Cloaked (Once Upon a Western Book 1) Read online

  Mary Rose tried to read his expression. His face looked concerned, but his voice almost sounded pleased, maybe a little triumphant. Why? Because he’d been right about horses spooking at nothing?

  As she pulled her hand away and stepped back from Mr. Linden, she saw another horse and rider galloping toward them. It was Hauer on one of Jubilee’s buggy horses. He rode bareback, hatless, crouched low over the horse’s neck. Mary Rose thought she might cry with relief.

  Hauer slid off his mount before it had come to a complete stop. He threw both arms around Mary Rose and held her close. “Thank God,” he said.

  Mary Rose found she wanted to cry into the shoulder of his soft brown shirt. So she did. She did not sob or weep, but tears of relief ran down her face. If Hauer had worried this much about her, she must have been in real danger.

  Mr. Linden said, “I’m happy I saw her and was able to stop that horse.”

  Hauer let go of Mary Rose and stepped away from her to face Mr. Linden, but kept one protective arm over Mary Rose’s shoulders. “Yes.” His voice sounded flat. “Yes, that certainly was lucky.”

  “If you ask me, that horse is too spirited for a green rider like Miss Mary. If I were Jubilee, I’d think twice about letting that old man teach any more riding lessons.”

  “It so happens, this is my horse, and it was my idea to let her ride it. And she handled it just fine, I’d say. She didn’t panic, she didn’t try to jump off. She hung on until we found her, which was exactly what she ought to have done.” Hauer gave Mary Rose’s shoulders a gentle squeeze.

  Mr. Linden repeated, “If you ask me—”

  “I didn’t.” Hauer spoke the words in the same calm way, but his tone sharpened.

  “No, I guess you didn’t.” Mr. Linden smiled, an expression Mary Rose was growing to detest more and more. He turned his attention to her. “Shall we walk back?”

  Hauer answered before Mary Rose could. “She can ride back.”

  Mary Rose shivered. She pulled a little away from Hauer to look him full in the face. “I... I don’t want to.”

  “I know.” Hauer put both his hands on her shoulders. “I know you can’t even bear the idea. But if you don’t get on that horse right now, if you don’t ride her back to the house and prove to yourself you can, then tomorrow you’ll find a reason not to ride. And the next day, another reason. With every day that passes, it will be harder and harder to get back on a horse, until the day comes when you realize you’re never going to ride again. Do you want that to happen?”

  Mary Rose looked at the ground, twisting her horse’s reins around in her fingers. She had an awful suspicion Hauer was right, but she also worried she could not climb back onto that horse without the frightened churning in her midsection overwhelming her. She might even scream.

  Mr. Linden said, “I don’t think we need to be quite that dramatic. Miss Mary, if you don’t want to ride, you don’t have to. I won’t let him make you do it.”

  That was precisely what Mary Rose needed to hear. She lifted her head. “He’s not making me do it. I think he’s right. I need to try this.”

  Mr. Linden stepped closer. “You don’t have anything to prove. Don’t let him bully you into this.”

  “I do have something to prove.” Mary Rose laid a hand on Shooting Star’s neck. The horse was hot and sweaty but seemed calm enough now. “I have to prove to myself I can do this.” She checked the girth straps to make sure they weren’t too slack again, then looped the reins up and over her horse’s neck. “But I’m afraid I’ll need help getting up there—I usually use the mounting block.”

  “Here.” Hauer laced his fingers together and held his hands upside down for her to step on, giving her a bit of a boost when she did so.

  Once in the saddle, Mary Rose sat still for a moment. She said a silent prayer for courage that would last her all the way back to the house. Then she nodded to Hauer, who stood looking up at her. “I can do it.”

  “We’ll take it slow,” he promised. Then he swung back up onto the carriage horse he’d ridden out after her. The three of them made their way back to the ranch house, never going faster than a walk.

