Liz Ireland (18 page)

The audience laughed, momentarily flustering Bea.

“Go ahead, Tommy, the dang picture’s been on fire for ten minutes now anyway!” a man in the audience yelled. Several others hooted their agreement. Most of the men were anxious to get this part of the evening over with so they could get down to the important business of drinking and dancing.

Lysander Beasley bustled to the head of the crowd. “Please, please,” he entreated with an officious frown.

“Ahem!”
Bea cleared her throat loudly and, with a backward scowl at a grinning Tommy, continued the story of chaos in the nation’s capital.

When the redcoats finally did get their chance, they were met with exuberant boos and hisses. The boys came running out with crude torches, and the audience gasped in surprise. The redcoats circled around Bea several times, causing her to display some very true-to-life anxiety.

Cecilia watched nervously as the teenage boys pestered Bea. Bea had hated rehearsing this part and had insisted that the torches would completely overpower the show. But watching the rapt faces of her audience, even Bea had to admit that including the pyrotechnics had been a wise choice. In the waning light of evening, the kerosene lanterns and the torches lent the scene an eerie feeling of authenticity.

Then, suddenly, from somewhere in the audience, a cry went up. “Fire! The White House is on fire!”

Cecilia rolled her eyes. Of course it was—that was the whole point! When women started jumping to their feet in alarm, however, she looked over to the side and caught sight of the muslin in flames. “Water!” she cried to a handful of ranch hands next to the pump. “Get water over here!”

Their surprised eyes summed up the situation in a second and they snapped to action, manning the pump furiously to fill the two buckets available. Meanwhile, mothers ran to retrieve the children near the fire. Given the lack of rain they had suffered through for the past two months, the school building was doomed unless the flames could be doused quickly.

Cecilia, watching in horror as the White House went up in flames for real, grabbed Dolly’s picnic blanket from the ground in front of her and started running forward. She heard her friend gasp as all her carefully prepared food and drink went flying, but she didn’t stop to assess the damage. Holding the blanket as wide as she could manage, she dashed up the schoolhouse steps and started beating the blanket against the flames. Smoke billowed out toward her, and her lungs, unprepared for the assault, filled up quickly. She coughed and soon felt herself being dragged back by a pair of strong arms. Through watery eyes, she saw Pendergast’s concern only fleetingly before he pushed her away.

“Do you want to get yourself killed?” he yelled at her. He took the blanket from her and dashed up the stairs.

“Do you?” she yelled back.

She ran forward again, this time aiming her shawl at the remaining embers. The thin material was completely insubstantial, but she just couldn’t stand aside and do nothing! This schoolhouse meant as much to her, if not more, than to the children who received their lessons there every day. More, certainly, than it did to Pendergast.

He glanced over at her, his smoke-smudged face creased in annoyance. “Get back, Cecilia!”

“No!” she called.

Behind her, a man ran up and tossed a bucket of water onto the muslin—and her. She stood for a moment in shock, her bare arms streaked and dripping, then stepped away before the next cascade of water was aimed at the wall.

At the bottom of the steps, Pendergast smiled at her, his white teeth gleaming against his smoke-darkened skin. “I told you to step back.”

Before Cecilia could spit out the retort on the tip of her tongue, Dolly hustled forward and pushed her aside. “Oh, Mr. Pendergast, how brave you are! You saved the schoolhouse!”

“Here, here,” seconded Lysander Beasley, who stepped up to pat the man on the back. “Ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Pendergast has done it again!”

The audience, most of whom were still standing from all the excitement, applauded and cheered and whistled.

Pendergast
had saved the schoolhouse? Cecilia thought heatedly. She glanced at the men who had quickly drawn the water to douse the flames—and even they were applauding the man.

“It’s all right, folks,” he said, taking over Cecilia’s duties effortlessly. “Now that the fire’s out, Beatrice will tell you how they took care of fires seventy years ago.”

Beatrice, her ringlets looking slightly frazzled from the ordeal, which altogether had not lasted more than a couple of minutes, stepped up to her place with some trepidation. As her shaky voice continued the narrative, smaller boys, representing the beleaguered American forces, saved the day with pantomimed buckets of water.

