He held out a long, narrow white box, and when Regan opened it, inside was a delicate rose of fine, thin, fragile, pink-tinted crystal. The stem and leaves were also glass, tinted a soft green. An engraved silver band hung gracefully down the side, reading, “Regan, will you marry me? Travis.”
Regan was speechless, afraid to touch the elusive beauty of the glass rose.
“Travis was so hoping you’d like it,” Reverend Wentworth said.
“Where did he find it? And how did he get it to Scarlet Springs?”
“That, my dear, is known only to Mr. Stanford. He merely asked if I’d deliver a gift to you at midnight tonight. Of course, when the box came and it was open, my wife and I, well…we couldn’t resist a peek. Now I really must go. Goodnight.”
She barely heard him, absently closing the door, leaning against it for a second, her eyes locked on the elegant, splendid crystal rose. Holding her breath, afraid she might break it, she put it in the little vase on her bedside table, next to the first live rose Travis had sent her. As she undressed, her eyes never left either rose, and when she went to bed the moonlight seemed to highlight each rose and she fell asleep smiling.
It was late when she awoke the next morning, already eight o’clock. After one quick look at her roses and sending all of them a radiant smile, she jumped out of bed and grabbed her dressing gown. One sleeve was twisted, and as she straightened it a blue piece of paper fell out. As it fell right-side up on the floor, she saw that it read, “Regan, will you marry me? Travis.”
Hastily, she stuck it in her pocket, thinking that she hadn’t noticed that any of the notes from yesterday were written on blue paper. She found Jennifer’s room empty. The child was often up early and in the kitchen before her mother was even awake.
Still smiling, Regan returned to her room to dress. Today she was sure Travis would show up, would come to her on bended knee and beg her to marry him. She might, just might consent. She laughed out loud.
Her laugh stopped when she found another blue note inside the bodice of her dress. Hesitating for just a moment, looking suspiciously at the note, she whirled about and began to search her wardrobe.
The blue notes were everywhere—in her shoes, in her dresses, inside her drawers, wrapped in her petticoats and camisoles, even under her pillow!
How dare he! she thought, getting angrier with each note she found. How dare he invade her privacy in such a way! If not Travis personally, then he’d hired someone to go through all her things and place the notes there. And when? Surely some of them had been put there during the night, because even the dress she’d worn yesterday had three notes in it.
Angrily, she left her apartment and went straight to her office. As far as she could tell, nothing had been disturbed in this room. Thank heavens she locked it each night.
Sitting down at her desk, she didn’t at first notice the thin bit of thread stretched across the leather blotter. Suspicious, her lips set firmly, she followed it down the front of her desk to the bottom, where it disappeared underneath. On her hands and knees, she slid down until she was flat on her back. Pinned to the bottom of her desk was a sign done in three-inch letters, “Regan, will you marry me? Travis.”
Teeth gritted, she tore it away and was tearing it into tiny pieces when Brandy entered the room with a few dozen pieces of blue paper in her hands.
“I see he’s been in here too,” Brandy said cheerfully.
“He’s really gone too far this time. This is my private office, and he has no right to come in here uninvited.”
“I don’t want to add to your anger, but have you checked your safe?”
“My—!” she began, but stopped. Only Regan had a set of the three keys it took to open the safe. The other set was locked in a bank vault a hundred miles to the south. Even Brandy never opened the inn’s safe or knew how or in what order the keys must be used; she left all that up to Regan.
Quickly, Regan went to the big safe and started the long process of opening it. As she pulled the last door, a piece of wide blue ribbon fell out. Slowly pulling it, her jaw set, her eyes angry, she saw immediately what was written on it. She didn’t bother to read it but reached in and grabbed a handful of ribbon and angrily threw it toward the trashcan.
“How did you guess?” she asked Brandy as she stood.
