Tracie Peterson - [New Mexico Sunset 03] (3 page)

Then, completely to Angeline’s surprise, Gavin turned and without even stopping to look back at her, called out, “I think you should reconsider what you think you feel, Angel. I have my own causes and marrying you is right at the top of the list.”

Chapter 3

T
hursday evening arrived, and Angeline forced thoughts of Gavin from
her head and replaced them with ones of the party to come. She dressed carefully in a white gown of cotton eyelet which was trimmed daintily with ribbons of pink. Three flounces fell in graceful swirls to make up the skirt, while the bodice fit snug to accentuate Angeline’s small waist.
She pulled her hair back from her face and tied part of it with a large pink rib
bon that matched those on her dress. Twirling before her mother’s cheval mirror, Angeline smiled. She’d never looked better, and she was more than a little pleased.

Angeline went downstairs and found everyone in a surprisingly good mood. Letters had come that day from John and James, and her mother was greatly relieved to learn that they were well. Her father, one of only two doctors in the town, happily announced that he had successfully saved the leg of one of the town’s older residents. The man had taken a fall on his horse, crushing his leg and breaking it in several places. Dr. Monroe had worked most diligently to restore the limb and now, after ten days of battling a fierce infection, he declared the leg well on the way to mending. Everyone was happy and the tone of the party was set in that mood.

The first to arrive at the party was David and Jenny Monroe and their twins Samuel and Hannah. At twenty, neither of the twins seemed all that concerned with leaving home. Samuel seemed to favor banking, while Hannah had spent the last year diligently working on the Belgian Relief cause. Angeline herself had joined Hannah’s efforts for a time, until boredom set in, as it usually did, and she was off and running to right wrongs somewhere else.

Angeline seldom gave too much consideration to her cousins. They were simple people, uninterested in the things that Angeline found fascinating and completely too quiet to be considered fun.

The Lucas’s arrived not far behind David and Jenny, and Angeline was relieved when Gavin seemed content to keep his distance and not bring up their previous conversation. Still, Angeline couldn’t help but watch Gavin out of the corner of her eye. She felt herself tremble once when she caught him staring at her, but when he did nothing but grin and give her a slight nod, Angeline calmed a bit and chided herself for being silly.

Maybe he’s thought better of it,
Angeline decided silently.
Maybe he’s sorry and embarrassed for asking me to marry him.
But just as soon as she considered that thought, Angeline knew that she didn’t want him to be. She rather liked the idea of having been proposed to, although she had no intention of accepting. A woman should be flattered when a handsome young man asked for her hand.

“But he didn’t ask,” Angeline muttered, quickly looking up to see who else might have overheard her.

“What was that, Dear?” her mother questioned, but no one else seemed to have heard.

“Nothing,” Angeline said, forcing a smile. “Nothing at all.”

❧

The Monroe’s beautifully cultivated yard was soon filled with several dozen people. Angeline was pleased with the effort her parents had gone to. Her
father had strung paper lanterns around the yard, and her mother had decorat
ed a beautiful buffet of food for all of the guests to enjoy. Angeline had never felt so special in all her life.

It didn’t take long for the men to begin their courting. Angeline was soon the center of attention, laughing at their stories and pretending to be shocked at the risks they faced in their jobs. But Gavin wasn’t among them, and for the first time, Angeline wasn’t nearly as interested in what the other men had to say. What was wrong with her?

From time to time, Angeline sought the crowd for Gavin. Inevitably, she
found him after searching for several minutes, only to realize that he knew, when their gazes met, that she’d been looking for him. He’d smile smugly, maybe give her a nod, but otherwise he made no attempt to command her attention or greet her. Angeline felt a sense of ineffable disappointment when Gavin finally turned to engage in conversation with Hannah and Samuel.

❧

“Sometimes I think she’s too popular,” Lillie Monroe said, coming to stand beside Gavin.

“She deserves to enjoy herself,” Gavin replied softly.

“Still, a mother worries about such things. Angeline is very stubborn, like her father,” Lillie said with a grin that Gavin shared.

