The Beloved Woman (5 page)

After the boy left, leading the huge gray horse behind him, Justis sighed in relief. Katherine turned her attention from Bingham’s work with her baggage. “What did he mean by ‘orphan’?”

“Some fool game of his. I don’t know.”

“You own him?” The disapproval was obvious in her voice.

“Yeah. But I didn’t buy him. Him and his sister were bartered for goods at the store. They were both sickly and bruised up. Wasn’t any other way I could get ’em away from their master.”

“I’m an abolitionist, Mr. Gallatin. I just want you to know that. A free-thinking abolitionist.”

Lord, why didn’t she just strip naked and do a dance in the road? he thought. That couldn’t make her any more controversial than she was already. He pulled a long Spanish cigar out of the band of his hat and jabbed it between his teeth.

“I’m not really opinionated on the subject, Katie, but I don’t own slaves. When Noah and his sister are older, I
plan to sign their manumission papers and send ’em up north to school. Good enough?”

She looked remorseful. “Yes. I apologize.” He nodded, satisfied. When she was wrong, she admitted it. Not many women did that. But after a moment she added, “Please don’t call me by a pet name. It’s crude. A gentleman would call me ‘Miss Blue Song.’ ”

Justis felt embarrassment creeping up his cheeks. One minute a smiling angel, the next a high-falutin’ queen. “I’m not a gentleman,
Katie.
”

She clamped her lips tightly together and turned away. “Just put those trunks on the veranda, please, Mr. Bingham. I won’t be here long.”

The sound of footsteps on a wooden floor heralded the appearance of Sam’s wife, her cheeks rosy from housework. She wiped her hands on a white apron as she pulled it from her calico dress. Rebecca Kirkland radiated the same wholesome sweetness as a pot of honey. She was made up of wheat-blond hair and buxom womanhood, with kind hazel eyes. When people wanted good chicken soup and tenderhearted treatment, they went to Rebecca. Justis had never looked at a female with brotherly affection before he met her.

“Welcome home, Miss Blue Song,” she said kindly, and held out both hands. “I’m Rebecca Kirkland. My husband and I are partners with Mr. Gallatin.” She shot an anxious look toward Justis, and he shook his head.

After a startled moment Katherine went up the steps and clasped Rebecca’s hands. “I’m sorry to intrude on you. I really don’t understand why Mr. Gallatin brought me here.”

“Jesse’s supposed to meet her,” Justis called. This had to stop. It gnawed at his insides more with each second. As soon as Bingham pulled away, he’d tell her.

White trash murdered your family. Your pa was full of bullets and the rest—well, they died in other ways
.

“Why don’t you fix Miss Blue Song some tea?” Justis
suggested loudly. He bit his cigar in two and had to grab the front end before it fell to the ground.

N
OAH AND HIS SISTER
, Lilac, were hiding beyond the arched doorway to the parlor, and they kept peeking at her. Katherine smiled at them, but they looked sorrowful in return. Rebecca Kirkland’s hands shook each time she raised her teacup. Justis Gallatin had quickly downed two glasses of whiskey from a cupboard in the corner. Now he lounged by the marble fireplace, scowling.

Something was wrong, very wrong, and fear grew inside Katherine until she could barely sit still.

“You know my family well?” she asked Rebecca.

“Oh, yes.” Her smile was too wide, her voice too gay. “They trade at the store.”

“And the people from the Talachee village? Do they trade with you also?”

“They moved on a month ago,” Justis said. “Went to the Indian territory out west.”

Katherine looked at him in bewilderment. “They deserted the settlement? They’d been there for generations.”

He cleared his throat, stared at the carpeted floor, and said finally, “Settlers claimed their land. That’s the way it is now. Since the lottery. Man shows up with a deed, Indians got to move. The treaty said so.”

“No chief of any importance signed that treaty. And it’s still being fought in Washington City.”

He slammed a hand on the mantel. “Dammit, this isn’t Washington City! It’s over, you hear? There’s nothing you or I can do to change it.”

The blood stopped in Katherine’s veins. She and Justis Gallatin shared a long, intense gaze, and regret slowly softened his features. “I’m sorry,” he said wearily.