  At first, Mary Rose felt awkward, worried she would fall off one side or the other. But while she rode, her muscles relaxed and she regained a little of the easy rhythm she had found so comfortable on her other rides. By the time they reached sight of the ranch buildings, she knew she would not be afraid to ride again another day.

  When they reined in at the barn, Jubilee came running down to them with considerable speed for a woman nearing sixty. Mary Rose noticed for the first time that her grandmother limped—she must have learned not to when she walked, but at a run, she favored one leg. Mary Rose dismounted in time for Jubilee to arrive and throw her arms around her the way Hauer had done. But Jubilee held her far tighter and made choked crying sounds.

  Finally, Jubilee released her and gave her a wavering smile. “And you rode all the way back,” she said. “What an uncommonly brave girl you are.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Mary Rose blurted. “Hauer said if I didn’t… He was right, that’s all.”

  “It’s a bad habit of his, being right so often.” Jubilee tried to laugh, but failed. “I’m so glad he was able to stop your horse. You weren’t thrown, were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t.” Mary Rose had to admit, “And it was Mr. Linden who stopped the horse.”

  “Ah.” Jubilee looked over at Mr. Linden. “Thank you. I owe you my granddaughter’s life.”

  “It was nothing.” He looked quite pleased with himself nonetheless.

  “It was everything,” Jubilee replied. Then she led Mary Rose up to the house and plied her with all the tasty food she could find until Mary Rose had well and thoroughly spoiled her lunch, and her dinner too.

  Chapter Nine

  For the rest of the week, Mary Rose spent all her time either riding or cleaning. Together with the two hired girls, she aired the bedding for all of the guest rooms except the two Hauer and Mr. Linden occupied. They polished all the wooden furniture. They beat dust from rugs, scrubbed floors, baked cookies, and washed windows. At home, Mary Rose had helped with such things from time to time, particularly if a mess occurred on the housemaid’s day off, or if they were preparing for a big party. Still, she’d never done quite so much cleaning all at once, and she found it tiresome.

  She tried to make friends with the two neighbor girls who worked alongside her, but they held her in some kind of awe and would not speak unless spoken to. Mary Rose could not tell if this was because she was two or three years older than they were, because she came from that mysterious place known as Back East, or because she was Jubilee O’Brien’s granddaughter. Perhaps it was all three.

  Mary Rose found she enjoyed the quiet evenings in the sitting room after supper, even though Mr. Linden was invariably present. She learned a great deal from his discussions with her grandmother. Hauer and she both did more listening than conversing, although whenever the conversation turned to books, Mary Rose contributed her own opinions. This pleased Jubilee, and she told Mary Rose repeatedly how happy she was to have someone to discuss novels with again. Not only did she encourage Mary Rose to read anything at all from her bookcase, she made recommendations of what to read next. Mary Rose had little time to read, thanks to the cleaning and other party preparations, but she looked forward to many happy hours with those books in the weeks to come. She had finished Pride and Prejudice but couldn’t decide what to read after it.

  Hauer continued to come down out of the woods to eat supper and sleep in one of the spare rooms. But he assured Jubilee she could clean his room while he was away all day, so that it would be ready for guests to use after the dance.

  One thing prevented Mary Rose from leading an idyllic new existence at her grandmother’s ranch. And it was not a thing at all, really, but a person, namely Mr. Connor Linden. Mary Rose couldn’t logically explain her distaste for him. But the way he watched her, maneuvered himself t
o be near her, and now found reasons to remind her that he had saved her from the runaway horse—all of that bothered her, logical or not. All the same, she knew she sometimes imagined that people’s actions meant different things than they really did. What if he was simply being courteous? How was she to know?

  She had considered asking her grandmother if she thought Mr. Linden was too... what? That was the trouble—Mary Rose could not accuse Mr. Linden of a single concrete thing. True, he made her uncomfortable, but what of it? Weren’t most young ladies discomfited in the presence of a handsome man, especially if the handsome man was attentive? Also, Jubilee got on well with Mr. Linden, and Mary Rose did not wish to endanger her own newfound relationship with her grandmother by casting slurs on him.

