Softly Falling Read online

“You got it, ma’am. How’d you know?”

  “I’m from Gloucestershire, which is hard by Hereford-shire. I have seen these cows.”

  She moved her plate of chop suey farther away, noting how his eyes followed it. Uncle, here comes another social gaffe of enormous proportions, she thought with some glee. “Mr. Sinclair, you are welcome to finish my chop suey.”

  “Not to your taste?”

  “Not really.”

  She glanced toward the beaded curtains as they rustled, and there stood Mr. Wing Li, his brow furrowed, his lower lip drooping, his eyes on her rejected plate. “Oh dear, he doesn’t take kindly to my lack of appetite,” she whispered to the foreman. “Is it a personal thing?”

  “I don’t pretend to know, ma’am,” he whispered back, his eyes on her plate too. “He scares me and he has that cleaver.”

  Lily laughed. Without a word, she pushed the plate toward him. Without a word, he forked the chop suey onto his plate and kept eating. “Hairiford, Hairiford,” he said around bites. “Sounds better than Herferd. Miss Carteret, after I won your father’s ranch, I spent my whole life savings on a bull. He resides in majestic splendor on two thousand acres of fenced land with his harem of two cows.” He put down his fork. “I am the laughingstock of the entire territory, but I have a plan.”

  His enthusiasm was undeniable. Lily sipped her tea, wondering about a man who ate chop suey, won a ranch in a card game, and gambled everything on an English hunk of beef. She had never met anyone like him.

  “I’ve never had a plan,” she said, setting down her cup. “I envy you.”

  Mr. Sinclair merely shrugged. “No need. Get a plan of your own, Miss Carteret.” His look was kindly then, as far as Lily understood kindness. “I’m speaking out of turn, but any daughter of Clarence Carteret should get a plan.”

  “Pretty soon?”

  “Almost immediately.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mr. Li insisted that Lily take a handful of almond cookies. “He make you give him your dinner?” he asked in a voice loud enough for Mr. Sinclair to hear as he twirled the cleaver, with its congealed blood and chicken feathers.

  “No, Mr. Wing. I have been on the train for four days and my stomach is . . . is . . .”—Lily patted her middle—“. . . unsettled.”

  Mr. Li brightened. He held up one finger as though to keep her there and rattled back through the bead curtain.

  “What have I done?” Lily whispered to the foreman.

  “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “But whatever he brings out, you should probably drink.”

  Lily closed her eyes when she heard the beads rattle again. She opened her eyes when he set down a porcelain cup, its content the same color as the soy sauce.

  “Bottoms up, Miss Carteret,” the foreman said with a grin. “Better you than me.”

  She gave him a speaking glance and picked up the cup. “My stomach doesn’t hurt that bad,” she said to Mr. Li.

  “Drink it, missy,” he said, still twirling that cleaver.

  She felt her stomach give a great heave as the brew landed inside and probably crawled away to some dark corner. She set the cup down and waited to die.

  Nothing. “I am cured,” she told him. Why not gild the lily a bit? “Mr. Wing, you are a wonder.”

  The Chinaman beamed at her and nudged Mr. Sinclair’s shoulder. “You bring her around anytime, Jack. She better than the bad girls at Lucy’s.”

  I will sink into the ground, Lily thought. She glanced at Jack, whose face had gone as red as a man lost three or four days in the Sahara.

  “Um, well, yes,” Jack managed, then stood up. He plunked some money on the table and nodded to Lily without looking at her. “We’d best be on our way.”

  He was halfway across the café when she joined him, taking his proffered arm. She could tell he was suffering in the worst way, and she liked him. Uh, best to put him at ease, she told herself, falling into the vernacular.

  “Mr. Sinclair, I have decided not to be embarrassed by anything I see or hear in your territory,” she told him in her most serene voice as he hurried along the boardwalk.

  “I don’t go to Lucy’s.” He turned even more red. Probably without being aware of it, he glanced up the street toward a building painted a color not found in elevated social spheres, where two women hung out the window, calling to passersby.

