The Pride of Hannah Wade (27 page)

“How long you been out on patrol, Cap’n?” she teased, noticing the taut flexing of his leg muscles. His horse sensed the hot agitation that fired his blood, and danced nervously. “Why do you suppose yore horse is gettin’ al excited?” She laughed.

Her throaty laughter followed him as Cutter caught up the braided rawhide rein of the pinto and rode away with it in tow. Halfway down Suds Row, he met John T. on his way home. The black sergeant saw the laundry under his arm, and a closed-up look came over his face. Cutter gave a cursory response to Hooker’s salute, and continued toward the stables. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw John T. start walking a little faster toward his makeshift dwelling. And Cutter damned that woman; he damned her to hell for twisting a man up like that.

It was all so sweetly familiar. Hannah moved slowly through the rooms, her fingers trailing over precious objects—so many little discoveries to make, so many little things she’d forgotten, but she had only to see an item again to recall it afresh. When her circle of the parlor was complete, she stopped in front of Stephen. A wondrous feeling of moving through time claimed her.

“It’s all exactly the way you left it,” Stephen told her with an encompassing gesture. “Not a thing has been moved.”

This demonstration of devotion and loyalty touched her. She gazed at him, seeing in his face the changes that the room did not show. With the tips of her fingers, she traced the gauntness of his cheeks.

“You’ve lost some weight,” she murmured as he
caught at her hand and lowered it. She studied his face, the glitter of gold in the tobacco-brown of his mustache. The thick sweep of his lashes hid his eyes from her, but she sensed that he was looking at her hand. Its callused roughness was a far cry from the velvety-soft texture it had once had. Then Stephen lifted his head and she felt the hard thrust of his gaze, so intense and probing.

“Did they hurt you?” he demanded in a voice made harsh by raw feelings.

She shut out the horror of her own memories to reassure him. “I’m all right now.” Her body swayed toward him, wanting his kiss, needing it.

She pressed her fingers to his lips as he tightly shut his eyes, as if in fervent prayer. He spoke against her desert-chapped hands. “Sometimes I thought I would never see you again.”

“I know,” Hannah said gently, surprising him with her answer.

“How?”

“The armband. Or has someone died in your family?”

“No one died.” Stephen released her and drew away to remove the black cloth from around his sleeve, all his attention becoming rapt in it. “This was my reminder of you. You were always with me. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I carried the thought of you. Whatever pain and grief I endured, I knew that it was small compared to what you must be suffering.” He paused to look at her. “Does that make sense?” Then he seemed to see her, and all that restless, intense energy was channeled into another subject. “We’ve got to get you out of those clothes. Where is that Cimmy Lou to help you with your bath? I had my striker put water on to heat. You wait here.”

Alone, Hannah turned back into the center of the
room and caught a glimpse of her refection in the wall mirror. She stared at it. The image of the woman the Apaches knew as Coloradas gazed back at her, clad in hand-sewn buckskins, curl-toed moccasins, and a colored headband around her forehead. Her skin was so brown, and her eyes were so dark. Yet Hannah recognized herself.

She remembered the last time she’d looked in this mirror; it had been the night of the Sloanes’ party, but the face of that other woman seemed to belong to a stranger, even though the features were the same. All the things in the parlor were familiar to her—except the remembered image of that other Hannah. During her captivity, she had forced herself to remember objects, acquaintances, places, details about Stephen; but she had forgotten what she used to think and feel, what she had wanted, what she once believed. She wasn’t sure anymore who that well-bred, well-schooled, and blissfully ignorant woman was.

Hannah turned away from the mirror and faced the parlor, a room meant to hold lavender scents and silks and the rustle of long skirts—not crushed mint and buckskins and the cat-footed silence of moccasins. In so many ways she hadn’t changed—not in her loyalties nor in her love for Stephen—yet an uneasy feeling plagued her. She couldn’t be that other woman anymore. She didn’t know her.

When Cimmy Lou Hooker came to the back entrance of their quarters, Stephen’s striker, Delancy, showed her through. Hannah had forgotten how much water was needed to fill the copper tub; the amount seemed prodigious after her desert existence with the Apaches. Luxuriating in the bath, she forgot her nudity in the pleasurable sensation of immersing her body in so much water. She didn’t display any of the modesty she would have shown before with servants present. “Miz Wade, where’d you get them scars? Did them
Apaches do that to you?” Cimmy Lou stared at the bum marks gouged into the skin below her collarbone.

