Softly Falling (27 page)

“Surely you need him,” she protested. “I wouldn’t dream of letting my puny plans stop him from important work. The winter count can wait.”

“No. Some of the boys don’t like Indian cowhands, and I don’t take chances. He stays.”

Lily nodded. She took off her coat. “I understand that better than you know.”

“Thought you might. Sorry about that fool in the cookshack.”

She shrugged. “It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.” She did have a bone to pick with him. The wind had made her forget for a moment. “Don’t you ever take a chance like that again! He could have killed you.”

“He’s a bully, and I know bullies. All hat and no cowhand,” Jack said with a shrug. “It won’t happen again. Not on the Bar Dot, and not while I’m in charge. ’Night, Miss Carteret.”

“Have we been reading too much
Ivanhoe
and Unknown Knight?” she joked, wanting to lighten the moment because he looked so serious, and heaven knows he had enough burdens already. “Do I have a champion?”

He nodded and waited a long moment before he replied, almost as if mulling around whether to say anything at all. “I decided
that
at some point after you got off the train and maybe before we ate chop suey at the Great Wall. Don’t sell yourself short. Chapter twenty-four when I get back? Good night.”

C
HAPTER
25

T
here was snow in the morning, just as Pierre had predicted. Lily watched it fall so lightly, now that the wind was probably blowing its way across Nebraska, or maybe one of those states farther east that she couldn’t name.

She held up her mittened hand so the flakes fell on the dark wool. Enchanted, she stared at the little dots of white, each one with its own design. They melted soon enough. She could probably scare up more paper from Papa’s office so her children could draw snowflakes. Each one would have to be different. She wished she knew why snow did that.

That was the problem with teaching, she decided, as she waved to Fothering and laughed to see Luella on his back as he trudged up the hill through the ankle-deep snow.
The more I learn, the more I want to know
, she thought, waiting for them.
My children probably think I know everything, but I don’t
.

The Sansever children were already there and practically leaping about in their excitement.

“The Little Man is back!” Chantal said. She started to dance around the room. She grabbed Luella’s hand when Fothering set her down. “Look! The yarn is gone.”

Hand in hand, the two girls—no, friends now—ran to the corner. They knelt and tried to peer into the tiny hole, which made Lily turn away in laughter. She walked to her desk, nodding to see the hairpins gone too. The Little Man had left a pebble in exchange, which Pierre had said he might do.

Nick’s smile was as broad as his sisters’ when he came in with more wood, tracking in snow. Lily swept it out the door while he thundered the logs in the woodbox by the stove, where Fothering had just finished lighting a fire. Soon the room was warm enough for the children to take off their coats. Lily noticed that Amelie was now wearing the coat Jack had procured from the faro dealer. Madeleine must have cut it down because the sleeves were perfect.

“Your mother did a lovely job altering the coat,” Lily told Amelie, who blushed.

“
Ma maman
can do nearly anything,” she whispered. “And look, my old coat fits Chantal just right.” Amelie paused, perhaps wondering if she should say anything else.

“Go on, my dear,” Lily said.

“Did someone ever give you hand-me-downs?” Amelie asked.

“So that’s what they are called here? No, my clothing was always new,” Lily told her. No matter what her uncle had felt about his younger brother’s ill-advised marriage to an island lady, he had never shied from putting the best of everything on her back. Madeleine had remarked only last week that her clothes were so well made.

“Your uncle was a wealthy man,” Amelie said.

“He still is,” Lily said.

Chantal had been listening. “Then why is your father . . . Ow! Amelie, you don’t need to poke me.”

“Maybe we are asking private questions,” Amelie told her little sister. “I’m sorry for her prying, Miss Carteret.”

“Not at all,” Lily said. She realized how little she had told the children about herself. Papa had probably said nothing. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to tell them where she came from, especially after the tense scene in the cookshack last night.

She knew Pierre was coming to the school in a little while, after the riders left to work the cattle that were so relentlessly moving south. She had watched Jack this morning during breakfast. He had a perpetual frown line now that she feared would only deepen as winter came. “We’re trying to convince Texas cows that they can’t trail over the next rise or the next, and find warmth along the Nueces or the Brazos rivers,” was how he put it. “Cows are not so smart.”

He had given her shoulder a little squeeze as he passed her table where she sat with her father. His hand still on her shoulder, he had leaned closer. “That man who harassed you last night? Someone gave him an amazing black eye.”

“It had better not have been you or Pierre,” she warned.

“We’re pure as the driven snow,” he said.

“Since when?” she retorted without thinking.

He lifted his hand from her shoulder. “I mean it, Lily. You have more champions than you realize. Don’t know how it happened, but word is spreading about the Bar Dot School.”

She had basked a moment in the security she felt when Jack was around, or Pierre. Maybe every girl needed an Unknown Knight or two. She felt suddenly self-conscious as he stood so close to her, so she looked around, hoping no one noticed. Her father was finishing his coffee, correcting Nick’s late night math. Everyone else was gone, except for Pierre, who looked at her with a half smile of his own.

“Champions?” she teased, hoping to lighten the moment. “Every lady needs one! Thank merciful providence that I didn’t decide to read
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
to you, instead of
Ivanhoe
.” There. That was friendly and nothing more.

“I was your champion before
Ivanhoe
,” he said and put on his Stetson.

“Miss Carteret, you are not paying attention to us.”

