Kitabı oku: «Storming Paradise»

Chapter One

Bill collectors! They were all overgrown, beady-eyed bullies in cheap serge suits and scuffed shoes. Shula Kingsland fully expected to see one of them right this minute, oozing out of the carriage that had just pulled up on Newstead Avenue in front of the house she shared with her sister.

Crouching behind the velvet overdrapes, Shula eased the lace sheers back a fraction. Her heart was pressing into her throat as she watched the cabbie extend a hand into the closed coach to help his passenger out.

“I’m not home,” the redhead muttered into the dark folds of the drapes. “I simply won’t answer the door. I won’t. Let him knock till his knuckles bleed. Till dooms—”

The cabbie handed a woman down from the coach. A child scrambled after her.

Shula yanked back the sheers. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Her relief was sweet, although brief. She wasn’t going to be forced, after all, to wheedle more time from some fool the bank had sent. But here came her sister with that ragamuffin again.

Shula stomped to the door, flinging it open just as the two of them were coming up the walk. Her bracelets jangled as she shook her fist and her rings glittered in the sunlight.

“Libby Kingsland,” she called, “if you want to be a mother so badly why don’t you marry and have babies of your own instead of dragging other people’s children home?”

The two sisters faced off in the arched oak doorway—Libby in her stiff-boned, grosgrain walking suit and Shula, still ruffled in her morning wrapper despite the fact that it was late afternoon. Both women had fire in their eyes, unlike the child who cowered now, caught between the Kingsland sisters’ silk flounces and sharp pleats.

In rough wool trousers and muddy brogans, and with her cropped blond hair, nine-year-old Amanda Rowan looked exactly like a boy. And it exasperated Shula Kingsland no end.

“Why can’t you leave him…I mean…her with the Sisters of Charity where she belongs?” Shula hissed at her sister now.

Libby’s gloved hand cupped the child’s ear as she brought her close against her hip. “Because they’re letting a certain someone out of jail today, Shula. And I’ll be damned if he’s going to hurt this little girl any more than he already has.”

“Oh.” Shula’s mouth closed with a smart little snap and her ringed fingers fluttered at the frilled throat of her gown as she dropped an almost sympathetic look on the child half-hidden in Libby’s skirt.

Gently Libby urged the little girl across the threshold and into the vestibule. “Go on up to the spare room, Andy. I’ll be up soon to get you settled.”

When the child nodded, blond hair straggled across her forehead. The sight provoked an instant cluck from Shula, whose hand whisked out to push the stray locks back.

She sighed wistfully. “Maybe while you’re here, Miss Amanda Rowan,” she said, emphasizing the feminine first name, “I’ll take my curling iron to that haystack on your pretty head.”

The child shot her a wounded look before turning to flee up the stairs. Shula winced at the sound of the big brogans thudding on each step.

“And maybe I’ll take that same curling iron to your tongue, Shulamith Kingsland.” Libby pulled the front door closed and turned the bolt. “There. Her father will have to crack through that to lay a finger on her now.”

As her older sister strode down the hallway toward the kitchen, Shula regarded the locked door. Lord, how she hated being cooped up in this dismal little house. First with her tight-lipped, stiff-boned sister, and now with a little girl who was trying with all her might to be a boy. Still, she thought, it didn’t hurt one bit that Libby was now as reluctant as she was to open the front door.

Libby! She was in the kitchen where Shula had tossed the unopened mail when she’d heard the carriage pulling up. The mail these days consisted mainly of overdue bills and disgusting letters from rude and impatient creditors, none of which she was anxious for her skinflint of a sister to see. Shula grabbed up her ruffled gown and rushed down the hall in Libby’s wake.

As she pulled the pins from her hat, Libby scowled at the stack of dishes in the dry sink, noting that it had grown considerably since she’d rushed out of the house this morning. Princess Shula, no doubt, had used a clean plate every time she passed through the kitchen. Of course, it had never occurred to her to do up any of them.

Still, fair was fair, and the dishes were Libby’s domain. They had agreed to that when they decided to use part of their small inheritance from their mother to buy and share a house. Shula, because she cared about money, would see to the bills and their investments. Libby would see to everything else, which meant she was cook, laundress, parlor maid and—judging now from the tower of dirty dishes in the dry sink—scullery maid.

