10
Across the road, kitty-corner from the livery, Roger Lord stood inside the swinging doors of Bigger’s Saloon, watching Hattie. Her lazy-cat posture infuriated him. That young lady was in serious need of instruction. She all but begged to be taught her place.
Roger believed in man’s supremacy over woman and the upper classes’ right to rule the masses as they saw fit. He’d considered himself a member of the ruling class for so long now, his actual, lesser origins were but a dim memory. No one in this town knew his standing came courtesy of his marriage to Gertrude. And why would they? It would be clear to a blind man he ought to have been born into the social status he enjoyed. Marrying into it had merely been a formality correcting that which should have been his due from the day he was born.
Self-righteous in his convictions, he was outraged at the remarks he’d overheard. The outspoken little bitch—place an ad declaring her virginity, indeed! Her arrogance galled him. Haughty chits failing to realize their proper status fairly begged to be given a dose of reality.
Roger knew from experience that the most effective way of teaching proper respect in a recalcitrant was through pain and humiliation. Arousal beat in his loins as he visualized training Hattie to subservience. He’d thought the pinnacle of satisfaction would be in defiling a well-born young lady of timid nature. Watching her quiver in terror, viewing her helplessness.
He’d been wrong. The ultimate hedonism, he now knew, would be breaking a well-bred lady of proud nature. Indoctrinating fear into one who’d harbored no fear before. Watching her terror, her revulsion, for an act he’d bet money she expected to reward her. After all, wasn’t that why virtuous girls sold their virginity? For a ring on their finger and all it implied? But damn few of them enjoyed the marital bed. He’d bet the farm, had he possessed one, that Hattie Taylor wasn’t among their numbers. Unfortunately, the same obstacles preventing him from debauching a timid, well-born virgin applied to Miss Taylor as well. Fate was damned unkind.
Roger scowled as he watched her tow-headed, muscle-bound friend roll a tandem bike out of the big double doors of the livery across the way. The two teenagers mounted the bicycle, and Roger stayed to one side of the saloon’s swinging doors, staring after them until they pedaled beyond his range of vision. Then he slowly turned away and walked to the bar.
Someday, somehow, an opportunity at his ultimate fantasy would come along. And when it did, he’d be ready. Until then he would simply dream of giving Hattie Taylor her just deserts.
With no destination in mind, Hattie and Moses headed out of town. Pedaling as fast as they could one moment, then lazily coasting the next, they meandered aimlessly. Hattie found it difficult pinpointing their exact location with Moses’ wide shoulders blocking everything in front of her. But when she said as much and demanded he exchange seats with her, he refused, claiming her steering was too erratic. So, the next time he began to pump furiously, grunting at her to pick up speed as they approached an incline, she instead raised her feet off her pedals and braced them on the cross section of her handlebars. Sweeping the back of her dress skirt up, she tucked its voluminous fabric between her knees to prevent it from tangling in the spokes.
Hattie grinned as she watched perspiration rapidly spread across the cotton shirt stretched between Moses’ shoulder blades. He stood to attain maximum leverage from his efforts, and by the time he glanced over his shoulder at her at the top of the hill, his breath was uneven from the exertion. “Christ Almighty,” he gasped, steering them off the road into a meadow.
By mutual consent, they hopped off the bike and watched it roll upright for a couple of feet before toppling into the high grass. “No wonder that was so much work. I shoulda known you’d taken a holiday.”
They strode through tall grass to the creek bisecting the field. It was still too cool for wading, but they lay on their backs in the grass and absorbed the warmth of the late spring sun. Eventually, Moses pulled the Police Gazette out of his waistband and smoothed the wrinkles out of the paper. Rolling onto their stomachs, they pored over lurid tales of murder and mayhem.
Hattie was still reading an article when Moses began tickling her neck with a blade of grass. She brushed the stalk aside, but he kept whisking its tip from her ear to the neckline of her gown. “What’s this?” he asked, brushing the grass blade back and forth over a gold chain showing at her nape.
Hattie sat up, the article forgotten. Hooking the chain, she pulled it from her bodice. The fine, delicate gold supported a small gold locket. “Aunt Augusta gave it to me for graduation. Look at this.” Smiling with pleasure, she popped the locket open and extended it as far as possible for his inspection. Inside was a miniature daguerreotype of a woman with soft dark hair. “My mother.” Smiling, she gazed at the image. “Mirabel told me that since I arrived in Mattawa, Aunt Augusta has written to my mother’s people in San Francisco at least once a year to request a likeness of my mother for me. For reasons known only to them, the Witherspoons consistently ignored her entreaties.”
