Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (14 page)

“I told you there was nothing wrong with him.”

“There had to be. Tell me about him.”

And so she told him about Richard. The next night she asked him about where he had been and what he had done in the five years he had been gone from Mason. Somehow it wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be, feeling her close beside him in the night, to tell her things he had never told anyone before.

So as the nights passed, they found out about each other. Eventually the talk began to include the work they had done that day, what they would do tomorrow, and even what would happen on the ranch in the spring and summer.

He must be out of his mind, Cord thought, for she would be gone soon, leaving the nights as empty as the days. But then maybe she would stay at least through the spring, maybe even through the summer. Maybe.

* * *

Chapter 14

“SOMETIMES I USED TO WONDER
if I was just born into the wrong family,” Anne told Cord, her voice soft in the night. “There’d be months and months when everything was all right, and then something would happen like that time at school with you and Marie, and everyone, not just my own family, but everyone, would be telling me what a disgrace I was. How could they all be wrong? But in my heart I thought they were wrong, and Mother was always saying, ‘Don’t tell your father,’ or ‘We can’t let your father find out,’ so I knew she didn’t think I was wrong so much as she wanted to keep peace.”

“She’s afraid of your father,” Cord said.

“Oh, no. Well, I never thought so. She’s just better than I am at doing what she’s supposed to. Father’s always been very strict. I think he was happiest when he was in the Army, but he was badly wounded in ‘64 and sent home. Mother says he didn’t like returning to civilian life and that’s why we moved out here, to start over.”

Cord listened without comment to Anne’s description of a childhood filled with family secrets and hypocrisies. From the time Edward Wells had opened his tailor’s shop, Leona helped at home when there were rush orders or too much work at once. Her work saved hiring a helper who would not always be busy, for money was a problem until Leona came into her inheritance when Anne was fifteen.

By the time Anne was five, she was sewing buttons on men’s clothing, getting her small hands rapped with a ruler if the work was below Wells’ exacting standards. At ten she went without dessert for a week when she pricked her finger with a needle and ruined the front of a fancy shirt with her blood. Nothing could have forced an admission from Edward Wells that his wife or daughter did any such work at all.

Anne also described some good times. She always loved school. In James Miles’ household she had seen a warm, loving family environment. She and Rachel Miles had been best friends from the first day they met, and they shared girlish games and confidences even after Rachel married.

When the Wells family first lived in Mason, Anne’s mother had a horse named Mollie and a buggy and made deliveries for the shop, sometimes visiting her friend Maudie Winter outside of town. While his women folks’ helping his business by sewing at home was Edward Wells’ deep and closely guarded secret, Leona’s making deliveries was not. Anne and her mother had grand times right up until the old mare died. Two unsuccessful attempts to replace the horse had disgusted Edward, and he refused to hear of it again, depriving both Leona and Anne of a treasured recreation.

“I suppose I just had occasional lapses that scandalized everyone until I started seeing Elroy Turrell,” Anne said. “After that there was probably never a day Father wasn’t unhappy with me until he sent me to Chicago. He didn’t think Elroy was good enough. He didn’t think the Turrells were good enough.”

“He got that right anyway,” Cord muttered.

“Do you want to hear this or not?” Anne said tartly. “Do you know Elroy?”

“Seen him around, but don’t know him,” Cord said. “Seems kind of spineless to me.”

“He is not!” Anne said. “He’s - sweet-natured, kind.”

Cord, who didn’t consider sweet nature a primary virtue in a man, just grunted.

Listening to Anne go on about the Turrells, people Edward Wells looked down on as unmannered and beneath him, Cord realized the friendly farm family had appealed to Anne as much as Elroy himself. She had liked their outgoing ways and even thought being a farmer’s wife would be far more interesting than town life filled with ladies’ teas and church sewing circles.

“I’m not sure Elroy felt strongly enough about me to risk Father’s disapproval and really come courting,” Anne admitted. “When I told him Father was sending me to Chicago, all he said was, ‘Maybe it’s for the best.’ He married someone else that same year.”

“Hurt?” Cord asked.

“No,” Anne said slowly. “Not the way you mean. I guess it hurt that he didn’t care more, but I didn’t either, really. I wanted a different life, but I didn’t want to go to Chicago.”

Anne’s Aunt Clara was Edward Wells’ sister, and from Anne’s description Cord formed a picture of a woman every bit as rigid and self-serving as Edward himself. Clara Wainwright was the childless widow of a federal judge. Like her brother, she had brightened her own future through a careful marriage and was now a woman of considerable influence in her own right. For Anne, life in Chicago had been far worse than life in Mason.

“There was nothing to
do
,” Anne told him. “She has servants to do everything. There were all these silly teas and lunches and dinners where you just talked about
nothing
for hours. I was afraid I’d lose my mind and start screaming right in the middle of some formal dinner.

“I think Aunt Clara finally realized how terrible it was for me because when I first asked about going back to school she wouldn’t hear of it, but in the end she did let me go. The University of Illinois allows women now, you know. She actually let me go, let me attend some classes there, and that’s where I met Richard Tyler.”

Cord listened intently to this part of Anne’s story, the part he most wanted to hear.

The son of a prominent Chicago banker, Richard was guaranteed a position in the bank when he finished school. Anne’s description made Richard sound like a better looking, more educated version of Elroy Turrell.

He was, she admitted, like her own family in that he cared very much what other people thought, but he told her he respected her quick mind and independent ways. With the university courses giving her something with which to occupy her mind, and Richard providing an agreeable escort to dances, dinners, and other social events on weekends, life began to be quite pleasant.

