Heart of the West (64 page)

He hit the threshold just as the fire took hold, the fire which had started when the lit firecracker had landed on top of a bale of cotton batting, setting it ablaze. The flames had spread along the freshly oiled floorboards to the shelves in back, which held rifles, handguns, cartridge cases, and other artillery, and beneath which were stacked in categorical and perfect order fifteen cans of kerosene and five of turpentine. The fire hit those cans and Sam Woo's mercantile exploded like a geyser into the Montana sky.

CHAPTER 27

"You are to lie still, you stubborn barbarian, the doctor says you have a crease in your skull."

Jere Scully hunched his shoulders and gripped the sides of his head with his hands. "Only a crease? Dear life, my head feels like it's been split in two."

Erlan tipped her rocking chair forward so she could build the pillows into a downy pile behind him. She pushed gently on his shoulder, urging him to lie back in the bed. A tenderness stirred in her as she looked at him. His big knuckles were bruised and caked with dried blood. His face was paler than the linen bandage around his head. His hands were smeared with petroleum jelly, where the skin had been blistered when he'd try to pull Sam Woo's lifeless body out of the burning mercantile. Oh, what a fierce dragon he had been, charging to her rescue with roars and swinging fists.

How had she ever tricked herself into believing she would never come to love him?

The lamp cast a soft glow over the quilt on the bed and the rose-sprigged wallpaper of Hannah Yorke's spare room. A breeze blew in the open window, cool now that the sun had set. It smelled of burned wood and dust, and hate.

"Ah, Lily..." He turned his head to look at her, and several long, slow heartbeats passed between them. He cupped her cheek with his callus-roughened hand. "Are you all right, then?"

She turned her face away from him. She felt bruised both inside and out. And cast adrift. Once again, in one explosive moment, all that was her life had been destroyed. "I am frightened," she said.

His thumb moved across her cheekbone as his hand slid around her neck, beneath her hair. "Don't be frightened, m'love. From this day out, I'll be taking care of you. He's dead, Lily. You're free of him."

She sucked in a sharp breath. "Do not speak such words."

"'Tes the truth."

The truth. She thought of all the truths that had once formed her life. A woman was a lowly creature, an imperfect being, whose happiness was to marry and give her husband sons. A woman's husband was her lord, and her sole purpose on earth was to obey him, to serve him, to please him. A woman must learn to yield, to suppress her wishes. A woman belonged first to her father and then to the father of her sons, until the hour of her death.

But men were not infallible; they were not lords. They were only men. And a woman...

If a woman thought too much, she began to question truths. And when she questioned truths she became
ni,
a traitor to her ancestors. A traitor to herself.

My destiny is a circle that is still only half drawn, Erlan thought. For the sake of Tao Huo's spirit, doomed by her crimes to wander forever between the shadow world and this one, she must return to China. Somehow she must find a way to extirpate her mother's shame and dishonor. She must kneel before her father and obtain his forgiveness on her mother's behalf. But her soul shivered faintly, as a realization crept into her heart like mist during the night. The realization that
she
could never forgive her father.

Jere stirred. His hand moved across the star-patterned quilt and onto her lap to part her clenched hands and take one of them in his own. Erlan's pulse thumped, filling her throat. Yet she held herself still.

He rubbed his thumb in a circle over the bone of her wrist. "We can be married by the circuit judge when next he comes through."

Her destiny was a circle half drawn. She knew what she must do. Yet her resolve kept wavering and dissipating. In another life, another place, surely they would never have to part.

"I will never marry you," she said.

His face showed all that was in his heart: love and despair and, still, a desperate glimmer of hope. "How can you be saying never? There's no one, no reason, to stop you coming to me now."

She filled her lungs and expended the ache with the air. "For Chinese and fon-kwei to wed is forbidden by law."

His fingers tightened their grip on her wrist. "No law's going to be stopping me from pledging myself to you before God."

She jerked free of his grasp. "Your stupid god is nothing to me, and my fate is not here with you. I must return to my lao chia. And if this child I carry is a boy, he must return as well, to find his destiny among his own people, close to the tombs of his ancestors. I am bound to Sam Woo as wife until
my
death, not his. It is my duty to return his bones to his native soil so that his spirit will find peace. For all those reasons and more, I can never marry you."

