Heart of the West

Heart of the West by Penelope Williamson

SHE WAS TORN BETWEEN TWO BROTHERS–

All her life proper Bostonian Clementine Kennicutt yearned to escape the pious tyranny of her father's rule. So when Gus McQueen rode into town and swept her off her feet, she was ready for him. Eloping with the carefree cowboy was the answer to her prayers…until she met his brother

THE ONE SHE MARRIED…

In the Big Sky country of Montana, Clementine yearned to feel the simple love of a wife for her husband. She'd pledged her troth to Gus, and she swore she would die honoring her promise, but each day her heart betrayed her…

AND THE ONE SHE WAS BORN TO LOVE.

Zach Rafferty's love was not like the soft affection of her husband–it was the wanton need of a dangerous man. And, despite her promise, Clementine knew he was the one meant for her all along…

ISLAND BOOKS Published by Dell Publishing a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

Copyright © 1995 by Penelope Williamson

ISBN: 0-440-22211-7

Reprinted by arrangement with Simon & Schuster Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada June 1996

For my mother, Bernadine Wegmann Proctor, and for her mother, Elizabeth Bonhage Wegmann. You showed me how.

Part One: 1879

CHAPTER 1

He wasn't coming. Oh, God, he wasn't coming after all! Clementine Kennicutt paced back and forth across the shell-patterned carpet, kicking at her skirts with the patent leather toes of her walking boots so that the stiffened muslin whispered in the too silent night.

She paced her dark and quiet bedroom. Down to the black walnut wardrobe. Over to the four-poster bed, all swaddled in white chintz and eyelet lace. Across to the fireplace. A lyre clock sat on the green marble mantle, its pendulum silently swinging. She had to lean close to its porcelain face to see the time. Ten minutes past midnight, ten minutes late. He wasn't coming, wasn't coming...

Back to the window, where faint light spilled in from outside. She pushed aside the voile undercurtains to peer down at the street. The glass was smeared with rain, and moist air made halos around the streetlamps. Moonlight lanced through melting storm clouds. The iron fence around Louisburg Square cast spiky shadows onto cobblestones that were slick with water and deserted.

There—surely that was a coach light flickering through the elm trees across the square. She pressed her face against the pane, trying to see better, but her breath fogged the glass. She flipped up the latch and pulled open the window.

The hinges squealed and she froze, her heart thudding in her throat. She eased the window open more slowly then. She could hear the wind now and the harshness of her own breathing.

A gust ruffled the green velvet drapes, slapping them against the casement. Behind her the crystal lusters on the mantel lamps tinkled. She leaned out the window, feeling the wind cool on her face. It smelled of the rain and of coal smoke. The street, shining with the wet, was empty still. He wasn't coming. "What are you doing?"

She whirled, almost stumbling. Light from the silver chamber stick in her mother's hand threw huge shadows on the cream silk-covered walls. Clementine's heart beat hard against the clenched fist she had pressed to her breast. "Mama, you frightened me."

The flame flared and jumped as Julia Kennicutt lifted the chamber stick. Her gaze traveled the length of her daughter, assessing the steamer cloak that covered a plain maroon walking dress, the kid gloves and black beaver bonnet, the bulging carpetbag at the girl's feet. "You are running away," she said. Her gaze went to the unlit candle waiting on the window seat and the china safe filled with matches. "With someone. You're running off with someone."

"Mama, don't..." Clementine shot a glance to the open doorway, expecting to see her father looming there. He always seemed to swell when he was angry, and the air around him would quiver. "I'll put everything away and go to bed, and no one but you and I need ever know. Only don't tell—"

Her mother left, shutting the door and taking the candle with her, plunging the room once again into darkness.

Clementine sank onto the chintz-skirted stool before her dressing table. The fear she so despised within herself clogged her throat, thick and sour like old grease. She heard a scraping noise outside, and her head whipped around. But it was only the wind slapping a tree branch against the corner lamppost. She stared with hopeless yearning at the window. If he came now, it would be too late. He wasn't coming anyway.

The door opened. She stood, squaring her shoulders as she began to draw deep within herself, away from the hurt. So battened down was she against the gale of her father's fury that it took Clementine a moment to realize her mother had come back without him.

Julia Kennicutt set the chamber stick among the glass bottles and enameled boxes on the dressing table. The beveled mirror reflected fractured light onto the two women. In her white nightdress and with her pale, unbound hair, Julia almost seemed the younger. "Clementine..." She lifted a hand as if to touch her daughter's cheek, then didn't. "You must take this with you."

