Teresa Medeiros - Nobody’s Darling

Lisbeth had been an accomplished musician. Before she ran away, the house had rung with music and laughter. After, it echoed only with silence.

Although she’d written faithfully every month, reassuring her father of her happiness and pleading for his pardon, Reginald had never forgiven her betrayal. He refused to acknowledge her letters in any way, although he kept them carefully preserved within the satin-lined confines of a rosewood box.

On a chill autumn eve thirteen years ago, another letter had arrived, this one penned not in Lisbeth’s sophisticated script, but in a hand that was girlish, yet painfully precise. Reginald had read the letter, his craggy face expressionless, before handing it to Anne.

It had been written by Lisbeth’s twelve-year-old daughter to inform Reginald that both Lisbeth and her precious Bartholomew were dead, struck down by an outbreak of cholera. Although the child’s account of her parents’ death betrayed no trace of self-pity, the smudged ink whispered of fallen tears, hastily blotted. Oddly enough, the girl was not writing to beg charity for herself or her six-year-old brother, but to inform her grandfather that she would ‘ honor her mother’s dying wish that he continue to receive a monthly letter apprising him of their circumstances.

In terse parentheses, she had scrawled, Why Mama should have continued to love such a cold and unforgiving ogre is beyond my comprehension. However, it is not mine to question her final wish, but to see that it is granted. The child’s bold rebuke had made Anne smile through her tears.

The letter had been signed Miss Esmerelda Fine and had been accompanied by the silver locket the duke had given Lisbeth on her sixteenth birthday.

Reginald had never acknowledged his daughter’s death, publicly or privately, but from that day forward, he had not risen from his wheelchair.

Esmerelda’s letters had followed every month without fail. Although Reginald gruffly “harrumphed” and “pshawed” at their arrival, he would eagerly clutch at them, tearing them open when he thought no one was looking. Sometimes Anne would slip into the smoking room to find him chuckling over some witty anecdote or gleefully savoring one of the thinly veiled insults the girl managed to sneak into nearly every letter. Although he would have denied it with his dying breath, his admiration for his resourceful granddaughter was growing. He silently applauded her successes and fretted over her failures.

His admiration, however, did not extend to his grandson. “A scribbler like his father,” he would mutter, scowling over some lengthy passage detailing little Bartholomew’s accomplishments. “Worthless boy won’t amount to anything.”

After reading and rereading each letter, Reginald would gently tuck it into the tiny rosewood coffin he had chosen to preserve his daughter’s memory.

Stricken by a sudden nameless dread, Anne gazed at the forlorn scrap of paper on the hearth. “Oh, my God, Esmerelda’s not—”

“Dead? No, but she soon will be if she pursues this daft scheme of hers.”

Shooting her brother a baffled glance, Anne dove for the hearth, rescuing her niece’s letter with shaking hands. She scanned it, the rapid movement of her lips betraying her agitation.

As she reached the end, her knees gave way. She sank down on a brocaded ottoman before the fire, gazing blindly into the dancing flames. “Dear God. What must she be thinking? To travel across an entire continent, alone and unchaperoned, in pursuit of this… this”—she reread the last paragraph of the letter, shuddering violently— “desperado.”

Reginald stomped his slippered foot. “She’s not thinking at all! The chit’s just like her mother. Weak, willful, and at the mercy of every ridiculous feminine whim that drifts through her empty little head.”

Anne felt compelled to defend the niece she’d never met. “Esmerelda has always struck me as such a practical little creature. She survived her parents’ death. She established a music school in her own home and tended her brother when she was little more than a child herself.”

Reginald shook a finger at her. “It’s that wretched boy who’s to blame. The father cost me my Lisbeth and now the son is imperiling Esmerelda.” He faltered as they both realized it was the first time he’d ever spoken his granddaughter’s name aloud.

“This letter is dated over two months ago,” Anne noted softly. “She might already be…”

Their eyes met. This time, neither of them was able to complete the grim thought. Reginald’s gaze strayed back to his lap. With a gentleness utterly foreign to his nature, he pried open the silver locket.