  Time to put the poor fellow at peace. She stopped. “Let us come to a right understanding, Mr. Sinclair. What you do or do not do in your spare time is your business.”

  “Seriously, I don’t. I do play cards now and then.”

  Lily found a larger concern as wind started to tug at her skirts. She released her hold on Mr. Sinclair’s arm and fought to keep her steel-taped bustle sedately behind her where it belonged. Another gust at the corner flared out her skirts, giving anyone who might be looking more than a glimpse at her legs. Her mortification grew as a man in a long linen duster whistled and tipped his hat to her. “Jack, you dog,” he called. “You’re the envy of nations!”

  “Mercy,” she murmured, taking her turn with embarrassment, suddenly grateful that the ranch was several miles away and she wouldn’t have to set foot in Wisner again until she left it.

  “Just a Wyoming zephyr, ma’am,” Mr. Sinclair said, kind enough to keep a straight face at her predicament.

  “I’d hate to be here when the wind actually blows,” she joked, wishing the wagon were closer.

  Once across the street and back on the wooden sidewalk, the buildings blunted the force of the wind. Lily took his proffered arm again and found herself nudged toward a store.

  “Forgot something,” he said. “I’ll be just a moment.”

  The store was cool and dark and a blessed relief from the wind. Interested, Lily looked around to see bolts of cloth on shelves and kegs of food. She followed him to the long counter, peering into the kegs and seeing raisins, flour, and cornmeal. There were several boxes with pungent dried fish. In the distance, hoes and shovels had taken up residence next to horse collars and crockery.

  “Imagine, all this in one store,” she said.

  “You don’t have general stores in England?” he asked.

  “No, indeed. We go from shop to shop,” Lily said. “I believe I like this better.”

  At the counter, while she waited for Mr. Sinclair, Lily admired German dolls with bisque heads and tiny feet in the glass-fronted case. Wooden trains and knives were jumbled next to dominos and packs of cards. Overhead were strips of gluey material with flies stuck to them, trapped in mid flight. As repugnant as that was, Lily couldn’t help but admire the enterprise of someone manufacturing and selling fly strips. The United States and her territories were going to be an unceasing interest, she decided.

  “Here.”

  Mr. Sinclair held out a small paper bag to her. She took it, surprised at its weight.

  “It’s a nickel’s worth of lead shot,” he explained. “What you do is sew a handful of these into each of the hems of your skirts.”

  His kindness touched her. “I’ll never be a spectacle in Wisner again.”

  She looked inside the little bag with lead shot, and it suddenly became something much bigger. Somehow, accepting the bag from a man that was essentially a stranger had cracked open her book of life for the first time. What had gone before—the shame of being a remittance man’s daughter, a woman of color, a poor relation—was only prologue. She couldn’t have put her finger on it, but accepting that bag meant she was going to live large now. Whether for good or ill remained to be seen.

  “A little lead in each hem?” she asked, grateful for his small gift.

  “Just drop in one lead ball and sew a little vertical seam on either side of it. Six inches later, repeat the process.”

  “Where’d you learn this, Mr. Sinclair?”

  “I could lie, but why? A faro dealer at the Back Forty told me that’s how she kept her skirts from flying in the wind.”

  Lily nodded, appreciative of his hones
ty. He had no airs to put on and probably nothing to prove. “She is a wise woman.”

  “Indeed she is. Vivian tells me she’s saving money to open a millinery shop in her hometown. Everyone needs a plan.”

  They drove in silence, but it wasn’t an embarrassed silence, not even after his plain speaking. Jack thought he ought to say something, but he noticed that Lily was looking around, noticing everything. She pointed at a brown and white deer-looking creature.

  “Antelope. You’ll see them with the cattle a lot. Don’t know why, really. Maybe they’re sociable.”

  He drove slowly, then looked back at Wisner, a middling sort of place with a background of low hills. It was the kind of town that needed a few more churches and then a school, and maybe ladies would come and there would be families. He hadn’t thought of the matter, but here was Lily Carteret sitting beside him, observing. Maybe that was why he saw Wisner through different eyes.

