Softly Falling Read online

  ALSO BY CARLA KELLY

  FICTION

  Daughter of Fortune

  Summer Campaign

  Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour

  Marian’s Christmas Wish

  Mrs. McVinnie’s London Season

  Libby’s London Merchant

  Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career

  Miss Billings Treads the Boards

  Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand

  Miss Whittier Makes a List

  The Lady’s Companion

  With This Ring

  Miss Milton Speaks Her Mind

  One Good Turn

  The Wedding Journey

  Here’s to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army

  Beau Crusoe

  Marrying the Captain

  The Surgeon’s Lady

  Marrying the Royal Marine

  The Admiral’s Penniless Bride

  Borrowed Light

  Coming Home for Christmas: Three Holiday Stories

  Enduring Light

  Marriage of Mercy

  My Loving Vigil Keeping

  Her Hesitant Heart

  The Double Cross

  Safe Passage

  Carla Kelly’s Christmas Collection

  In Love and War

  A Timeless Romance Anthology: Old West Collection

  Marco and the Devil’s Bargain

  NONFICTION

  On the Upper Missouri: The Journal of Rudolph Friedrich Kurz

  Fort Buford: Sentinel at the Confluence

  Stop Me If You’ve Read This One

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  To Marilyn and Gordon Bown

  and Kemari Rawlings with love.

  When you have exhausted all the possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.

  —THOMAS EDISON

  PROLOGUE

  Because Lily Carteret had a generous soul, she understood why her uncle couldn’t look her in the eyes when he gave her the ultimatum—long overdue, in her opinion.

  “Lily, my fiancée is wondering who you are, and I am disinclined to tell her.”

  His fiancée. Oh heavens, his fiancée was gat-toothed with thinning hair, but her father was a baronet, and the Carterets were a pretentious bunch. A prosperous shipbuilding company wasn’t enough. Uncle Niles Carteret, widowed himself, craved even the shadow of a title to cross his path, and Lady Sophronia Wadsworth seemed the answer to his prayer.

  “To avoid any disclosure, you are sending me where?” Lily asked. She kept her voice level and well modulated, as she had learned at Miss Tilton’s School in Bristol, a city not known for social airs, but good enough for Lily Carteret.

  “Wyoming Territory, to your father’s ranch.”

  Uncle Niles spoke as though Wyoming had a bad odor. Or perhaps “father’s ranch” was the bad odor, or maybe just “father.” Lily couldn’t really tell, but she had her suspicions.

  Wyoming, was it? She had finally been banished too. Sitting there in the Blue Room, reserved for any unpleasantness at the manor, Lily glanced out the window at the rain and merely wondered if it rained so much in this Wyoming. If not, then hallelujah.

  “When do I leave?”

  “Lady Wadsworth will be here Thursday next for a visit. Monday would be best. I’ve made arrangements.”

  Uncle Niles rose, and Lily did too, head high, for she had been the soul of grace even before her incarceration at Miss Tilton’s School. Her hand was on the knob when her uncle cleared his throat.

  “In his last letter—two years ago, in ’84, if I recall—your father mentioned how well the cattle business was going. I’ll send one hundred pounds with you, for him to invest on my behalf. He said anyone can make a fortune on what they call the ‘open range.’ ” He lowered his voice like a conspirator. “I think Wyoming has turned him toward responsibility.”

  I doubt it supremely, she thought. “Do you still send his remittance checks?”

  “Every quarter, as directed by Papa’s will. I am an honorable man,” he assured her. “Send me a report, eh?”

  She nodded. India had failed Clarence Carteret, or vice versa; Australia, ditto. And now he owned a ranch in Wyoming Territory? Doubtful.

  When she just stood there, privately amazed that her uncle was still so gullible, he cleared his throat, her signal to give a slight curtsy and leave.

  Lily vetoed the curtsy, her first tiny blow for liberty. She was being released too, and it didn’t feel half bad.