Her hands felt so icy, she curved them around the teacup for warmth. Gazing down into the amber liquid, she tried to think. She was not ordinarily given to nervous
moods, but right now a bleak sense of doom was crawling through her stomach. “I want to go home,” she said softly. “Right now. I have missed my family for six years.”

Rebecca made a strange noise. Katherine looked at her quickly, searching for answers. Delicate footsteps tapped on the porch, and Rebecca left the room hurriedly when someone knocked at the door.

Katherine stood and faced Justis. “Please take me home.”

He struggled for a second, then shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Surely you understand my impatience to see my loved ones.”

“Nope. I’ve got no loved ones. Never have had any.”

“Oh, you’re being deliberately argumentative! Why not simply—”

“Justis, my dear, you’ve finally found her. I’m so glad.”

Katherine pivoted to find a petite young woman breezing into the parlor, voluminous pink skirts flouncing around her, her cheeks flushed just as pink, her eyes as hard as blue sapphires. A pile of beautiful red-gold hair was arranged in ringlets around her head, and her features were striking despite the thick pattern of freckles that covered most of her face.

She went to Justis, took his hands, and looked up at him sweetly. “You were terribly kind to do it.”

“Amarintha, wait,” Rebecca called frantically, following her.

“This is the poor thing,” Amarintha cooed, turning to Katherine. “You brave dear.”

Katherine’s mouth dropped open as the visitor threw both arms around her and hugged delicately, brushing a cool cheek against hers. When the woman stepped back her gaze swept over Katherine with intense appraisal.
The pink mouth tightened. “And such a fine example of what civilization can do. It’s so very tragic.”

Suddenly Justis inserted an arm between them. “Amarintha, let’s you and me step outside for a minute.”

Katherine had had enough. “Stop it.” Her fists clenched, she backed away from the group, away from Rebecca’s strained expression, the newcomer’s rather melodramatic one, and the fierceness in Justis Gallatin’s eyes as he started toward her.

“Someone tell me the truth,” she ordered.

“You mean she doesn’t
know
?” Amarintha asked. “No one’s told her that her whole family’s dead?”

Justis swung about and glared. “Dammit, you did that to be spiteful!”

Katherine sagged against a chair, grasping its back. In a second Justis reached her. He latched on to her arms and held tightly, looking down at her in anguish.

“This isn’t how I wanted to break it,” he said hoarsely. “But I reckon it’s as good a way as any.”

She stared up at him and frowned in concentration. Whole family dead. No, of course not. “Where are they, really?” she asked.

His fingers dug into her arms. “They were killed four days ago. All of ’em. We don’t know who did it. The farm was robbed and most everything was burned.”

The words glanced off her, making sense but not penetrating her shield of disbelief. “But you don’t understand,” she murmured, and raised her hands to grip his dusty shirt. “My family tries very hard to fit in. Papa enlisted when Andrew Jackson asked Cherokees to help him fight the Creek Indians. He’s a veteran. My mother’s mother was a medicine woman and my mother was a Beloved Woman in the Blue clan. When the first missionaries came here, she convinced the people at the Talachee settlement to trust them. Don’t you see? No one would want to hurt my family.”

“Katie gal,” he whispered, shaking her a little. “They’re dead. Believe me.”

She pulled away from him and walked out of the parlor, out of the hotel, and across the side yard, where she stopped by the beech tree and wondered how she’d gotten there. Coming up the dusty trail past the hotel was a team of oxen pulling a large wagon filled with barrels. The two teamsters on the wagon seat gaped at her and pointed, then yelled something, she didn’t care what. She turned and stumbled blindly.

“Easy, gal, easy,” Justis’s drawling voice said close to her ear, and his thickly muscled arm latched around her waist. She wasn’t certain whether she was walking or being carried, but she ended up behind the hotel in the midst of a flower garden.

Her knees buckled but she didn’t fall. Instead, she was lowered to a sitting position among the flowers, and Justis sat beside her, holding her to his chest and stroking her shoulder.

“There was no shaman to speak formulas over the bodies,” she whispered. “And no preacher to pray for them.”

“Sam said the right things,” he assured her. “And we buried ’em proper.” His arms tightened around her. “Go ahead and cry. I’m so sorry, Katie.”

After a minute passed and she only sat silent and stiff in his embrace, he drew back to look at her. Katherine gazed past him to the sunlight streaming into the hearts of the flowers, carrying power to them, to the earth, to everything that was strong and eternal.