“He asked me to marry him only months after we first started seeing each other. I was sure it would be a good life. Aunt Clara approved, and the whole family was delighted. We knew we couldn’t marry until Richard finished school and established himself at the bank, but we were willing to wait.”

Did she sound wistful, Cord wondered.

“Right from the beginning we had minor differences,” Anne continued, “but everyone does, don’t they? And I knew it was my fault. It was always the same kind of problem I had with my own family.”

“Like what?” Cord asked.

“Well, like the dress,” Anne whispered. “You said you liked it, but it was only here where no one saw me, except Ephraim and Martha, but we didn’t know they were going to stop by.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Christmas. The red dress I wore Christmas.”

“Yeah, I remember. It’s pretty.”

“I had it made for a special occasion in Chicago, and Richard made me take it off.”

“I thought he was a gentleman,” Cord said.

Anne pinched his arm. “You know what I mean. He made me go back and change it - for this drab gray one that Aunt Clara picked for me - he said that red was too bold a color.”

“Sounds like you had another little gray man there. Surprised you and Pratt never got to courting,” Cord said.

“He wasn’t like Yellow-Belly Pratt,” Anne snapped. “He wasn’t gray and he wasn’t little!” Then she said more slowly, “I was used to it then. To always being the one who was wrong, the cause of all the trouble.”

Cord ignored her lukewarm defense of her old beau. “So he was gray and gutless and he never touched you.”

“He touched me. We kissed and we held hands sometimes. It was proper. Do you think I should have been with him in that way?”

“Hell, no. He’s probably not capable.”

“He’s married now. They have children.”

“Must be Catholic.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Virgin births.”

“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to make belittling remarks?”

“Talk.”

So Anne told him about the quarrel that ended it forever with Richard Tyler. They had attended a small dinner party of school friends, among them a friend of Richard’s Anne particularly disliked. Daniel drank to excess. Sober he was rude. Drunk he was ugly. He had cornered Anne alone once and forced a disgusting, liquor-laden kiss on her.

Only mildly tipsy that night, Daniel started lecturing everyone on one subject after another. He pompously quoted one of the great philosophers, except he attributed the quotation to the wrong man. Unable to resist a small revenge, Anne tartly pointed out the mistake. The whole company had a huge laugh at Daniel’s expense, but Richard saw nothing even vaguely humorous in the incident. She listened to a diatribe all the way home.

“He said maybe educating women was a mistake after all. He didn’t even care when I told him I did it because Daniel forced that kiss on me. He didn’t care! He said I had to promise never to contradict any of his men friends again. Ever. We had a terrible argument.”

“So that was the end?” Cord asked.

“No. Maybe. Maybe it was already the end, but he went to Aunt Clara, and she said I couldn’t go back to the university until I apologized and gave Richard his promise. It was sneaky and conniving and - and a betrayal. That’s what made me break the engagement. I wrote him a letter. Aunt Clara was furious and of course when Father found out he was worse - beyond fury.”

Edward Wells took the first train to Chicago but was unable to repair the damage. He might have been able to coerce Anne into relenting, but Richard was as unwilling to resume the engagement as Anne, and Edward had no leverage over Richard Tyler.

White with rage, Edward brought his daughter home in disgrace, not speaking a single word to her from Chicago to Mason. The next year was absolute hell.

“He raged at me over every meal and every other time he saw me. He finally wore down, but he never really got over it. After that everyone just accepted that I was a spinster because I was - difficult - and that was that. Until George Detrick started the trouble all over.”

Cord listened to Anne’s story with wonder. He had always assumed that women like Anne Wells lived charmed lives, cherished, treasured, and protected by loving families, enjoying their lives of leisure and ease. He had watched her explore her own strengths and courage in those first weeks here with him and thought of her as having escaped a cage, but he had thought it was a comfortable, gilded cage, not a true prison.

He finally began to understand that a woman of this much strength and spirit might find the life she had led restrictive and boring. He was not ready to accept that his own life suited her perfectly.

* * *

Chapter 15

ANNE WAS FILLED WITH ENVY
as Cord described a childhood as different from hers as night from day.

The Bennett clan was a fun-loving, rowdy lot. He barely remembered his mother, and for the years Cord knew him his father was a vague shell of a man. Frank and Ephraim, so much older, had together acted as father, and his sister Hannah and Martha had divided the role of mother. Cord and his sister Marie were inseparable as children. Ephraim’s oldest children were the same age as their half-Indian cousins, and so in those days there were usually half a dozen young Bennetts tumbling all over the ranch.

The summers were filled with swimming in the creeks, horseback riding, games, and roughhousing. Winters there were sleigh rides, snow forts, snowball fights, and other sorts of good times. They all worked too, of course. The family worked as hard as it played, but it was all part of the whole.

“After that trouble at school, the whole family just set themselves to teaching us at home,” Cord said. “It was probably a better education. Eph and Frank both went to college back East. Eph stuck it out and got the degree, and Frank did two years, even though he hated it.”

The few ugly episodes of prejudice that occurred during those early years failed to make a lasting impression on either Cord or Marie. The Bennett family kept the children in their midst, protecting them too well until what the whole family came to call “the Hatch business.”

Cord’s voice stopped in the darkness, and Anne waited long enough to wonder if he’d fallen asleep before prompting him. “So what happened? Why did you attack him?”

“I tried to kill him. If no one had gotten there for another couple of minutes, I would have.”