Chapter 17
December wind tore at the barn door and sent dust devils spinning across the stable floor as Shane led his horse inside and closed it tightly behind him. Several stablemates nickered a greeting to the buckskin, and Cherokee blew softly through his lips in reply.
Shane yanked off his hat and smacked it sharply against his thigh to knock the snow off before it melted and ran down his back. He was cold and his bad knee was stiff. Damn if a man didn’t start feeling his age early on a cold December morning, he thought.
He’d been up before dawn after a relatively decent night’s sleep. The weather had been so foul the night before that neither he nor Gabe had bothered to stand guard. It was going to be a rotten winter. He could smell it the same way he could smell the storm rolling down out of the north country.
“Too nasty for outlaws,” he murmured to his horse. Damn straight too foul out for Beau Thompson to be up to mischief. There had been no trouble for weeks, and Shane had begun to hope that whoever had targeted Kilronan had moved on.
Snow had been falling since midnight—not serious snow, just large, hard dry flakes accompanied by a sudden drop in temperature. November had been warmer than normal, except for a bitter spell in the middle of the month, but a bear Gabe had shot was fatter than normal, and his fur was thick and shaggy.
“Bad winter,” Mary had predicted when she’d seen and felt the pelt. “Raccoon and beaver have heavy coat, too. Bad winter. Best you hunt meat quick.”
Not one to argue with Mary unnecessarily, Shane had hunted. He and Gabe had brought in deer and ducks and geese. He’d traded a young oxen for three pigs, and he’d slaughtered the hogs as well. The women had been busy for days, curing and salting hams, making sausage and scrapple, and straining and boiling down lard.
Preserving the meat for winter was heavy, tiring work, and Shane was surprised to see that his wife did her share without complaint. If Caity was inexperienced at such tasks, Mary was an old hand. The Osage woman was so valuable that he’d made no protest when she’d insisted that they needed another girl to help with the chores.
Actually, Caity and Mary had taken Urika in while he was away trading for the hogs. He’d come home to find a strange Indian girl standing over a pot of boiling water in the yard, plucking feathers from a wild goose. When he’d asked who she was, the startled wench had dropped the bird, let out a shriek, and run into the kitchen to hide behind Mary.
“Urika good worker,” Mary had informed him. “Osage woman strong.”
Urika didn’t look as if she were strong or a woman to Shane. Urika’s rail-thin face was scarred with pockmarks, and her undeveloped girl-child body seemed too frail to pull her own weight.
“I can’t afford to hire more help,” he’d said firmly. “Feed her for a day or two, and send her on her way back to her family.”
Mary had smiled and shifted her pipe from one corner of her mouth to the other. “No pay,” she clarified. “Urika work for food.”
The Indian lass had stared at him with huge, frightened eyes, and Caitlin had looked anxious.
“Please, Shane,” she’d said. “The girl is an orphan and half starved. Someone has treated her badly, and she has no place to go. Mary says that Urika walked for three days to get here. Surely we can manage another plate at the table. It wouldn’t be right to turn her away. Not when there’s so much to be done.”
“Mary told you,” he’d grumbled.
God knew the girl looked needy enough, he reasoned, but Kilronan was their livelihood. They’d none of them survive if he took in every beggar that wandered in. “Why can’t this Urika speak for herself?” he’d asked.
Caity had a ready answer for him as usual. “Urika doesn’t speak English. Just Osage. But Mary and Gabe know Osage. Isn’t that lucky?”
In the end he’d relented and let Urika stay. If the Indian girl had asked for wages, he couldn’t have kept her on. His coin box was empty. Anything that they needed between now and the time he delivered his stock to Fort Independence in the spring, they’d have to do without.
Shane shook his head as he led Cherokee toward the nearest empty stall. Women. Once they put their heads together and started to scheme against him, a man didn’t have the chance of an apple in a hog pen.
The barn was dark and shadowy with the windows and doors battened down, but it was a lot warmer than outside. Scents of drying hay, oiled leather, and horses filled Shane’s head, and he let the day’s worries slide off his shoulders.
He’d come a long way for an Irish boy with holes in the soles of his brogans. He had a willing wife in his bed, land of his own, and a son. And unless he’d guessed wrong, Caity had been stirring up some of her soda bread for the noon meal.
Then the faint sound of something scraping against the boards overhead broke through his reverie. As his head snapped up, a few stems of hay sifted through the cracks and drifted past his face.
Instantly wary, Shane tensed and released his horse’s bridle. Cherokee trotted on, nosing up to a stablemate before shoving open the stall door with his head.
