Marry Me (50 page)

“Ah, yes. From
The Merchant of Venice.
The Duke speaking to Antonio of Shylock. Am I your stony adversary, Rhyne? Who is sorry for you that you’ve come to face me? Your husband?”

Rhyne said nothing.

“Where is Coleridge Braxton Monroe? He’s not with you.”

She didn’t answer him, but she also didn’t look away.

“You should have never left the stage,” Judah said into the yawning silence. “You had such presence there. Like your mother. She could hold any audience rapt, not only these simple miners and shopkeepers. I wanted to take her back east, find work in real theaters. Did you know that?”

Rhyne shook her head. He did have the capacity to surprise.

“She wouldn’t hear of it. It was understandable, I suppose, that she wanted no part of the New York stage, but she could have had roles in playhouses in Chicago or St. Louis.”

“Not Philadelphia?”

Judah smiled thinly. “There, too, but she’d made her escape once. She wouldn’t have gone back.”

“Escape? You mean because of what you did.”

He didn’t answer right away, his eyes reflective. “Yes, I suppose I did mean that.”

“The judge told me you worked cooking for a family in Philadelphia.”

“Did he? I suppose your mother told him that. What else did he say?”

“Very little. He didn’t know why you left, for instance.” She paused, giving him time to offer an explanation. When he didn’t, she went on. “How many people got sick?”

“Five.”

Rhyne’s eyebrows lifted. She was as taken aback by the number as by the fact that Judah had offered it. “Three of the family,” he said. “Two of the help.” “Did you know you were responsible?”

“No. I still don’t.”

“You tried your hand at cooking again.” “I had to have money, didn’t I?” “More people got sick.”

He shrugged. “Outbreaks like that happen all the time.”

“They happened a lot around you.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. We were moving west. It seemed like the typhoid was everywhere. St. Louis was the worst of it. Delia took sick there and almost died. The babies did.”

Rhyne stared at him. “There were babies?” “Stillborn twins.”

So there was some truth in the tale her brothers told her. She should have suspected they hadn’t spun it from nothing. They’d have been very young at the time Delia sickened with the fever and probably overheard more than they witnessed, but they still managed to get the gist of it right: Judah had killed his other children.

Now Rhyne wondered if Judah had also killed his wife. “How did my mother die?”

“You know that. You killed her.”

Although it was what she’d expected to hear, what she had always heard, Judah’s bald delivery still could make her flinch. She observed the curl of Judah’s lip, the pause he took in stroking his iron gray beard, and knew he’d enjoyed getting that small rise from her.

“She didn’t die giving birth to me,” said Rhyne. “She lingered some.”

“I suppose your brothers told you that.”

“They did.”

“Well, the end was the same, wasn’t it? Lingering only meant she suffered for her sin.”

“Me, you mean,” said Rhyne. “I was her sin.”

“That’s right. You brought on the puerperal fever.”

Rhyne wondered what her father knew about childbed fever. “Did Doc Diggins tell you that?”

Judah shook his head. “Not then, but later. I told him what happened, and he figured it was the fever that took her.”

“Then he never suspected it was typhoid.”

“No reason that he should. Puerperal fever is what he said.”

“I reckon he did, not knowing any better.” She watched Judah set his jaw. His hands were now resting on the arms of the rocker, but his white fingertips gave Rhyne the impression that he was holding himself back. “I don’t think you meant to kill her.” She took no satisfaction from watching him flinch. “I think you meant to kill me. The first time Delia sickened with the fever and lost your twins, that was all nature’s doing, but my mind’s circling the idea that maybe you had something to do with the second time she took ill. Nature figured in it, sure, but mostly it was
your
nature. You’d seen enough typhoid by then to suspect you had some part in the outbreaks. I bet Delia thought so.”

Judah said nothing. His grip on the rocker relaxed. He stopped clenching his teeth.

“You couldn’t have been certain that she would get sick again, and you must have realized there was no controlling the consequences if she did, but you risked it because you wanted the child gone. You wanted her free of her sin.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

Rhyne was aware that what Judah offered wasn’t precisely a denial. “Do you want to set me straight?”

He merely stared at her.

