He should have taken Catherine and made her his. But that he never could have done. She had been Law’s from the first.  Neither of them had known it instantly, but he had.

As a y
oung man he had envied Law and his restless, reckless ways. And it would seem he would envy him the rest of his life.

“
Well, it looks like you’re going to have to put your hair up,” he told Jessie now. “I’ve just been telling Hugo you’re growing into a young lady and it’s time I sent you off to a finishing school in the States."

“
Yes,” Roget said, peering down at Jessie through his monocle, “I was telling Godwin that Fanny here attended Lady Bertram’s in St. Louis. I can recommend it as an excellent finishing school.”