  “It’s nothing like your home, is it?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t really had a home, Mr. Sinclair. As you were plain speaking, so shall I be.”

  He waited, wondering what she would say, but half knowing, because he knew her father.

  “I’ve lived at the mercy of begrudging relatives all my life,” she said, looking straight ahead now. “They fed me, clothed me quite well, and educated me because they had to. To their credit, I have never gone without anything I needed, not once. Uncle Niles owns a shipbuilding yard in Bristol. He’s a wealthy man and aiming for a match with a lady who is plain and prim, but the daughter of a baronet.” She paused and looked at him, hoping he understood what she didn’t say.

  “And . . . and maybe you don’t fit into the world he wants?”

  “I don’t. He decided to send me on my way to his younger brother, a remittance man. That way, two of us are out of sight and out of mind.” She raised her hands in her lap and then lowered them. “I don’t know what will become of me here, but I intend to count somewhere.”

  Jack thought of his own life and felt an amazing kinship with the pretty lady who was neither fish nor fowl, and who had absolutely nothing in common with him. “I came out here after the war. There was nothing left for me in Georgia. I starved and I probably should have died, but I learned about cattle.”

  “You understand me then,” she said.

  He didn’t mind her subsequent silence. He was content to breathe the pleasant lavender of her hair or clothing. He tried to imagine the landscape through her eyes: the edge of the plains as it met low hills and the mountains beyond; the dry air and the wind-chased dust devils; the enormity of the sky. Everything was tawny now in late summer, more parched and thirsty than usual, even in this dry land.

  Cattle roamed everywhere, crossing the dirt track that passed for a road, idling around shrinking water holes, on the search for grass. Beyond them were the drift fences—slatted affairs paralleling the road but not attached to each other—that he knew she would question.

  “Those fences can’t hold anything in,” she commented finally.

  “They’re drift fences. Look around you. You won’t see any bob wire, or maybe you have wooden fences at home.”

  “Some, and stone fences. Even hedgerows.” She turned to look at him then, and he saw all the intelligence in her lively eyes. “But these don’t keep anything in. How could they?”

  “It’s open range, Miss Carteret. Each ranching district has drift fences, which are supposed to keep the cattle from wandering too far.” He gestured to the wideness around them. “You’re looking at cattle from several ranches. They just mingle together until the cows gather. The boys from different ranches separate them according to brand. Usually the four-year-olds go to market.”

  She must have heard his uncertainty. Jack reckoned she was a hard woman to fool.

  “But . . . but they didn’t go this year? Is that what you’re . . .” She chuckled. “. . . you’re not saying?”

  “They’re too puny, what with no rain and no grass. The buyers from Chicago made lowball offers and most of the ranchers decided to hold them over for another year.”

  “You sound skeptical,” she told him, and again he was impressed with her awareness.

  “I am. Who is to say this will be an easy winter, with enough snow and rain in the spring?” He spoke to his horses and pulled back to slow the wagon, just watching the cattle, something he did all the time, because they worried him.

  “You’d have sold anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  He couldn’t hold back his admiration, and the sudden realization that he had a most unlikely ally. “Bravo, Miss Carteret!”

  “Oh, now,” she said with a low laugh. “You’re teasing me.”

  “No, I’m not! I wouldn’t. I’d have sold the whole lot, even at a loss.” Might as well unlimber his whole gripe on her. “That’s what I told Mr. Buxton, but he ignored me. Said the consortium knew best. What was I but the foreman who works the cattle?”

  She peered at his face in a way he found endearing. “You’re the one who knows. Who is Mr. Buxton?”

  “He’s my boss, but he never rides the range. He works for a whole bunch of Englishmen who have sunk amazing fortunes into cattle. They call themselves the Cheyenne Land and Cattle Company.” He started the horses in motion again. “I’m the one who knows, but who listens to a man making seventy-five dollars a month?” He couldn’t help his sarcasm. “They’re piling in thousands of dollars and that makes them experts.”

