“Is that right, lad?” Eli asked, looking at Cay’s wet form in sympathy.
The three of them were watching her, waiting for her answer, and Cay was tempted to tell the truth—but she knew that was the female way. She’d seen her brothers do awful things to one another, but they’d die before they told. It seemed to be some misdirected code of male honor to hide the truth.
She had to bite her tongue but she said, “Yes, I fell.”
“There now,” Eli said kindly. “At least you weren’t hurt.”
Alex put his arm around her shoulders protectively. “Come on, let’s get you into some dry clothes.” He looked at Eli. “We’ll see you both early tomorrow morning.”
“Mr. Grady should be here by noon,” Eli said. “I’ll let you tell him we have no recorder.”
“I will,” Alex said and started to lead Cay away.
But she turned back. “I forgot my hat.” When she’d fallen into the water, her hat had come off and landed on the wharf. As she picked it up, the boy Tim was standing there, smirking at her in triumph. Water was running down Cay’s hair and dripping onto her nose. She knew she shouldn’t be so childish and she certainly shouldn’t stoop to that hateful boy’s level, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe the male clothes she was wearing were turning her into Tally. As she came up from getting her hat, she stuck out her leg and hooked her foot around his ankle. His feet flew out from under him and he fell forward, his face hitting the side of a wooden crate.
Cay put her straw hat firmly on her head and walked past him with her chin in the air.
“He gave me a bloody nose!” Tim yelled from behind her.
Eli gave the boy a hard look. “But it was your own fault, wasn’t it, lad? Just as you said it was young Cay’s fault that he fell in the river, so was your mishap an accident. Wasn’t it?”
Cay kept her back turned and her breath held.
“Yeah, I tripped,” Tim said with reluctance.
Smiling, Cay looked up at Alex. “Are you ready to go?”
“I am unless you want to do something else. Maybe you’d like to run the boy over with a wagon.”
“No. A bloody nose is enough.” She was smiling sweetly up at him. “Do you think we could buy me some new clothes? Otherwise I’ll have to run around naked until these dry.”
“Cay, lass, after what you did to that boy, I’ll obey whatever you say.”
“If only that were so,” she said with a sigh, making Alex laugh.
Thirteen
Cay held her wet clothes at arm’s length and straightened her pretty new waistcoat. The owner of the trading post said he’d purchased it from a young gentleman who needed money for supplies before he set off into the wilderness.
“He never came back,” the man said, his eyes wide as he tried to frighten Cay. “He probably got eaten by something.”
“My brother isn’t going on the trip,” Alex said with no humor in his voice. The last thing he wanted was for Cay to be more afraid than she was already. “How much is the waistcoat?”
Now, Alex frowned at the way Cay kept looking at the embroidery around the edge of the vest. It was of honeybees buzzing about a border of wildflowers. His personal opinion was that she looked so feminine already that she should have put on the old, nearly worn out garments that he’d chosen for her. But nothing would do for her but to buy the decorated waistcoat. “Stop that or people will know you’re a girl,” he said under his breath.
“That man thought I was a boy. And that hideous Tim thought so, and Eli didn’t doubt that I was male. It’s only you who thinks I look like a girl.”
“They’re all blind.”
Moving ahead of him, she turned around and walked backward. “Are you telling me that if you saw me now, if you didn’t know me that is, and had never seen me before, that you’d somehow know that I was a girl?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “You walk like a girl, talk like one, and you nag like a girl. I’ve never seen anyone more feminine than you are.”
“I think there’s a compliment in there.”
“No, there isn’t.” Alex was frowning. “If I leave you here, you’re going to be found out, and when someone realizes that you’re hiding your true identity, they’re going to ask why.”
“So take me with you.” The idea had been playing in her mind all day, but she’d meant to slowly ease Alex into it, not drop it on him like a blacksmith’s anvil. “I can—” She’d started to tell him that she could draw, but he cut her off.
“Absolutely not! Under no circumstances. No, no, and no.” He strode ahead of her toward the boardinghouse.
“But—” She caught up with him. “Maybe going with you would be better than staying here alone and unprotected.”
“No. Going into uncharted territory where every corner reveals a new danger is not better than staying here in safety. And I don’t want to hear another word about it.” As he opened the door to the boardinghouse, he gave Cay a look that said he wasn’t going to listen to anything she had to say.
Cay put her shoulders back and walked inside ahead of him. She wanted to make a sharp retort, but she was instantly overwhelmed by the two girls they’d seen outside when they rode into town.
“We knew it was you,” one said, her eyes wide as she looked at Cay. “I told Alice that you’d be staying with us.”
They were twins, looking to be identical, and not especially attractive. They wore dresses that had been washed many times and were faded. Next to them, Cay, in her beautifully embroidered waistcoat, looked resplendent.
“You’re the prettiest boy I’ve ever seen,” the second girl said as she slipped her arm through Cay’s.
The first girl took Cay’s other arm. “Come into the dining room and we’ll feed you. You’re very thin.”
“Is it true that you’re going to be staying with us for months and months?”