  CHAPTER 1

  The fact that he couldn’t read was Jack Sinclair’s little secret. He’d learned to sign his name for the paymaster during the War of Northern Aggression, but as the war lengthened and Confederate funds shortened, he hadn’t overused his sole bit of education. Maybe someday he’d have time to learn, but so far, no luck.

  Maybe everyone already knew he couldn’t read and just didn’t want to embarrass him. That seemed unlikely, because he didn’t live in a society interested in sparing a person’s feelings. Still, that might be the case, if he could believe a comment from Vivian, a faro dealer he knew at the Back Forty, Wisner’s sole saloon.

  “Jack, you’re just a nice man,” she had told him. Maybe she meant it. Maybe people didn’t want to hurt the feelings of a nice man. A fellow could hope, anyway.

  He pocketed Madeleine’s scribbled note to pick up flour and sugar at Wisner’s only general store and hoped that the clerk could read what looked like chicken scratches. Jack had stopped to tweak little Chantal’s pigtail. She looked up from the dough she was rolling and turned tender eyes on him.

  “I’ll see if the clerk has some old penny candy gathering dust,” he whispered to her. She was just six, but she could stand on an upended milk pail and roll dough.

  Mrs. Buxton’s note had been much neater. Jack came to her room, Stetson in hand, because she didn’t hold with anyone wearing a lid indoors. He had learned long ago just to go upstairs to her bedroom and knock, because she hadn’t the energy to walk very far, and downstairs constituted very far. Sickly, stern, and pitiful rolled into one disturbing invalid, she gave him her usual once-over.

  “Mr. Sinclair, get a haircut.”

  “I was going to ask Preacher to cut it toni—”

  “A haircut in town. Can’t cost more than fifteen cents, with a nickel gratuity.”

  Jack was too shy to explain that nearly two bits wasted in town meant two bits he couldn’t spend on grain for Bismarck, placidly adding muscle and bone in his own private pasture.

  “Yes’m,” he said and held out his hand for the list.

  She handed it to him. “Make sure it’s Pond’s Healing Cream and no imitation.”

  “Yes’m.” He felt the warmth rising from his neck at the thought of leaning across the counter, giving the clerk his leveling stare, and demanding Pond’s Healing Cream. A real man could hardly do that, but try to explain that to the boss’s wife.

  Jack started for the door, but Mrs. Buxton wasn’t through. “Mr. Sinclair, tell the post office clerk distinctly that there is a package for me and he needs to look a little harder.”

  He almost grinned but stopped in time. Trust a boss’s wife to demand packages to materialize, even if they weren’t there. He regarded her with some sympathy but not a lot; he didn’t think there was anything wrong with her except disappointed hopes and too much Wyoming.

  “Ma’am, I’ll demand your package and give the clerk a good shake if it isn’t there. Wo
n’t shoot him, though. That’d be rude.”

  Why he bothered to tease, he didn’t know. Mrs. Buxton had no sense of humor.

  She gave him a fishy look. “One more thing. Mr. Carteret wants you to stop in his office.”

  Jack held in his sigh until he was on the stairs. Would it have killed the Buxtons’ clerk to come to him? Jack had been ranch foreman long before Clarence Carteret became a clerk. Thirty a month and a two-room house, and Clarence felt superior to everyone. Maybe it was the English accent. What an irritant the man was. Any day now, the boss would figure it out and fire the skinny weasel.

  Still, Jack’s mother had raised him right, or right enough. He went down the stairs quietly, because Mrs. Buxton always whined about a headache. He stood outside the closed door at the bottom of the stairs. Jack stalled long enough to man himself for a visit to the clerk.

  He glanced through the lace curtains to the outside wondering if someday he would have a house like this with lace curtains, his reward for learning the hard business of ranching in Wyoming. After twenty years, discounting the years where he shivered, starved, and learned his trade in a place foreign from Georgia, Jack could run a ranch. Compared to the consortium’s Bar Two Dot (usually shortened to Bar Dot), his few acres nearby were paltry indeed. So he knocked on the door with a grimness about his mouth that he couldn’t totally blame on the man at the desk.

