Marianne's Marriage of Convenience Page 14

  “Excellent!” Lance said with feigned enthusiasm. “Just sign this form if you would, please. You can bring your entry fee over any time that suits you. Five dollars,” he added.

  Mrs. Ridley accepted the pen he offered and scrawled her name across the paper. Then she twitched her skirts into place and sailed toward the exit. “Rosie Greywolf, indeed,” she sniffed. She banged the door so hard Marianne jumped.

  The four of them stood staring at each other until Abe coughed loudly. “Lance, mebbe you better add some hooch to that coffee yer brewin’.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Wednesday edition of the Lake County Lark carried not only the advertisement for Collingwood Boots Marianne and Lance had devised but an extra-long feature-length story about the upcoming Fourth of July horse race, written by editor Cole Sanders. Lance spread the front page out on the cutting table in the shop, and he and Marianne pored over every word.

  “Marianne, just listen to this,” he said as they bent over the paper. “‘The horse-racing competition sponsored by Collingwood Boots promises to be the highlight of the July Fourth celebration. A junior boys competition and a women’s race will be included in the festivities, with prizes donated by Collingwood Boots. So far, seventy-five riders have signed up to compete.’”

  Seventy-five riders, Marianne thought, calculating anew the entry fees that would accrue to the business. “Why, that’s almost four hundred dollars! That should buy enough cowhide to keep Abe busy for some time.”

  And, she thought with a spurt of enthusiasm, it would also pay for at least one advertisement in a Brooks and Cassidy dime novel.

  *

  The very next morning Eugenia Ridley was back. For a moment Marianne wondered if the woman had changed her mind about riding in the horse race, but that thought evaporated within the first three minutes of her visit. Mrs. Ridley twitched her skirt and leaned toward her in a conspiratorial manner.

  “Yesterday when I visited your establishment I noticed something disturbing,” Eugenia intoned direfully.

  “Oh? What was that?”

  “You should be more careful, dearie. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but there was an Indian boy skulking around your shop.”

  “Skulking! Excuse me, Mrs. Ridley, but Sammy Greywolf is certainly not ‘skulking.’ Sammy is employed here at Collingwood Boots.”

  The woman’s thin eyebrows went up. “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Marianne replied sharply.

  “Well, I never! I never would have thought—You do know he is an…? Oh, dear, there is simply no way to sugarcoat this. The boy is a savage!”

  Marianne stared at her, feeling her hands close into hard fists.

  “And—” Mrs. Ridley took a step closer “—that old man in the back? My gracious sakes, he is a black man.”

  “Yes,” Marianne said, her voice tight, “he is.”

  “Dearie, you know as well as I do that until a few years ago his people were slaves, shiftless and uneducated. You shouldn’t trust him.”

  Marianne had to work to keep her voice calm. “On the contrary, Mrs. Ridley. Abraham Garland has been the foreman here at Collingwood Boots for twenty years. As for being shiftless, if it were not for Mr. Garland’s hard work, Collingwood Boots would have gone bankrupt years ago. And,” she added with a bite in her tone, “Abe is not uneducated. Mr. Garland owns more books than my husband and I do between us.”

  Eugenia Ridley worked her rather prominent jaw back and forth but said nothing.

  “Did you wish to withdraw from the July Fourth competition?” Marianne asked in her sweetest tone.

  The woman drew herself up to her full height, which Marianne judged could be no more than five feet. “Certainly not,” she exclaimed. “Why would I do that?”

  “Mrs. Ridley, I hate to mention it, but your entry fee of five dollars has not been paid yet. I thought perhaps you had changed your mind.”

  “Nonsense!” the woman snapped. “I never change my mind. About anything.”

  Marianne clenched her jaw. “I can see that, Mrs. Ridley. Once your mind is made up, it most certainly remains—” she bit the inside of her cheek “—closed.”

  She expected the woman to flounce out of the shop in a huff, but instead she extracted five crumpled dollar bills from her reticule, grasped Marianne’s hand and slapped them into her palm.

