Authors: Ann Parker
"You may dance with me anytime, Reverend." She smiled in the semi-dark.
He sat on the edge of the bed, buttoning his dress shirt. "Just let me know when the music starts. I’ll be there." He was smiling as well.
He glanced toward the window, now a gray rectangle behind the drawn shade. "It’s almost dawn, Inez. I’ve got to get the rig to the livery and be at church in a few hours."
Reverend Sands draped the white necktie about his collar, then gathered one long strand of her hair, letting it slide between his fingers to the pillow. "Even though I’d rather stay," he added.
She watched him through half-opened eyes. "Won’t do to have that rig sitting out there at first light. Your reputation as an upright man of God might not survive an all-night visit."
"Next time, I’ll walk." There was enough of a question in his voice to cancel the presumption of his words.
"Next time. I like the sound of that."
"Me too." Still smiling at her, he began maneuvering the complicated loops and twists of the cravat.
"I think," Inez ventured, with a stretch, "that we’re at the stage where first names are appropriate. You know mine. What’s yours? I can’t keep calling you Reverend Sands."
He reached over her to retrieve his cuff links from the nightstand. "It’s on the church sign."
"Reverend J. B. Sands." She meditated a moment as he worked the cuff links into the link holes. "What does the ‘J’ stand for?"
"It stands for itself." Reverend Sands snapped the last link into place.
"Surely you have a birth name," she persisted.
He leaned forward, tracing her eyebrows with one finger. "Very well. But this is just between us. Justice B. Sands. First part’s a bit heavy-handed for the ministry, I thought. Suits a man of the law, not of the cloth."
"Justice B. Sands." She tried it out. "Nice. And the ‘B’ is for…?"
He smiled and ran his finger down the side of her face, from temple to cheek to jaw.
"Another secret, Justice Sands? How many do you have?"
"Probably enough to match yours, one for one."
"Hmmm." She curled her fingers into his shirt front and tugged. "So, will you tell me? Or do I have to coax it out of you?"
He lowered his face and their lips touched, lingered. Inez took his hand and moved it down to her breast.
Sands sat up. "That’s enough," he said with mock gruffness, tucking the flannel sheet firmly under her chin. "We keep doing this, there’ll be no minister to receive the congregation."
She smiled lazily, watching him pull on his shoes. "So what’s the sermon for today, Reverend?"
"New beginnings." He stood and uncovered his black waistcoat from a tumble of stockings, petticoats, and drawers. "Appropriate for the coming decade. For Mrs. Rose. For us too, come to think on it. Will you be there?"
"Of course." She turned to one side, propping herself with an elbow. "And while you’re preaching at the pulpit, you can imagine what I’m thinking about in the pews."
"And you can imagine what I’m thinking about during the hymns."
He finished buttoning the waistcoat, glanced around, and spotted his gun belt on the cedar trunk. After buckling on the heavy leather belt, he returned to the bedside and sat once more, adding, "Number one-oh-six is for you, Inez." His eyes lingered on her lips a moment, then he bent down and swiftly kissed her nose.
As he stood and shrugged into his evening coat, he asked, "Do you have an extra key?"
"Extra…" She blinked. "In the table by the front door. Why?"
He laughed at her cautious tone. "I don’t want to leave your door unlocked when I leave."
"You’re making too much of all this."
"No. Just being careful. There’s too much at stake. Especially now." He paused by the bedroom door. "The get-together for the Roses is after the service."
"I remember." She started to drift off.
"I’ll walk you and the Roses home afterward." He closed the bedroom door behind him.
She rolled onto her back, listening. The front door squeaked open and shut. A key turned and the bolt shot home.
Inez floated in a pleasant surfeit of warmth, remembering her first encounters with Reverend Sands and her initial suspicions, which now seemed so distant, so foreign.
How long ago? Not even a month.
A month.
Her smile faded. She counted backward, trying to recall the last day…
"Damn!" Inez leaped from the bed. She grabbed the wrapper hanging on the bedpost and snugged it tight around her as she hastened to the cedar chest. Throwing it open, she began feverishly tossing out items of clothes, searching.
It must be here. I haven’t used it since—
Her hand closed on the small case holding her female syringe. Relief surged through her. But the various nostrums she had used with it were gone, casualties of her empty marriage bed.
The pantry.
She flew barefooted to the kitchen and fumbled along the pantry shelves, pushing aside tins of milk, coffee, and tea and almost knocking over the bottle of vinegar. Inez hugged its dusty brown glass with the fervor of a drowning man grabbing a life line and tried to recall whether vinegar was an effective douche or not.