Hattie beamed. “So, this year Aunt Augusta sent a letter demanding they either send a miniature of my mother, or Jake would begin proceedings on my behalf for a portion of the Witherspoon estates. Mirabel said the picture arrived quite speedily after that. Isn’t she the best? And I never heard a word of this from Aunt Augusta herself. She only said she was sorry she couldn’t locate one of my father as well.”
“She is one fine lady, all right,” Moses agreed. He pointed his forefinger at the small timepiece pinned above her left breast. “This is new, too, isn’t it?”
The dainty watch on her chest was attached to a retracting chain, enabling her to check the time without unpinning the artfully crafted bow-shaped clasp securing it to her bodice. “It’s from Jake and Jane-Ellen. Since her confinement kept her from everything last night, Jake gave it to me.” Her eyes gleamed with hero worship. “Hand to God, Moses—his timing couldn’t have been better. When you let Florence-May say nasty things about me, I felt lower than a snake’s belly. I’d just walked away from overhearing that when Jake asked me to waltz. It was a relief to dance with someone who didn’t expect clever conversation. I was in no mood to be witty.”
Hattie pulled out the dainty watch to admire it, smiling with dreamy satisfaction. “After the waltz, he escorted me to the veranda for some air and gave me this.” Closing her eyes, Hattie lay back in the tall grass. “Jake Murdock,” she vowed solemnly, “is the most wonderful, honorable man in the entire world.”
Moses looked away. He had worked in his father’s barbershop after school and Saturday mornings since he was twelve. Customers took him for granted as he swept up, straightened magazines and newspapers, and ran errands for the clientele. Given his size, he didn’t blend into the woodwork. But he’d started his first growth spurt when he was fourteen, and men didn’t bother monitoring their conversations around boys the way they did around females.
Moses admired Jake Murdock nearly as much as Hattie did. But he’d heard the talk. Hell, he’d probably known within two days when Jake once again began frequenting Mamie Parker’s place. Moses didn’t judge. But he knew perfectly well that Hattie, who tended to view situations as either black or white, would be destroyed if she knew. Not that there was the remotest possibility it would be brought to her attention. Gossip of this nature did not circulate in Mattawa parlors. The men in town all adhered to a code of silence when it came to protecting their own.
In a way, Moses almost wished it wasn’t so. Much as he admired and respected Jake, there were moments he fiercely resented him. Hattie thought Murdock walked on water, and who could compete with that? Jake was just a man, not a ten-cent hero like that Fred Fearnot character in Work and Win magazine. It made Moses a little testy to know, while Hattie had no problem believing the worst of him at times, her precious Jake was forever inviolate.
But it was senseless to hold a grudge against Murdock. The man hadn’t asked for Hattie’s single-minded devotion. And, hell, Moses liked Jake. He liked him a lot. So, as he’d done many times before when Hattie began raving about her hero, he changed the subject. “My folks got me a timepiece, too.” He pulled it from his pocket and passed it to Hattie to admire. He hesitated a moment, knowing he’d regret telling her this, but it was too exciting to keep to himself. And Hattie wasn’t like most females. She neither wanted nor appreciated being sheltered from life’s steamier aspects. “My old man also promised to take me to Mamie Parker’s place.”
“What!” Hattie sat up like a puppet whose strings had been jerked. She stared at Moses with huge eyes. “When?”
“I couldn’t pin him down. Sometime soon.”
“You must promise to describe it to me in detail once you’ve been there!”
“Describe what, exactly?” Moses had visions of being expected to describe all the sweaty details of his sexual education before Hattie’s relentless quest for knowledge was satisfied.
“You know! How it’s decorated, what the harlots wear, what they look like, everything! I have seen the outside, of course, but never the inside.”
“Okay, yeah, I can do that.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. But it’s not like seeing it for myself.” She tossed her head. “I’m going to sneak out there and see it on my own some night, I declare I am.”
“The hell you say!”
“You can’t stop me, Moses Marks. If you won’t take me, I’ll simply go on my own.”
“Fine! You do that! For God’s sake, sneak inside one day? No wonder they talk about you in town the way they do. No decent girl would ever suggest the things you do!”
He wished the words back as soon as they left his mouth, even before glimpsing the look of betrayal on her face. He reached for her, but she shook off his hand and stalked through the high grass to where they’d left the tandem bicycle.
It was a struggle to see the handlebars through her tears, but by the time Moses reached her, Hattie had the bike upright and herself under control. She felt as if she were bleeding inside, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Never! Ignoring every apology he attempted, she helped him push the bicycle through the grass to the road. When he offered her the forward seat, she declined with cool courtesy and climbed on the rear one.
“Hattie, I didn’t mean it,” he tried once again. She refused to look at him. “Sometimes I just get so frustrated I say things without thinking.”
“Could we not talk, Moses?” she requested quietly. “I want to go home.”