  “I expect that I will win first prize in your ladies competition, dearie. And I will expect the pair of boots to fit my foot exactly.” She lifted her skirt and waggled her black leather shoe.

  Marianne bit back the words that danced on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she looked into the unblinking, hostile eyes of the Ridley woman and made an instant decision.

  That afternoon Sammy set out to scout the course he would be laying out for the race. Both he and Lance were gone all afternoon, and by suppertime Marianne had worked up not only an appetite but a healthy dose of apprehension about her decision.

  Chapter Nineteen

  That evening, while she squished her fingers through the bowl of ground beef and chopped onion she was mixing up for her meat loaf, Marianne thought about what she had agonized over all day. Peeling potatoes and scraping carrots was not helping her to stay calm, and by the time she’d cobbled together an apple crisp for dessert she had worked up a full-blown case of nerves.

  She wanted Lance to approve of her. She wanted him to keep on liking her. In fact, she was surprised at how much his regard mattered. It made her feel something she had never expected as the result of this marriage…valued. Not just tolerated, or obeyed, but valued. It made her feel that she truly mattered to him.

  But this morning Eugenia Ridley had visited, and every other sentence out of the officious woman’s mouth made Marianne cringe. The woman disapproved of Indians. She didn’t trust Negroes. Somehow Marianne had thought people in the West would be free of that sort of prejudice.

  When she and Lance had arrived in Smoke River the townspeople had been friendly and accepting. Now she was beginning to see something else; under the surface perhaps things weren’t so different from the undercurrents of prejudice she had experienced back in St. Louis. Even though Mrs. Schneiderman had come from Germany when she was a young woman, she’d steadfastly refused to rent a room to anyone with a foreign-sounding name like Cohen or Wachowsky or Bloomberg. And the schoolteacher who taught at the private girls academy had been denied lodging just because her last name was Lipinsky.

  She couldn’t deny Eugenia Ridley’s right to enter a horse race that was open to everyone. But she also couldn’t pretend to like the woman. And for some reason she couldn’t explain she didn’t trust her. The uneasy feeling nagged at her.

  She pressed her meat loaf into the baking pan and set it in the oven, then began mixing up the topping for her apple crisp and tried to keep her mind on what she was doing. The closer suppertime came, when Lance would climb up the stairs for their evening meal, the more nervous she grew.

  When he finally appeared, dead tired after a long day of laboring under Abe’s critical eye, she put her dilemma out of her mind and concentrated on feeding him. Everything went well until dessert, when she finally confessed her plan.

  Lance stabbed his spoon into his bowl of apple crisp and stared at his wife. “You’re going to what?” he shouted.

  “I have decided to enter the ladies horse race on July Fourth.”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  Marianne slowly laid aside her fork and turned mossy green eyes on him. “No, I have not ‘gone crazy,’ as you put it. This is something I need to do.”

  “Why? You don’t ride. You don’t even own a horse!”

  Calmly she spooned out a second helping of dessert for him and rose to refill their coffee cups. “I do ride,” she said. “Though I admit I haven’t been on a horse since I was ten years old.” Her voice shook just the tiniest bit.

  “Then why are you thinking of doing it now?”

  She sidestepped his question. “Sammy said I
could ride one of his mother’s horses.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he pursued. “Why on earth do you want to enter this horse race?”

  She looked everywhere but at him, at her coffee cup, at the pan of apple crisp, even the cream pitcher. “Well, I want to do it because…because Eugenia Ridley is so worked up about Rosie Greywolf’s being an Indian that I am afraid she will cheat.”

  “Cheat? How could she cheat?”

  “Oh, there are lots of ways. She could put a cocklebur under Rosie’s saddle. She could feed Rosie’s horse cough syrup to make it drowsy. She could slice through Rosie’s reins so they would break during the race. She could… Oh, I don’t know. I just know Eugenia Ridley can’t be trusted.”

  Lance gulped down a swallow of coffee. “I don’t even want to ask how you would know about shenanigans like feeding a horse cough syrup.”