His mouth pulled into a wry smile. But his rainwater eyes glittered wetly. "You haven't said you don't love me. That's one reason you haven't mentioned."

On one of her walks along the river she had come upon a trout stranded on the bank, flopping and struggling against the air that was killing it. Her heart felt like that fish, stranded and struggling now against her fate.

He reclaimed her hand, stroking, touching, making her love him. "Will you kiss me, Lily?" he said. "At least don't make me wait a thousand years for that."

His lips were even softer than they looked, and warm. And they fit perfectly with hers.

Outside, on the gallery, Hannah Yorke sat on a slatted wooden swing and watched the moon skim wildly across a windy sky. After such a hot and dusty day, the night had the bite and tingle of champagne.

From here she could see the stark gallows-like headframe of the Four Jacks silver mine and the torchlights burning at the shaft head. The piercing wail of the shift whistle rose above the wind. In a few minutes men in mud-splattered boots and slouch hats would walk past her gate, and one of them would be her man. Surely he would come tonight. When he heard his brother had been hurt and was resting at her house, he would come.

He didn't come every night, and he hadn't come at all lately. For three years she had loved him with a kind of greedy wonder, and now she was filled with such a terror that she was losing him.

She had dressed with special care tonight in a gown of striped lilac India silk trimmed at the sleeves with dark purple cashmere lace. The skirt had a deep ruffle with organ-pipe pleats and a bustle that fell in a bouncing cascade over her rump. The bodice was modestly filled in with a jabot of pleated white Swiss muslin. It was a lady's dress, and she felt like a lady when she wore it.

But beneath it, in case he stayed the night, she had put on wispy-thin lisle stockings and a lace-trimmed scarlet petticoat with a matching chemise and drawers fashioned of the sheerest silk.

Surely he would come tonight. And when he did come, she would make him understand that she was not the clingy, demanding woman he'd last seen. The real Hannah was a take 'im or leave 'im sporting gal. A girl who was easy on the eyes and easy on the heart, and easy to stay with because she was easy to leave.

Easy to leave... She felt a twisting, clenching pain in her chest every time she thought of the stupid mistake she'd made the last time he came calling. The mistake that had driven him away and had kept him away for two weeks.

It had happened after the loving.

After the loving, she never stayed with him for long. She always got up and poured herself a drink and lit a cigarette— naughty, unladylike habits she'd picked up from former lovers. She always kept her face carefully turned away from him until she was sure she could control what he would see. She didn't want him to see what he meant to her. And she didn't want to look at his face and see all that she didn't mean to him.

But that last time she'd turned around and looked at him too soon. She'd caught the restlessness on his face, the heavy-lidded, unquiet eyes. And the words had come blurting out of her before she could stop them: "What's wrong?"

"It's the bloody stinking mine," he'd answered, a brooding sulkiness to his mouth reminding her just how young he really was. "That's what's bloody stinking wrong."

"So why don't you quit?" she'd said without thought. Her relief that it was the Four Jacks and not her that had put the moodiness on his face had made her muddle-headed.

He'd sneered at her, exaggerating his Cornish brogue. "Right, Hannah m'girl. Quit me job an' do what?"

"You could work for me. You could run the hotel and the flophouses for me as a sort of overall manager of my properties. And I've been thinking of setting up another livery here in Rainbow Springs—Snake-Eye has way more business than he can handle. We could do it together, be partners."
We could get married,
she'd almost said, God help her.

He'd leaped out of bed and come at her, naked and beautiful. She'd watched, sick at heart, as the chilling hardness came over his eyes. "I'll be a ponce to no woman, Mrs. Yorke," he'd said, practically snarling the words. "You want to buy yourself a kept cock, you'll have to look to someone else's." And he'd cupped his penis, which was still half erect and wet from having just been inside her. "This one isn't for sale."

And then he'd put his clothes on and walked out of the room and left her standing there. And only pride had kept her from crying until after she heard the front gate squeal shut behind him.

Oh, my, had she ever scared him off proper just by offering him a job. Imagine how far and fast he'd have run if she'd asked him to marry her.

