Merline Lovelace (7 page)

“Mary Prendergast is a friend. A very good friend. Her mother and mine were closer than any sisters when they were young. My mother considers her an adopted daughter.”

She’d seen his face that night in the upstairs hall, when he’d swung the widow off her feet. The look in his eyes hadn’t struck her as the least brotherly.

He must have read the doubt in her eyes before she turned her head away. Catching her chin, he brought her face gently back to his.

“I won’t lie to you. I care for Mary. Very much. Everyone in my family does. And we’re exceedingly proud of her accomplishments in the field of medicine.”

Victoria felt hollow inside, as though she’d tried and failed some crucial test. She could never measure up to a woman as accomplished as Mary Two Feathers Prendergast. Or so she thought, until Sam smiled down at her.

“But you’re the woman I want as my wife.”

“Because you can’t have Mary?”

“Because I desire you.”

The resonating honesty in his voice reassured her, but it was the tenderness in his eyes that vanquished her.

“Now, do I get an answer to my question? Will you marry me, my darling?”

He hadn’t said he loved her. Only that he desired her. A small, protesting corner of Victoria’s mind recognized the difference. Yet the warm endearment overcame her lingering doubts.

He might not love her with the same passion she did him. Not at this moment, perhaps. But he would! He
would!
She’d see to that. With the utter confidence that came with youth and beauty, she vowed he’d soon forget Mary Two Feathers, forget every woman but her.

“Yes,” she answered on a tremulous sigh. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

“Good girl!”

It wasn’t quite the response she’d imagined all those hours she’d snuggled under her covers, dreaming of the moment she brought Sam to his knees. She was feeling just a bit let down until he tipped her chin up another inch.

“Do you think we can seal the bargain without doing more damage to your shoulder?”

“I think we should at least try.”

That was all the encouragement he needed. Exercising extreme care, he bent his head. Victoria hid a wince at the ache in her shoulder and tipped her head.

Once her mouth opened under his, however, the
pain disappeared and she felt only wild, singing joy. It was there, the moment their lips met. The instant, fiery heat. The greedy want. The burning need. When he raised his head, she had to fight for breath.

“I’ll make you a good husband,” he promised softly. “I swear it.”

With a shaky laugh, she gave him fair warning. “Well, I shall probably make you a wretched wife.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m entirely serious.” Dragging in a breath, she enumerated her faults. “I can’t play two notes in a row on the piano without causing Papa to wince. Mama says my embroidery would put a one-armed paperhanger to the blush. And Cook won’t let me anywhere near his kitchen. Not since the time I became distracted by a story I was composing in my head and set a pan of hot grease afire, anyway.”

Laughing, he tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. “Is that the worst I have to worry about?”

She made a clean breast of it. “I’m told I can be a bit…well…stubborn at times.”

Wisely, Sam made no comment. Dipping his head, he brushed her lips again.

Longing leaped to life inside Victoria once again, so quick, so all-consuming. She felt its answer in the need that rippled through Sam, in the hardening of his muscles and the careful restraint.

He was right, she thought, her throat tight. This hunger was enough. For now. Love would come. With care, with patience, with time. He couldn’t want her like this and not come to ache for her as much as she ached for him.

She couldn’t know, of course, that time was the one commodity they didn’t have.

V
ictoria awakened the next morning to a piercing joy and a horrendously sore collarbone. So sore, she almost submitted to her mama’s stern injunction that she must remain at home and allow her bruises to heal.

“At the same time,” Rose suggested, “you might compose the announcement of your engagement.”

“I’ll do it later. I’m going in to the
Tribune
with Papa this morning. I have another piece to compose first.”

“Victoria! What could be more important than the announcement of your forthcoming marriage?”

“You’ll read it in tomorrow’s edition,” her daughter teased, dropping a kiss on Rose’s cheek. “I’ll be back before lunch, I promise.”

She escaped to the foyer before her mother could object further. Hiding a grimace, she struggled awk
wardly into her coat and brushed aside her papa’s concerns when he came down the stairs a moment later.

“Thank goodness it’s not the arm I write with.”

Tucking her hand in his, she tripped out into the bright March sunlight.

The entire staff was at the paper when she and her papa arrived. When her papa proudly announced his daughter’s forthcoming nuptials, Ed Jernigan led a round of hearty congratulations.

The celebrations were short-lived. A dozen or more urgent dispatches had come over the wires during the night. Leaving her papa and Ed to pore over their contents, Victoria retreated to her desk and plucked a freshly sharpened pencil from the holder in her drawer. After thinking for a moment, she began to write.

Quite proud of the piece, she submitted it to Ed Jernigan for editing. He in turn took the draft to her papa, who returned it to Victoria.

“I’m sorry,
liebchen,
but ve cannot run this as you haf written it.”

“Why not?”

“You give our readers too much opinion and too little fact.”

“Yes, well, it’s an opinion that needs airing.”

“Perhaps.”

