Never Look Back (83 page)

‘I can imagine,’ he said. ‘I heard the Contessa brought her from New Orleans, was she a slave?’

‘Not Zandra’s, she was appalled by slavery,’ Matilda said, then went on to tell the story.

‘I suppose if Dolores had been less plain she would have pressed her into some other kind of service!’ he replied with some sarcasm.

Matilda bristled. ‘Don’t you ever make those kind of remarks about Zandra,’ she snapped. ‘She never “pressed” anyone into service, as you like to call it. Just the fact that Dolores chose to stay looking after her when she was old and frail proves the high esteem she had for her. Zandra left her five hundred dollars in her will, so she clearly cared for her too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking a little sheepish. ‘I guess I’m just like everyone else, and find it difficult to imagine a woman owning a parlour house having a heart.’

‘It was a pity to you didn’t get to meet her,’ Sidney piped up, wanting to smooth the waters. ‘She was one lovely lady, Captain Russell, you’d have liked her the way we did, but tell us about your new posting.’

James repeated what he’d already told Matilda. ‘Benicia is one of the better postings because it’s a newly built fort. Unfortunately, the temptation for some of the enlisted men to desert will be even greater here, so close to this city of sin and gold, than anywhere else,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Especially as for the most part there will nothing to do all day but drill.’

‘Won’t you be fighting Indians?’ Sidney asked.

James smiled at the naive view that this was all soldiers did, and shook his head. ‘We’re only here to keep law and order in the gold-mining towns,’ he said. ‘Trouble can brew up like a spark in dry straw, our job is just to quell it.’

After asking a few questions about army life, Sidney reluctantly went back down to the saloon. Matilda and James moved back to the couch in front of the fire while Dolores cleared the table.

‘Don’t you have to go downstairs tonight?’ he asked once
Dolores had left the room and Matilda handed him a brandy.

‘I should, but I won’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to leave you alone up here and you can’t come down with me without any boots.’

‘I don’t mind being alone,’ he said, stroking her cheek with one finger. ‘By rights I should be up at the fort with my men, not lying around here in comfort. I’ll have to get back very early in the morning to lead them to Benicia.’

Matilda hadn’t realized he was moving on so quickly. ‘I thought you’d have a couple of days here,’ she said sadly.

He drew her into his arms. ‘I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about how things are,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where we can go from here, Matty. Evelyn’s joining me soon in Benicia.’

Matilda’s heart plummeted. While his wife was right over the other side of America in Virginia she imagined she could forget about her. ‘Are you trying to tell me that this is all we get?’ she asked softly.

He tilted her face up to his and looked into her eyes. ‘How can I say that, Matty? I wish I could say it was a terrible mistake and this is where it has to end, but I can’t. It sure doesn’t feel like a mistake, it feels like the rightest thing I’ve ever done.’

‘But how can we have anything more, James?’ she asked gently, suddenly so very aware of how precarious this love affair would be. ‘How can I be in your life when Evelyn is with you at the fort? Maybe I could bear you having a wife if she was far away. But not here, so close.’

He said nothing for a little while. She could see a tic twitching under his eye, and knew he had something he wanted to share with her, but felt he couldn’t say.

‘What is it? Come on tell me, we can’t have secrets now.’

‘She doesn’t want to come,’ he blurted out suddenly. ‘It was her father who insisted she must.’

Matty frowned. ‘But why doesn’t she? Surely every wife wants to be with her husband.’

He hung his head, she thought he looked embarrassed.

‘The truth of the matter is that Evelyn expected that her father would immediately push me up through the ranks once we were married,’ he said in a rush. ‘She thought I’d get a posting in Washington and saw herself in a smart house, entertaining fellow officers and their wives. She was shocked when her father packed
her off to join me in New Mexico, her plan was to stay at home in Virginia.’ James paused and leaned forward to give the fire a poke. ‘The sad thing about this is that Evelyn was as mistaken about her father as she was about me. He’s of the old school, like me, believes in real soldiering, not sitting behind a desk somewhere. He knew my real talents lay in training raw recruits. He also believes a woman who marries a soldier should take what comes with the job.’