She gripped Clementine's wrist, pressing something into her palm. The weight of the object surprised the girl, and she almost dropped it. It was a heart-shaped sachet embroidered with silk flowers and decorated with lace. The smell of roses clung to it, but it was too heavy and lumpy to be filled with sweet-scented powder or herbs. Clementine hefted it in her hand and heard the clink of coins.

"It's not a lot," her mother was saying in a strained whisper. "Not more than a hundred dollars. But it would be a good start for you, should you ever need to run away someday from this man you are running off with now."

Clementine looked down at the small bag in her hand. She had a wisp of memory, of having seen it once years ago among her mother's underthings—a place where her father was unlikely to go snooping, where a heart-shaped sachet smelling of roses would never seem out of place.

She looked back up to her mother's white face. "You were going to use it yourself," she said. "All these years you've just been waiting for a chance—"

"No, no." Julia gave a sharp shake of her head, and her hair swung free, slapping against her cheek. "I won't leave this house. I haven't the courage."

Clementine tried to thrust the sachet back into her mother's hands. "But you can come with us. We're going to the Montana Territory—"

Julia made a soft, strangled sound. "Montana... oh, my. What a whimsical, fey child you've always been. What would your young man think of a girl who dragged her mother along on their elopement? And to such a wilderness, no less. Can you imagine me among those horrid buffalo and Indians? Oh, child..." She lifted her hand, and this time she did touch her daughter's cheek. "You are so very young. You think you'll have such grand adventures, and you will—though not, I expect, the sort you're dreaming of."

"But, Mama—"

"Hush now, and listen for once. There is something to be said for safety and security, for staying close to the life you've always known. So at least take the money, since you'll probably need every bit of it on the day your grand adventures cease to be so grand." Her fingers slid off her daughter's cheek, and she sighed. "I have only this one thing to give you, and even it was stolen from him."

Clementine felt the hardness of the coins through the thin silk, felt their weight. And the weight of all the words that had always remained unspoken between them. She imagined pulling the hoarded words out of her heart, holding them out to this woman, her mother.
This one thing I have to give you.
Like coins in a silk cachet smelling of roses.

"Clementine, this man you are running off with..."

"He is nothing like Father." She put the sachet into the pocket of her cloak, and put away those other words she didn't know how to speak. "He's a kind man, a laughing, gentle man. I am sure of it." But she wasn't sure of it, for she barely knew him; indeed, she knew him not at all. And she had this sinking feeling, like a weight of soggy dough in her belly, that he wasn't coming for her anyway. She squinted, trying to read the lyre clock. "You won't believe this, Mama—but he's a cowboy, a real cowboy."

"Oh, heavens... I think you had better spare me the details." Her mother tried a smile, but the hand she laid on Clementine's arm trembled. "No matter what sort of man you believe him to be, promise me you'll keep the money as your own secret from him. Otherwise he will think it his by right and—"

The rattle of carriage wheels on cobblestones sent Clementine flying to the window. "Quick, Mama, douse your light."

A small black gig rolled down the street, wavering in and out of the shadows and pools of lamplight. It was tattered and mud-splattered and missing its hood, yet to Clementine's eyes it looked as magical as would a gilded coach pulled by white unicorns. She dropped one match and broke another before she managed to light her candle. She waved it twice across the window, then blew it out.

She snatched up the carpetbag, its weight dragging against her arm. She had crammed as much as she possibly could into it, for she couldn't begin to envision all the things she would come to need in a wilderness like Montana. She almost laughed aloud. He had come. Her cowboy had come for her after all.

She turned away from the window. Shadows obscured her mother's face. Yet she heard Julia's sharp intake of breath as if she were choking back her own unspeakable words. "Go with joy, child," Julia said. She gripped the sides of her daughter's head, squeezing hard. "Go with joy."

They stayed in this awkward embrace a moment before Clementine pulled away. But at the door she turned. "Good-bye, Mama," she said softly to this woman, her mother, who stood in silence. A shadow among shadows.

Clementine's feet made no sound on the hall's thick runner, and she gripped the heavy bag against her chest to keep it from banging against the wainscoted walls. But the servants' stairs were narrow and twisting, and she caught her toe in the hem of her skirt and tripped, dropping the valise. The bag thumped and clattered its way into the kitchen, spilling open. Trinket boxes, balls of cambric stockings, and a fluting iron rolled beneath the big block table and behind the icebox, getting lost among the coal scuttle and lard buckets.

Clementine's breath left her in a gasp. She had made enough noise to rouse all of Beacon Hill, to awaken her father surely. Her father... She stuffed what she could find back inside the bag, managing to refasten only one clasp.