Shane listened intently, but he heard nothing except the scrape of his buckskin’s tongue against a salt block.
“Gabe?”
When no one answered, Shane dropped his hand to rest on the worn handle of the Colt revolver at his hip.
“Who’s there?” he called as he moved toward the ladder that led to the hay loft. “Justice, are you up there?”
A cloud of hay filtered down through the hatchway. Shane’s fingers tightened on the grip of his pistol.
“ ’Kenna!” Derry’s small face appeared in the opening overhead.
“Derry?” He snatched his hand away from the gun. “What are you doin’ up there?”
The child’s bottom lip began to quiver. “Can’t find kitty.”
“Are you out here alone? Is Justice up there in the loft?” Shane crossed to the ladder and lifted his arms. “Come on down.”
“C-can’t.” A fat tear rolled down her nose. “I climbed up an’ can’t get down.”
“There are no cats in this barn. Come on, little one. I’ll help you.”
“Kitty,” she repeated stubbornly.
“How the hell did you get out here without Mary or your mother seeing you?” It was freezing outside, and none too comfortable in here. “Where’s your coat, nubbin?” Shane shuddered inwardly as he thought of how easily she could have crawled into one of the corrals where the horses were penned or even wandered away from the barn and become lost in the woods.
“Inna house. I for-got.”
“Climb down from there,” he ordered.
Derry shook her head so hard that her pigtails swung from side to side. Her dark hair was full of hay, and stems clung to her dress and pantalettes.
“Jump if you’re afraid to come down the ladder backwards. I’ll catch you.”
She sniffed and stuffed a dirty thumb into her mouth; then her impish face vanished from the loft hatchway.
“Whoa there, button,” he called. “Stay right where you are. I’m comin’ up.” He seized hold of a rung and swiftly climbed the ladder.
Derry was standing several yards away, backed against a pile of hay. She looked scared to death.
“Easy now,” Shane soothed. He took a step in her direction, and she began to cry. “Shhh, don’t do that.” He didn’t know much about little girls, but he did know about skittish foals.
He crouched down. “Don’t be scared. I’ll sit right here until you come to me.”
For several minutes he waited and she cried. Then Derry peeked through her fingers at him.
“I chase . . . chase a kitty,” she stammered.
“No kitties here. Mice, maybe rats, but no cats.”
“Justice said,” she flung back.
“Would you like to have a cat?”
Both small hands came away. “Kitty on a boat.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “There was a cat on the boat, but there aren’t any on Kilronan.”
Derry wiped her face, smearing dirt and hayseed down one cheek. Shane could see that the child was shivering, and he wanted to snatch her up and wrap her in his coat, but instinct made him wait.
“I’m hot,” she admitted.
“Cold?”
“Um-humm.” She nodded and looked at him wistfully. “No kitties?”
Shane shook his head, then slowly removed his coat. “Mama will be looking for you, Derry. If we don’t go in the house, who will eat her bread and wild plum jelly?”
“Justice.”
“So what are we goin’ to do about that?”
She took a small step toward him.
“I won’t hurt you, nubbin.”
Derry pointed to the ladder. “ ’Kenna climb. I climb.”
A small flake of hay must have lodged in his eye. Shane rubbed at the irritation. “If I go down, you’ll follow?”
She nodded. “No kitty.”
He shook his head. “Nope. No kitty, but McKenna will try to find you one come spring. Maybe in Fort Independence when I go to trade my livestock.”
A cat. He hated cats, and here he was promising her one. “Damned, softheaded fool,” he muttered as he climbed down the ladder.
Derry peered down. “ ’Kenna?”
“What?”
“Want hay?”
She giggled as an armful of hay tumbled onto his head. “Derry!”
“ ’Kenna catch!” she cried.
Half blinded by the hay, he threw up his arms, and the warm, laughing child fell into his grasp. Derry’s tiny arms tightened around his neck, and he felt her damp kiss on his cheek. “I wove Papa.”
Shane wrapped his thick sheepskin coat around her.
“ ’Kenna?” she demanded from inside the thick folds.
“What?”
“You wove me?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I love you.”
Caity was standing on a chair in the great room trying to hang an Indian blanket over one of the front windows. She wore a white apron over her blue taffeta gown, and her hair was tucked up under a linen cap. She looked so adorable that Shane would have grabbed her around the waist and kissed her—if he hadn’t been so furious with her over letting Derry slip out of the house.