Right this minute it felt closer to slavery, Libby thought as she tossed. her hat onto the table before sagging into a chair. She tugged off her gloves and tossed those, too, onto the stack of mail that Shula hadn’t bothered to open. Probably too busy taking clean plates from the cupboard and putting dirty ones in the sink.

Well, she didn’t have time to worry about Shula’s laziness right now. And she wasn’t going to let her sister’s comment about frustrated maternal instincts bother her, either. Amanda Rowan needed her help. Desperately. It was as simple as that.

A constable had brought the battered child to the Sisters of Charity on Christmas Eve, the same night they had locked John Rowan up for “doing his daughter wrong,” as the grim-faced policeman had explained. The extent of that abuse was obvious, even to the sheltered Sisters of Charity who ran the or-phanage, when they saw the bruises on young Amanda’s body. And when the child took a pair of scissors and chopped off her long blond curls; when she refused to wear anything but trousers and ungainly shirts and big, clumsy shoes; when she refused to respond to any name but Andy, it became obvious that, since being a little girl had only brought her pain, Amanda Rowan was determined to change that sad fact of her brutal, young life.

Libby, who spent time with the children at the or-phanage, had been drawn to the battered child immediately. Out of compassion, certainly. Out of her need to help and comfort the bruised waif. And, perhaps as Shula continually accused, out of some frustrated maternal inclinations. She was a woman, after all. At the age of twenty-five it was only natural that she would feel such stirrings. But since she had no intention of marrying—ever—those instincts would remain just that. Vague stirrings.

As always, the thought of marriage made Libby’s mouth crimp slightly. Her smooth brow furrowed. The very idea of marrying caused her stomach to tighten and twist into a hard little knot. She was unlike her sister, who reveled in the notion and seemed to consider marriage her very reason for being. Well, a profitable marriage, anyway.

Shula had already tried it once—unsuccessfully—by running off with the Van de Voort boy when she was eighteen. They had spent, according to the bride anyway, a grand and glorious time in Rome until young Charles Van de Voort had succumbed to a fever, leaving Shula a widow before her nineteenth birthday. She couldn’t even claim widowhood, however, because the groom’s family had had the marriage annulled, along with seeing that their former daughter-in-law was persona non grata in the finer drawing rooms in Saint Louis.

As a result, Shula was having a devil of a time trying to find a wealthy beau. And she spent the major portion of that time carping about her trials and tribulations, sighing and whining and generally making Libby’s existence miserable.

“And here you sit, Libby Kingsland,” she admonished herself now in a disgusted tone of voice, “stewing about your sister who’s twenty years old and perfectly capable of taking care of herself when you ought to be worrying about a nine-year-old who can’t and whose monster of a father means to snatch her back.”

Shula wafted into the kitchen, plopping herself down in a chair directly across the table. “And if you don’t stop talking to yourself, Libby Kingsland, people are going to start looking at you peculiarly and thinking you’re an addle-brained old maid.” The redhead gave her sister a satisfied little smile as she fussed with the ruffles at her neckline.

Libby’s nose twitched. “What’s that smell?”

“My new perfume.” Shula gave her lush auburn curls a tender pat. “It’s from Paris, France. Isn’t it heavenly?”

Heavenly? It struck Libby more as something dredged up from the gutter—wet sycamore leaves, perhaps—but she knew from long experience that an honest reply would send Shula into a royal snit for the rest of the day.

“It’s fine,” she offered. Then, seeing Shula’s mouth begin to curl down at the corners, Libby added, “It smells good.”

While Shula fashioned a smile and lifted a wrist to sniff the foul fragrance, Libby once again berated herself for even considering her baby sister’s outsized, overwrought sensibilities when she had much more pressing problems. One anyway. The brutal John Rowan was getting out of jail. Today.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Andy,” she murmured.

Shula made a noncommittal little noise, extending an arm casually across the table, then reaching beneath one of Libby’s gloves to extract the pile of mail. There were three envelopes, two of which she immediately recognized—another notice from the bank and another “polite but firm” note from the dressmaker. She slid them toward her and surreptitiously tucked those two into the folds of her gown, all the while studying the unfamiliar envelope postmarked Texas.