  He could have said more, but Jack was curious to know just how bright she was. She looked at the vastness of the plains, full of cattle, and then up at the sky without a cloud in sight.

  “What’s going to happen, Mr. Sinclair?” she asked. “What do you know?”

  “I’ll show you when we get to the river.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Hang onto the seat,” he told her. “Or grab my belt. It’s steep here. Don’t be shy.”

  She gripped the wagon bench as they started down toward the Sublette River, hardly more than a creek now. She pressed her feet against the wagon boards as the pitch grew and then grasped his belt, trying not to slide. He enjoyed the feel of her fingers.

  He reined in at the river so the horses could drink, and she let go of his belt, her face tinged with slight color that made her light tan skin so handsome.

  He knew she was embarrassed, but he didn’t bother to set her at ease, because that was the journey, as she would discover the longer she lived here. He pointed toward the muskrat mounds along the bank.

  “Muskrats. Seen any before?”

  She shook her head, then moved a little closer to him when he said they looked like big rats. Must remember this, he thought, amused.

  “They live along riverbanks here and pretty much hole up for the winter.”

  She gave him another puzzled look.

  “I knocked into one of their lodges the other day, out of curiosity. I’ve never seen walls so thick. That means a bad winter.”

  She didn’t try to hide her skepticism.

  “You’re as unconvinced as my boss!”

  “We can’t call this scientific,” she said a trifle tartly.

  “Well, let me show you something else. Just stay here. I’ll be back.”

  He let himself down by the water’s edge and walked back among the cottonwoods, looking until he found what he wanted. “Up you get, little feller,” he said as he carefully lifted a caterpillar off the tree. At the wagon, he set the little beast on the seat and watched her slide the other way.

  “It’s a woolly caterpillar,” he said, letting it crawl onto his index finger. “Don’t go all girly on me. They’re upstanding little citizens. I’ve never seen one so woolly.”

  She looked less skeptical. In fact, a fine frown line worked its way between her eyes. She reached out tentatively and touched the creature. “When will it freeze here?”

  “Already has. Last week.”

  “But that was the end of August!” She held her hand palm up an
d he deposited the caterpillar in it. He watched the frown deepen as she brought the caterpillar closer to her face. “It’s so warm today.”

  He returned the caterpillar to a tree. “It’ll be warm a few more days, Miss Carteret, maybe another week or two even, but we’ve already had our first freeze.”

  “You’ve never seen it so early?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s going to be a bad winter, and I can’t convince anyone.”

  “What’s going to happen to all these cattle?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask that question,” he said. “It’s bad luck.”

  “That’s silly,” she retorted immediately. “I mean . . . well, I mean . . . that’s silly.”

  “Tell Mr. Buxton for me, will you?”

  They started up the opposite bank in silence, Miss Carteret with her hand on her totally impractical hat this time. He needed both hands on the reins, or he would have happily put one behind her back to steady her. She leaned forward and grasped the front of the wagon, giving a small sigh of gratitude when they were on level soil again. He pointed to a cluster of buildings—so small on the open plain—and edged the wagon in their direction.

  “I don’t mean to upset you, but that’s your father’s ranch that I won last January.”

  He wished he hadn’t been looking at her eyes then, because he saw shame.

  “Mr. Sinclair, two years ago, my father wrote his brother—my uncle—all about his wonderful ranch. He never mentioned this.” She spoke so softly. “Two years! He lied to us. My uncle thought things were better, and he sent me to this wonderful ranch that now belongs to you.”

  She looked away, and he felt the hot embarrassment for someone else that was somehow worse than almost any other emotion. This English lady was pawning her dignity, and it ripped at his insides. He didn’t know what to say, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “Let’s see it, then,” she said after a long pause. She put her hand up to shade her forehead and take a better look. “Right now at least, I’m not feeling too sorry for myself.”

  It was an interesting comment, spoken clearly and with no tears in her voice. He knew then that he was looking at a lady with no expectations, and it pained him. Some chivalrous part of him wished that ladies had an easier time of it in this vale of tears than men did. Generally, woman’s lot was worse, or so he had observed.