Longshadow's Woman

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One

With a graceful gesture, Carrie resettled her best straw hat, angling the brim against the sun. Sighing, she once more addressed the mule in the only language the beast understood. “Move along there, you lop-eared son of a bitch!”

If there was one thing Sorry hated more than pulling a plow, it was pulling a cart. It had cost Carrie more in time and aggravation than she could afford just to get the wretched old bag of bones hitched up. At this stop-and-go speed they wouldn’t make it to the jailhouse until tomorrow, and she didn’t have a day to waste.

Her husband was going to pitch a fit if he got home and saw the damage Sorry had done to Peck’s paddock gate before she had time to mend it. Nothing was too good for that ugly gelding of his. His own private paddock, a fancy new stall, the very best oats, not to mention fresh water that had to be hauled all the way up from the creek daily, and Darther wasn’t one to do the hauling himself. That’s what he had her for, as he delighted in reminding her.

As for Carrie, the mule and the chickens, they could starve as long as that damned racehorse of his didn’t suffer the least discomfort.

Blessed horse. She was going to have to shed the habit of swearing. Emma said it wasn’t ladylike, but it was hard not to fall into bad habits when every other word out of her husband’s mouth was foul. Nor had her uncle been any better. Carrie had a vague memory of a softer voice with a far different accent, but it was wedged so far back in her mind that sometimes she thought she must have dreamed it.

“Step it up, Sorry, we’re never going to get there at this rate,” she pleaded.

But pleading didn’t work. Reasoning didn’t work. The damn-blasted mule just stood there, ignoring the heat, the flies—ignoring Carrie. The only thing that got through his thick skull was the language he was used to hearing from Darther.

“Listen here, you wall-eyed bastard, either you start walking or I’m going to carve your dumb ass into a thousand pieces and feed every scrap to the crows!” Bishop Whittle would be scandalized if he could hear her now.

Sighing, she slapped the reins across the mule’s thick, dusty hide, causing him to lurch into motion. Her feet flew up, the straw hat slipped over her face again and she nearly lost her grip on the reins. “That’s better,” she grumbled, shoving her hat back on her sweating head.

Within minutes they had settled back to a torpid stroll. Where Sorry was concerned, locomotion came in fits and jerks, or not at all. “Come on, sweetheart,” she cajoled, “we have a long way to go, and the slower you move, the longer it’ll be before you can get shed of this old cart. I’ll give you a turnip if we make it back before dark.”

Which would never happen at the rate they were going. Not that she was afraid to be out after dark. Still, she didn’t like the prospect of driving home alone at night with a prisoner. By the time darkness fell she intended to be secure in her own home, with the chickens shut up for the night, the mule fed and watered, and her prisoner, if she managed to rent one, safely locked inside the barn.

Twitching away the flies, Sorry continued to amble along the dusty wagon road. Carrie managed to curb her impatience. At least they were moving. It could be worse. According to Darther, all mules hated all females. Something to do with what he referred to as their half-ass breeding.

If anyone should know about jackasses, it was Darther. Theirs was not a match made in heaven. The first time she had suggested hitching that ugly gelding of his to the plow and clearing the cut-over field, he’d given her a wallop that had landed her on her backside. She had been new to marriage at the time, and hadn’t known what to expect.

Now she did.

From the top of a tall, dead pine, a red-tailed hawk watched her progress. Dust rose in pale drifts behind the cart, overtaking it as a fresh breeze sprang up from the cloudless sky. It hadn’t rained since early July. All that was left of her kitchen garden, of which she had been so proud only a few weeks ago, were a few leathery beans no longer than her little finger, despite all the buckets of water she had toted up from the creek. She’d felt like giving up when the deer and rabbits had got to her cabbages, leaving only two rows of green stalks.

But giving up wasn’t in her, because Carrie had another dream. And this time she had the grit and determination to make it come true. As a child she’d had those same qualities, but back then they’d been called stubbornness, and no one had wanted to adopt a stubborn, headstrong little girl who was neither smart nor pretty, even though she had tried her very best to be quiet and obedient.

