Patricia Rice (29 page)

But bear-like, I must fight the course.

~ Shakespeare,
Macbeth

A cold wind seemed to blow right through him as Pace dismounted and walked toward Dora. The color had leeched from her face beneath the enormous bonnet. Mud and grass stained her hands from pulling the more stubborn weeds. Beneath the mud, her fingernails were cracked and broken. Dora never had been one for a lady's graces. She'd never aspired to become a politician's wife.

This was the woman he had plowed and planted with his seed. Pace still hadn't recovered from the shock. Reluctantly, he dropped his gaze to the distended curve beneath her skirt, and he tried imagining his child growing there. His imagination failed him. He didn't feel alive enough to create anything.

His brain still didn't spin correctly. The first thing he said was "Mine," without a question mark after it, a statement of ownership. She didn't confirm or deny. She didn't need to. Dora had been a part of his life since childhood. Despite the gap between them, Pace knew her as well as he knew himself. Which wasn't saying much
.
He just knew the child could never belong to anyone else.

Since she wasn't speaking to him, either in anger or welcome, Pace ran a shaking hand through his hair and said, "I haven't eaten. Is there any breakfast left?"

With an enigmatic look, Dora returned to her hoeing. "In the kitchen," was her only reply.

Feeling like a heel but unable to deal with his new reality, Pace took himself off to the washhouse to clean up. He changed into wrinkled but clean clothes from his saddlebags. He found biscuits and bacon keeping warm in the kitchen, although he saw no sign of a cook. With reluctance, he forced himself into the house to greet whatever remnants of the household remained. His mind, however, stayed on the problem of the woman in the garden beyond these walls.

His mother greeted him as if he'd never left, scolding him for wearing a wrinkled coat, complaining her breakfast was cold. Pace sat through her selfish diatribes without listening. His hands kept spinning his hat around and around while his thoughts whirled.

He knew what was required of him, what he was honor bound to do. Dora wasn't a lady of his own class like Josie, but she was an honest woman, and he had taken her to bed and given her his child. If she'd been a Negro slave or a loose white woman, he'd feel no obligation, but he had taken her innocence. He had no choice but to pay the consequences.

Only it was Dora who would really pay the consequences, no matter what he did. He would make a poor excuse for a husband. He owned nothing, had no future. He didn't even know how to operate her pitiful little farm for a profit. He doubted his ability to do any better at fatherhood than his own had. He had no example but his father to follow. He wouldn't wish that on any child. As a husband, he would no doubt be worse. At least his own father had land and the knowledge to build on it. He didn't even have that.

Despite the black spiral of his doubts, Pace knew he had no choice. He had to offer her the protection of his name, if nothing else. Dora wouldn't find any other suitors now, not after carrying a bastard. That alone destroyed any hopes she might have entertained of making a good match. Marriage wouldn't improve her situation by much, but if she was lucky, he would drop dead or get killed, and she could call herself a widow. Maybe he would just disappear from her life after the baby's birth, and she could call herself widow anyway.

That seemed a halfway reasonable solution. Pace rose abruptly in the middle of one of his mother's complaints and started for the door.

He found Dora in the henhouse. She had washed her hands and covered herself with one of her blasted aprons. She carried a basket to gather the eggs in, but she'd only found a couple. For the first time since his arrival, Pace felt a wry sense of relief. If she started throwing things at him, she wouldn't have much ammunition.

"There's a preacher over in the county seat who will marry us, no questions asked. Can you travel that far?"

She looked up at him then, her fine blue eyes regarding him gravely. Pace wanted to wiggle with discomfort like a schoolboy caught chewing gum, but he managed to retain some sense of decorum. He would have liked to have done better than proposing in a henhouse, but now that he'd made the decision, he felt a sense of urgency to have it done with. He didn't know much about having babies, but this one looked as if it could pop out any minute.

"Thou needn't make such a sacrifice," Dora answered dryly. "Everyone assumes the child is David's."