Cay looked over her shoulder at Alex, her eyes begging him to rescue her, but he was smiling in a way that she’d come to know well. He was thoroughly enjoying her discomfort—and glad she’d be occupied for a while.
“I have some things that I need to take care of,” he said, his voice full of laughter. “I’ll see you later, little brother. Have a good evening.”
Cay sent him a look that said she’d get him back for leaving her, but he just smiled broader as he left, closing the door behind him.
The second she was alone with the two young girls, they bombarded her with questions.
“How old are you?”
“Where does your family live?”
“Are you married? Engaged?”
“What’s your favorite food? I’m an excellent cook.”
“I saw you riding a horse. I like horses, too. I think we have a lot in common.”
“Are you really going to stay for months? We can go riding together every day. Just the two of us. Alone. I’ll take a picnic lunch, and if we get lost we can stay out all night.”
When the girl who’d made this offer started caressing Cay’s hand, she snatched it back and sat down at the dining table.
“Out!” came a voice from behind her. “Both of you get out of here this minute and leave this young man alone.”
Turning, Cay say a woman standing in the doorway, a plate of food and a mug in her hands. She was tall and handsome, but she was a bit old to be considered pretty. Cay guessed her to be in her early thirties, but there was a look in her eyes that made her seem older, as though she’d seen and done too much in her short life.
As she set the food in front of Cay, she gave the girls a threatening look, and reluctantly, they left the room.
“I apologize for them,” the woman said. “We don’t get too many young men staying here, and I’m afraid they went a bit overboard. I’ll do my best to keep them away from you while you’re here.”
On Cay’s plate was a roast bird that didn’t look like a chicken or any other flying creature that she’d ever seen, and she wondered what they hunted in this country.
Tentatively, she picked up the knife and fork that the woman had handed her and began to eat. It was good.
“I’m Thankfull,” the woman said as she sat down across from Cay.
Cay almost said, Thankful for what? but she didn’t. She’d been around Alex for so long that she almost made jokes about everything. “How did you know I was staying here?”
Thankfull’s mouth twitched in humor. “The boy Tim came here to have his nose seen to. It’s a good thing you aren’t going with them or he’d give you trouble.”
“He took a dislike to me right away.” Cay was eating some vegetable she’d never seen before, but it was delicious. She wondered if it would grow in Virginia. Maybe in her mother’s orangery.
“I think he was jealous,” Thankfull said. “He was to be the youngest one on the journey, but there you were with your youth and handsomeness and your education, and—”
“Education?” Cay didn’t like for this woman to guess too much about her.
Thankfull smiled. “According to young Tim you sound like an English professor. Not that he’s ever met one, but he had a lot to say about your ‘uppity ways.’”
Cay was pleased that the woman seemed to understand the boy so well, and she was beginning to think she liked her. That was a good thing if she was going to have to spend a lot of time with her. “Have you lived here long?”
Thankfull went to the sideboard to get a pottery bowl. From the little Cay had seen, the house was sparsely furnished with what looked to be locally made furniture, and it was clean and neat.
“A lifetime,” Thankfull said as she spooned sliced fruit into the bowl and put it before Cay. “Not really, but it seems like it’s been a very long time.”
Cay knew that she shouldn’t ask for more of the woman’s story because that was a female trait. Her father had often said that he could know a man for twenty years and not find out as much about him as his wife learned in twenty minutes.
But Cay couldn’t help it. She was in a strange place among strangers and she wanted to hear about the woman’s life. “And why is that?” she asked.
Thankfull didn’t say anything for a while, but Cay’s expression encouraged her. Thankfull didn’t say so, but nearly all their boarders were older men, and all they wanted to talk about was business of one sort or another. They didn’t take the time to sit and talk with a woman who ran a boardinghouse. “My mother died when I was born, so for many years it was just my father and me. He liked to move around, so I never got to really know many people, but there was one young man . . .” She waved her hand in dismissal. “Anyway, my father heard that there were better jobs and better, well, everything farther down south, so we moved again and again. He remarried when I was seventeen, and his new wife had the twins, Jane and Alice. She wasn’t a woman who took easily to motherhood and the domestic life.”
“You mean she took advantage of having an older stepdaughter and gave the children and the house to you to take care of?”
Thankfull smiled, and when she did, Cay thought she looked much younger and prettier. “More or less. After all, she was only six months older than I was. She wanted to enjoy her life.”
“But you . . .”
Thankfull shrugged. “She died when the girls were ten, and my father died the next year, so it was a good thing that I was still at home to take care of them.”
“So you were a mother without being a wife.”
“A person does what she has to.”
“Yes, she does,” Cay said as she picked up the bowl of fruit and looked at it. She was thinking about all that had happened with her and Alex. She’d indeed done what she’d had to.
“So you’re going to stay here and wait for your brother to return from Mr. Grady’s expedition?”
“Actually, my brother wants me to stay here a few weeks, then return home.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes,” Cay said. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“You’re awfully young to travel alone.”
“I’m twenty.”