A row of copper pan bottoms reflected her white face as she ran to the door that led to the mews out back, where her cowboy was to go after he had seen her signal. Her bootheels clicked on the brick floor. The sachet of coins in her pocket bounced heavily against her thigh.

The bolt stuck, and she bruised her knuckles trying to force it. The door scraped like a rusty chain as she yanked it open. She spilled out onto the stoop and came to a stumbling and breathless stop in front of a tall man, made taller by the deep crown of his wide-brimmed hat.

"Mr. McQueen..." She had to stop to suck in a deep breath. "I am here."

His laugh was young and carefree, and his teeth flashed white beneath the long drooping curve of his mustache. "I heard you coming, Miss Kennicutt. Me and all the rest of Boston." He took her valise, trailing a petticoat and corset laces, and tossed it into the gig. He stretched out his hand to take hers.

"Wait, there is another," she said, pointing. "Over there behind the dustbin, beneath that pile of old gunnysacks." The rotting sacks hid a calfskin trunk fitted with brass hardware and banded with copper. A piece at a time she had smuggled its contents through the house and out to the mews.

"What've you got in here"—he grunted as he wrestled with the trunk, trying to wedge it into the narrow space between the small gig's leather seat and the splashboard—"bricks and cobblestones?"

"It's just a camera," she said quickly, afraid that he would ask her to leave it behind, that she would have to choose between her new life and the only part of her old life that mattered. "And glass plates and chemicals and such things. There'll be room for it, won't there? It's not too heavy, is it? I can manage—"

He turned and gripped her face the way her mother had. Only he kissed her. A man's kiss that was hard and fierce and left her feeling excited and breathless. "I knew you'd come with me, girl. I just knew it."

His strong hands spanned her waist and lifted her into the cart. He leaped onto the seat beside her, spanked the reins against the horse's rump, and they clattered out of the alley, turning toward the river.

Clementine Kennicutt looked back to the house, to the window of the room that had been hers for all of her life. A flickering light flashed once and was gone—her mother lifting a candle in a brief and lonely farewell.

She watched the dark window until the house was swallowed by the shadows of the elms. She turned and there ahead of her, floating above the mansard roofs of Beacon Hill, was the moon, round and plump as a Christmas orange.

Her head fell back and she laughed softly into the night sky.

"What?" said the young man beside her. He tugged at the reins, and the horse high-stepped around the corner. Louisburg

Square and her father's house disappeared forever, but the moon stayed with her.

She laughed again, stretching out her hand to the moon, her fingers spread wide. But it remained just out of reach.

If one's life, Clementine Kennicutt had often thought, could be written out like a tale in a yellowback novel, then in her story she was fated to end up married to a cowboy.

Actually whenever she'd done her imagining, it was she who had chased wild mustangs across the range, taken a bead on a stampeding buffalo, and whooped it up at the end of the trail in Dodge City. Still, one had to be practical. Even in daydreams little girls did not grow up to be cowboys. But they
did
grow up to be wives, and if... well, just suppose... But even that, she knew in her most practical moments, was stretching things for a girl whose father was minister to Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts. A girl whose way of life was as different from a cowboy's as was cheese from the moon.

The union of her parents had been a marriage of convenience and money. Julia Patterson had brought with her to the altar an inheritance of fifty thousand dollars and a house on Beacon Hill. The Reverend Theodore Kennicutt brought his fine old Boston name, along with his godly self. Clementine was their only child, and the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt did know his duty as a parent and a servant of God. Daughters were weak vessels, prey to vanity and instability. A pretty face didn't mirror a pure soul. No one was allowed to coddle or pet or make a fuss over little Clementine.

Sometimes, when she was supposed to be contemplating her sins, she would follow her thoughts back as far as they would go, back even before she knew about the cowboys. She thought she must have been four that summer her grandfather took her to the bleachery and she discovered what life could be.

Grandfather Patterson had a smiling face, ruddy as an overripe apple, and a great booming laugh that jiggled his big belly. He owned numerous textile finishing plants, and on that day he took Clementine and her mother on an outing into the coun- try where he had his bleachery. It was an enormous brick building with a belching smokestack. Inside, great bubbling vats emitted billowing clouds of steam. Hundreds of pipes crisscrossed like netting over the ceiling and dripped onto her head. Fumes pinched her nose and made her eyes water. Mama said the bleachery put her in mind of the cauldrons of hell, and Clementine loved it. The clattering noise, the fearsome stink, the hustle and bustle of it, the
life
of it. Even now when she thought of the fullness of what life could be, she was put in mind of that noisy, smelly bleachery. She had loved that place and she'd waited with barely controlled excitement to go back, but they never did.