Softly Falling (15 page)

Lily nodded. She glanced at Jack.
Thank goodness you don’t need anything from me
, she thought.

C
HAPTER
14

Y
ou know Lily won’t mind,” Jack told his sliver of a shaving mirror as he washed his face and picked up his Bible. He looked around his room for something else the school might be able to use and found a pamphlet given to him during the war. Pamphlets with thin paper usually ended up in the privy or as fire starters. If Lily could use it, all the better.

No point in putting on airs with Lily Carteret, not after what he’d told her in the schoolroom this afternoon. Maybe she saw his efforts with a chair and a coat as indications of his resourcefulness, rather than evidence of his love of gambling.

It hardly mattered. He was here doing a job he was paid for, and she was probably here until she found a way to leave. He already knew he would miss her when the time came. He already noticed that the Sansever girls had begun to gravitate toward her.

Others had noticed too. With his coffee cup, Preacher had pointed to Chantal, who was circulating with the second pan of biscuits. “We used to get first pick, boss,” he said. “What do you bet Amelie will make Lily her first stop with the pie too?”

“Never bet on a sure thing, Preach,” Jack had replied. “I’m okay with that.” He chuckled. “Maybe the girls’ll like us better again when the homework starts!”

“I doubt it. Have you noticed that Lily is the kind of person you don’t mind doing things for?” He nudged Jack. “Think what a great foreman she’d make.”

He asked himself again why he thought Lily needed a visit tonight. He knew Lily Carteret was capable, but he didn’t think she knew her own inner strength yet. In his twenty years in the territory, so hard at first but easing some now, he had seen the weather, the Indians, and the loneliness break people. The Indians were mostly guests of the US government on reservations now, but the loneliness and weather remained as potent barriers to settlement.

He thought Wyoming was hardest on the women, who seemed to need other women around to talk to and learn from. He couldn’t help but consider Mrs. Buxton, increasingly jumpy and strange. Had she always been that way, or was life here weighing on her admittedly fragile mind?

He had never thought of women as weaker than men, just different. Someone like Lily Carteret was different in more ways than most. He had developed his own love for Wyoming Territory; maybe he wanted her to like it too. And so he would visit.

She seemed glad to see him, kindly ushering him in. She took his hat and set it on the table, and he looked around, amused to see the little changes that now showed a woman’s touch.

She had hung up the two photographs that had kept him company for several months. He noticed a clean towel by the basin and pitcher, and a new bar of soap. She had stuffed a few flowers into a bitters bottle, flowers he recognized from the Buxtons’ yard. He pointed to them and she nodded.

“I plucked a few. I don’t think anyone noticed,” she said.

He saw a jumble of books and pamphlets on the drop-leaf table and added his donation. “Just a Bible and a pamphlet someone gave me. Nothing much. Looks like you already have a Bible.”

“I can use another one,” she assured him. “Papa, look who has come to visit us.”

Jack hadn’t even noticed Clarence Carteret sitting there so silent. “Good evening, suh,” he said.

“Ah, yes.” That was Clarence: always about a beat behind. He was pale and sweating, but he sat there, as if he knew he owed something to his daughter, even if he wasn’t quite certain what it was.

“I’ve been telling Papa about my day, and Freak, even,” Lily said. “Do have a seat.”

Maybe that was why he came to visit. He liked the little elegancies about her, from the accent on the second syllable of
Papa
, to her well-bred tidiness—not a hair out of place. He had never seen anyone like her.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “I do appreciate that you found me some in town.”

“All Wing Li had was green tea; at least, that sounds like what he was saying,” he told her, pleased that she liked the little packet he had left by her plate in the dining hall.

“We enjoy it, don’t we, Papa?”

Her father nodded, but he was sweating, and he kept looking toward the closed door to his room.

She got them each a cup and sat down next to her father. She plucked the book from the little shelf above the packing crate settee, and he recognized it as the book that Preacher had been reading out loud last winter. It was a wonderful story about Crusaders and a Jew and his daughter. He couldn’t remember the name.

“I’ve been reading
Ivanhoe
to him at night. We’re on chapter seven. Do you mind?”

“No, ma’am, not at all.”

Before she began, she did a little rundown on the earlier chapters, and it was just as he remembered. “You might have read it somewhere before,” she said. “If you’d rather I didn’t read . . .”

“It’s no bother,” he assured her again, wanting the story, even if it was only one chapter. She had no idea how much he wanted the story.

She cleared her throat and began. “ ‘The condition of the English nation was at this time sufficiently miserable. King Richard was absent a prisoner . . .’ ”

Jack closed his eyes with the sheer pleasure of her proper English voice, so much better than Preacher’s Alabama twang. Even if he never heard another chapter of
Ivanhoe
, he planned to store up this memory of the night a lovely Englishwoman read out loud.