“Oh, Shane.” Caity smiled at him over her shoulder. “Give me a hand, would you? This blanket won’t—” She broke off as she spied the child in his arms. Dropping the red-striped trade blanket, she hopped down off the chair and confronted him. “Whatever are you doing with Derry?”
“I found her in the barn.”
“In the barn? In this weather?” Caity snatched the little girl away from him. “Have you lost your wits, man? You’ve no sense at all to take a baby outside without her hat and cloak. She’s half frozen.”
“Mama! I chase a bad kitty.”
Derry began to spill the tale of her escape, but Caity paid no more attention to the colleen than she did to him. “Shame on you,” she cried. “Suppose she takes a chill? What kind of father are you?”
“Not much of one, it seems,” he said. “I only discovered the babe you should have been watchin’.”
Caity’s cheeks paled and a deep flush swept up her fair, freckled face. “I owe you an apology,” she replied. “I’m sorry. I only saw her with you and thought—”
“She’s your child, Caity. This isn’t County Clare. Keep a closer guard over her or you’ll lose her.”
“The fault is mine. She is mine alone, and if she comes to tragedy, the responsibility will be mine.”
Derry frowned and began to whimper.
“There, there, my sweet,” Caity murmured to her. “It was wrong of you to go out of the house without an adult, but we won’t worry about that now.” Caity went to the doorway. “Mary! Would you ask Urika to give Derry a hot bath and put her in her nightgown?”
There was a flurry of activity as Caity told Mary what had happened, and the older woman hurried the child off to the kitchen hearth. Then Caity glanced back at him.
“It’s only proper that you admonish me for not doing my duty by the children.”
Shane felt the first twinges of regret that he’d spoken so harshly. Caity was a good mother, not just to her own daughter but to his son as well. She showed the patience of Job in dealing with the boy, and anyone could see that she was well on the way to civilizing him. “Maybe I was wrong, too.”
When the silence between them made him shift his weight from one foot to the other, he glanced around the room. Caity had been busy in here, he could see. Pine boughs lined the mantel over the huge, stone hearth, and the wide floor planks had been scrubbed and polished until they shone. There wasn’t much furniture, just two rough benches and a straight-backed chair, but the windows were clean and the walls gleamed with fresh whitewash. She’d hung two small paintings on the far wall, a portrait of a man wearing an old-fashioned military uniform and a sword, and another of a handsome woman in a hooded green cape.
“Uncle Jamie wouldn’t know this house if he walked in the front door,” Shane said. “You’ve done well with it.”
“Have I?”
“No need to take on so,” he answered. “I didn’t mean to start a war. I just wanted you to know how much danger the child—”
Caitlin crushed the corner of her apron between her fingers. “Didn’t you? Well, congratulations. You’ve done it without trying.”
“Peace, woman,” he said. “Are you in your flux that you’re so peevish?”
Her eyes widened. “I’ll thank you to keep a decent tongue in your head, sir,” she said. “My . . . my personal . . . Such things are none of your affair.”
He shrugged. “I’d think that would be a husband’s affair, especially when his wife turns to a shrew every month.”
“That’s unfair!” She whirled around, clearly meaning to flee the room in a huff when she suddenly stopped short. “Who would not turn into a shrew when a husband calls out another woman’s name in their bed?”
“You’re still holdin’ that against me?” He took a step toward her. “It was a dream, Caity, nothin’ more.”
“You still think about Cerise. Admit it.”
“Once,” he said. “Just once I mentioned her name in my sleep and—”
“More than that,” Caity said angrily. “Three, four times—just last night you did it again. Do you compare us?” She caught her breath. “How do I match up with her?”
“What do you want me to say?” he demanded. The back of his head felt as though someone were driving a ten-penny nail through it. “What Cerise and I had was different than what I felt for you when I married you, but it was real.”
Caitlin whitened. “And now? Do you love me now, or do you still love her?”
“Love can die, Caity. The love I felt for Cerise died that night she was murdered. She killed it when she asked for money to get rid of our child—when she told me that she’d never leave the life she had to scrub and cook for one man.”
“If you don’t love her, then why can’t you let her go?”
“Because her blood is on my hands. Because I was crazy drunk and—” He broke off, unable to go on, unable to say that he’d been mad enough to want her dead, to admit to Caitlin that he’d grabbed Cerise’s shoulders and shaken her as he’d seen his father do to his mother dozens of times.
“Did you kill her?” Caitlin asked.
“I’ve told you that I didn’t. Isn’t that enough?”