During all her time as an upstairs girl in that Franklin parlor house, and those down-and-dirty years in a Deadwood crib, not once had she ever really succumbed to the whore's fantasy that some night some john was going to begin by buying fifteen minutes of her time and end by asking her to marry him for life. No, good ol' Hannah Yorke had never let herself in for that sort of soul-ache. If she had dreamed at all it was that someday she'd be her own woman, able to take care of herself without having to do it by lying on her back. A strong woman, with no make-believe and once-upon-a-time loves that could hurt her heart.

But then an arrogant boy, a hard-eyed wild one, had come strutting into her life, and she had fallen in love. Deeply and forever in love. Now suddenly here she was wanting to marry him and have a child by him, to make a family and live happily ever after.

Lord, she was truly a fool. She was already thirty-five—imagine having a baby at her age—and he was only twenty-two, a mere babe himself. When he turned thirty-five, she'd be nearly fifty. Imagine a man still in his prime wanting anything to do with such a worn-out old hay bag. And that wasn't even the worst of it. Once upon a time she had been a whore, and wife or not she would always be known as a whore. She wasn't fool enough to think all those men she'd spread her legs for in the past wouldn't come crowding into their marriage bed some night.

What she had to do was put all thoughts of marriage out of her head. Being a wife wasn't for her and never would be. And besides, he was a wild one. She didn't want him tamed. She only wanted him.

The squeal of the front gate startled her so much she nearly jumped out of her skin. He came at her out of the night. A man with a long, youthful stride, with the wind blowing his dark hair, and the lampshine from the windows highlighting the masculine planes of his face.

He took the porch steps two at a time, then stopped abruptly when she stepped out of the shadows. "Hannah! They told me Jere's been hurt in a brawl and that he's here with you. What's happened, then?"

She gripped her hands together behind her back to keep from touching him. To keep from slipping her arms around his waist and pressing her face into his neck and breathing deep of the smell of him. "Some man started rabble-rousin' against the Chinese, and sentiments got outta hand. It ended with Sam Woo getting killed and his mercantile catching on fire and blowing up. Your brother came charging to the rescue and he took a powerful whack on the head for his pains, but he's all right. He's resting up in the spare bedroom, and she's with him now—Sam's wife... widow."

He stared at her hard a moment, then shook his head. "Christ. Well, I'll just go on up and see him. If I may."

She almost choked on the egg-sized lump in her throat. He was being so damn polite. A man was always at his most polite right before he got around to telling a woman that he'd up and fallen in love with someone else.

"Of course you may," she said, summoning from somewhere deep within her a bright smile to plaster on her mouth. She waited until he was all the way upstairs before she followed him inside and went alone to her own room.

She lowered the wick on the lamp and lit a braided twist of dried sweet grass to sweeten the air. She paced the room, her purple kid slippers and the train of her skirts brushing the carpet in soft, intimate whispers. She touched things: the matching glove and handkerchief boxes on the bureau, the button hook and garter buckle she'd left out on the bed stand. The razor, shaving cup, and brush she'd bought for him to use when he spent the night.

But not the bell jar. She didn't go near the bell jar with its yellowed violets and roses. She had promised herself that when her heart got broken this time, she would keep no fading mementos.

It wasn't long before he came to her. She'd left the door open a crack and he pushed it wide with his knock. A slow smile spread across his sweat-dirty face, and her heart melted. She loved him so much she hurt with it.

But she didn't throw herself into his arms as she wanted to. She had to be careful to be good ol' fun-loving Hannah. Easy on the eyes and easy on the heart.

Easy to leave.

"I thought Mrs. Woo was going to put a matching lump on my head if I didn't leave the boy in peace," he said. He didn't come all the way into the room or shut the door behind him. "It's fine of you to be taking him in for the night, Hannah. We'll be getting out of your hair come morning."

"Why don't we wait and see what the doc says, huh?"

He started to leave and she nearly flung herself across the room to snatch the door out of his hands and slam it shut, to keep him with her. "Where're you going?" she asked, her voice sounding shrill even to herself.

He looked back at her over his shoulder, but she couldn't read his thoughts behind the brittle glitter of his flat gray eyes. There was always an aura of danger about him, of a savagery just barely kept under fierce control. He was such an arrogant boy. But she'd often wondered if beneath that arrogance, deep within the core of him that he always kept carefully guarded from her, if there was a man who was vulnerable and bruised.