One thing had never changed, though. Once she made up her mind to do something, she refused to give up. And Carrie had set her mind on making her husband’s land prosperous again. The first step was to grow herself a cash crop. With the seed money she would get from that, she would clear more land and grow more corn, until not one square foot of dirt was wasted. One field had been cut over by a previous owner years before, but the job had never been finished. The stumps were still there, and now the underbrush had grown back again, but it was conveniently close to the creek. Come spring, once she got it cleared and turned, she could hill it and plant it by herself, and tote water during the dry spells. That was the first part of her dream. She couldn’t allow herself to look farther into the future.

During Darther’s absence she’d been making good progress. A gambling man, her husband was seldom home if there was a horse race, a dog race, a cockfight or a card game anywhere within a three-day ride. He would come home, more often drunk than sober, and stay just long enough for her to sponge and air his fancy suits and launder his shirts and smallclothes, and then he’d be off again. As the racing season neared, he’d be gone sometimes for weeks at a time.

Once he left home again, Carrie was in the field every day at cock-crow, digging and prying, playing tug-of-war by pitting that stubborn mule against equally stubborn stumps. It was backbreaking work, even with two good hands, but she was determined to have every damned stump—every blessed stump—dug up, dragged off to the side and burned. She’d been whacking away at gum roots when she’d missed and nearly chopped her thumb off. The fact that her hand had been filthy at the time hadn’t helped, but one way or another she intended to be ready to plant come spring, and nothing as puny as a bad hatchet cut that refused to heal was going to keep her from doing it, either.

It was Emma, her elderly widowed neighbor, who had told her about the prisoners who were sometimes leased out for farm labor. “County allows so much a day for feed. As long as a man’s not wanted for murder, you can take him out on parole and save the county his keep. I don’t think it’s on the books that way, but as long as you sign papers saying you’ll return him in as good condition as when you took him out, they’ll look the other way. Let him escape, and I reckon they can lay a claim against you for misuse of county property.”

They’d been idly discussing ways of getting the job done, seeing as how Carrie’s hand was so slow to heal. She couldn’t afford to hire anyone, even if she could have found someone willing to work on her husband’s farm. “Darther left me a little money last time he was home, but I spent it on meal and sugar and cracked corn. Wonder what kind of prisoner I could rent for the price of three dresses, two straw hats and a pair of shoes with holes in the bottom?”

She’d been half teasing, and Emma had laughed. Thank goodness one of them was able to laugh. “You’ll manage,” the older woman had said. “I’ve got some money laid by. You can pay me back from your first crop. For interest you can give me half a bushel of corn for my chickens.”

Carrie had thought about it all the way home that day last week when she’d gone to take her friend a basket of fried rabbit and turnips. It had been Emma who had befriended her nearly three years ago when Darther had first brought her to this godforsaken place to cook and clean and service his needs whenever he was sober enough to attempt the marriage act.

It had been Emma who had told her all she knew about that particular part of a wife’s duties. More importantly, she’d taught her all she knew about planting. Carrie still had much to learn, but driven by dreams, desperation and determination, she refused to waste another planting season. By now she knew better than to expect any help from her husband. Even if he was home long enough, and remained sober enough, he was hardly inclined to soil his hands with honest labor. Racing and gambling were all the man ever thought about. He was convinced that Peck, half Arabian, but so ugly no one ever suspected him of being a runner, would one day make him a fortune.

Peck was fast, all right. Carrie had watched him being put through his paces out on the road, but even if the big, ugly gelding won a fortune, Carrie would never see a penny of it. Darther would plop it all down on the next race or cockfight or hand of cards, and lose every last penny. Not only was he a loser, he was a stingy loser. He might come home sporting a new silk vest with his fancy frock coat and checkered trousers, but just let her ask for money to buy something useful, like a new cow, or a plow that wouldn’t fall apart at the first use, and she’d end up on her backside with a swollen jaw. Drunk or sober, her husband had a treacherous temper.

When Darther had accepted her in payment of a debt he was owed by her uncle, she had been so eager to escape her uncle that she’d allowed herself to be used that way. She had even begun to dream all over again. She had seen him around the store a time or two before that, and noticed his fine fancy clothes. He’d boasted a lot, too, only back then she hadn’t known it was only boasting.

“Darther has racing interests,” her uncle had said, making it sound terribly important, as if he owned a track, or at least a flock of Thoroughbreds. “The man knows more about horseflesh than he knows about his own family.”