  The day before the dance, however, she had an encounter with Mr. Linden that troubled her more than any of his earlier behavior. Before Jubilee shut herself in the kitchen with Mrs. Mills to discuss whether they had laid in a large enough supply of lemons for the lemonade, she instructed Mary Rose and the two neighbor girls to bring every chair they could find and line them up along the walls in the dining room. For it was in the dining room that the dancing would occur, and they needed plenty of seating for folks who were resting or waiting their turn. Mary Rose led the girls in raiding the guest rooms. While they carried the last of the guest room chairs down the hall to the dining room, Mr. Linden appeared beside Mary Rose.

  “Allow me.” He took the chair from her.

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, you’re most welcome,” he said with one of his smiles that always unnerved Mary Rose. But his next words bothered her still more, for he added, “Anything at all for the little heiress.”

  Mary Rose stopped walking. “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Linden waited while the two girls walked ahead out of earshot. Then he leaned closer. “Come, Miss Mary, we all know why your grandmother invited you here. To see if you would make a suitable heir to her estate, of course.”

  “It’s Mary Rose,” she reminded him, her cheeks flushing. “And I don’t know any such thing. I don’t believe you do either. My grandmother did not invite me—my parents sent me here for the summer.” Though she knew they had sent her off with some such idea.

  “No matter. Your plan is working, either way. She couldn’t be more pleased with you if she tried.” He smiled as if they were co-conspirators. “I must congratulate you. You have her wrapped around your little finger after that incident the other day. Throwing a party for you is only the beginning. Next she’ll be giving you gifts, asking you to stay here for more than just the summer.” He nodded. “Well done, young lady.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mary Rose hurried away down the hall, leaving him with the chair. She pushed open the back door and rushed out to the back pasture. Somehow, being outside and away from the confines of the house eased her confusion a bit. Surely he had been teasing her. Hadn’t he? If he thought she had come here trying to curry her grandmother’s favor, then everyone else must think that too. They must think her a money-grubbing, heartless girl.

  Mary Rose felt sick. All her bubbly joy about the next day’s dance curdled inside her. They would be right to view her that way—after all, her parents had sent her here to mend the family rift so that Jubilee would not leave everything to some stranger. And she had gone along with the plan so she could have an adventure.

  But what could she do about this? Tell her grandmother? What if Jubilee cancelled the dance? Mary Rose thought of Deputy Christopher Small. She had so been looking forward to dancing with him, to meeting his eyes long enough to memorize their exact shade of blue. She wanted to know if she had imagined his interest in her, if the gift of a flower and the promise of a dance were how he charmed any new young lady of his acquaintance. Now she would wonder if the guests were all talking about her and her nasty, scheming ways.

  Hauer’s voice interrupted Mary Rose’s self-incrimination. “Miss Mary Rose, could you help me with this?” There he stood in the doorway she had fled through. He had his saddlebags slung over one shoulder, his bedroll under one arm and a canvas-wrapped bundle in the other hand. “I want to take this all in one trip, if I can,” he said. “But I think I have more than I can manage. Would you mind? If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Of course.” Hurrying back down to the house, she took the bundle from him. It filled her arms, bulky but not heavy. Clothes, maybe a pair of shoes or boots too, all wrapped together in a sheet of canvas.

  “Thank you.” He picked up a parcel wrapped in brown paper that he’d set inside the door, then set off across the pasture toward the trees.

  “Where are we going?” Mary Rose asked.

  “To the cabin up where I’m cutting timber for your grandmother. You know she needs my room for the folks she’s asked to stop for the night.”

  “You’re staying up there tonight too?”

  Hauer looked at her over his shoulder. “I think it’s best I stay down here tonight. Don’t you?”

  Mary Rose wondered why Hauer made such a point of staying in the big house when clearly he hadn’t done so before she came. She remembered that overheard argument he’d had with Jubilee her first morning, when he’d declared he needed to protect them from... what was it? Wolves, or some such. At the time, she’d suspected there was more to it than that, but she still wasn’t sure what it might be. “I’m sure it’s best if you think so.”