“I don’t suppose you have any suggestions,” Libby said.

“About what?” And who the devil was writing them from Texas? Shula wondered now, frowning as she slid a fingernail underneath the flap then slipped out a single sheet of vellum.

“About what!” Libby’s fist hit the table. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve been saying, Shulamith Kingsland? Don’t you care one whit what happens to that poor little—”

“Oh, my Lord!”

“What?”

Her sister’s face had gone white as the cloth that covered the table except for the dabs of rouge on each of her cheeks.

“Shula,” Libby insisted, “what in the world is the matter?”

“It’s from him,” Shula breathed, still staring at the paper in her hands.

“Him?” A score of young men’s names flitted through Libby’s brain. Shula was forever mentioning this one or that one. None of them, though, struck Libby as capable of shaking the stuffing from her sister or taking the color right out of her face. “Him who?” she demanded.

In a whisper that was more breath than voice, Shula replied, “Him. Our father.”

Libby felt her own cheeks paling. “Give me that.” She grabbed at the letter, but her sister immediately clasped it to her bosom and sighed dramatically.

“He begins it Dear Daughters,”Shula said.

Libby snorted. “That’s probably because he can’t remember either of our names.” Angling back in her chair now, she crossed both arms. “Well, what else does the old goat have to say after fifteen years of utter silence?”

Shula’s lips trembled. “He says he’s dying, Libby.”

“Dying?” The older sister repeated the word as if it were incomprehensible, as if she hadn’t enough breath to clearly speak it nor enough sense to understand it. The Amos Kingsland she remembered was an enormous and vital man. He couldn’t be dying. Every muscle in her body, every ounce of her being seized tight, rejecting the notion. “I don’t believe it.”

“He wants us to come to Texas. To Paradise.”

“Paradise.” Libby’s head was swamped with images, not of angels in long, flowing robes or billowy white clouds, but of huge, dusty cowhands in leather chaps, of wild dark clouds rushing across a shadowed landscape. The music she heard suddenly wasn’t comprised of heavenly harps or choirs of angels, but rather the bawling of hundreds of cattle, the thunder of thousands of hooves. She shivered and blinked, then stared at her sister as if suddenly realizing she wasn’t alone.

Shula was smiling not so much at Libby but at the world in general. The color had returned to her face. It was flushed now, and her eyes were bright. Feverishly so. “I knew it,” she exclaimed, waving the letter aloft. “Didn’t I tell you? Well, I probably didn’t since you close your ears whenever the man’s name is mentioned. But I always knew he’d send for us.”

After pushing away from the table, Shula began fluttering around the small kitchen. “Paradise. Don’t you just adore the sound of it. It’s bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. Did you realize that, Libby? Bigger than an entire state.” Shula sucked in a breath. “I guess that makes our father about as important as a governor. Do you recollect the house? I confess I haven’t any memory of it. Of course, I was only five when we left. But it must be grand. Was it grand, Libby?”

Her silk gown swished as Shula turned to her sister, who sat rigid and silent. “Libby?”

“I won’t go.” Libby’s lips barely moved when she spoke. “I’m sorry he’s dying, but I will not go. Not ever.”

Shula sniffed, resuming her circuit of the room. “Don’t be silly,” she said dismissively. “Of course you’ll go. Our father’s dying and he wants us. Good Lord, Libby! Think what that means.”

It meant trouble, Libby decided, or worse. Unable to bear a second more of her sister’s outlandish exuberance, she had left the kitchen and had gone up to the spare room to check on the child, whom she found smack in the middle of the big four-poster bed, fast asleep. As gently as she could, Libby unlaced and removed the dreadful brogans from the little girl’s feet.

How fortunate Andy was, Libby had thought, to be able to escape all her trials and terrors in such deep and innocent sleep. For a moment, as she had stood gazing down at her, Libby had envied the child for that. She was sleeping like an angel. Libby couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had such an angelic rest.

But—dammit—yes, she could. It had been at Paradise with the white curtains billowing in, with South Texas sunshine buttering the walls of her room, with the lullaby of cattle and the sweet, sweet smells of hay and mock orange and jasmine.