Thankfull’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. “Please don’t tell my half sisters that. I told them you were only sixteen. If they know you’re twenty, they’ll have you married to one of them in two weeks.”
Cay smiled. “I hardly think so.”
“Yes, they will,” Thankfull said seriously. “You don’t know how bad they want to get out of here. Alice says she’s going to become an actress, but Jane wants to get married and have children.”
“But they couldn’t be more than . . . What?”
“Fourteen, almost fifteen. But they’ve been exposed to a lot in their short lives, so it makes them think they’re older. I was hoping that maybe you’d like one of them and . . . and . . .”
“Take her off your hands?”
“Yes,” Thankfull said, smiling.
“So you’d like to get out of here, too?”
“More than anything.”
“But you haven’t found a man among all of them who must come and go here?” Cay asked.
“I’ve been asked, yes, but, no, I haven’t found a man I want to keep. If you know what I mean.”
Cay started to say that she knew exactly what Thankfull meant, but she thought better of it. If she was going to have to spend weeks in her company as a male, she’d better start putting on the act now.
When Thankfull said, “I have a letter for you,” the news so startled Cay that she nearly choked.
“From whom?”
Thankfull smiled at the “whom” and glanced at the doorway to make sure no eyes were prying. “It’s from Mr. Connor.”
The way she said the name made Cay look at her sharply. It was almost as though Thankfull had a soft spot for the man. Or, as Alex would probably put it, “a blazing hot lust.” But then, he seemed to see romance in everything.
“Do you?” Cay said at last. “And you’re sure it’s for me?”
Thankfull pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and for a moment she held it, as though she were reluctant to let it go. “It just says ‘to Cay’ and it’s addressed in care of me. It was delivered yesterday by a man on horseback. I think he must have traveled night and day to get here before your brother left.”
“He must have,” Cay murmured as she took the letter. She wanted to break the wax seal immediately and see what Uncle T.C. had written, but one look at Thankfull and she knew she couldn’t. It was obvious that the woman would want to hear the contents of the letter, but Cay would be able to tell her nothing.
“Have you finished eating?” one of the twins said from the doorway.
Thankfull sighed. “He has,” she said as she took Cay’s empty plate and bowl away. “But maybe he wants to rest now.”
“But I have things I want to show him,” one girl said.
“And so do I,” the other twin said. “Please come outside with us. We have lots of things we’d like for you to see.”
Cay was torn between wanting to run from the girls and wanting to keep her disguise of being a boy who’d probably like two young girls fussing over him. “Will you show me some of the oddities of this country?” she asked as she got up.
“We’ll show you anything you want to see,” one of the girls said, giggling.
Cay gave them a smile and thought that when she saw her mother she was going to beg her forgiveness. Many times Cay had thought her mother was too strict, too old-fashioned, but now she could see what happened to girls who didn’t have a mother to correct them every second of the day. This is what they became.
“You don’t have to go,” Thankfull said, giving her sisters a stern look.
“No, it’s all right,” Cay said as she allowed the girls to take her hands and pull her out of the room. “I’m interested in this land.”
Fourteen
“They tried to kiss me!” Cay said in horror to Alex. It was dark out, they were in the barn, and he was rubbing down both of their horses.
“Did they, now?”
>
“Don’t you dare start laughing at me. If you do, I’ll—” She gave him a half smile. “I’ll not let you see Uncle T.C.’s letter.”
That stopped him from smiling. Turning, he looked at her. “What did he say?”
“Actually, I haven’t opened it yet.”
“You haven’t read it?”
“For your information, I’ve been very busy since you dumped me in the middle of those female sharks. Do you know what those two girls wanted from me? Their hands were all over me. And every time I took a step, they were trying to kiss me. One of them tripped me so I’d land on the other one. They—”
“So they’re like all the other females on the planet,” Alex said in dismissal. “Where is the letter?
“They are not like other females. I have never—”
“How else is a man to know when a woman wants to be kissed unless she tells him so?” he said impatiently. “Now give me the letter.”
“Maybe that’s so, but there is such a thing as subtlety. Doctors use leeches that don’t stick to a person as close as those two stuck to me. I couldn’t take a step that they didn’t—” The look Alex gave her made her stop talking about the twins and take the letter out of her pocket, even while she was thinking that she should have read the letter by herself. After all, it was addressed to her alone. But in the last days she’d become so accustomed to sharing everything with Alex that she hadn’t even thought of keeping the letter to herself.
She handed the sealed letter to him, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he went back to rubbing her mare.
“Read it to me.”
Cay broke the seal on the letter. The sight of her uncle’s familiar handwriting nearly made her cry, but she took a breath and pulled herself together. “It’s dated five days after . . . after I met you.” That seemed to be the most polite way of describing the prison break. She began to read.
“My dearest, dearest Cay,
“There is no way I can begin to apologize for all that has happened to you. It was all my fault and I will never forgive myself. But as much as I’d like to tell you in as lengthy detail as I have paper and pen, Adam is here and you know what that means. I am to get on with business.