"I'd say you matured nicely," Lee replied in his deep husky tone of voice. "Very nicely."
Mary blushed more furiously. "Anyway, after that, I became very shy and withdrawn. I began to keep to myself. I didn't know myself anymore. So, I began to read and study more, to help with the women's work, and stayed as far away from men as possible."
"When did you start carrying the derringer?" Lee asked.
"I got it as a present for my fifteenth birthday. A year or so before we left the Indian Territory for Wyoming."
A gun as a birthday present for a fifteen-year-old girl? Unusual to say the least. Unless, Lee thought, the fifteen-year-old girl was part Cherokee Indian and living in a territory where all too many men considered Indian women, and most especially half-breed Indian women, as theirs for the taking. And white men weren't the only men who posed a threat. The territory was full of outlaws, mixed bloods, and Indians who felt the same way. "Who gave you the gun as a gift?"
"Uncle Benjamin," Mary smiled at the memory. "Reese's father. He gave me the gun, then asked my mother to make sure that, in the future, all my skirts had pockets on the right side. He taught me how to shoot and made me promise to keep it loaded and carry it with me at all times."
"What prompted your uncle to give you a gun?"
"I don't know," Mary answered quickly. Too quickly.
"Yes, you do," Lee insisted.
Mary took a deep breath. "I decided I wanted to continue my education so I could become a teacher. The family talked it over and decided that I should attend a very expensive, very exclusive girl's school back east in Boston. I didn't want to go to school that far away from home, even though I knew Reese and David were attending Harvard University nearby, so Uncle Benjamin suggested I attend a school in St. Louis. He had a friend there who operated an exclusive school of higher education for girls."
"I agreed, and Uncle Benjamin traveled with me to St. Louis. He was going to Washington on business and promised to stop by and see how I was getting along on his way home. Everything was difficult at first." She took a deeper drink of tea, then cradled the cup in her hands. "Oh, there were the usual adjustments, I suppose. It took a while for the other girls to become accustomed to sharing space with me. I knew I was different."
"I understood that most of the girls had never seen an Indian and had heard all the horrible stories about Indians— how we massacre and mutilate innocent men, women, and children in their beds. But after the third month, I thought everyone was adjusting. Unfortunately, I didn't realize the other girls hadn't adjusted to my presence at all. They had simply schemed to get rid of me at the end of the term. I never realized girls could be so vicious."
"What did they do?" Lee asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
"The school held an end-of-term social the last week of April—a dance. And young men from one of the
area military academies were invited to be our escorts. After the dance," Mary recited the story in a flat unemotional voice that told Lee more about the trauma she had suffered than an avalanche of tears. "I went upstairs to bed, full of high spirits, because the social was my first real dance. After I fell asleep, someone sneaked two of the young men from the academy into my room."
Lee's breath caught in his throat, and he could barely get the words out of his mouth. "What happened?"
"I don't think they meant to hurt me," Mary answered. "The plan was for me to be caught with a man in my room so I'd be sent home in disgrace. But the young men had other ideas. I woke up to find one of the boys standing over me. He held me down while the other one tried to…" She took a breath.
"Did he?"
Mary shook her head. "No. One of the girls, one I had helped tutor, got scared. She knew about the plan to teach the 'Injun girl' a lesson. She ran to the headmistress who arrived in time to prevent it. The next morning, the headmistress wrote a letter to Uncle Benjamin requesting that he come to take me home. I was being expelled from school for lewd behavior."
"What about the other girls or the boys?" Lee demanded. "What happened to them?"
"I don't know. Nothing more was said about the incident to me. I was expelled for having men in my room." Mary swallowed hard. "After all, rules were rules, and I had broken them. My uncle came to St. Louis and rescued me. I think Uncle Benjamin could have bought my way back into the school, but I didn't want to return. I just wanted to go home. The following year, I did attend a school in Philadelphia, but I never forgot what happened. Since the day of my fifteenth birthday, I've always carried my derringer in my pocket and kept a lamp burning in my room so I never have to wake up in the dark and worry that someone might be there."
Lee thought it was a measure of just how exhausted Mary had been, that he had been able to enter her room and carry her from her bed to his without waking her, or having her shoot him, in the process.
"Bidcut," Maddy interrupted, pointing to the biscuit left on Mary's plate.
Mary handed her biscuit to Lee, who spread it with butter and jam and gave it to Maddy, whose nightgown was covered with crumbs and whose face was smeared with butter and jam as well.
"She's getting crumbs in your bed," Mary commented.
"That's okay," Lee said. "I don't think I'll be needing it for a while."
"What?"
"I did a lot of thinking last night, Mary, and I don't see how either one of us can plan for the future until I get some of Tabitha's demands out of the way."
"You're leaving me," Mary said flatly.
"I'm leaving town later this afternoon," Lee explained. "But I'm not leaving you. I'm coming back to Utopia, but for now, I have to return to Chicago."