‘Well, so she should,’ Matilda said stoutly.

James gave a mirthless little laugh. ‘Can you begin to imagine, Matty, what it’s like to have a wife with you who is determined to hate everything sight unseen? She was a spoiled, pampered child, Matty, she has no spirit of adventure, no desire to broaden her horizons, and she has never learnt that sometimes life has to be a compromise.’

Matilda noted that James had carefully chosen every word he’d said about her, he was too gallant to be openly disloyal. She thought the plain truth was that Evelyn had married James believing she could manipulate him and her father to get exactly what she wanted, and that real love had never come into it.

If this was true, then she need have no guilty conscience about taking Evelyn’s husband as a lover. It still meant that they had no real future together. It would always be an illicit relationship which they would have to hide. But however painful and difficult that might be, it had to be far less agonizing than cutting him out of her life.

‘I can’t say goodbye,’ she said, leaning into his chest. ‘So there’s nothing for it but for us to be lovers in secret. That is, if you can find a way to come and see me now and then?’

‘I can find a hundred and one excuses to come into San Francisco, if you still want me/he said, with a voice husky with emotion. ‘Maybe you could even organize regular riots so I’ve got good reasons.’

Matilda giggled. ‘There will be a riot if you don’t come.’

A little while later Dolores knocked on the door to say she had made up the bed for the Captain in Zandra’s old room and asked if they needed anything more this evening.

Matilda thanked her and said there was nothing more they needed. James smirked as the door closed behind the maid but made no comment.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely comfortable with having a servant,’ Matilda said thoughtfully. ‘You see, I was a very nosy one, and knew absolutely everything about the Milsons. I don’t like the idea that Dolores knows everything about me.’

‘I’ve never thought about it in that way,’ he replied with a smile. ‘But then I was surrounded by servants right from birth. The way Dolores fussed about my wet clothes was almost like going home again.’

‘And they must have been slaves?’

‘Yes,’ he said, a shadow flitting across his face. ‘Of course I didn’t understand the significance of that until I was about eleven. My father stopped me playing with the children around that time. Up till then I thought we were just one big family, black or white. Indeed, I much preferred the black people, they were far nicer to me than my own folks.’ He paused for a moment, a troubled look in his eyes. ‘That’s another cloud on the horizon,’ he said after a few moments. ‘If the Southern States are ever to join the Union they will have to agree to abolish slavery. But I can’t see them doing that, and I can only see it ending in civil war.’

Matilda didn’t see why this should trouble him unduly, and said so.

‘You are forgetting I am a Southerner,’ he said with a sigh. ‘How could I lead my men against my own people?’

Any further deep conversation was halted as the band struck up downstairs. James jumped as the lamps began to tinkle with the vibration, and Matilda laughed. ‘Our peace is over now,’ she said. ‘In an hour or two we won’t even be able to hear ourselves speak.’

‘Then kiss me again instead,’ he said.

The kisses earlier had been savage, a thirst that had to be quenched, the whole act had been a primitive urge which had no finesse or delicacy. But now it was time to tease, please and explore each other. James made a nest of cushions in front of the fire and laid her down on it, pulling the ribbon from her hair and running his fingers through it. He whispered endearments, his eyes full of tenderness, he said again that fate must have planned for them to be together. Between kisses, garments were removed slowly, piece by piece, and tossed aside.

Matilda looked down at him as he hooked her breasts out
from the confines of her chemise to suck at them, and she trembled with pleasure. As his shirt came off and that hard golden-brown chest which she’d so often admired on the trail touched her nipples for the first time, it was so erotic she felt faint with desire.

It was she who removed his pants, running her hands down his muscular thighs, stroking his hard buttocks, delighting in the soft gold hair on his legs. His penis was far bigger than either Flynn’s or Giles’s, as upright as a sabre, yet so warm and smooth to the touch.

James stroked her body as if tuning a musical instrument, waiting for the moment when the pitch and tone were perfect. Every kiss heightened the sensuality of his probing fingers, he licked and sucked at her naked flesh as if he was feasting on her, and when he finally entered her, Matilda’s senses were already spiralling out of control, lost in the wonder of loving and being loved.