“Careful you don’t hit Cecilia with that water!” jeered Jim Brennan, one of the Summertree hands. He looked at Cecilia with mock surprise. “Oh, never mind—here she is!”

“Very funny,” Cecilia muttered. Leave it to Pendergast to rouse himself from his sickbed to steal her thunder!

Behind Bea, girls in mobcaps helped put out the fake flames. The first mural was then pulled down, revealing the muslin rendering of the present-day White House. It was scorched, but otherwise surprisingly intact. The whole cast squished together on the steps to sing a patriotic song for their finale.

Much clapping ensued, and Bea descended to the kerosene footlights to take her bow. A smattering of the other girls and boys joined her, but most ran restlessly out to play a rowdy game of tag before being rounded up by their relatives to eat.

As Cecilia made her way through the crowd all the talk was about the fire. But in spite of that calamity—or more likely, because of it—several people were exclaiming that “Pendergast put on the best pageant ever!”

Back at the boardinghouse, she rifled through her remaining dresses in dismay. She could only thank heavens it was dark out; perhaps no one would notice that the cotton dress she picked out with the striped sleeves and skirt was practically threadbare.

She took off her yellow dress and went to the washbasin, which she had filled with water when she came in. No amount of scrubbing seemed to get the soot off her arms and neck—especially the smell. After ten minutes of trying, however, she dried herself and slipped the clean dress over her head.

At least the striped pattern and scooped neckline set off her figure, she thought as she started fastening the multitude of tiny pearl buttons up the front. Once that was done, she took a bottle of amber liquid from her washbasin table and dabbed the rose scent on her wrists. Still smelling smoke, she dashed some behind her ears for good measure.

The sound of old Charlie Moore’s fiddle was already coming from the schoolhouse when she stepped outside again, and it was joined by Toby Clark’s harmonica by the time she reached the clearing where the picnic baskets were being gathered up. Cecilia scurried toward Dolly and Buck, hoping to get a nibble of chicken. The request for food, however, was met by a sour purse from her friend.

“Chicken? Cecilia, all the chicken we had went flying when you grabbed up my blanket during the fire! Poor Buck said it looked as though I’d used sand for batter.”

Buck frowned in greeting. “You sure weren’t using your head when you went running headlong into that fire, Cecilia.”

“My head just wasn’t thinking about your stomach,” she retorted more sharply than she’d intended. But honestly, it seemed, if men weren’t in love with you, they could hardly spare a civil word! “Anyway, maybe I can get some grub off the men from the ranch.”

Dolly laughed haughtily. “Those scroungers? I bet they’ve already picked every bone in the schoolyard.”

Cecilia’s stomach growled in protest. Wonderful. “Well, maybe I can rustle up a cup of water. That is, if everyone hasn’t sucked the well dry.”

She trudged off toward the well. It was dark, so she had to squint to see the faces belonging to the voices who called out greetings to her—and snide comments about getting drenched. No one was telling
her
that she had put on the best pageant ever!

The well was happily deserted, and Cecilia drew herself some water and looked out over the crowd. The kerosene lanterns that had provided illumination for the pageant were now doing duty in the clearing that had been designated as the dance floor. A few couples had already gathered in their light to twirl to a spirited waltz. In spite of herself, Cecilia tapped her foot and looked about anxiously for Pendergast, but the man had disappeared.

“So here you are!”

The deep voice caused Cecilia to choke on the swallow of water she was taking from the dipper. She turned, coughing, and looked squarely into the disapproving eyes of Silas Summertree.

“D-Daddy?” she said, trying to catch an even breath. She’d been so consumed in looking for Pendergast that she’d completely forgotten about her father, who had obviously just arrived.

Silas Summertree was not a towering man by any stretch of the imagination. The crown of his head only topped Cecilia’s by a few inches, with one marked difference. Whereas Cecilia had a cascade of golden blond hair, Silas’s head was as smooth as an eggshell. The most striking similarity between them was the brilliant blue eyes they shared, which so often mirrored each other in affection, irritation and stubbornness.

“Well, I’m glad to know you can still recognize your own father,” he said gruffly. “I see you so seldom I thought you might have forgotten.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Cecilia huffed, giving her father a quick hug. “I just couldn’t get away.”