“Your word.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You want me to take you on your word, yet you can’t take me on mine. You can’t accept the truth about Derry.”
“Truth can be different dependin’ on where you stand to look at it,” he whispered hoarsely. “But I didn’t stab Cerise to death, and if you can’t believe that, then to hell with you.”
“I want to believe someone else killed her, Shane,” Caity cried. “I do believe it.” She covered her face with her hands. “Do you think I’d be here with you if I thought you were a murderer?”
He went to her and folded his arms around her. “Don’t cry,” he said. “It tears me up when you cry.” Damn but he hated fighting with Caity; he always came out thinking she held aces and he had nothing but a pair of deuces.
They’d kissed and pretended to mend the quarrel that night, but the hurt remained underneath like the seeds of winter wheat under a February snow.
And then the next evening after supper they found reason to disagree again.
“Christmas is coming,” Caitlin said after the children were abed and he was sharing a pot of tea with her. “We must do something about buying gifts for the children.”
“They have warm clothes, plenty of food, and a roof over their heads. I can’t afford fancy store-bought presents.”
“Not even for Christmas?” Caity’s stare told him more than her words. She thought he was a tightwad, too penny-pinching to provide for his kids.
“I told you, Caity,” he answered. “Until I sell my stock at Independence—”
“You’re too poor to keep Christmas.”
Shame burned his neck and crept up his cheeks. His wife knew little of grinding poverty. How could she understand the helplessness he’d felt as a boy watching his baby sister cry for a gingerbread man in a shop window that Shane couldn’t buy for her?
There had never been Christmas presents in Patrick McKenna’s house, and few Christmas dinners either. Justice and Derry were rich compared to what his brothers and sisters had endured.
“Justice is too old for toys,” he answered brusquely. “And the less Derry expects, the easier it will be for her.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Caity said.
“Bake them cookies or something. Kids like cookies.”
“Naught but cookies on Christmas morn?”
“Some children would think themselves well off if they ate as ours do. Meat every day and cake on the Sabbath.”
“But your children don’t have to do without,” she protested. “You have six hundred acres and a house and barns to your name! Horses and cattle and—”
“Damn it, woman! Can’t you understand. I have Kilronan, but I have no money until I sell my livestock. It took all I had to send for you.”
Her anger faded; puzzled, she stared at him. “You mean we’re penniless?”
“Aye.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He exhaled softly. “It’s not a wife’s place to worry over finances. A husband—”
“Poppycock! A wife should be a partner to her husband. I understand being without money. After my father died, Maureen and I struggled to buy food and fuel for the fires.”
“My uncle left Kilronan in debt, Caity. I’ve fought to pay off what he owed. I’m cautious, but I’d not begrudge you or the children anything if I had coin to spare.”
“I feel like such a fool,” she answered. “I’ve wronged you without reason. Forgive me, Shane.”
“No, the fault is mine. I should have told you before, but I’m a proud man. It was easier to have you name me a skinflint than to tell you that I’m what I’ve always been—a Paddy without a shilling in his pocket.”
She shook her head. “Just this,” she said, waving her hand to take in all of Kilronan. “Just half of Missouri. Don’t hold me so cheap, Mr. McKenna. I can be a help to you instead of a hindrance. I could help you earn money.”
“Could you, now? And how would that be? Could you help us break horses?”
“Don’t make fun of me. I’m serious. I could teach school, or I could sell some of the things I’ve brought from Ireland.”
He felt another wave of inadequacy run through him. “I’ll not have my wife peddlin’ her goods on a street corner. I’ll take care of us. You go on the way you have, lookin’ after the kids, makin’ this house a real home. I’ll tend to the rest.”
He was already thinking, trying to figure a way to give her what she’d asked for. And then he remembered the man in Saint Louis who’d made him an offer.
“I want to help, Shane. Really help.”
“You are,” he assured her. “And you’ll have lots to do in the next two weeks. I’m goin’ to Saint Louis.”
“Why? You didn’t say anything about it before. Can I go with you?”
“Business.” He covered her hand with his. How soft it felt, he thought. He hoped he could keep it that way; he didn’t want her hands to become lined and callused like Mary’s were. “And you can’t come. I mean to travel fast and be back by Christmas.”
“But why?” she demanded. “Why now with winter weather coming on?”
“Trust me,” he said. “I know what I’m doin’.”
“But I don’t want you to go.”
He leaned over and kissed her. “And those words are music to a husband’s ears, darlin’. It’s what every man wants to hear.”