“Listen,” he said desperately. Her politeness was killing him. Hattie yelled and screamed and called him names. She didn’t resort to cool social manners. “I’ll take you by Mamie’s place, okay? We’ll take the shortcut and go by there right now.”
“Why?” She nearly screamed the question. She did slug him between the shoulder blades. “Because I’m not a decent girl, so it really doesn’t matter where you take me?” She hit him again and the bike swerved as Moses brought it to a halt. “Just take me home, you hypocritical sonovabitch!” Hating that she couldn’t prevent it, she burst into tears.
Moses froze. He’d seen Hattie spitting mad and he’d known the talk that followed her wherever she went had to hurt, though she rarely let it show. But never, in all the years he’d known her, had he seen her cry. And in typical Hattie fashion, she didn’t cry in half measures. No, sir, no dainty sniffling for her. Huge tears spilled down her cheeks, her eyes and nose reddened, and her entire body shuddered with the force of her emotions.
Unable to bear watching it any longer, Moses plucked her off the bicycle seat and carried her to a downed tree alongside the road. Sitting, he set her beside him, murmuring soothing words and awkwardly patting her back. Turning, Hattie wrapped her arms around him and clung, sobbing for every insult and slight she’d ever received, every untrue word ever said about her.
The worst part? Hattie knew in her heart Moses wasn’t wrong. While she hated the unfair judgments people made about her, she also knew she possessed an unthinking tendency to say outrageous things at times. Of course she was never going to sneak into a cathouse. But, Lord love her, she sometimes wished she had been born a male. Their lives were so much freer and worlds more interesting than women’s were.
“You know I didn’t mean it,” Moses kept muttering. “You’re my best friend. You know I didn’t mean it.”
“Then you shouldn’t have said it,” she finally muttered, raising her likely red-rimmed eyes to look at him. But she was incapable of holding a grudge, and her anger washed away with her tears. Besides, Moses was her best friend and she knew she sometimes drove him to the limit, thus bringing out his counterattacks. She summoned a half smile. “After all,” she murmured, “I’d never say anything so mean to you if I didn’t mean it.”
Moses snorted. Raising a hip, he dug a handkerchief from his back pocket and passed it to her. “Here. Blow.” Once she did, he mopped up the remaining puddles beneath her eyes with a clean edge and said, “What about the time you swore Florence-May Jordan told you I reminded her of a big blond gorilla?”
“Well, that hardly counts. Who in their right mind would believe Florence-May would ever tell me a blessed thing? We both know what her opinion of Hattie Taylor is. You, on the other hand,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes and speaking in a thick, sugary accent in an exaggerated imitation of Miss Jordan, “are ‘Just so big and strawng!’”
“At least she’s got that right,” he agreed and flexed his biceps. When Hattie pretended to swoon and cried, “Oh, Mistah Mawks!” Moses stood up. “You wanna go home now?”
“Yes. And we can take the shortcut by Mamie Parker’s place. If I’m late coming home again, Aunt Augusta will make me wax the stair rails. And that takes forever.”
“Hattie, with all the talk going around about you, even you must see it’s a bad idea if you’re seen anywhere near Mamie’s establishment. You’ve got a lighted torch in both hands, girl. Don’t go beggin’ a dance on a powder keg.”
“We’ve used the shortcut behind it for years, Moses. I hardly think I’m chancing the ruin of my reputation by pedaling past Miss Mamie’s stable!”
“Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you if this blows up in your face.”
And it usually does, Hattie admitted silently. She almost did the smart thing and told Moses to take them the long way home. But she was serious about her aunt’s threat. Augusta had promised Hattie exactly that if she came in late again. And if Hattie knew nothing else, she knew Aunt Augusta kept her word. If Hattie failed to show up when she said she would, she would be waxing those railings.
As they drew closer to the infamous establishment, Hattie wished she’d thought to trade places with Moses. He informed her as they crossed the railroad tracks that they were going to whip through the shortcut—and if she didn’t like it she could just lump it.
She’d accepted his conditions. But like it had been on the trip earlier, her visibility was restricted by Moses’ shoulders. When they suddenly stiffened, Hattie knew he must have seen something truly scandalous, and she feared she was going to miss it.
“We’re going home,” Moses said flatly, and started to turn.
“What is it? What’d you see?”
“Nothing.”
“Moses, what is it?” She rose to stand on her pedals, unmindful that her skirts were dangerously close to the bicycle’s spokes. She stared over his shoulders at the stable, which looked deserted and mundane at this hour of the afternoon. For pity’s sake, there was nothing scandalous there. Why, there wasn’t a blessed thing to see aside from . . .
“No.” Her legs losing strength, Hattie collapsed back onto the bicycle seat.
The only thing to see was an old saddle on the corral fence. And, beneath it, the colorful saddle blanket Hattie had given Jake Murdock two birthdays ago.