“I heard tell it was the other way around,” Gavin offered lightly. “In fact, I’ve heard a few stories about you and my mom that make Angel seem kind of tame.”

Lillie laughed out loud. “Gavin Lucas you’ve been listening to your father again. Or was it Daniel?”

“Both,” Gavin admitted. “I guess they just want to train me up so I’ll not be shocked when I take a wife.”

“Then your mother and I had best get busy and give you our side,” Lillie said with genuine affection for Gavin. She looped her arm through his and with a more motherly tone, spoke of courtship. “Stubbornness can be both a virtue and a curse, depending on how you use it. In my case, stubbornness keeps Dr. Dan and I together. But, we love each other a great deal,” she added softly, “and just like the Bible says in Proverbs 10:12, ‘Love covereth all sins.’ ”

“It does tend to make you overlook things, doesn’t it?” Gavin reflected, his eyes still on Angeline.

Lillie was rather taken back by his response. She followed his gaze to her daughter. “I worry something fierce about her, Gavin. She’s so young, and she’s not a bit aware of how ugly the world can really be. Now she’s going off to Denver and, after that, who knows where? Her heart is so soft and giving, and she’ll expect everyone else to be the same way.” Lillie stopped, pulled her arm from Gavin’s.

Silence engulfed them for a moment, then Gavin turned to his mother’s lifelong friend. “Don’t worry about Angel,” he said softly. “I intend to see to it that she’s well cared for. I’ll never let anyone hurt her if I’m able to do anything about it.”

Lillie smiled at Gavin’s chivalrous reply. “You can’t be everywhere, Gavin. Angeline’s bound to take wings and fly away someday, and there’s no way I can stop that. Not that I really want to stop her from growing up, it’s just that I worry about the kind of people she’ll meet; the type of man she’ll finally settle down to marry.”

“Then stop worrying about it,” Gavin said boldly. “I intend to marry Angel and I told her so. She just needs to get used to the idea.”

Lillie’s mouth dropped open at Gavin’s declaration. “You what?”

Gavin looked a bit embarrassed as if suddenly realizing it was Angel’s mother he was talking to. “I hope that didn’t seem too out of place. I do intend to speak with Dr. Dan about it before just barging into the family.”

Lillie was still dumbstruck as Garrett and Maggie came up to announce they were heading for home.

“I’ll help you get the wagon,” Gavin said to his father and followed him off into the night.

❧

“I’ve certainly enjoyed myself,” Maggie said, then nodded towards Angeline. “Looks like she has, as well.”

“Yes,” Lillie replied and looked at where Gavin had stood only minutes before. Should she say something to Maggie? Maybe she should asked her how she felt about them finally being joined as in-laws?

“The children always seem to love these get-togethers. I wish Daughtry lived closer. I miss her so much when she’s gone, and it seems like when she and Nicholas come for a visit, all we do is talk about Kent and what new thing he’s doing. I never seem to get to talk about what she’s doing or thinking.”

“I know what you mean, and I have Angeline here all the time. It just seems as if she’s drifting away. Did you know that she wants to travel abroad?”

“Not a healthy time to do that,” Maggie replied.

“No, but she reminds me so much of myself. Remember when I nagged my mother into taking me to London?”

“Do I ever! I was green with envy.”

Lillie nodded. “Now it’s our children. Now, instead of things happening to us, it’s them. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

Maggie laughed. “It does indeed. I remember thinking when Daughtry was expecting Kent that it used to be me bringing the new lives into our family. All of the sudden, I changed places with my child and she was a child no more.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Lillie said as though the thought were a revelation. “I felt that way tonight, almost as if I were an outsider looking in. I used to be that young lady,” Lillie said, pointing to her daughter.

“Yes, I remember you telling me all about it,” Maggie agreed.

“You’d never come to the parties because you were sworn to never marry.” Lillie couldn’t help but laugh. “Now, just look at you.”

“God had other plans,” Maggie replied softly. “I thank Him, too, that He
did.”

