Rose(29)

Feeling a lot like a drowning man about to go under for the third time, Rose watched them ride away. George had told her he wanted an army career. He was also set against anything that smacked of home and family responsibility. He wanted no ties whatsoever.

Rose had sworn she would never marry a soldier.

Her father had rarely been home. He never took his family with him because he said it was dangerous and it distracted him. Her whole life had been spent waiting for him to come home on his short visits and counting the days until he had to go back.

And now she discovered George wanted an army career and didn’t want a family.

She was surprised at how much this disheartened her. She knew she liked George, depended on him, had built daydreams in her mind and heart with him at the center. Only now did she realize these were more than dreams. They were hopes. She had placed her future in George Randolph’s hands without even knowing it.

And now he had quite positively handed it back to her.

She felt lost. Like a ship whose rudder had been wrenched off in a collision with a hidden shoal. Her future yawned before her, empty and somehow dangerous.

“We sure got us a heap of dirty clothes,” Zac stated, intruding on her thoughts. “You mean to wash them all today?”

“Every piece,” Rose said.

“You don’t have to. Nobody will mind.”

“What you mean is you don’t want to do all that work,” Rose replied. She felt a little better. She always did when she talked to Zac.

“Yeah, that too,” Zac admitted with a brash grin. “Seems like an awful lot.”

“Once we get everything clean, we won’t have to do this much again.”

“Why are women always carrying on about being clean? My ma was forever pestering me about it. Ever since she died I don’t wash no more than once a month, and I’ve growed just fine.”

“But you don’t smell so fine,” Rose said, wrinkling up her nose. “Now rustle about and get me some more wood. It’ll take boiling water to get this dirt out.”

“I don’t see nothing wrong with dirt,” Zac grumbled as he headed off. “God must have liked it, too. He sure made lots of it.”





Rose looked around the kitchen. Something about the room bothered her, but she couldn’t decide what it was. That annoyed her. This was her first full day at the ranch, and she had too much work to do to get distracted by vague feelings. It would take every minute she had to be ready by the time the men came home. If her plan was to succeed, she had to stay ahead of them.

Still, when she stepped into the pantry to look for some canned fruit, the feeling settled over her again. The moment she stepped back into the kitchen, she knew what it was. The room was too small to account for all the space in this half of the house. It was so obvious she wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before.

Because you’ve been too busy and worried and upset and frightened to notice anything that wasn’t shoved under your nose. She stared at the inner wall and almost immediately saw the door. It was nearly covered by heavy coats and rain slicks hanging on a series of wooden pegs. She would have to change that. The kitchen was no place to keep such clothes.

She moved one coat and tried the handle of the door. It turned, but she had to take down two more coats before she could get the door open.

She stepped into Mrs. Randolph’s bedroom.

The room was fully as large as the kitchen itself and filled with furniture such as Rose had never seen. The few pieces of china and crystal had told her the Randolphs had once been rich. This room showed her what the inside of their Virginia mansion must have looked like.

Apparently Mrs. Randolph had brought everything from her bedroom, from an enormous canopy bed covered in satin and mounded with pillows to the several rugs that covered the rough board floor. Someone had even tried to wallpaper the room. The attempt had been given up after the smooth inner walls had been covered. The log-and-mortar outer wall was covered by furniture and curtains. Brocade curtains and swags hung at windows made small and high for defense rather than beauty. Chairs, chests of drawers, wardrobes, and a daybed competed for the limited space in the room. A door at the end of the room, roughly adjacent to the pantry, must lead to a storage closet.

Rose stepped into the middle of the room even though she felt she was violating some unspoken taboo. Dust and the fine grit of Texas dirt covered everything. They probably hadn’t disturbed the room since their mother’s death. Rose wondered whether this was some sort of shrine or just a corner of their lives they had shut away. She knew she wouldn’t ask George. If he wanted her to know, he would tell her.