The Bridal Veil Read online

  But she had barely slept last night for remembering the way he’d looked at her, the kindness she’d seen in his smoke-colored eyes, and how her icy hands had felt warmed when he took them into his own. Everything feminine in her wanted to ignore her common-sense explanation of why Luke had sat on the porch with her, why she’d caught him watching her with a raw yearning that even she could recognize. In the deepest core of her, she felt herself responding to the same stirrings that the rest of the earth seemed to take in stride. She could easily imagine Luke covering her with his lean, hard body. The very notion scandalized, and yet tantalized. In fact, her own yearning begged her to believe that there was more to his attentions than a basic animal drive. But doubt plagued and confused her. When she looked in the square mirror in her room this morning, she saw the same face staring back at her that she’d known for twenty-eight years. The past weeks on the farm had not transformed her so that Luke would see someone besides the tall, plain woman who’d arrived here from Chicago. Only her bridal veil could perform that kind of magic. Even that notion was a work of fancy, one that she was trying to let go of. How odd that even as a rational, mature woman, she clung to the idea, the hope.

  And then there was still the matter of Belinda’s death—

  Emily was alternately puzzling over these thoughts and whip-stitching her sleeves when she heard Rose thunder up the stairs and slam her bedroom door. She was home from school already? Emily looked at the watch pinned to her bodice and realized how late it had gotten. Muffled sobs floated to her and she debated whether to intrude or not. She’d made good strides with Rose, but her role was still vague and undefined. No, she decided, the girl was suffering. Emily’s protective instinct took over and she put aside her stitching with the intention of comforting her. Before could leave her chair, though, Rose darted out of her bedroom again and charged back downstairs.

  “Rose! Where do you think you’re off to now?” Cora’s grating voice spiraled up the stairwell to Emily’s ears.

  “The barn.”

  “Well, missy, you just think about what I said. And since you and Mrs. Becker want to be family, you can make your own blamed supper.” Emily heard the front door slam. It reminded her of when the servants used to argue in the kitchen on Washington Boulevard, but this was far worse. The servants had never yelled at her or Alyssa. What in the world is going on? Emily wondered. She didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

  “You, Mrs. Becker!” came Cora’s rude bellow. “I’m going to sit with Bertie Richmond. She sprained her ankle and she can’t get her housework done. I hope you know how to cook.”

  The back door slammed with enough force to rattle the windows. And Emily found herself alone in a suddenly quiet house.

  ~~*~*~*~~

  “Miss Emily?”

  Emily looked up from the pile of potatoes that she was peeling, and not very well, she had to admit. At the back screen door, Rose stood with a dirt-and-tear-streaked face, clutching Cotton to chest. She struggled with the lamb’s limp weight. Its back feet dragged around Rose’s knees, the little hooves brushing against the legs of her overalls.

  “Rose!” She jumped from her chair and the potato she held slid out of her hands, bouncing across the floor. She ran to the screen door and held it open. “What happened?”

  “Cotton is worse again! He’s gasping for air. Daddy isn’t back from the feed store, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “Bring him in here.” Without a thought for the potatoes or the clean dinner plates she’d put out, Emily pushed everything aside to make room for the sheep. His fleece was grimy with hay, manure, and dirt, but that didn’t even cross her mind. “What did your father say is wrong with him?”

  “He said something about congestion of the lungs, but Cotton was getting better, truly he was.” Bewilderment and terror crossed her face in waves. “Only now—now—“

  Only now the little thing seemed to be panting as if he’d run across a field, his sides heaving with the effort to draw one breath. Now and then, he issued a weak bleat.

  Emily didn’t know the first thing about animal medicine, but she had rudimentary knowledge of how to ease a human’s breathing problems. “All right, we’ll have to work quickly. Get under the table.”

  “What?”