He hadn't thought she would refuse him. Pace stared at her in confusion. She serenely returned to her egg-gathering as if that ended the subject. Anger began to take the place of wisdom. "The child is mine. I have the right to claim him."

She glanced up at him, as if in surprise to find him still there. To her credit, she merely replied, "I will not deny thee that right."

"Then you will allow me to give him my name," he said in satisfaction.

She shrugged as she straightened to look at him again. "Thou mayest call him anything thou wishes."

Pace gritted his teeth in frustration. "Legally. I want him to have my name legally. That means we must wed."

She was back to regarding him as if he were some strange species of animal. "That is foolish. Thou doth not wish to marry me. Josie is a widow now. It would be best for all if thou marries her and settles down. This place needs a man's hand."

Pace slammed his fist against the wooden wall, shaking the flimsy building and sending the hens flapping and squawking in riotous cacophony across the floor. Dora dodged the panicked birds and eased toward the door, an uneasy expression he'd never seen on her face.

Annoyed at her look of fear, Pace grabbed Dora's arm and hauled her into the sunshine. "To hell with Josie. To hell with the damned land. That's my child, and I mean to claim it. If you can't travel, I'll fetch the preacher. Just get yourself gussied up and ready. I'm not having that babe born a bastard."

Finally, she seemed to take him seriously. She quit struggling against his hold, but her expression remained cold and wary. "Thou canst not mean that," she said. "Thou hath a future that cannot include me. I cannot be a politician's wife. I doubt that I can be a lawyer's wife. Thou liveth in a different world. Thou mayest claim the child if it means so much to thee. I never wished to keep him from thee. Thou mayest adopt him, as Papa John adopted me. There is no need for us to marry and ruin thy career."

An overwhelming urge to weep swept over him. Pace turned his eyes up to the approaching gray clouds and fought against the bitter tears of despair stinging them, not knowing where they came from. Fighting the bleakness seeping through him at her words, he returned his gaze to Dora, forcing a blank expression, hiding the tearing agony of knowing even his guardian angel didn't want him.

He released her arm and shoved the awful bonnet from her hair. Silver curls gleamed in the sunlight. Blindly grasping for a last thread of salvation, Pace took a deep breath and answered without inflection, "I have no career. The voters would rather hang a Union man than see one in office. I can't see that changing anytime soon. I can put out a shingle and write wills and deeds, but the people around here aren't likely to forgive my politics. We'll probably starve on what I can make if I stay here. You're better off staying with Josie and my mother while I look for a place elsewhere. I would feel better if you carried my name under those circumstances. You are the innocent party. I don't want you exposed to scorn on my account. You have as much right to the name of Nicholls as Josie and my mother."

Pace could feel her studying him in that otherworldly way of hers. Sometimes, it made him feel like God looked directly through her eyes. It made him nervous and uncomfortable, for good reason. At the same time, Pace felt as if her judgment would see all sides, would see what he could not. He expected her to be fair, not human. It was an irrational expectation, he knew, but Dora hadn't failed him yet.

Her forehead wrinkled in consternation as she took his words and processed them through whatever knowledge and information she possessed that might change or contradict his declarations. Pace could almost literally see when she recognized that his predictions were not self-pity, that there was a decided modicum of truth in what he said. She glanced up at him with eyes filled with worry.

"Where would thee go?"

That wasn't the question he had expected. Sighing with frustration, running his hand through his already disheveled hair, Pace glanced nervously at Dora's distended belly again. He could swear he saw it shift as the child within moved, and he had the sudden urge to hold his hands against her to steady the movement.

He resisted the urge, but his sense of immediacy escalated. That child was getting ready to be born, and he wanted no mistake about his ownership. His honor demanded it. He refused to acknowledge the possessive instincts flooding him. He just meant to do what was right.

"That doesn't matter now. What matters is getting you to the preacher as soon as possible. We can discuss details later. Can you travel or not?"

Pace doubted that Dora weighed even a hundred pounds on her own. The child must add another twenty pounds of excess burden. He didn't know how she carried it. Still, she seemed like a weightless bird poised for flight while she contemplated his question.