Brandy seemed a bit nervous and gave Regan a weak smile. “I hope you’re ready for this. It seems that while everyone in town was here yesterday and their stores were closed, somebody, or maybe it was an army of somebodies, put these little blue proposals all over town. The doctor found one in his bag and four in his office. Will, at the mercantile store, found six in his place, and”—she paused to stifle a laugh—“the blacksmith picked up a horse’s hoof and found one on blue ribbon wadded inside the horse’s shoe.”
Regan sat down. “Go on,” she whispered.
“Some of the people are taking it well, but some are fairly angry. The lawyer found one in his safe, and he’s talking about suing. But, in general, everyone is laughing, saying they want to meet this Travis.”
“I never want to see him again in my life,” Regan said with feeling.
“You don’t mean that,” Brandy smiled. “Maybe your notes are all alike, but most of the others are quite creative. There are bits of poetry, some things from Shakespeare, and Mrs. Ellison, who plays the piano, received an entire song which she says is very pretty. She’s dying to play it for you.”
Regan’s head came up. “Is she out there?”
Brandy grimaced. “Everyone feels as if they’re involved now, and…most of them are out there.”
“Who is not there?” Regan asked bleakly.
“Mrs. Ellison’s grandmother, who had the stroke last year, and Mr. Watts still had milking to do, and…,” she trailed off apologetically because she could think of no other missing townspeople.
“Mrs. Brown’s sister is visiting, came in yesterday, and she’s dying to meet you. Brought all six kids over, too.”
Regan put her arms on the desk and buried her face. “Can a person die by will, just by wishing it? How can I face all those people?” She looked up at Brandy, her face horribly distressed. “How could Travis do this to me?”
Brandy knelt beside her friend and touched her hair. “Regan, can’t you see that he just wants you so badly that he’ll do anything to get you back? You don’t know the hell he’s been through since you left. Did you know that he lost forty-five pounds when you first left him? It was a friend of his named Clay who talked him out of giving up on life.”
“Travis told you all of this?”
“In a roundabout way. I did some prying, and it took a while to piece together all the facts, but I did. Right now the man is past any sense of pride. He doesn’t care what he has to do to get you back. If he can enlist the whole town to help him, then he will. Maybe his tactics are a little…well, maybe he’s not exactly subtle, but would you rather have one rose and a man like Farrell or, what was the final count, seven hundred and forty-two roses and Travis Stanford?”
“But does he have to do all this?” Regan pleaded, flipping the thread leading to the note that had been under her desk.
“You’ve told me repeatedly how Travis never asked you anything, but only told you what to do and how to do it. If I remember correctly, at the ceremony you said no to him just because he hadn’t asked you to marry him. I don’t believe you can accuse him of not having asked you now. And, too, you said you wanted to be courted.” Brandy stood, smiling. “This courtship may go down in history.”
Regan, in spite of herself, began to smile. “All I wanted was a little champagne and a few roses.”
Eyes wide, Brandy put her fingers to her lips. “Please don’t mention champagne. You may start a flood.”
A giggle escaped Regan. “Will he ever do anything on a normal scale?”
“Don’t you hope not?” Brandy said seriously. “I’d give a lot to be in your shoes.”
“My shoes are all packed full of notes,” Regan
said, deadpan.
Laughing, Brandy started toward the door. “You’d better prepare yourself. They are waiting eagerly for you.”
Brandy laughed at Regan’s heartfelt groan before leaving the room.
Taking a moment to calm herself, Regan thought about Brandy’s words. Everything about Travis was overscale, from his body to his house to his land, so why did she expect his courting to be any different?
Carefully, she retrieved the ribbon from the trash and tenderly folded it. Someday she’d show this to her grandchildren. With resolve, shoulders straight, she left her office and went toward the public rooms.
Nothing could have prepared her for what was awaiting her. The first person she saw was Mrs. Ellison’s grandmother enthroned in a chair, smiling at her with one side of her face, the other side paralyzed by her stroke.
“I’m so glad you could make it,” Regan said graciously, as if she’d issued invitations to this party.
“Seven hundred and forty-two!” a man was saying. “And the last one was made of glass, all the way from Europe.”