  “I do.”

  They continued on without speaking until they reached the trees, tall pines that ranged from spindly saplings to tall, broad trees with branches stretching far above Mary Rose’s head. It smelled cool and refreshing under the trees and was almost dark enough to be gloomy. A rough and rutted path curved away under the pines, all dried mud and dust, clearly the way fallen trees were dragged down from wherever Hauer cut them.

  Hauer told her about various trees, plants, and animals they saw along the way, naming them in English and Cherokee, and sometimes German too. Mary Rose enjoyed trying to say the words foreign to her tongue, and they laughed together over her frequent mispronunciations. Finally, Mary Rose asked, “If your father spoke German and your mother spoke Cherokee, how is it you speak English so well? If you hadn’t told me you didn’t grow up with it, I would never have guessed.”

  Hauer’s answer surprised her. “That’s your grandmother’s doing, hers and your grandfather Michael’s.”

  “How is that?”

  “She told you my family used to trade at the store her folks ran. When my ma died, and we roamed away farther and farther, my pa and I still came back every year or so to trade with them. Like coming home it was, in a way. One year, beginning of winter, my pa took sick. Only place I knew I’d be welcome to nurse him was at their trading post, so I brought him there, though we arrived too late to save him. Jubilee and Michael had been married a year or two already. Before he died, my pa asked them to look after me. Jubilee took that seriously. I stayed with them all that winter.

  “They taught me better English, and to read and write too. When Jubilee decides to do a thing, she does it right. Or the way she believes is right, anyhow. Those books you’ve been reading—they’d read them out loud in the evening, the four of us sitting around a warm fire eating popcorn or apples. Your father was little, and he took to me like I was his older brother. I could make him laugh even when he was black as a storm cloud with anger.”

  Mary Rose decided to ask the question that had bothered her for years. She’d never been brave enough to ask her parents. “Why did my father leave home?” She had imagined many reasons, but now might be her one chance of learning what had gone wrong between her father and grandparents.

  Hauer didn’t answer immediately. Finally he said, “I wasn’t here. When the war came, I joined the cavalry. As an interpreter, mostly. I didn’t see any of the fighting back East. But I gather your father was impatient to go to war. Jubilee and Michael wouldn’t hear of it—he’d have been about your age, I sup
pose. But he wouldn’t listen. I expect Michael or Jubilee told him some nonsense about never coming back if he left without their blessing, the way desperate parents would, and he took it to heart. I think Michael died still hoping his son would come back.”

  “When did my grandfather die?”

  “Must be going on seven, eight years now. It was the influenza. I’d have thought Jubilee would try to mend the rift then, when she wrote your folks about his passing.”

  “How did she know where to write us?”

  “I think she kept track of your pa easily enough. Augustus O’Brien isn’t such a common name.”

  “Then why didn’t she ever try to fix things?” What Mary Rose meant was, why did she have to do it, when she’d had nothing to do with the argument in the first place?

  “Afraid he wouldn’t answer, I think.”

  “I see.”

  The conversation stalled there, and they walked on in silence. A mile from the ranch house, the forest gloom gave way to sunlight, and Mary Rose saw a little cabin nestled in a clearing. Above the treetops, the grand mountains towered in unapproachable majesty. Bright snow covered their peaks, making them look like a row of dignified old men. The whole scene was so picturesque that Mary Rose exclaimed, “Oh!”

  “Pretty sight, isn’t it?” Hauer stopped at the edge of the trees and let her enjoy the view. The cabin itself looked quite new. It was big enough to have two or three rooms and a loft above. Dozens of tree stumps surrounded it, evidence of the work Hauer had done there. Five fallen tree trunks lay on the edges of the clearing, their branches stripped away and piled together in a great heap. A sharp axe stood embedded in a stump near the door of the cabin as if waiting for Hauer to get back to work.

  “What’s it for?” Mary Rose asked. “Why build another house way up here?”