Lily laughed and turned her focus to Luella. “And I apologize. Amelie said something made me think that you might like to know more about me.”

Nick raised his hand. “I do, but it’s more than that.” His eyes were troubled. “That man in the cookshack was rude to you.”

“He was,” Lily agreed, wondering in her heart if everything in life belonged in a classroom for discussion. “You know I am darker than you, but my father is light.” She went to the wall where the map of the world hung, complete with the Braxton Bitters nymph in her diaphanous robes. She pointed to the Caribbean Sea and touched the small island in the Lesser Antilles that still held such a chunk of her heart. She pointed to England and located Bristol.

The children squinted to see, so she called them forward. Besides, it was getting colder, and they could warm themselves closer to the stove.

“My father is the youngest son of a prominent family here in Bristol,” she explained, tapping the map. “Since he could not inherit his father’s estate, he went here to manage a sugarcane plantation.” She ran her finger from England to Caribbean waters to Barbados.

“Sugarcane?” Chantal asked.

“It grows in tall stalks and tastes sweet. That’s one way sugar is made,” Lily explained. “Papa met my mother there. She was the daughter of an apothecary.” Lily held up her hand before Luella had a chance to raise hers. “What is an apothecary? My grandpapa made potions and pills to cure people of their illnesses. He was from Spain. My grandmama was the daughter of a former slave and a French plantation owner.”

“Slavery?” Amelie asked, her eyes wide.

“Yes. My
abuelo
—my grandpapa—actually freed my grandmama. They married, and my mother was born about a year later.”

“You’re pretty,” Luella said in her forthright way. “Was your mother pretty too?”

“She was beautiful,” Lily said simply. “I’ll bring a photograph of her tomorrow.”

“Is she in England?” Amelie asked. She looked down. “This isn’t going to end well, is it?”

Her heart went out to the quiet child who held back so much. Lily picked up her chair from behind her desk and set it in front of the students. She wondered if she had been hiding behind her desk, not feeling confident, unsure of herself. The moment had come and gone, and she knew it would never return.

She heard a small sound in the corner, and there was Pierre. He had come in so quietly, and now he was squatting by the door. He nodded to her, encouraging her to continue.

“No, it isn’t, Amelie,” she said, her voice soft. “It’s a sad story. Mama died in Barbados of yellow fever. It comes and goes on the islands, and it came to her.”

Amelie’s head went down on her desk. Lily rested her hand on the child’s hair. “It came to me too, but I survived. I was five.” She glanced at Pierre. “What this means is that I can never get yellow fever.”

She couldn’t sit still. A few strides took her to the blackboard and she wrote i-m-m-u-n-e in big letters. “Immune. This means I can never get yellow fever.”

“If it comes to the territory, you’ll be safe,” Luella said.

Lily couldn’t help her smile, and it relieved her heart. “Yes! Of course, yellow fever doesn’t come here.” She sat down among her children again. “None of you need to fear it.”

“What happened then?” a voice asked from the corner.

The children looked around in surprise and relaxed to see Pierre.

For a small moment, she wanted to be angry with him for forcing more of the story, but it passed; he was right. Besides, Nick wanted her to explain someone like the man last night.

“My father and I went to England, where I shivered in the cold and cried because I wanted to go home,” she told her little audience. “My Uncle Niles sent me to a very nice school nearby and saw that I had beautiful clothes.” She sighed. “But I didn’t look like the other girls and they made fun of me. Called me names, like that man last night. I tried to ignore them, but it hurt.” She glanced over her shoulder at the word on the blackboard. “
Immune
means to be protected from something. We are never immune from hurtful words, so it’s best never to say them in the first place.”

“If I see him again, I will fight him,” Nick said, barely suppressing his anger.

She touched both his hands that were balled into fists on his desk. “No.” She felt her face grow warm. “I have plenty of champions. All I need you to do is study and learn and promise me that you will never say hurtful things about people’s color.”

The boy held out his arm and rolled up his shirt sleeve. He looked at her, and she unfastened the little mother of pearl buttons at her wrist. She pushed up her sleeve and turned her forearm up, too, next to his.

“You’re not much darker than I am, not at all,” Nick said. He watched her face, and Lily could see what a fine-looking man he would be someday. “I think Luella is whiter than we are.”

The little girl rolled up her sleeve and moved closer. “True,” she said, “but you know, I’m not really white, not like teeth or snow.”

“What are we then?” Lily asked, loving these children in the Temple of Education with all her heart.

The children looked at their arms. “Maybe beige,” Amelie suggested. She glanced back at the Indian. “Mr. Fontaine, what do you think?”

Pierre rolled up his flannel sleeve. “I am a little lighter than Miss Carteret. My mother was Lakota and my father was a French fur trader, with maybe a little Ojibwa.” He rolled his sleeve down. “You are beige. Miss Carteret and I will be tan like a buffalo hide. This one.” He pointed to the winter count with its spiral and colorful figures.

What a perfect change of subject
, Lily thought with admiration. She rolled down her sleeve and had Chantal fasten the two buttons at her wrist.

“Mr. Fontaine is here to tell us about winter count,” Lily said. “We can make our own, because I think he found some canvas.”

“Jack Sinclair found it,” Pierre said. He opened a stiff, vividly painted hide shaped roughly like a box, but flat. “This is
parfleche
, Miss Carteret. I store things here.” He pulled out five squares of canvas, each about the length of a yardstick. “One for you too.”