“Papa! Surely you don’t condone the kind of atrocious behavior I witnessed yesterday?”

“You know I don’t. But ve haf talked, you and I, about vhat sells newspapers. This von’t. Not vhen so many of our readers vill soon be sending sons off to fight.”

Shocked and more than a bit disillusioned, Victoria could only stare at her father.

“Rewrite the piece,” Deitrich said gently. “Remove the emotion. I haf taught you the difference betveen reporting the news and shading it. You must not let Sam’s situation influence how you report things vhen var comes.”

With a little sniff, she snatched the draft from his hand and marched back to her desk. It was several hours before she could admit that her father was right. She’d put too much of herself into the piece. Too much of Sam.

With a little ache just under her breastbone, she took a clean sheet of paper and began again. When it was done, she gave it to Ed once more, returned to her desk and began composing the announcement of her engagement.

The bold-face paragraph announcing the engagement of Victoria Rose Parker to Samuel Garrett appeared in the March 31 edition of the Cheyenne
Tribune.
Mr. and Mrs. Deitrich Parker capped the announcement with a brilliant soiree at their home that evening.

Quite by coincidence, the Spanish Cadiz chose the same date to angrily denounce the United States’s arrogant demand for Cuba’s independence.

World events were quite overshadowed for Victoria when, amid popping corks and boisterous toasts, Sam presented her with a solid gold locket as a betrothal gift. The heart-shaped pendant dan
gled from a pin in the shape of a bow and was studded with sapphires. To match her eyes, he declared to the rapturous sighs of every female present that night.

Victoria begged a photograph from his mother and cut it to fit one side of the locket, with hers on the other. Caught up in the excitement of all prospective brides, she spent the next weeks daydreaming, attending gala dinner parties given in honor of the engaged couple and planning a trip to New York with her mama to shop for a trousseau.

Somehow she managed to squeeze those activities around hurried hours at the
Tribune,
where she and her papa and Ed Jernigan pored through the continuing avalanche of dispatches. Diplomatic tensions mounted daily as first the pope, then the ambassadors of England, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Russia appealed to President McKinley to avoid war.

As Victoria had confided so ingenuously, and so very, very ignorantly, to Sam, it was quite the most exciting time. Not until after the president formally requested Congress to issue a declaration of war did hard, cold reality begin to set in.

She was never quite sure when she first noticed the elevated eyebrows and sideways glances aimed at Sam whenever he was asked when he would
shake the mothballs from his uniform and rejoin his regiment.

Sometime after April 9, she thought, when the American consul general and other U.S. citizens departed Cuba in anticipation of imminent hostilities. Perhaps after April 10, when the U.S. high-handedly declared the island independent and American warships began a blockade of its harbors. Certainly by April 23, when Spain, driven to the wall, declared war and President McKinley responded by issuing a call for 125,000 volunteers.

Not to be outdone, Congress authorized funds for some 200,000 volunteers, including three regiments of cowboy cavalry. Wyoming’s Senator Warren, North Dakota’s Grigsby and the bold, brash assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who’d spent a number of years in the West and wanted badly to experience actual combat, immediately set about organizing the three regiments.

All across the country young stalwarts jammed recruiting stations. Grown to manhood during the three decades of peace following Appomattox, they’d never tasted combat, never heard cannons roar or the earsplitting din of bullets fired in fusillade. But they had absolutely no doubt that they would handily whup the thousands of well-armed, battle-tested Spanish regulars currently in Cuba.

As eager as other Americans, Wyomans poured into Cheyenne. While harried officers tried to sort
through the twenty or more applicants for every billet, the city’s saloons and brothels did a booming business. High spirits inevitably produced high jinks. Streetlamps got shot out. Two drunks stumbling down busy Fourth Avenue one afternoon decided to douse a glowing cigar stub by peeing on it. A half-dozen furiously squawking chickens mysteriously ended up inside the coffin of the recently deceased deacon of the Episcopalian church.

Even Victoria, who’d firmly believed women should throw off the outdated strictures of the declining century, took care not to walk the streets alone. Her mama escorted her to the shops to purchase what they’d need for their upcoming expedition to New York, and her papa accompanied her to and from the newspaper offices.

Sam provided frequent escort in the evenings. She was on his arm, strolling home from a stirring concert of Mr. Souza’s rousing marches, when a short, stubby wrangler planted himself directly in front of them.

“Remember me?”

How could they have forgotten the pugnacious pacifist whose adherence to his principles caused the near riot outside the Frontier Hotel a few weeks ago?

“Yes,” Sam said. “I do.”

“The name’s Powdry. Dan Powdry.” He thrust
out his hand. “I jest wanted to thank you for steppin’ in like you did.”

Sam gripped the callused paw. “You’re welcome.”

“I coulda took ’em, you understand. Bunch of damned fools, thinking they’re the only ones with sand in their craw.”

“Courage takes many forms,” Sam said quietly. “You displayed more than your share that day.”