They moved together like one person, her legs clenched around his waist, bodies wet with perspiration, making sucking noises as they touched. She wanted him deeper and deeper inside her, she clawed at his back and buttocks, and then at last it happened again, that glorious eruption inside her, and she could only cling to him, murmuring his name over and over again.

An hour or two later, James sat back on his haunches and smiled down at Matilda naked on the pile of cushions.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked. ‘Do I look funny?’

‘You look wanton,’ he said. ‘But not funny, unless I count your reluctance to move to a comfortable bed as amusing.’

‘Well, Dolores might have come out of her room to see if we wanted anything,’ she said.

‘I don’t think even fire would drag Dolores out of her room tonight,’ he said. ‘She knew you had designs on me.’

‘She knew no such thing,’ Matilda retorted, pulling out a cushion and throwing it at him.

‘Good servants are mind-readers,’ he said. ‘She probably knew too that you needed some good loving.’ He had never known a woman as abandoned in love-making as Matilda had been, and yet he knew it hadn’t come from experience. She was also the most beautiful woman he’d ever made love to, his heart ached just to look at her.

He felt he could drown in the depths of those blue eyes, her lips were so soft and full, her skin like cream satin. The scent of her hair made him think of that sweet-smelling sage out on the prairies, and her body was perfection. Breasts still as firm and uptilted as they’d been that day he glimpsed her naked in the river, her tiny waist emphasizing the curves of her hips, and such a pert, rounded bottom. Most women of twenty-six had begun to lose teeth, yet hers were still as white and even as a child’s.

‘It was good loving,’ she said with a smile, and just the way she looked at him made him tremble and want her again.

He lay down beside her and pulled her into his arms, burying his nostrils in her hair and breathing in that cool, clean scent. There was so much he wanted to say to her. That Evelyn didn’t like love-making, she just endured it. That she was so empty-headed that an hour or two alone with her seemed endless. All she thought about was her appearance, always preening in front of a looking-glass, and she was insufferably rude to servants too. But he could say none of these things, even if it would make Matty understand why he had been unfaithful to his wife.

He’d already committed the greatest act of disloyalty, it wasn’t right to talk about Evelyn’s failings too. She couldn’t really help being the way she was, she was just a typical product of her class and upbringing.

‘I could leave the army, run off with you and your children to England,’ he whispered, as the idea came to him. ‘We could make out that we married on the wagon train, that Amelia is my daughter. I could find some work there, and we could have other children.’

She half smiled. ‘You couldn’t leave the army,’ she said, tweaking his nose. ‘It’s what you love. You would hate England, it’s cold and rainy, and just as full of bigots as America. In time you’d come to hate me for taking you there.’

‘But what else is there?’ he said.

‘What we’ve got right here.’

Right now it seemed enough for him. He could stand being out soldiering for months on end, as long as he always had her to come back to. But he guessed that once Evelyn joined him, every evening in her company would seem like eternity.

‘But I have no right to expect you to just wait until I can come to you. It could be months, maybe even years sometimes.’

‘It doesn’t matter, James. I’ll wait,’ she said, her eyes wide and honest. ‘I’d rather have just a few hours of your time now and then than have you for ever, knowing I spoiled your life and career. You could get to be a general one day, you might be able to help put this country to rights. I’ll be happy to watch you do that.’

James leaned up on one elbow and looked down at her. ‘But you are worth so much more than that.’

‘While I’m waiting for you I won’t be idle,’ she said. ‘I do have a life of my own, and a business to run.’

He admired her more than ever at those brave words. She was a truly independent woman and she wasn’t going to wilt in a corner while he was away.

‘That’s more like it,’ he teased. ‘For a moment I believed you had only the highest of ideals. The truth is, you want me out of the way, there
is
an element of self-interest!’

‘Of course,’ she said with a sly grin. ‘Now we’ve straightened that out, perhaps we can talk about something else.’

‘I have to go now,’ James whispered just as dawn broke. ‘I don’t want to go, Matty, but I must.’