“Wonder how he got it here and didn’t break it?”
“And wonder how he got up to my loft? The ladder broke two days ago, and I ain’t had time to fix it. But there it was, just as pretty as you please, a ribbon around a bale of hay and asking Regan to marry him.”
There was a man painting a vine of roses on the wall behind the bar in her taproom, and beside it were numbers—5:00 A.M., 1 rose; 5:30 A.M., 2 roses, all the way down to 38 roses at 11:30 P.M. and one rose at midnight and the total at the bottom. She didn’t bother to ask who the painter was or who had given him permission to paint on her wall. She was too busy fending off questions.
“Regan, is it true this man is Jennifer’s father yet you’re not married to him?”
“We were married at the time Jennifer was born,” Regan tried to explain. “But I was underage and—.”
Someone else’s question interrupted her.
“I hear this man Travis owns half of Virginia.”
“Not quite, only about a third.” Sarcasm didn’t dull their interest.
“Regan, I don’t like this man leaving notes in my private safe. I have private documents in there, and a lawyer’s word to his clients is sacred.”
On and on they went, hour after hour, until Regan’s smile was plastered on. Only a small voice at her side made her respond. “Mommie.” She looked down to see her daughter’s small face, obviously worried about something.
“Come on,” she said, lifting her daughter and carrying her to the kitchen. “Let’s see if Brandy can fix us lunch, and we’ll go on a picnic.”
An hour later, Regan and her daughter were alone together by a little stream north of Scarlet Springs. They’d demolished a basketful of fried chicken and little cherry tarts.
“Why doesn’t Daddy come back home?” Jennifer asked. “And why doesn’t he write me letters like everybody else?”
For the first time, Regan realized that her daughter had been excluded from the notes and roses. Thinking back, she knew Jennifer’s room had been free of any marriage proposals.
She pulled her daughter to her lap. “I guess because Daddy is trying to get me to marry him, and he knows that wherever I go, you go too.”
“Daddy doesn’t want to marry me too?”
“He wants you to live with him; in fact, I think at least half of the roses are for you, to get you to come live with him too.”
“I wish he’d send me roses. Timmie Watts says Daddy only wants you, and I’ll have to stay here with Brandy when you go away.”
“That was a dreadful thing for him to say! And totally untrue! Your Daddy loves you very much. Didn’t he tell you of the pony he bought for you and the treehouse he built? And this was before he’d even met you. Just think what he’s going to do now that he knows who you are.”
“You think he’ll ask me to marry him too?”
Regan had no idea how to reply to that. “When he asks me, it means he wants you too.”
Sighing, Jennifer leaned against her mother. “I wish Daddy’d come home. I wish he’d never go away again, and I wish he’d send me roses and write me letters.”
Rocking her daughter, stroking her hair, Regan felt Jennifer’s sadness. How Travis would hate knowing he had hurt his daughter by excluding her. Perhaps tomorrow she could make up for Travis’s oversight. Maybe she could find some roses, if there were any left within the state after Travis’s harvesting of them, and give them to her daughter—from her father.
Tomorrow, she thought, and almost shuddered. What could he be planning for tomorrow?
Chapter 19
JENNIFER WOKE HER MOTHER THE NEXT MORNING, A little bundle of roses clutched in her hand. “Do you think they’re from Daddy?” she asked her mother.
“Could be,” Regan said, not really lying but giving the child hope. She’d placed the little bouquet on her daughter’s pillow early this morning.
“They’re not from Daddy,” Jennifer said with great despair. “You put them there.” With a fling, she tossed them across the bed and ran to her own room.
It was some time before Regan could comfort her daughter, and she was close to tears herself before Jennifer quietened. If only there was some way she could get a message to Travis and tell him of Jennifer’s distress.
When they were finally dressed, both of them far from cheerful, they held hands and together prepared for what the day—and Travis—had planned for them.