"I have no wish to marry," she stated flatly. "I have no desire to be a man's possession."

Pace stared at her blankly, not comprehending her argument. She might give birth at any minute. He could literally see his child moving within her womb. He would throw her over his shoulder and haul her off to the preacher if she didn't cease this unreasonableness. Perhaps it had something to do with her pregnancy. He shook his lawyer's mind into action and tried desperately for rationality.

"You are already mine," he stated as flatly as she had. "You think I would allow another man to touch you now? As long as you are here, within my reach, that won't change. And you have already promised you won't deny me the child. So unless you leave the child and go, you cannot escape me. You are my wife in all but name, Dora. The legal words will make no difference to what is already between us."

He saw the flash of fear in her eyes, the frozen look of a captured deer. That one brief glimpse nearly tore him in two before it disappeared, and he read the calm acceptance of his logic.

He closed his eyes and gave a sigh of relief, ignoring his own burgeoning doubts when she finally replied.

"I can travel. We needs must take the cart. The carriage horses are gone."

He swore a curse that made her flinch. When she picked up her egg basket and turned back to the house, Pace caught her arm in apology.

"I'm sorry. I've been around other men too long. Gallant has been trained to the traces. I'll hook him up to the curricle. It has some springs, at least. I don't want you jostled too much."

She looked surprised at his nervousness. "I am not an eggshell. I will not break so easily. Didst thou wish for me to press thy clothes before we go?"

No, he wanted the damned servants to do it, but he understood now that there weren't any. No voices singsonged through the quarters. No laughter drifted from the kitchen. No one called from the upstairs windows to idlers lingering below. The unplowed field took on new meaning. Pace clenched his jaw against a dozen questions and shook his head.

"I'll find something in my room. Wear something pretty, and leave that apron behind. A person only gets married once. We might as well try to do it right."

As if what they did was right, Pace thought later as he helped Dora into the curricle. He'd finally taken enough time to calculate that she was eight months gone with child. They would be married in a strange church, by an unknown preacher, without any friends or family around them. It certainly wasn't the wedding he had expected, but he couldn't provide better under the circumstances.

Dora wore a lacy cap to cover her curls instead of the concealing bonnet. Pace conceded this improvement and the probable necessity of keeping the March wind from blowing her hair to a frazzle. She had changed into a clean gown, one slightly less worn than the other, which warned him it was her best gown. Considering how difficult it must be for her to find something that fit, he admitted she probably couldn't do better. He couldn't even do much about it. He'd raided his father's small store of coins and found it too limited for wasting on new clothes.

When he took the seat beside her, she unfolded her fist and wordlessly handed him the gold ring he had given her. Pace glanced from Dora's expressionless face to the ring, then tucked it into his coat pocket. The ring had been as close to a promise as he had ever made. Now he was carrying out that promise. He would find some way to take care of her. He just didn't know how yet.

They didn't talk much on the ride over. Despite the distant clouds the sun continued shining, but the wind was brisk and cool. Dora shivered inside her cloak, and Pace cursed his inability to even protect her from the weather. He really didn't want to know what Dora thought, and he appreciated her silence. She had probably hoped to marry in her own church, in whatever odd manner her religion accepted. He already realized they would not accept him, but she hadn't said a word about it.

The only words that came to his own mind were apologies, and they were fairly useless at this point. Even though Dora had been willing, he had taken her to his bed without any thought of the consequences. He was experienced. She hadn't been. Hell, she probably hadn't even known what could happen to her. This whole affair was entirely his responsibility.

He shunned the thought of the shame she had endured these last months on his account, what she would have continued enduring if someone hadn't poured him onto the train going home. Now he knew what her letter must have contained. Apologies wouldn't begin to cover his actions.

On an ordinary work day, the county seat harbored only a few horses at the hitching post and a farm wagon half-loaded with supplies in front of the mercantile. Horse piles steamed on the macadam roadway as Pace steered his gelding to a place near the front of the courthouse. Dora clenched her hands as she stared up at the imposing brick structure, but Pace ignored her nervousness.