So long ago.

Libby sat for a long time, keeping watch over the sleeping child, letting her mind drift back to a time and a place she had tried for fifteen years to erase from her memory.

Paradise! Lord, how she’d loved it. Every inch of the place from Caliente Creek where the mesquite tangled to the southernmost pastures where the air was heavy with salt from the gulf. The images—all the sights and sounds—came back so quickly and with such intensity now, it nearly took Libby’s breath away. As if having been locked away for so many years, they were rushing and spilling over one another to make themselves seen and heard. Fast. Bursting its banks like a creek after a summer storm. A flash flood. Or—Libby smiled softly at the notion—as they said in Texas, a real gully-washer.

So many memories. And superimposed on them all was the image of Amos Kingsland. His glossy black boots. His enormous, work-roughened hands. His deep auburn hair and the scratchy beard that bristled from his chin. That beard was what Libby remembered best.

Her father had been a steamboat captain in the Gulf of Mexico before venturing inland to raise cattle. The salt breezes of the gulf seemed to have permeated his beard and to have given it a permanent thrust so that, even in the house, it was as if the wind were tugging at his chin.

Or so his little girl had imagined. It hadn’t been wind at all, Libby thought now, but pure stubbornness, a will to succeed at any cost, and no qualms whatsoever about bending anyone to that will. As he had bent her mother. Bent and nearly broken the sweet, soft Ellen McCafferty Kingsland Carew.

Just then, as if the mere thought of her mother had somehow conjured up her form, Shula poked her curly head in the door.

Quickly Libby touched a finger to her lips, gesturing toward the sleeping child.

“You look so much like Mama sometimes, Shula, I find myself looking twice,” she whispered.

The ruffled apparition rustled across the room and sought her image in the mirror over the dresser. “I do, don’t I?” She rearranged a few curls, then leaned forward to more closely inspect her eyebrows. “Of course, Mama was a fool, bless her heart.”

Libby opened her mouth to protest, then kept silent. Sadly enough, it was true. Their mother had been, if not a fool, then an exceptionally weak woman. Where she’d gotten the gumption to walk out on Amos Kingsland was a mystery. Even so, that strength had quickly deserted her once she had married that tightfisted mercantilist and bully, Edgar Carew.

Thoughts of her poor mother prompted Libby to whisper, “What would you do, Shula, if a man ever lifted a hand to you?”

Her sister snorted. “I’d slap him back.” Her eyebrow arched in the mirror. “Or worse.”

Libby sighed. “I wonder why Mama didn’t”.

Shula shrugged now. “She was afraid, I guess. Who knows? I can tell you I gave our dear stepfather the back of my hand on quite a few occasions, along with several pieces of my mind.”

Libby’s eyes widened in astonishment. “What did he do?”

“He just laughed. The pig! I hated losing Mama, Libby, but I have to say I didn’t mind one little bit that that awful Edgar perished in that carriage accident, too.”

Shula sighed softly at her reflection, then turned to face her sister, her hands lifting to fasten on her hips. “We need to start packing, Libby. Where’s that old trunk of Mama’s I took to Italy with me?”

“I have no idea.” But what Libby knew was that she wasn’t prepared to argue now, here, and possibly wake Andy, who needed all the peaceful sleep she could get. Once thwarted, Shula wouldn’t be able to whisper, she would probably scream.

“Take a look up in the attic,” she suggested, hoping to occupy Shula temporarily and thus forestall their confrontation.

“I hate it up there,” Shula said. “It’s dark as a week of midnights, and all that dust gets into my pores and just takes up residence for days no matter how hard I scrub. I won’t even mention the spiders.” Shula shivered, sending her gown into a flurry. Then her expression brightened. “Maybe I could just order a new trunk. One with all those cute little drawers and…”

The heat of Libby’s glare withered her sister’s speech, as well as her enthusiasm.

“Well, they are cute,” she finished glumly. “We don’t want to look like two kitchen maids when we go to Texas, do we?”

As much as she felt like one sometimes, Libby thought there was nothing wrong in looking like one. But since she wasn’t going to Texas anyway, it didn’t make any difference. She continued to scorch her sister with her gaze, using her thumb now to indicate the door.