He was scarcely aware of the passage of time as Lily read chapter seven. She used different voices, depending on the characters. He knew she would read to her little students that way, and he envied them already. They would have her special gifts for five or six hours every day.

“ ‘. . . leaving the Jew to the derision of those around him, and himself receiving as much applause from the spectators as if he had done some honest and honourable action.’ ”

Please don’t stop
, he thought as she put her finger in the book to mark the place.

“I think my Papa is ready for bed,” she said, keeping her voice neutral, as if that would make the sight of Clarence Carteret sweating and shivering more bearable.

“Should I help him?” Jack asked in a low voice.

“No. He’ll make it.”

She stood up and kissed her father. “I think you should go to bed now.”

Clarence nodded, and with a great sigh, he pulled himself erect with some effort and went to his room without a word, closing the door quietly. Jack tried to ignore it, but he heard the sound of a bottle against a glass almost immediately.

Lily looked so young just then, as she glanced down at her watch and then right into his eyes without flinching. “Another half hour tonight,” she said simply.

“I’d better go,” he said, remembering his rusty manners. Trouble was, Lily’s eyes filled with tears, and he realized that his abrupt departure would signal something he never intended—that he was ashamed and couldn’t wait to distance himself.

“No,” he said decisively and sat down again. “I’d like another cup of tea. That is, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” she said, and he heard the relief in her voice.

She came back from the lean-to kitchen with his cup refilled and handed it to him. The starch was back in her spine again, and he knew his damage hadn’t been irreparable.

“I should have some biscuits or tea cakes, but I’m no cook,” she confessed. “I never learned. Do you think Madeleine might have time for lessons this winter?”

He took a sip and doubted that he would ever get used to tea. “Perfect. Time hangs heavy in the winter. Just ask her.”

Cooking may not have been her forte, but Lily Carteret had impressive skills as a hostess. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but he found himself telling her about his childhood near Valdosta, Georgia, just scraping by on a farm so poor that one meal a day was the rule. He could have lied and made it sound better. How would she have known? If he couldn’t lie about his association with faro tables, what would have been the point in lying about the poverty of his youth?

“The war started and I signed up,” he said. “I am probably the only Confederate soldier who put on weight on rebel rations.” He chuckled, and not from embarrassment. “Told you we were poor!”

He didn’t fight any battles for her, but he did describe the rapid retreat into the Virginia countryside, and the final battle, when everyone was hungry and discouraged beyond imagination. “That’s where I got this,” he said, pointing to the scar by his mouth. “And thus ended my army career. And now I will go,” he said, shaking his head over the offer of more tea. Mercy, how did anyone drink more than one cup of the stuff and not have to pee?

They shook hands, and it felt formal, where before the evening had been friendly.

“I’ll read another chapter tomorrow night,” she said. “You know, if you’re not too busy.”

“I’ll be here,” he told her. He put on his hat and touched his finger to the brim. “You have the girls lined up for duty tomorrow?”

“I do. We’re going to cut out letters and numbers from the brown paper Mr. Watkins so kindly gave us—freight notwithstanding.”

He laughed out loud at that, then glanced at the closed door.

“Never mind,” she said. “He’s past hearing.” She squared her shoulders, which touched his heart, and opened the door to the outside. “Madeleine is going to dip the letters and numbers in some starch. She says it will make them sturdy.”

He nodded to her and she closed the door. He stood there a moment, wondering about the bravery of women, then remembered his overtaxed bladder and made tracks.

Lily took the cups and saucers into the lean-to and then allowed herself the luxury of forgetting about them. The days of maids around to do those things were long gone, but it was nice to imagine it for a moment. The dishes would still be there in the morning.

She put
Ivanhoe
back on the shelf, smiling as she remembered the delight in Jack’s eyes while she read. How could a person go through life and never read? Somehow she would find a way to teach him this winter. Like he said, time hangs heavy.

She thumbed through the Bible he had loaned her. She had three now, and there would be a use. Some of the Psalms made easy reading for her beginning readers. She picked up the pamphlet he had left, and felt the blood drain from her face.

“ ‘The mixing of the races is an abomination to the Almighty,’” she read silently, horrified until she remembered that Jack Sinclair, trusted foreman on the Bar Dot, ambitious rancher, and owner of a magnificent Hereford bull, was illiterate. Poor man! He would die a thousand deaths if he knew just what it was he had given her. At least, she thought he would, but she didn’t know him well, and he
was
a Southerner, after all. Both ideas rattled around in her brain until she told them to stop.

No, Lily, he is merely a man who cannot read
, she thought as she thumbed through the poorly printed screed. She put it in her trunk, but it could just have easily gone in the stove. She hoped he didn’t hold with such sentiments as expressed in the pamphlet, because she was coming to like Jack Sinclair.

C
HAPTER
15