“The same goes for me,” Lillie happily seconded. Then completely changing the subject, she reached out and took hold of Maggie’s hand. “Gavin is so much like Garrett. He’s a good man, as are all of your sons.”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed at Lillie’s sudden praise. “What is it?” she questioned. “What are you trying to say to me?”

Lillie looked across the short distance to Angeline, then back to Maggie. “Gavin told me tonight that he intends to marry Angeline.” Maggie’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “He told me not to worry about her,” Lillie continued, “because he intends to take care of her.”

“Well, I’ll be.” Maggie finally breathed the words. She couldn’t help but get a mischievous look to her face. “His brothers will never let him hear the end of it for this. Has he asked Angeline yet?”

“I think so, but he said she needed time to get used to the idea.”

Maggie laughed heartily. “Sounds like his father. Poor Angeline.”

Lillie smirked a grin as she glanced at her daughter. “Poor Gavin.”

Chapter 4

A
ngeline returned home from Denver a changed woman. Her vocabulary was expanded to include words like suffrage, franchise, and equal rights. Furthermore, she now quoted women who had made their marks in history—Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to name a few. In short, Angeline had a new cause. Women’s suffrage! The right to vote!

“Mother, you wouldn’t believe what I learned,” Angeline rambled in animated excitement. “Colorado agreed in 1893 to allow their women to vote and Wyoming even entered the union fully granting suffrage rights to their women!”

Lillie took it all in stride. Angeline was always at one cause or another.
It was really a small wonder she hadn’t been bitten by the suffrage bug soon
er. It wasn’t until Angeline announced her plan to join the suffragist Willa Neal on her lecture tour through New Mexico that Lillie stopped dead in her tracks.

“You what?”

“Oh, Mother,” Angeline’s voice oozed excitement, “I’m going to fight for the suffrage cause! I’m going to be a suffragist and win us the right to vote!”

Lillie eyed her daughter carefully. “Angeline, we need to discuss this more thoroughly with your father. I doubt he’ll be very enthusiastic to the idea of you traipsing off with strangers.”

“It won’t be the idea of strangers that will bother him. He’ll be narrow-minded like most men and not see a need for women to vote.”

“Angeline, I don’t care for your tone. When has your father ever given you cause to believe that he doesn’t esteem a woman’s opinion?” Lillie asked her daughter in genuine concern. Who had put such ideas into her little girl’s head?

“Mother,” Angeline began very patiently, as though she were talking to a simpleton or small child, “women have been made to believe for a very long time that they were incapable of sound judgement. We marry and give birth to men, raise them to adulthood, but somehow when it comes to logic and sense, men believe us totally null and void—completely uneducated and without a hope of making responsible decisions. Yet who do they think trained them up? On who’s knee did they learn their first words?”

Lillie stared at her daughter in complete shock. Angeline was unconcerned with her mother’s surprise. It was to be expected, she reasoned. Hadn’t Willa told her that women were as much to blame, maybe even more so, for their own lack of rights?

“Mother, this is a new age, and the men and women of this world need to wake up to the realization that the world is growing up and moving on.” Angeline voiced the practiced words she’d heard at one of the many suffrage lectures she’d attended in Denver. “We have the automobiles being mass produced on an assembly line where workers are paid five dollars a week! There are aeroplanes that fly men in the air and moving pictures that can record things as they happen. And with all this technology and progress toward a better world, woman are still suppressed and treated as though they are second class citizens!”

“Enough!” Lillie cried and put her hands on her hips. “Angeline, I’m happy to know that you spent your time learning about the world, but honestly, you rant this suffrage cause like you had been made to endure some horrendous ordeal. Your father and brothers have only treated us with the utmost of respect. Your father, a college-trained doctor, often seeks my opinion in cases of his female patients, simply because I am a woman. You have only known kindness and respect from the men in this community, and I resent the fact that you act as though it has been otherwise.”

Angeline was taken aback by her mother’s outrage. “While it is true,” Angeline countered, “that our menfolk have offered certain deference to our opinions, they still see us as frail, weak creatures who need to be sheltered from the pains of the world.”