“I guess not,” she said. “The way I see it, she did die free of her sin. She delivered it to you. What I can’t figure is why you didn’t kill me right off. You could have told her I was stillborn, and she’d have probably believed you.” Rhyne smiled faintly. “Maybe I was noisy from the first.”

“Screamed like a banshee.”

Rhyne nodded. “And later? After Delia was gone? Why did you decide I could live? You had to find a wet nurse, someone who wouldn’t talk later about the daughter you had it in your head to raise as a son. That seems like a powerful lot of trouble for you.” Rhyne thought she saw Judah’s nostrils flare but couldn’t be sure. She reminded herself that he hadn’t admitted to anything and that perhaps he never would. She had no evidence to force his hand. Supposition was what she had, most of it coming to her a mere moment before she spoke it aloud.

“The judge thinks you raised me like a boy so you could punish him,” she said. “I don’t reckon you know if that’s true or not. It seems the sort of thing that’s easy to keep from yourself.” She didn’t expect an answer, so she wasn’t disappointed when Judah remained quiet. “I told him he was wrong. I thought I had a right to say it since I was the one gettin’ cuffed.”

“You always did try my patience.”

“That’s a fact.” She was doing it now. “I told him the real reason you raised me Runt instead of Rhyne.”

“Oh? I’d like to hear that.”

“I figured you didn’t want me growin’ up to be a whore like my mother.” Rhyne remembered how the judge had jumped to his feet when she’d said that. It was telling that Judah remained seated. Elijah Wentworth had risen from his chair to defend Delia. Either Judah wasn’t bothered by what she said, or he couldn’t be bothered.

“You might be right,” he said. “Didn’t work, though, did it? Some things are bred in the bone.”

Rhyne recalled Whitley saying much the same thing to her, but Whitley had been talking about decency, not adultery.

Judah warmed to the subject. “You took up with the first stranger to see what was under your trousers.”

“Strangers,” she said. Her stomach curled in on itself, but she pressed on. “There were two.”

“Well, then you are the very equal of your mother, aren’t you? She had two.”

It was difficult to hear him make a comparison of equality. “She was married and took a lover,” she said steadily. “I was raped.”

“So you said.”

“It’s true.”

“So you said.”

Rhyne was reminded that Judah didn’t need his stick to jab at her. She felt as if he’d driven his fist hard into her belly. It was difficult to breathe. “I went looking for one of the lambs. Do you remember? A timber wolf scattered the sheep. We thought maybe it took Isolde’s lamb.”

“I remember. I told you to let it be.”

“You did.” She’d gone out anyway, needing to know the lamb’s fate as much as she needed to track the wolf. “I went upstream, way beyond Robert’s Ridge. Took the trail to where I thought there might be a den. I suppose being intent on one thing made it easy to miss the other. I was jumped just a ways off from where I was headed. They thought I was lookin’ for them.”

“Could be you were just looking for trouble.”

Rhyne had already decided he could say whatever he liked. She remained determined to go on. “They got my rifle away from me right off. That’d never happened before. I was purely pissed, Judah. You know I was. I threw myself at the one holding it over his head.” She averted her eyes for a moment, the memory of her impulsive act shaming her as much as the consequences had. “There was a struggle. The other fellow grabbed me from behind, and then I was wrestling him to the ground. I don’t know exactly what gave me away, probably something he touched that wasn’t right. I generally don’t go for close-in fighting. Rusty taught me better than that.”

“Your temper failed you.”

Rhyne knew that it had. “I took a fist,” she said, absently touching the bony arch of her cheek. “When I woke, they’d already moved me. It wasn’t so much a cave as a deep hole in the face of the rock. I reckon miners blasted it out once upon a time.” Her eyes dropped to where Judah’s fingers had begun to drum against the arm of his chair. It was the only sign she had that he was becoming impatient, perhaps uncomfortable.

“One of them was grunting over me,” she said. “Pounding me against the rock.”

Judah made a hissing sound as he sucked in a breath. “Have you no shame?”

There was a time that Rhyne’s face would have gone hot. That didn’t happen now. Her cheek still felt cool against her fingertips. She let her hand fall back to the table and didn’t look anywhere but at him. “I did, but I reckon that was mostly because you thought I should. Not everyone thinks like you do.”

“That doesn’t make everyone else right.”