The reception rooms were full of townspeople, but since there was no new excitement, often only one family member was present. Stiffly, Regan fended off their questions and kept Jennifer near her as she checked the rooms of the inn and tried to keep up a normal routine. She was quite tired of being a spectacle for everyone to stare and gawk at.
By noon nothing new had happened, and the townspeople, deflated, began to go home. The dining room was filled but not packed, and Regan noticed Margo and Farrell dining together, their heads bent, almost touching as they talked. Frowning, she wondered what the two of them could have to say to each other.
But she had no more time to think about anything else, because the noise coming from the hall was rising in tone and pitch.
Eyes skyward, she felt like crying in despair. “Now what has he done?” she muttered.
Jennifer clutched her mother’s hand. “Do you think Daddy’s come home?”
“I’m sure he’s done something,” she said, and started for the front door.
Music began to fill the front of the inn as soon as they left the dining room. The sound of horses and wagons and other sounds she’d never heard before became louder and louder.
“What is it?” Jennifer asked, eyes widening by the second.
“I have no idea,” Regan replied.
The front of the hotel was plastered with people, all frozen in their places at the six windows in front and the open door.
“Jennifer!” someone yelled, and all the people suddenly came alive.
“It’s a circus!”
“And a menagerie! I saw one in Philadelphia once.”
Jennifer’s name was repeated several times before Regan could make a place for herself and her daughter on the front porch.
Just rounding the corner by the schoolhouse were three men, their faces painted, wearing satin clothes sewn with spots and stripes of outrageous colors, and they were doing flips, tumbling, jumping over each other.
Something on their chests seemed to be letters. It took Regan a while to make out the word because of the clowns’ acrobatics.
“Jennifer,” she said. “It says Jennifer.”
Laughing, grabbing her daughter in her arms, she pointed excitedly. “It’s for you! They’re clowns, and they have Jennifer, your name, written on their suits.”
“They’re for me?”
“Yes, yes, yes! Your Daddy has sent you a whole circus, and if I know Travis, it’s no little circus. Look! Here come some men doing tricks on horses.”
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More than a little stunned, Jennifer watched as three horses, beautiful, golden, long-maned horses, came galloping toward them, a man in each saddle, one standing up, another jumping in and out of the saddle, his feet barely touching the ground, and the last man’s horse seemed to be dancing. As a body, they stopped in the midst of a storm of dust and saluted Jennifer. Grinning almost enough to tear her skin, she looked at her mother.
“The circus is for me,” she said proudly, turning away to look at the other people beside her. “My Daddy sent a circus for me.”
A stilt-walker followed the clowns and equestrians, and then came a man pulling a small black bear on a chain. Everything had Jennifer’s name written on it. The music was growing louder as the band came closer to the inn.
Suddenly a hush fell over all the townspeople as around the corner came the biggest, most bizarre creature anyone had ever seen. Lumbering slowly, its massive feet making the ground quake, the animal with its trainer leading it stopped before the inn. The man unfurled a sign down the animal’s side: “Capt. John Crowinshield presents the first elephant to appear in these United States of America. And at a special request of Mr. Travis Stanford, this great beast will perform for—.”
Regan read the sign to her daughter, who was clinging tightly to her mother.
“For Jennifer!” a second sign heralded.
“What do you think of that?” Regan asked. “Daddy sent the elephant to perform just for you.”
For a moment Jennifer didn’t answer, but after a long pause she leaned toward her mother’s ear. “I don’t have to keep him, do I?” she whispered.
Regan wanted to laugh, but the more she thought of her daughter’s question and Travis’s sense of humor…. “I sincerely, truly hope not,” she said.
Thoughts of the elephant vanished as soon as it moved away, because behind the animal was a pretty little white pony covered with a blanket of white roses with “Jennifer” spelled out in red roses.
“What does it say, Mommie?” Jennifer asked with hope in her voice. “Is the pony for me?”
“It certainly is,” said a pretty blonde woman in a revealing—scandalous actually—costume of stretchy cotton. “Your Daddy found you the sweetest, gentlest horse in this state, and if you like you can ride him in the parade.”