“I don’t know ’bout that, but I do know I’m not one to forget someone what done me a good turn.” He jerked a thumb toward the saloon across the street. “Can I buy you and your lady a beer?”

Bawdy shrieks of laughter almost drowned out the honky-tonk piano music coming from inside. Victoria wasn’t surprised when Sam politely declined.

“Some other time, perhaps. It’s late and I have to get my fiancée home.”

Powdry shrugged and tipped his hat in Victoria’s direction. “You got you a good man here, ma’am. No matter what them fools said.”

“Yes, I think so, too.”

Yet she couldn’t help noticing how silent Sam became whenever the war turned up in conversation. Aching for him, Victoria snuggled close against his arm for the rest of the way home.

The good-night kiss she gave him that night was unrestrained and unabashedly hungry, as if the
sheer force of her passion could make him forget the names he’d been called, the sideways glances, the damned war itself.

Victoria wasn’t the only one who observed Sam’s slow withdrawal. Julia Garrett, too, watched her son turn more and more inward, though his smile was as ready as ever, his manner as solicitous as any mother could wish.

He was gone for days at a time attending to the family’s cattle, timber and real estate interests spread across most of western Wyoming. When he returned, he divided his energies between helping Jack break and train horses for the cavalry and squiring Victoria around town.

He never spoke about his feelings concerning the war. Although Sam celebrated along with everyone else when Admiral Dewey soundly defeated the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, Julia noticed he had little to say concerning the War Department’s stupendous struggle to train and equip the two hundred thousand volunteers now in uniform.

Her husband took note of his son’s reticence, as well. Two nights after Dewey’s stunning victory, the general studied Sam across the dinner table. There were just the three of them that night. Victoria, who’d joined them frequently in the weeks since the engagement was announced, had gone to
cover the meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary War Relief Committee for the
Tribune.

Slipping a hand into the pocket of his waistcoat, Andrew fingered the telegram he’d received this afternoon. His glance drifted from his son to his wife.

Julia was a tried-and-true army wife. From the day she and Andrew had found each other again after years apart, she’d followed the drum without so much as a murmur of complaint. Packing up an entire household. Riding across snow-covered prairies and sun-baked deserts. Braving Indians and outlaws, droughts and flash floods, scorpions and fleas. Cheerfully, she’d set up housekeeping in tents, sod shanties, and once, when stranded by a ferocious snowstorm, an abandoned chicken coop.

Following her husband from one remote outpost to another was one thing. Watching her only son ride off to war was another. Andrew knew she’d felt more relief than remorse when Sam resigned his commission and came home. Even now, knowing how it ate at their son’s soul to stand back while his friends and brothers in arms readied for war, Julia had cried when Andrew shared with her the contents of the telegram.

She showed no trace of tears now, though. Calm and serene, she met her husband’s gaze. “You might as well tell him and get it over with, Andrew.”

Sam glanced up from his beefsteak. “Tell me what?”

“You know I’ve been coordinating the revisions to the training manuals for the three regiments of cowboy cavalry,” Andrew began.

“How could I not? You and Colonel Wood have been burning up the telegraph wires.”

“It’s been a busy time,” the general admitted with a smile.

Laying aside his fork, Sam lounged back in his chair. He was glad to see the animation in his father’s face. All three of the men organizing the volunteer cavalry units had relied heavily on the general’s vast experience as a horse soldier to help set up the tables of organization for the new regiments. Senator Warren from Wyoming and Torrey from North Dakota had consulted with him extensively. Charged with forming the regiment from New Mexico and Oklahoma Indian Territory, Colonel Leonard Wood and his enterprising, enthusiastic friend Theodore Roosevelt had also drawn heavily on Andrew Garrett’s expertise.

Proud of his father’s role in the enterprise, Sam set aside his fork. “I’m still surprised Mr. Roosevelt insisted that Colonel Wood take command of the First Volunteer Cavalry instead of assuming that honor himself.”

“For all his occasional bluster, Roosevelt has enough sense to realize that his years in the New
York Guard don’t qualify him for command of a regiment. Leonard Wood won a Medal of Honor during the Geronimo campaign. Although he’s a surgeon by profession, he’s a born leader.”

“Like the man who trained him?” Julia put in.

“Yes, well…” With a roll of his shoulders, Andrew shrugged aside his years of command. “Wood is a good soldier and a brilliant organizer. Did you know he’s convinced the War Department to purchase Krag-Jorgensens for his entire regiment?”

“No!”

Despite his determination to remain as detached as possible, Sam couldn’t suppress a leap of excitement. So far, the army had only issued the Krag-Jorgensen rifle to regulars. The first small-caliber, smokeless powder repeating rifle, the Krag didn’t give off a telltale puff of black smoke when fired—a puff that too often pinpointed troops’ positions to snipers and gunners.

“How in the devil did Colonel Wood pull off that miracle?”

“I suspect you’ll find out when you get to San Antonio.”