Rhyne sidestepped that argument. Instead, she said, “The men … they took turns.”

“You mean you enjoyed the first so much, you invited the second.”

“Yes,” said Rhyne. “That must be what I mean.” She saw that he didn’t know what to make of her concession. There’d been no sarcasm in her tone because it was no longer important to her to convince him that she was the one who’d been wronged.

“They had names,” said Judah. “You never say their names.”

Rhyne wondered if he needed to think of it as personal. It was, but not in the way he wanted to imagine. “Hank and Carl Hardin.” “Brothers?”

“Cousins, I think.” Hank had called the other one ‘Cuz’.
You got her, Cuz. You got her good. Show her what a man’s got ‘tween his legs that she don’t. Then I’m gonna show her how a boy’s gotta take it.”
She let the echo of his voice fade away. His rasping, ribald laughter remained with her a bit longer.

“Your bastard would have been a Hardin,” said Judah. “Kin to both of them, I suppose.”

Rhyne didn’t disagree. She couldn’t explain why only Carl Hardin could have fathered her child. She needed to concentrate to hear what Judah was saying to her.

“Are they the pair that Wyatt and Will found murdered a ways from here?”

“The same.” She nodded slowly. “But I think you knew that.”

“If I did,” he said, owning nothing, “I also kept quiet.” “I know.”

“You might have been hanged for it.” “Maybe. They were wanted, so it’s hard to say. The bounty hadn’t been posted yet.” “Dead or alive?”

“Alive, but you heard the sheriff talking about it the same as I did. He didn’t seem all that concerned that he’d found them dead. Mostly it was the mystery of it that bothered him.”

“Are you thinking about solving it for him?”

“I might. Not today. Maybe not even soon. But someday. Cole thinks he already knows. Will Beatty, too. It could be I’d just be setting their minds at rest.”

Judah’s chin jutted forward. “Why are you talking about it now?”

“You never let me have my say before, and I needed to tell someone. I was sitting up there on the ridge, trying to decide what to do, when I realized that the person I needed to tell was you.”

“Is that right?”

Rhyne reached behind her and drew Judah’s walking stick across her lap. She had had his full attention before, but now he was wary. “I know what you did with this,” she said. Her hand ran along the carvings in the ebony. Except the tip, the wood was solid and smooth. She didn’t have to look at it to make out the shapes of the rook, knight, bishop, and pawn. “After you beat me unconscious, I know what you did with it next.”

“You didn’t want the bastard.”

She couldn’t deny that she’d said it, but what she told him now was also the truth. “I think you’d really forgotten I was your daughter, not your son. The baby proved different. I didn’t know what I wanted. Except for the once I stood up to you about not parading myself on stage, I guess I hardly knew my own mind. You about beat me senseless then, so I knew what I could expect when you told me you’d get rid of my baby.”

Rhyne’s hands tightened over the queen and the knight. Ebony was a hard wood, not easy to break over her knee, but the thought ran through her mind. “Leastways, I thought I knew. Cole told me what you did. He found the ropes that you used to tie me down. You must have been worried that I’d come to. It didn’t happen, though, and I can’t figure if that’s a blessing or not. Sometimes I think I remember it, but maybe it’s just that I can
imagine
it.”

She lifted her left hand and uncovered the knight. She angled the stick so he could see the tip of it but was careful to keep it away from his grasp. “That last pawn,” she said. “You see how the ebony’s worn there? The wood’s brittle from you striking it against things to get attention. I reckon no amount of oil can heal the scarring of a dead piece of wood, even one as fine as this.” She retracted the stick, used a fingernail to pick at a hairline crack, and then held up her hand to show him the splinter. “See that? He found some of those inside me.”

Rhyne waited, but Judah only returned her stare, his lined expression infinitely harder than hers. “I can’t bring myself to believe that you might have done the same to my mother. You loved her once. I have to hope that was enough to make a difference.”

Judah struck as quickly as a snake, heaving himself out of the chair and leaping at Rhyne. She was ready for him, had been since the moment she confronted him, and she flung herself sideways so that he grabbed air and not the sleeve of her coat. Never turning her back on him, she retreated until she could put his rocker between them. She held the walking stick in both hands at chest height and kept it parallel to the floor, prepared to swing it in either direction.