She swung into the saddle and looked down at him. “You are the one who doesn’t seem capable of seeing anything but your own point of view.” She picked up the reins to the horse. “I hope your high principles keep you warm at night.” She started to move away from him, then stopped. “Like hell I do! I hope you’re miserable for the rest of your life. I hope that every time you read that I’m singing somewhere in the world, it makes you cry.” At that, she kicked her horse forward.
Chapter 16
Maddie stood by her horse and looked out over the beautiful landscape that was near her father’s house and felt like crying. But she couldn’t cry—or at least she was not going to cry. She’d done enough of that already.
It had been three weeks since she’d left ’Ring, three miserable, long weeks. When she’d arrived at her father’s house, she’d been glad to see her parents and the old mountain men, but being near them hadn’t made her feel a whole lot better. Hears Good had ridden into the front yard ten minutes after Maddie and Laurel had arrived, and he’d regaled his friends with stories of Maddie’s escapades with the army officer. There had been a time when Maddie would have found the stories hilarious, but not now. She had done little more than greet her family, then she went outside and left them to their telling of stories.
It was her mother who had come after her, and it was in her mother’s arms that Maddie had lain while she choked out the truth of what had happened. Maddie told of her fear for Laurel, of her fear while singing, and, most of all, she told of her love for’Ring.
“But he wants to put me in a cage,” she said.
Her mother had said very little, had just listened, making no comment.
For the first two weeks of Maddie’s stay her father’s friends had tried everything to make her stop moping. Bailey sang three new songs for her, terribly vulgar things, and asked her help with the tunes, but Maddie just said that he was doing fine on his own. Her father asked her to go hunting with him, but Maddie didn’t want to go. Linq asked her to help him find young trees to make new skis for the coming winter, but Maddie said that she’d rather stay at home. Thomas said he was writing about his adventures as a young man and needed Maddie’s help, but she couldn’t keep her mind on the subject. Hears
Good tried teasing her, but she just looked at him with blank eyes.
Laurel lost patience with her sister. “You’re better off without him!” she yelled. “I didn’t like him at all. He thought he knew everything. He thinks he’s the only one who can run that company of Jamie’s, and I bet that Jamie could run it all by himself. He—”
“Jamie couldn’t stop flirting long enough to do anything,” Maddie said tiredly. “You know nothing about ’Ring. He takes care of people. He takes on the responsibility of the world. And now he’s going to be all alone.”
“He won’t be alone. He’ll find someone else. And you’ll find another man and he—”
“It took us all our lives to find each other, and we won’t find anyone else. I will continue singing and…” She trailed off. Until she’d met ’Ring she’d thought she’d had everything there was to have in life, but now nothing seemed to mean anything without him.
“Why don’t you sing?” Laurel asked softly. “Everybody wants to hear you sing. Bailey says that you don’t remember how. He says that that man made you forget how to sing.”
Maddie blinked back tears. The last time she’d sung had been for ’Ring, when they had made love for days on end.
Now, standing on the hill, looking out at the countryside, she didn’t know what she was going to do with her life.
“Still haven’t made up your mind?”
Maddie turned to see her mother standing behind her, and she smiled. The rest of the world thought that Jefferson Worth had single-handedly explored the West, but Maddie knew how much her father’s life had been involved with his wife’s, and how much Amy Littleton had influenced him.
“Made up my mind about what?” Maddie asked.
“About how much love means to you.” Maddie didn’t answer, so her mother kept talking. “When your father asked me to marry him, I was so very happy. I immediately started talking about our life together, how we’d go back to Boston and live in my father’s house. I said that Jeff could run my father’s freighting business. I even talked of the beautiful clothes that I would buy for Jeffrey.”
Maddie looked in puzzlement at her mother. She knew that her mother’s father had been quite wealthy and that one of Jeff’s objections to taking a young woman up the Missouri River to paint had been her life of ease and luxury. But Maddie couldn’t imagine her father living anywhere but in the West, couldn’t imagine his wearing anything but buckskins.
Amy continued. “For a while I thought I was going to have to give him up. I was sick unto death of the dirt and the sickness of the West. I was tired of the same food day in and day out. I was tired of men and their filthy habits. I wanted to go back east and live with people who could say a whole sentence without using a vulgar word. I wanted books and music and porcelain dishes. I wanted pretty clothes.”
A few years ago Maddie wouldn’t have wanted to hear this about her parents. Always before she wanted to think they’d been in love forever, that they’d never had any problems. “What did you do?”
“I left him. I knew what I wanted, and he couldn’t give it to me. I went back east and lived for a whole year without him.” Amy smiled in memory. “But I hadn’t bargained for how much I had changed in that year. I wasn’t the same young lady who had left. I was annoyed with my women friends when they were so easily frightened by things like a skittish horse. When you’ve been trapped without water for three days while Apaches are shooting at you, a nervous horse doesn’t mean much. And I was always shocking people with my observations. I could not bear the pretense of ‘society’ any longer.”
“So you went back to Dad?” Maddie said.
“By then they had a steamboat going up the river, and I got on it and went to him.”
“And begged him to take you back.”
Amy laughed. “Not quite. In fact, a long way from begging. I told him what he’d have to do to keep me.” She smiled. “It didn’t take much to see that he was as miserable without me as I was without him. I told him I wanted a proper house and that I was not drifting about the West as he tended to do. I said that he was free to travel whenever he wanted, but I was staying in one place.”
Maddie looked back toward the mountains and smiled. It had worked for her parents because every summer her father had gone exploring, visiting his friends in different tribes, and some of the old mountain men still living in the hills. For five of those summers Maddie had gone with him, and Gemma had nearly always gone with their father.
“Am I to go to ’Ring and tell him that I must sing and he must go with me?” Maddie asked.