“I don’t think I understand why you feel this way,” Lillie said a bit softer.

Angeline came to her mother and took hold of her hands. “Mother, you wouldn’t believe the things that are done to women every day all over the world. Women, who because they have no voice and no chance to make changes, are put upon to be all manner of things for all manner of men. Some are bought and sold for the pleasure of others, and when they dare to raise a hand in their own defense they are maimed and often murdered!”

Lillie sat down at her kitchen table, pulling Angeline with her to take the chair beside hers. “Angeline, I know full well of the ugliness in this world. I
have chosen not to make it an issue in your upbringing because I hopedI
could shelter you from it for as long as possible. Perhaps it was naïve of me. Perhaps it was unwise, but nevertheless, it had nothing to do with equal rights and whether women should or shouldn’t have the right to vote.”

Angeline took in her mother’s words and weighed them against her newfound knowledge. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh,” Angeline began, “but Willa Neal told me that often women are a worse enemy to our cause than men.”

“You mean she doesn’t get the reaction she wants from women and so she calls them an enemy?”

“No, of course not!” Angeline exclaimed. “She simply means that sometimes women are too misinformed and need to be educated.”

“Sounds like the same argument you told me that men give for why they won’t approve women’s rights to vote.”

Angeline was temporarily silenced at her mother’s logical argument. Finally, she decided she needed to put the conversation on a more positive track and switched to another related, but seemingly neutral topic. “I did so enjoy being around learned women, Mother. I always knew that you and Aunt
Jenny and Maggie were women of knowledge, but these women have attend
ed college and they seem to know so much.”

“Wisdom is a powerful thing, Angeline. Solomon was wise and he still struggled to make the proper judgments.”

“Proverbs 7:4 says, ‘Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman.’ Willa told this to me, Mother. God, Himself, gave a clear picture that wisdom is a feminine virtue.”

“Is that all you perceive in that verse? Did you pay any attention to what came before it or went after it? You can’t rip pieces out of the Bible to fit your causes, Angeline.”

Angeline seemed genuinely deflated, and Lillie felt sorry for her daughter. “Look, I would very much like the right to vote.” Angeline perked up at this declaration, but Lillie waved her into silence and continued. “However, I will not fight a cause that degrades the rights of one to boost the rights of another. Nor will I see God’s hand in a fight that leads people into civil disobedience and self-declared war against one another.”

Daniel chose that inopportune moment to come whistling through the back door entrance. Lillie fell silent as she heard

Daniel cast aside his doctor’s bag. Entering the kitchen, Daniel noted the stern expression on his wife’s face and an even more troubling look of composed anger on his daughter’s.

“What are you two arguing about this time?” Daniel asked seriously.

Lillie got up and went to embrace her husband, while Angeline stood and waited by the table. “It seems,” Lillie told Daniel softly, “Angeline wants to accompany a leading suffragist on her lecture circuit.”

Daniel grinned. “Suffrage, eh?” He looked at his daughter with genuine affection, but she saw it as a patronizing gesture.

“I know what both of you are thinking and you’re wrong!” Angeline declared. “I believe in this cause and I intend to fight it for all I’m worth. I may not be old enough to benefit from it yet, but in a few years I’ll be twenty-
one, then I’ll be able to hold my head up high on the way to the voting place.”

“Whoa, Angeline,” Daniel said, stepping away from his wife. “There’s no reason for you to get so upset.”

“You and Mother think I’m a child,” Angeline protested, “but I’m not. I’m a grown woman and I have rights, and I intend to fight for those rights. Willa Neal is a wonderful woman. She has a great deal of knowledge, and she’s graduated from a very fine college back east.” She paused long enough to point a finger at her mother. “And while I might have expected this from Father, I thought you would understand. But I see you’re just as misinformed and naïve as Willa said most women are.” Turning to leave, Angeline paused at the door. “I believe in this cause, and I believe what she says in regards to what needs to be done. With or without your permission, I intend to join her.”