I don’t remember. But it’s this or water.
Back in the bedroom, she filled the syringe with shaking hands and lay back on the bed, steeling herself for the cold liquid intrusion. Afterward, she moved off the bed and crouched over the chamber pot.
From this bleak position, she stared through the tangled snakes of her loose hair, trailing to the floor, and remembered the aftermath of her plunge to the swimming hole twenty years earlier.
A groom from her family’s stables had discovered her and hauled her back to the main house and her mother’s wrath. Her mother, bedridden for months, had stood before her, one hand clutching her dressing chair, the other supporting her swollen belly.
"Inez! Look at you!"
Inez bent her head to hide defiant eyes, dark hair dripping pond water onto the inlaid mahogany floors.
"If your father were here, he’d whip you so hard you wouldn’t sit for a week." Her mother paced with a heavy, rolling gait, her fury building. "A lady does
not
jump into a swimming hole. Or ride astride. Or whistle. Or argue with her betters." She winced, gripped her belly, and sank onto the bed. "A lady must, above all, protect her virtue and reputation. If you continue this way, you will have neither."
She rocked, hazel eyes boring in on her unrepentant daughter. "Your father and aunt want to send you to boarding school. Your Aunt Agnes says you’ve too good a mind to waste. Your father," her voice sank, contemptuous, "thinks the discipline will break your spirit. He doesn’t see how much like him you really are. Made of iron and steel, both of you."
Inez looked up from her muddy toes to see her mother weeping. Terrified at last, Inez ran to her, promising she’d be a lady from now on.
"Inez, the baby’s coming soon—please God, a son—and I can’t handle you anymore." Her mother smoothed back Inez’s tangled hair with a tender but despairing touch. "When your father returns, I will tell him he may send you to board in the fall. Dear child, if only you’d been born a boy."
Inez’s sister Harmony was born soon thereafter. The last of seven children, the only other besides Inez to survive childbirth and infancy.
Two decades later, Inez opened her hand and watched the empty syringe roll across the floor. She covered her eyes and listened to a far-away roar grow closer.
The approaching gale howled across the broad Arkansas Valley in the high Rocky Mountains and hurtled itself upslope to Leadville, rattling windows, setting unseasoned wood planks creaking, insinuating itself through thousands of unchinked cracks.
The storm had arrived.
Dawn increased toward morning while Inez yanked the snarls out of her hair and listened to the winds wail. By the time she left for church, the gales had diminished to occasional gusts and the snow fell in earnest. The dark gray sky seemed in mourning, promising only sorrow.
She stepped into the sanctuary of the church. The service was yet to start; Reverend Sands was nowhere to be seen. She moved up the pews and slid in beside Susan, Emma, and Joey.
"How was the dance?" Susan’s cheeks shone red from the cold.
Inez searched for the right word. "Wonderful," she said faintly.
"Wonderful?" Susan prompted.
"Yes. For the most part."
Susan looked disappointed at her brevity.
Inez suspected she didn’t present the appearance of a belle returning from a ball. Her eyes felt gritty from the stinging snow, and the alcohol and lack of sleep were catching up with her. She folded back the hood of her cloak and scanned the pews.
No Cat DuBois. No Angel. None of Cat’s girls.
Harry.
Impeccably groomed as always. Yet there was something slightly out-of-focus about him. Haggard shadows around his ice blue eyes led her to believe he had also spent a sleepless and dissipated night. He glanced toward her. Inez turned away, not willing to read his expression any further nor let him read hers.
In the front pew, Mrs. Titweiller whispered to a gaggle of women. In unison, they turned toward Inez, noses pointing like hunting dogs flushing out game.
Inez lifted her chin and glared back, daring them to find easier prey.
"Good morning! Today we greet the last Sunday of the year and the decade, and prepare for the next." Reverend Sands mounted to the pulpit and sorted his notes as whispers and coughs faded to silence. He appeared as refreshed as if he’d had a full night’s sleep.
"We have a change in our order of service. We’ll begin with hymn number one hundred and six." Above a sea of heads bowed over hymnals, Reverend Sands smiled at Inez.
The stinging in her cheeks intensified. She thumbed through the pages until one-aught-six jumped out. The voices of the congregation rose in chorus. "Through all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing!"
Outside, snow and wind hissed. Inside, music enveloped Inez. "What though the tempest ’round me roars, I know the truth, it liveth. What though the darkness ’round me close, songs in the night it giveth. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love prevails in heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing!"