  Unexpectedly she grinned at him across the supper table. “I listened to a lot of talk around Mrs. Schneiderman’s dining table. You would be surprised at some of the things I learned.”

  Lance stared at her. God help me, I don’t know this woman sitting across from me at all! Sure, he slept next to her every night, and he’d kissed her until he ached so bad he couldn’t bear it, but did he actually know her? Know what went on inside her head? What she felt?

  Good Lord, did all men feel their wives were total strangers to them?

  Marianne was looking at him like a sleek cat who’d just finished a saucer of cream, and that made him wary. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to ride in the horse race because you don’t trust Eugenia Ridley.”

  “Yes.”

  He resisted the impulse to roll his eyes to the ceiling. “Marianne, just stop and think a minute. Even if Mrs. Ridley does do something unfair, what could you do about it?”

  “Oh, Lance, I don’t know. I just know that I don’t trust the woman, and I have to do something. I can’t let her think that nobody is watching what she does.”

  “I don’t like it. Marianne, I don’t want you to do this. You haven’t ridden for years. It’s dangerous.”

  “Lance, I’m not going to try to win the race. I just want to ride on the course along with the others, along with Annamarie Panovsky and Rosie Greywolf and Eugenia Ridley and the other women who enter. Carl Ness’s wife, for instance.”

  “Huh?”

  Marianne sent him a smile that made him uneasy and subtly changed the subject. “Did you know that Carl Ness’s wife, Linda-Lou, was a fine horsewoman when she was young?”

  “How young?”

  “When she was sixteen.”

  “Yeah? How old is Linda-Lou now?”

  Marianne shrugged. “Forty-something, I think.”

  Lance groaned. “Please don’t do this, Marianne. Please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you could get hurt.” He set his shoulders. “Marianne, I forbid you to ride in that race.”

  That stopped her. Or at least it slowed her down for a minute or two. She pressed her lips together and said nothing for a long time. Then she exhaled a deep sigh and straightened her spine in that way he remembered from the years at Mrs. Schneiderman’s, and suddenly he tensed.

  “Lance, we have a partnership of equals. We do not have a marriage in which a husband can forbid his wife to do something.”

  “Maybe that’s what we should have,” he replied. “Didn’t we promise to love, honor and obey?”

  “We promised to love, honor and keep each other in sickness and in health. We did not promise to ‘obey,’ if you remember.”

  He snorted. “Well, that was damned shortsighted of Reverend Pollock.”

  She flashed him an annoyingly sweet smile. “I think it was quite farsighted, if you ask me.”

  “Marianne…”

  She picked up her spoon and swirled it around and around in her bowl of apple crisp. “I will need a pair of riding boots,” she said slowly. “Tomorrow I’m going to ask Abe to measure my foot.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Abe jerked away from the iron boot last he was hunched over and pinned her with disbelieving brown eyes. “You’re gonna do what? Miss Marianne, ya wanna run that by me again?”

  “I am going to enter the ladies’ race on the Fourth of July.”

  He slapped his hand down on the leather sole he was stitching. “No, ya ain’t, girl. Horse-racin’ is dangerous out here if ya don’t know what ya doin’.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “And I will need a pair of riding boots.”

  “No, ya don’t.” He shoved the boot last to one side.

  “I most certainly do, Abe.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe I shoulda asked if Lance approves of this harebrained plan you come up with. Does he?”

  “Well, no, he doesn’t.”

  “But yer gonna do it anyways,” Abe muttered. “It’s writ all over yer face. I shoulda knowed a woman pretty as you ain’t got a lick of sense.”

  Marianne reached over and patted the gnarled hand resting on the half-finished boot. “You know that’s not true, Abe. I have very good sense.” Usually.

  He surveyed her with shrewd brown eyes. “Been kind of a short marriage, hasn’t it?”

  Marianne felt her cheeks grow warm. “Our marriage isn’t over,” she protested. “It’s just, well, undergoing some, um, growing pains.”

  “Miss Marianne, I been married before. And if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s this—a marriage that’s got ‘growin’ pains’ is a marriage that’s about to bust wide open.”