“Yes.” She covered the marks with the large bath sponge. Time had dulled the memory of that sharp-searing pain, but not the sight of the red-hot stick coming at her. “I tried to run away once,” Hannah admitted in an emotionless voice. “They punished me.”

“I bet you didn’t try to escape from them again.”

“Only once.” Hannah dipped the sponge in the soapy water, then raised it and squeezed the liquid over her outstretched arm. “When the Mexican army attacked the
rancheria,
I tried to give myself up to the soldiers so they could bring me back. But they thought I was an Apache and tried to kill me.”

It was good to talk, to release some of the words. It let some of the horror out. And Hannah knew that the colored woman’s questions were only the first of many that would soon be asked by others. This was merely practice, she thought wryly.

“Well, yore as brown as one, that’s fo’ shore.” Cimmy Lou shook out a toweling blanket and held it up for Hannah to step into as she climbed out of the copper tub. “How’d you get like that, all over?”

“They took away my clothes.” The towel was wrapped around to swaddle the full length of her.

Cimmy Lou stopped rubbing her down. “Every stitch?”

“Every stitch,” Hannah answered flatly. The knock that came at the bedroom door was a welcome intrusion. “Yes?”

“Doctor Griswald is here.” Stephen’s voice came from the other side.

“I’ll only be a moment.” She turned to Cimmy Lou, concerned now with the task of making herself presentable. “My robe, Cimmy Lou.”

After donning a minimum of underclothes, Hannah
slipped on the long robe and tied the sash snugly around her waist. Freed’ of its ribbon, her auburn hair tumbled loosely about her shoulders as she crossed the room to the hall door and opened it.

“Please come in, Doctor Griswald.” The army surgeon and her husband were conversing in low tones in the narrow hallway. They stopped abruptly when she spoke, and Hannah felt the doctor’s close scrutiny. She was becoming uneasy with the way everyone was watching her, as if expecting to see something, some mark of her captivity perhaps.

“Your face is thinner,” Doc Griswald announced, and tilted his head back to look at her up close through his bifocals, “It appears you’ve lost weight. Your color looks good though, even with that tanning from the sun.”

“I am feeling well,” Hannah insisted as he walked past her into the bedroom, his medical bag banging against his leg. Actually she’d had more rest in the last two days than she was accustomed to having in a week, and more food and water, too.

Stephen smiled at her, but remained out in the hallway. “You’re beginning to resemble the Hannah I married.” The look in, his eyes was as warm as the low comment. “I’ll leave you in Doctor Griswald’s capable hands.”

“Miz Wade, what you want me t’do with these buckskins?” Cimmy Lou inserted.

“Burn them.” The order came from Stephen, Quick and firm, before Hannah had a chance to speak. “Burn the moccasins, everything.”

Hannah didn’t like the hard set of his jaw, the sudden blaze of light in his eyes; she remembered the temper that boiled behind them. But she held her peace, turning instead to the colored laundress to confirm, “Yes, burn them, Cimmy Lou.”

“Whatever you wants, Miz Wade.” She shrugged to indicate that it made no difference to her and picked up the naturally tanned leather garments, folding them loosely over her arm. “You be needin’ me fo’ anythin’ else, Miz Wade?”

“No, you may go.” Hannah dismissed the woman and walked to the dresser, where the doctor had spread open his black satchel. Again, she felt herself the target of his close attention.

The minute the door closed behind Cimmy Lou and they were alone, the doctor inquired, “What’s the date today, Mrs. Wade?”

The question startled her, especially the tone in which it was asked; he seemed determined to trip her up in some way. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I haven’t asked anyone. It’s late winter, the season the Apaches call Ghost Face, and it’s almost the time of Little Eagles, which I think is early spring—so it might be February ... of 1877.” The answer was the most complete one she could give him.

“Well, it doesn’t appear that you’re addle-witted,” he concluded, and took out his stethoscope.

In the hallway outside, Cimmy Lou turned away from the bedroom door and started for the kitchen. Stephen followed her, his stride quick and determined. “Is she all right?”