Daniel’s face changed instantly from compassionate to fiercely stern. “That’s enough, Angeline. You’ll do no such thing until we deem it acceptable and in your best interest. Now, apologize to your mother.”

Angeline turned up her nose and stormed from the room. There was no way she intended to apologize. Not when she was right!

Feeling very much the martyr, Angeline threw herself across her bed and pounded the mattress in rage. Willa had warned her that this would happen and Angeline hadn’t believed it possible. Was the entire world blind to the needs of women?

❧

Lillie’s astounded expression exactly matched her husband’s. When Daniel opened his arms to her, Lillie eagerly sought the refuge he offered.

“She’s so different now,” Lillie said near to tears. “I thought maybe we could talk through it, but she just kept getting more upset with each thing I said.”

“Shh,” Daniel soothed. “It has nothing to do with you.”

“She thinks I’m stupid,” Lillie said, and a sob escaped her. “Stupid and oppressed and blind to my womanly rights.”

Daniel smiled over his wife’s head. “Yeah, you seem real oppressed, Lillie. Have I managed to keep you chained to my side unable to achieve your God-given potential?”

Lillie pulled back and looked at the amused twinkle in her husband’s eye. “Oh, Daniel,” she grinned and wiped at the tears in her eyes, “I’ll take oppression if it’s with you.”

Daniel took Lillie’s face in his hands and kissed her soundly on the lips. “I feel the same way about you, my dear.”

Lillie melted against her husband, perfectly content that after twenty-some years of marriage, they could still argue together, work together, and joyfully love together. They had weathered many storms and would undoubtably face many more.

“What are we going to do about Angeline?” Lillie whispered the question against Daniel’s chest.

“Give her time to cool off and come to her senses. Maybe she’ll get interested in one of the local causes and forget about her suffragist friend.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Lillie said, wrapping her arms tightly around Daniel’s neck. “I hope you are.”

“If not, there’s always my idea about a convent.”

❧

Angeline’s tantrum was spent, and now she felt more determined than ever to leave Bandelero and assist Miss Neal. She pulled out a calendar and noted the day when Willa planned to be in Santa Fe for her first speech. With any luck at all, Angeline would find a way to join her.

“I’ll show them that I’m more than a simpleminded female,” Angeline whispered to the room. “I’ll show them that I’m capable of bettering the cause for women! I’ll show them all!”

❧

For the next few days, Angeline was the epitome of cooperation and genteel refinement. She didn’t utter a single word about suffrage or equal rights and went about her chores as a dutiful daughter. She was content in the fact that no one was wise to her plans. She reasoned away any feelings of guilt, telling herself that even people in the Bible often had to step out of line in order to accomplish God’s will.

On what was to be her last evening at home, Angeline sat quietly sewing while her father discussed one of his cases. Her mother was quite engrossed in the conversation, adding her own thoughts on Daniel’s procedures. All in all, Angeline thought it a perfect evening. It was the way she wanted to remember her parents. It was the way she wanted to remember her home.

Getting up and excusing herself for bed, Angeline went to her room and double-checked her suitcase. Everything was ready. She opened her window and cautiously lowered her case to the ground by using a rope she’d managed to hide beneath her bed. Then securing that same rope to the leg of her bed, Angeline prepared to descend in the same manner.

She cast a quick look around the room and smiled. She was leaving a child, but when she returned, if she returned, she’d be a worldly, wise woman. She double-checked to make certain they would see her letter of explanation, then pulled on her jacket and hat, and climbed out her bedroom window.

Reaching the ground, Angeline heard the train whistle blast it’s announcement that final boarding was taking place. She picked up the suitcase and ran for all she was worth, managing to pat her pocket and reassure herself that her ticket and money were both still within.

She approached the train depot cautiously, for the first time worried that someone might see her and try to stop her. Thoughts of Gavin came to mind more than once. She’d only been home for four days and no doubt Gavin planned to see her Sunday at church. Poor Gavin would be so surprised, she thought and stepped up onto the train car’s platform. They would all be surprised, she smiled as she took her seat.