“Humph.” Silas scowled and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for a cigar. “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” he asked, lighting a match and taking a tug on the tobacco.

The sweet scent never failed to remind Cecilia of home. She smiled warmly, feeling nostalgic. “
Couldn’t.
Dolly needed me. Didn’t Buck tell you?”

“Buck!” Her father barked out the name. “He hasn’t talked about anything in weeks except for Mrs. Hudspeth. I promised them they could get married at the ranch Sunday.”

“Sunday!” Cecilia cried in dismay. “That’s so fast it’s almost shameful!”

“Nothing shameful about getting married,” he retorted brusquely. “You might ought to try it sometime.”

Cecilia rolled her eyes. “And marry who? Mr. Walters?”

Her father stepped forward and wagged a finger in her face. “That’s your problem—you’re too picky!”

“Clara says you can’t be too picky.”

“That woman!” He rolled his eyes in frustration. “I left her at home, baking for the wedding.”

“Clara hates things like this,” Cecilia reminded him. “She thinks dancing is hazardous to people’s good sense.”

As if for the first time, her father looked her over from head to toe and frowned. “Good Lord, what are you wearing?”

“A dress,” she replied.

“It’s a mess!” he cried, appalled that his own daughter should be seen in such a rag.

Cecilia scowled at his unknowingly insulting her prowess with the wash.

“I think it’s time you come back to the ranch,” he said.

“Oh, no.” Cecilia moaned.

“Now don’t get up on your high horse, Cecilia. I had a friend over last week who owns a ranch outside San Antonio. Good-looking fellow. You could have some new clothes made up and—”

She clucked her tongue. “Daddy, you know how I feel about ranchers.”

“Then why in thunder don’t you find someone else to marry?”

“I told you, there
isn’t
anybody.”

His eyes opened, as if an idea occurred to him. “What about that new schoolteacher fellow? You must have seen him around here quite a bit.”

“What about him?” Cecilia asked suspiciously. If Buck was shooting off his mouth at the ranch...

“I hear he’s quite a good-looking fellow,” her father expounded, “and a hero, to boot. Saved a whole wagonload of women from bandits.” He craned his short neck to view the crowd. “What happened to all those Germans, anyway?”

“They went back to Fredericksburg.” Thank goodness. Pendergast was hard enough to stomach without his own fawning throng.

“When I arrived here tonight I heard this schoolteacher fellow practically put out the fire by himself!” her father added.

“That’s not true,” she said. “
I
helped, too.”

“Is that why you smell so peculiar!” her father cried in relief, but he was too involved in this new idea about the schoolteacher to concern himself with her reaction. “Seems like he’d be a smart fellow, too—just the type for you.”

“Hardly,” Cecilia said.

Her father perched on his toes and craned his neck to glance around the crowd. “Where is the man—what’s his name, Pender...Pender...”

“Pendergast!” Cecilia said through clenched teeth.

“That’s it! In fact, the more I hear about him, the more I like him.” He stopped his search and glanced at her with interest. “This Pender-whoozit isn’t why you haven’t been home, is he?”

“No!” she cried emphatically. “Daddy, you don’t know what you’re saying. Pendergast isn’t at all marriageable material. If you knew more about him—”

“About who?”

Together, she and her father turned toward the sound of the deep voice behind them. And there he was, Pendergast, grinning like mad. “Here we are at the well again,” he joked.

Cecilia opened her mouth to make a tart reply, but before she could speak, he thrust his hand out toward her father. “You must be Silas Summertree. My name’s Eugene Pendergast.”

Her father, who was at least a head shorter, took his hand and shook it vigorously. “Well!” he said, impressed so far.

“You don’t travel in this part of the country for long without hearing about the Summertree ranch,” Pendergast said.

Silas Summertree ate up the shameless flattery and gave as good in return. “You’ve created quite a stir yourself in your short time here. Well, I was just telling my daughter here that you and she—”

“What are you doing here, Pendergast?” Cecilia interrupted before her father could embarrass her completely.

“Don’t you remember?” he said, his eyes sparkling.

A waltz was playing in the distance. Cecilia stared at him for a moment, mesmerized by his gaze, tempted by the prospect of being swept up in his arms. God knows she wanted to...