“They’re buried on the land?” she asked.

“On the ridge beyond the house.”

“Then they’ll always be part of it, and it’s part of me. And I’ll always have the land. I’ve dreamed it.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “You’ll never want for anything, Katie. Before I buried your pa, I
promised him that I’d look after you. And I want to—it’s not just a duty.”

What was he saying? Look after her? Why was it his concern? She was no child, and she didn’t need any help from a white man.

She stared at him dry-eyed. “Take me home.”

J
USTIS KNEW SHE
wasn’t heartless, and he was relatively certain that she had a sound mind, but her reaction to her family’s death was the most puzzling thing he’d ever seen. She acted no more hysterical now than she had two hours before, in the garden.

She sat on the wagon seat beside him, her bonnet in her lap, her expression blank. He knew Indians could be stone-faced when they wanted, but this was different. The Blue Song farm was nearly three hours from town—a long trip in a mule-drawn wagon over a rutted trail—but she’d been still as a statue the whole way.

They turned onto the trail to the farm, but even that seemed to have no effect on her. The trail wound between steep hills covered in hardwood trees. As it neared the farm, clumps of purple irises and yellow jonquils dotted every sunny spot along the sides.

Suddenly she laid a hand on his arm. “Stop, I want some flowers,” she said in a low, calm voice, and he felt as though a woodthrush had just murmured in his ear. “My mother planted these when I was little. My goodness, spring must have come late this year. I’m surprised that they’re still in bloom.”

She climbed down before he could help her and spent the next ten minutes filling her arms with yellow and purple blossoms. Justis watched her in silent worry.

She hardly knew what was happening, he thought.

Back in the wagon again, she nuzzled her face against the flowers, then smiled. “Just as I’ve remembered them. It will be good to be home again.”

“You’re gonna be all right,” he said gently. “You’re just a little confused in the head right now.”

“No.” She gazed up the trail. It disappeared over a rise, and beyond were the first fields. “It’s all burned and broken, I know. The springhouse is the only thing that still stands.”

“How do you know that?”

“I see things in my mind sometimes, and they’re usually true.”

He inhaled sharply. “You see anything else about the place, or what happened?”

“No.”

“Good.” This was not a line of conversation he wanted to pursue. When she offered no more words, he was relieved. The mules crested the hill and he pulled them to a stop.

This part of the land was too hilly for farming. Jesse and his field hands had cleared it for grazing, so it dipped and rose under a green carpet of grass, dotted by an occasional cluster of shade trees in the valleys.

Dread grew inside Justis as the fields passed behind them and the forest closed in again. After a short distance it opened on the main clearing. A row of burned cabins bordered the road.

“Papa freed his farmhands when he joined the church,” Katherine said casually, as if the cabins weren’t heaps of charred pine logs. “The families stayed on and worked for shares, though.”

Justis noticed that her hands were digging into the flowers as she talked, crushing them. He patted her knee. “Your pa sent the hands away last year. North. He couldn’t protect ’em from kidnappers.”

She wasn’t listening. Leaning forward, her body rigid, she gazed at the rubble of the main house and outbuildings. Her feet hit the ground before he stopped the wagon. Cursing under his breath, Justis followed her as she walked through the grounds, the flowers falling from
her arms unheeded, scattering in a breeze that suddenly whipped over the ridge.

He trailed her silently, waiting for her to do something, say something, to fall on the ground and sob like he expected a woman to do. She held her handsome gray skirt up and walked through the debris the raiders had spread in their hurry to find everything of value.

Justis winced as she stopped here and there to pick up small items—a button, a broken ivory comb, the stem from a pipe—all of which she tucked into her purse. She halted under the oaks in the front yard, and he prayed that she wouldn’t notice the bloodstains beneath her feet.

She didn’t seem to see anything around her, though. Her head was up, her eyes alert as if she were listening to voices he couldn’t hear, or talking silently to one of the Cherokee spirits. “Where are they buried?” she asked.

“Over yonder, overlookin’ the valley.”

The Blue Song land was beautiful, but the valley made it magnificent. Jesse had grown corn taller than a man’s head in those rich bottomlands. A meandering stream crossed the valley’s farthest edge, and hazy blue mountains rimmed the distant horizon.