Anne knew what he would find there. A faded daguerreotype of a young girl with a plump toddler cradled in her arms. The little boy with the dimpled cheeks and nest of dark curls had been unable to resist smiling at the photographer, but the girl, striking despite her severe braids and starched pinafore, stared dutifully ahead, her solemn eyes betraying the faintest hint of wistfulness.

The duke studied the locket for several minutes before snapping it shut. “Potter, my cane.”

“Yes, sir.” The butler emerged from his corner to retrieve his master’s cane.

Anne fully expected her brother to resume brandishing it like a rapier, but to her surprise, he planted its brass tip firmly on the rug. Her surprise deepened to shock when he staggered to his feet. An alarmed Potter rushed at him, but Reginald waved him away, growling a warning.

Anne backed away from him as well, clutching her throat. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

She held her breath without realizing it as her brother straightened his hunched back with an almost audible creak. Beneath their gray-fringed brows, his dark eyes glowed with determination.

Standing fully erect for the first time in thirteen years, he pounded his cane on the floor once for emphasis and said, “I, my dear sister, am going to America to rescue my granddaughter from that… that…”

“Outlaw?” Anne whispered. “Renegade?”

Reginald’s upper lip curled in a regal sneer, warning that only the vilest of epithets was to follow. “Cowboy.”

Calamity, New Mexico

Esmerelda Fine eyed the Wanted poster nailed to the porch post of the stagecoach station with a jaded eye. “Billy Darling,” she murmured. “A rather harmless name for such a wicked man, isn’t it?”

“Beggin‘ your pardon, ma’am, but Billy ain’t wicked. He’s just a man that does what needs to be done. If someone needs killin’, he kills ‘em.” The grizzled cowhand who had overheard her musing spat a fat wad of tobacco on the plank sidewalk, barely missing the pleated hem of her skirt. “You cain’t fault a man who enjoys his job. Why, Billy’s the only Darlin’ since the war to turn his hand to good honest work.”

Drawing her skirts close to her legs, Esmerelda cast the man a withering glance. “Which means he kills for profit instead of amusement?”

She turned her attention back to the image of the hired killer glowering down at her from the Wanted poster. The handbill was a weathered twin of the one she’d kept neatly folded in her silk reticule during the long, arduous train and stagecoach journey from Boston. Seeing his ignoble image displayed before all the world gave her some small measure of comfort, reassured her that he wasn’t some imaginary devil woven from the fabric of her darkest fears and fantasies.

A thick growth of whiskers obscured the outlaw’s features, but the menace in his eyes was palpable. How many men had gazed into those steely eyes over the barrel of a pistol and known them to be the last sight they would see on this earth? An invisible cloud shadowed the sun as Esmerelda remembered that her brother had been one of them.

Bitterness tightened her lips as she shifted her gaze from the poster to the cowhand. “So how did such a paragon of industry end up with a price on his own head?”

“Aw, them U.S. marshals got all riled up when Billy brought one in dead that was wanted alive. Seems they needed the feller to testify against a band o‘ bootleggers that’d been sellin’ whiskey to the Comanche.”

“But your Mr. Darling saw fit to administer justice himself. How terribly noble of him.”

Her sarcasm did not escape the old man. “From what I heard tell, miss, Billy had every right to be riled. The feller shot him in the back. If he hadn’t been so all-fired contrary, Billy wouldn’t have had to blow his damn fool head off.”

Esmerelda felt herself blanch. Alarmed by her fading color, the cowhand jerked off her bonnet and began to fan her with it. “Now, miss, you ain’t goin‘ to swoon on me, are you?” He reached for her reticule. “You got any smelling salts in that there fancy bag?”

Shocked by the stranger’s familiarity, Esmerelda clutched the reticule to her bosom, comforted by its solid weight. “I should say not, sir. It’s simply the heat. I’m not accustomed to such a brutal climate.”

That much was true. The brave little bonnet that had elicited such a pang of yearning when she’d seen it displayed in the window of Miss Adelaide’s Millinery Shoppe had done little to deflect the ruthless rays of the sun. The saucy pair of bluebirds affixed to its brim had wilted just west of St. Louis. Esmerelda breathed a sigh of relief at being freed from the bonnet’s sweltering confines. A whisper of a breeze, arid yet sweet, teased the damp tendrils of hair at her temples.