  “What do you need, Clarence?” he asked with no preamble.

  “That’s Mr. Carteret to you,” Clarence said.

  Jack knew better than to argue, and he knew “Clarence” was good enough for a remittance man, who couldn’t get by without that quarterly check from England, and a man barely sober on a good day.

  “What do you need?” Jack repeated, without benefit of first or last name this time. Maybe he just felt like twitting all that pretension sitting behind a desk.

  “My daughter, Miss Lily Carteret, will be on the afternoon train. Pick her up.”

  Gadfreys! The man wasn’t going to come along? Although he didn’t relish riding any distance with Carteret, it was only four miles to Wisner.

  “I’m taking the four-seater buckboard, so you’re welcome to come along. Your daughter?”

  “My daughter,” the clerk replied. “I don’t need to meet her.”

  Suddenly Jack understood. The worm wasn’t brave enough to tell this Miss Lily Carteret he’d gambled away a paltry two-thousand acre spread. Obviously the little twerp had never learned to own up to a misdemeanor.

  He tried again. “How long’s it been? She’ll probably want you to meet her.”

  Carteret turned his attention back to the ledger before him. “Nine years,” he muttered.

  “Suit yourself,” Jack said with a shrug, grateful that his own father, a hard enough man, was never so callous. “In case the platform is loaded with young ladies, how about a brief description?”

  “You’ll recognize her,” Carteret said, obviously reluctant to continue the conversation. “She was tall for her age at fifteen. Looks like her mother.” His voice grew almost wistful. “Her mother was from Barbados.”

  That was it? Did Mr. Remittance Man think Jack Sinclair was going to walk up to every woman on the platform and ask if her mother was from Barbados? “More information would be nice. Maybe even helpful,” he suggested.

  Carteret gave him a long look. Jack thought he saw a little embarrassment in it, but he could have been wrong.

  “Sinclair, do you know what café au lait is?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Didn’t think you would.”

  Jack ordered himself to count to ten. By twenty, he felt better. He gave Carteret his patented stare-down-his-long-nose look that generally worked with new hands and salesmen. Amazing, but Clarence couldn’t meet his glance. Jack hadn’t used the stare in a long while, but it still worked, apparently.

  “What about cambric tea?”

  With a shock, Jack understood. “I’m to look for someone not pasty white,” he said, feeling suddenly sorry for Miss Lily Carteret, who deserved a better father, no matter what her hue.

  Clarence Carteret surprised him. “She looks like her mother,” he said again, and with greater dignity. “Quite a lovely woman. You’ll find her.”

  In the past decade, Jack had made the short drive to Wisner more times than he could count, but as this hot and dry summer turned the corner into September, he was starting to dread the trip. The sky had been bright blue since April with no hint of rain. Brittle grass and parched ground outlined with cracks widened in the soil.

  Too many cattle nosed in the dry brush and lowed by shrinking ponds. The commission agents had offered so little for this year’s four-year-olds that most of the ranchers chose to winter over their herds and hope for better prices in ’87. Jack shook his head as he threaded Sunny Boy through a regular convention of steers complaining about their lot in life.

  He glanced west toward his own few acres. On the rare chance that the Cheyenne Northern was actually on time, he’d better ride for Wisner, get ranch business done first, collect Carteret’s mulatto daughter, and stop by the Two Jay on the way back to the Bar Dot.

  Wisner wasn’t much, not an up-and-coming town like Wheatland, which had a merchants’ club and three banks. One bank, a post office, a Methodist church, one general store, one undertaker, a hotel, a greasy spoon, a lawyer, a saloon, and a sporting house made up Wisner. What more did a Wyoming town need? A doctor might have been nice.

  Mrs. Buxton’s package was waiting for hm. The clerk handed it over with a frown. “Shake it.”

  Jack shook it and rolled his eyes. “Let’s hope Mrs. Buxton ordered a parcel of broken glass from Monkey Ward.”