If he even had a family, he’d never admitted it. “Raised up in New York,” he’d once boasted. “Been to every racetrack on the Eastern Seaboard.” She had later learned that he was what was called a carpetbagger, a species not well respected in the South. But that was long after she’d married the man. When they had crossed the border into North Carolina after the hasty marriage ceremony, she’d been picturing a fine house surrounded by green fields where elegant, long-legged horses gamboled with their foals.

Oh, yes, Carrie was good at dreaming. It was all that had kept her going in the years since the Indian raid. She had learned to create a separate reality inside her head that made life more bearable.

Things would get better. Someone would adopt her and take her into their home. The uncle who finally sent for her would come to love her, and she would be a comfort to him in his old age.

None of her early dreams had worked out, of course. Her uncle, a storekeeper in Virginia, had turned out to be a mean, slovenly man without an ounce of kindness in him. And Darther, so dapper with his well-fed body and his fancy clothes, had turned out to be more nightmare than dream. The lovely plantation she had visualized on the ride south had been the last straw. She had taken one heart-stricken look at the pigsty her bridegroom called home and felt the last of her dreams crumble around her feet.

Her honeymoon had been no better. The painful, embarrassing experience that even now she couldn’t bear to think about, had ended the next day when a weasel-faced man called Liam had turned up with the news that some breeders were coming down from New York to look over the crop of two-year-olds, and that there might be some action up in Suffolk.

The dust hadn’t even settled behind them before Carrie had braced her shoulders, set her jaw and gone to work. She now had a roof over her head that didn’t leak, a chimney that hardly smoked at all, a real iron range big enough for a kettle and a stew pot, and a kitchen garden, never mind that it fed mostly deer and rabbits.

Best of all, she had a good friend and enough rich, flat land, if she could ever manage to get it cultivated, to grow herself a fine cash crop. Last year’s hog was gone but for a side of bacon hanging in the smokehouse. Her cow was gone, too, and she really missed fresh milk and butter. She’d had a nanny goat briefly, but the thing had butted her off the stool one too many times. Carrie had sold her when she’d eaten the bottom off a whole line of laundry. Now she had only a flock of chickens, but she managed to snare enough squirrels and rabbits for meat, which she shared with Emma.

She’d have herself some fine, collard-fed venison, too, if she could ever locate the ammunition for her husband’s Springfield rifle. The gun rested proudly on a rack of antlers over the door. He’d told her more than once that he’d skin her alive if she ever touched it, and she had to believe him. His pappy’s Springfield, a fancy gold watch fob, and Peck, that ugly old gelding, were the only three things in the world her husband valued.

When he’d left home this last time she’d watched him out of sight, then deliberately climbed up on a chair and lifted the gun down from the wall. Staggering under the unexpected weight, she had propped it beside the door. Living more than a mile from the nearest neighbor, and that neighbor only Emma, who could scarcely do for herself, much less for anyone else, she felt better having protection at hand—or at least the appearance of protection. Now and again someone would wander in, looking for Darther. She always told them he was away, but because she didn’t want strangers hanging around waiting for him to come home, she made sure they saw the rifle and tried to look like the kind of woman who knew how to use it.

And now, here she was, getting ready to take a prisoner home with her. What she needed was a big, mean dog, only she didn’t know where to get one. Wouldn’t much trust him if she did. Still, even empty, the rifle should be enough to keep her prisoner in line. He would have no way of knowing the thing wasn’t loaded. Emma said he’d be wearing leg irons, too, so if he gave her any trouble, she’d just club him with the barrel.

Catching a glimpse of a brick building, which could only mean they were nearing Currituck Courthouse, Carrie dealt with her misgivings one at a time. The county wouldn’t allow a dangerous criminal out on parole. Besides, he’d be in irons. As for what Darther would say when he found out, she would think of something. She could tell him she intended to plant a pasture for Peck; that should do the trick. Until it was knee-high, he probably wouldn’t know the difference between corn and pasture grass.

Meanwhile, she had her own future to see to.

To pass the time, he counted. Counted the fleas crushed between a grimy thumbnail and forefinger. Counted the bricks in the wall, the bars on the window, the number of times the jailhouse dog yapped outside the door.