  Marianne shook her head. “Abe, didn’t you and your wife ever disagree on something?”

  He thought for a minute. “Well, I had plenty of disagreements with wife number two,” he said slowly. “And me an’ wife number four fought like wet cats.”

  “And what happened?”

  His face changed. “Well, now, me and wife number two argued ’bout most everything. Her name was Clarabelle, and she was real fussy. She didn’t like her bacon too crisp or her dresses too loose or her husband too spine-stiff. She didn’t like a whole lotta things, and after a while I decided I didn’t like her not likin’ so many things, an’ I called it quits.”

  “You mean you gave up,” Marianne accused.

  Abe’s graying eyebrows pulled into a frown, but he didn’t answer. “Now, wife number four, name of Lacey, she just up an’ left.”

  “Because of a disagreement?”

  “Guess so. Never did know ’xactly what tumbled her out the door. One mornin’ I jest woke up and she was gone. Didn’t leave me a note nor nuthin’.”

  “What was your disagreement about? It must have been about something important.”

  “Near as I kin remember, it was whether brown sugar or white sugar tasted better in a cup of tea.”

  Marianne laughed. “Abe, no woman leaves a man over a cup of tea. There must have been something else going on in your marriage that she wasn’t happy with.”

  “Huh! Most often a feller don’t have a gnat’s idea what’s goin’ on in his marriage.”

  “I think Lance might,” Marianne said quickly. Her face must be scarlet by now, she thought. She was remembering Lance’s kisses and how much she looked forward to nighttime when they lay close in their cobbled-together bed. “I think Lance understands many things about his marriage,” she repeated.

  Abe went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Now, wife number one, she didn’t like a lot of things, either, but I usually jest gave in. That’s why we stayed married as long as we did.”

  Marianne thought guiltily about Lance’s disapproval of her decision to enter the ladies’ race. About his actually forbidding her to enter. Was she wrong to want to do something Lance didn’t want her to do? Did being married mean that a wife could do only those things her husband allowed?

  Abe was looking at her with a strange expression on his lined face, half sympathy and half worry. “Miss Marianne, I’d be honored if you’d come back to my littl
e room and let me make you a cup of strong coffee. You look like you need some shorin’ up. And,” he added in a low voice, “some good advice, straight from the shoulder.”

  She followed him to his tiny quarters at the back of the shop and watched him fill the speckleware pot with water and dump in a handful of ground coffee beans. His place was neat as a pin, she noted. She’d bet Eugenia Ridley’s kitchen wasn’t half as tidy.

  “Set yerself down a spell, Miss Marianne, an’ get ready to listen to the smart things ol’ Abe’s gonna tell you ’bout bein’ married.” He gestured at a blanket-draped wooden apple box. She perched uneasily on top and watched Abe lift two coffee mugs off the nails in the wall.

  “You ain’t been married but a month, Miss Marianne.”

  “A month and four days, to be exact,” she said.

  “An’ already you’re rockin’ the boat. Now, is that ’cuz you got yer man so tied up in love knots he cain’t tell whether he’s comin’ or goin’?”

  “No,” she answered quickly. “I don’t believe Lance is tied up in…knots. He’s just flexing his male muscles by telling me what I can and can’t do because…well, because no doubt that is how his parents raised him.”

  “An’ how’s that?” Abe inquired.

  “Oh, you know. A man is supposed to provide for his wife, and in return a good wife is supposed to obey her husband.”

  “Lemme ask ya this, Miss Marianne. Ain’t you tied up in just a teeny tiny love knot yourself?”

  Marianne opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it. Instead, she bit her lip and focused her gaze on the coffeepot. Yes, she supposed she was just a teeny-tiny bit in love with Lance. “What difference would that make, Abe?”

  “Makes a whole passel of difference! You wanna do things that please him, don’tcha?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, then? Seems to me what ya need to do is obvious.”

  “Abe, I am used to being independent, making my own decisions. All those years I spent at the boardinghouse, from the time I was thirteen years old and on my own, taught me that I, and I alone, am responsible for my life.”