  The clerk turned back to targeting pigeonholes with letters. Jack watched a moment, wondering what it would be like to receive a letter and be able to read it.

  The chair in the impromptu barbershop constituting a corner of the general store was more comfortable than he remembered. Since the Cheyenne Northern was late as usual, he felt rich to the tune of another fifteen cents and included a shave with his haircut. Glory, but it felt good just to sit there with a hot towel on his face. If only there was someone to knead the knots out of his neck, which had tightened into bullets after a summer with no rain.

  A visit to Vivian’s faro table would have been nice, but he had to save money. No telling how much hay and grain he’d have to buy for Bismarck and his harem this winter. He wasn’t any great shakes at faro, but Vivian was nice to talk to.

  His face in the mirror was always a shock. His little scrap of a shaving mirror at home only showed a bit of personal real estate; here was his whole head. At least his hair wasn’t thinning, even if that strawberry blond color seemed childish for a man going on thirty-five. He had enough weather wrinkles to avoid the nickname of Babyface. Or at least no one called him that to his face, since he was the foreman and had certain powers of hire and fire.

  Observing him, the barber was not helpful. “You could maybe grow a handlebar to cover that scar. Get it in the war?”

  “Sure did.” He smiled at the barber. From his speech he was a Yankee, and he still held that shaving razor. No sense in mentioning that his army was Lee’s. “I earned it. How much?”

  Transaction completed, Jack handed over his notes in the general store portion of the building and added Mrs. Buxton’s admonition about Pond’s Healing Cream. Good thing he never had acquired a wife or he might have had to pick up something that would make him blush. He doubted foremen blushed, and he didn’t intend to be the first.

  As it was, the clerk handed over the jar with a flourish and added it to the pile. Madeleine’s chicken scratch seemed legible to the fellow, which relieved Jack.

  “How’s Madeleine doing, anyway?” the man asked as he wrapped Jack’s purchases in brown paper and twine. “Must be a little tough without old Jean Baptiste to bring in wages.”

  “It is.” He sighed, wondering how much to disclose of the cook’s anguish at
her husband’s death. “Three little kids . . .”

  Jack was no fan of small talk, but the brief exchange reminded him of the penny candy be had promised Chantal, rolling dough so diligently, and a bag of peppermint drops for Manuel, minding his ranch and Bismarck. Jack found what he wanted and kept it separate from ranch purchases, adding in a dime’s worth of lemon drops for himself. That and the shave constituted his splurges for the summer.

  He put the parcels in the buckboard, which already held the windmill parts he had picked up earlier. A brief visit to Stockmen’s Savings and Loan assured him that he could treat himself to lunch at the greasy spoon, grandiosely named the Great Wall of China. It was run by a Chinaman who wielded a great cleaver to send poultry to a better place.

  But there was the Cheyenne Northern, less late than usual. Maybe Miss Carteret wouldn’t be too refined for the Great Wall of China.

  One middle-aged lady got off the train and looked around. Her anxious expression changed to relief when a middle-aged gentlemen stepped up, Stetson in hand. Jack watched them out of the corner of his eye. When all they did was shake hands and leave considerable distance between them, he figured her for a mail-order bride. Give’um a year and there’d be a baby. Someone had to populate this sparse territory, since he wasn’t doing any heavy lifting in that regard.

  The train next coughed up what looked like a preacher and a salesman. He watched, and there she was.

  How in the world did she do it? Every person who got off the Cheyenne Northern was windblown and blowsy. There wasn’t a hair out of place on Lily Carteret’s head, from what he could see of her dark hair under the small hat, tipped forward so stylishly. He knew she had been traveling from New York City, long enough for her clothing to be wrinkled and travel stained. But she looked as though she had just stepped out of a fancy store, as neat as wax.

  “Jee-rusalem Crickets,” he murmured. “I have died and gone to heaven.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It couldn’t be anyone but Miss Lily Carteret. Clarence Carteret was absolutely right about the cambric tea color of her skin, but that wasn’t the first thing Jack noticed. In fact, it was way down his manly list.