She answered him over her shoulder, half angry and half mocking. “If’n yore askin’ me if I could tell how many of them ‘paches she bedded, once a field’s been plowed it’s purty hard to know who done the plowin’.” Cimmy Lou chucked the buckskin clothing in a box that was kept in the kitchen for garbage. “I do know they took her clothes from her an’ made her go ‘round naked as the day she was born fo’ awhile. It’s fo’ shore she ain’t pure an’ white no more.” She swung around to give him a knowing look, smug and self-satisfied that
she was getting back at him through his precious wife, “You been wantin’ her back an’ she’s here. Now we’ll see how you like it.”

Stephen took a step toward her, then stopped, his body rigid. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re only saying it because you’re jealous.”

“She’s welcome to you.” Her short laugh mocked the arrogance of his assumption. “’Course, there’s the other thing. With her bein’ without clothes for so long, her body’s almost as brown as mine. Maybe you won’t miss me so much. At night in the dark, you jest might mistake her fo’ me. An’ who knows, Majuh? Maybe them. Apaches taught her a few things.”

“My God, I’ll—“ His hands were clenched into fists at his sides.

“You’ll what, Majuh?” she flared in challenge. “You know I’m sayin’ the truth. Last week you called me a slut. Well, jest what does that make her?”

He raised a hand to strike her, hesitated, then stalked from the kitchen. Outside the bedroom door, Stephen paused, all the raw turbulence of his temper stirring beneath the veneer of severe discipline.

An imperious knock rattled the front door in its frame, the sound traveling down the narrow hall to break through his harsh musings. Several seconds passed before he responded to its summons and went to answer it. His first rush of pleasure at Hannah’s return, apparently unharmed, was gone.

When Stephen opened the door, the colonel’s wife, Ophelia Bettendorf, and Maude Goodson confronted him. He stiffened at the avid curiosity not quite hidden by their expressions of concern and remained standing in the doorway, blocking their entrance.

“How is she?” demanded silver-haired Ophelia Bettendorf, reigning queen of the officers’ wives.

“We came as soon as we could,” Maude Goodson
interposed. Her delicate white skin and blond hair reminded Stephen of how different from them Hannah had become.

“She’s fine,” he said tersely. “The doctor’s with her now.”

“One of us should be with her,” the colonel’s wife stated. “At a time like this, she needs the company of another woman. I’m sure there are certain things she simply can’t tell a man, things that would be too painfully embarrassing.”

“All those months of captivity—it must have been a horrible ordeal.” Maude Goodson clutched her Bible. “I know she’ll want to relieve her mind of the dreadful experience.”

“You ladies are kind.” A stiff politeness marked the faint smile that curved his mouth. “But I’m sure you’ll understand that, with all the excitement of coming home, rest is of the first importance. Perhaps she’ll be up to seeing you in a day or two.”

“Really, Major-” Ophelia Bettendorf began haughtily.

“I’m afraid I must insist.”

Their disappointment at not being able to see Hannah was not fully concealed. “You will tell her we called?” the captain’s wife requested anxiously.

“Of course. And thank you for your concern, ladies.” Stephen remained in the doorway until they turned away, then stepped inside and shut the door. He crossed to the parlor window and stood to one side to watch them.

It was an empty sky, as washed out as Cutter felt. Sunlight glinted on the ground, catching the brittle flashes of mica particles in the sand. He left the stables and headed up Officers’ Row, his long body weighted by fatigue. His uniform was travel-stained and he
needed a shave. But more than that, he wanted to kick back and relax, let all the jumble of thoughts and events spill from him.

His bachelor quarters were closer than the Wades’. He kept thinking of a wash, a shave, a change of uniform, and maybe a shot of whiskey and one of those black Mexican cigars he’d been saving. Cutter went to his quarters, but only to leave his laundry; then he went out again and down the walk to the adobe building where Major Wade resided.

Before Cutter reached the
ramada,
Wade stepped outside to meet him and moved into the deep shade below the raftered roof. Cutter followed him partway, then stopped and came to attention to salute him. A driving tension charged the air despite the forced calm Wade showed him as he returned Cutter’s weary salute..

“At ease, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.” He shifted to a loose and relaxed stance, his mind tired but alert to the unsettling currents in the still air. “You wanted to speak to me, Major.”