  “Go on. We’ll make a steam tent, and you need to hold him. I have a bottle of eucalyptus oil upstairs that we’ll use for an inhalant.” Rose crawled under, and Emily picked up the lamb and handed him to the girl. Then she raced out of the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom to get the oil. She opened her trunk and flung things right and left before she found the tissue-wrapped vial at the bottom. Galloping back down the stairs, she skidded to a halt in front of the sideboard, pulled open a drawer, and yanked out two tablecloths to make the tent. She flung them over the table, arranging them so that they reached the floor and created an enclosure underneath. Turning to the stove, she stoked the fire to a hot blaze, then pumped water into two big kettles and put them on the burners. From the kettle that always sat on the back of the stove, she poured boiling water into two crockery bowls and dripped over them the oil of eucalyptus. The aromatic vapor instantly filled the kitchen and gave it the odor of a sickroom.

  “Rose, here are bowls of hot water. Be careful that you don’t burn yourself.” She lifted one flap of the makeshift tent and pushed the medicated water inside. “Try to hold his nose close to the vapors.”

  “Oh, he won’t let me!” The lamb struggled in Rose’s arms, apparently having enough life left to fight his nurse. Emily dropped to her hands and knees and crawled under the table to help.

  “He’s probably scared and doesn’t understand that we’re trying to heal him.” She took the baby onto her lap and tipped his head close to one of the bowls. “Just hold him there.”

  Rose’s fear showed in her pale cheeks and tear-wet eyes. “Please let him live,” she prayed. “Please. He’s so little. And—and I don’t have much family.”

  Emily’s heart clenched in her chest. “What do you mean, dear? You’ve got your father and your grandmother—”

  “No, Grammy is mad at me. She found my drawing and she said I don’t love her.”

  God, again? Emily thought wearily, struggling with the lamb’s hooves. “What drawing?”

  The girl dashed a dirty hand across her eyes. “I’ve been drawing a picture on that brown paper you gave me. Kind of like that tapestry you told me about, the By—Bygone one?”

  “You mean the Bayeux Tapestry?”

  “Yes, that’s it. I’ve been sketching the story of our family on that long piece of paper. I started with Mama and Daddy and me in front of our house, and then I drew in Mama’s grave.” She went on to describe the picture as she’d sketched it thus far. “Then you come along in the story.” Rose hung her head and her braids swung forward.

  “And your grandmother didn’t like that?” Emily could just imagine that she didn’t.

  The girl gave a tremendous wet sniff and Emily heard the agony of heartache in her voice. “She said that I must not love her anymore and that I’d better figure out which side my bread is buttered on. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.”

  Just then, footsteps sounded on the stairs and the back door opened. “Lord above! Good Lord above!” Cora had returned. “Are those Belinda’s table linens?” Her voice climbed in volume with each word. Rose flashed Emily a look of fear.

  She put the lamb back in the girl’s lap and crawled out of the tent. Rising to her full height, she towered over Cora, who wore a battered blue straw hat and carried a knitting bag. “Yes, Mrs. Hayward. We’re trying to save Rose’s lamb. He’s having trouble breathing.”

  Cora’s contorted face turned scarlet and she made a series of inarticulate noises that raised the hair on Emily’s arms. “The lamb? You ruined Belinda’s beautiful tablecloths for a lamb? Have you lost your mind?” she screeched at last. “It’s a good thing I came back for my favorite apron, or who knows what you’d do to the res
t of the house. Didn’t I tell you to keep your hands off Belinda’s tablecloths? Didn’t I tell you not to touch any of her belongings, Miss Fine-and-Fancy-Manners?” Her fleshy double chin wagged like a turkey wattle with every word she shouted.

  Beneath the table, Rose began crying again and fury filled Emily’s head like the eucalyptus vapor. “Can’t you see how you’re upsetting Rose? Your behavior is appalling and unacceptable, Mrs. Hayward,” she replied, cutting off each syllable with fire and ice.

  Cora would not back down. “Oh, is that right? Well, everything was fine between me and Rose before you got here. Then you came, uninvited, trying to change things, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. You act like you own this place, lock, stock, and barrel. Well, you don’t! You’ll never belong here! This is still my daughter’s house.”

  At last, Emily thought, it was out. The dreadful harridan had finally joined words with her graceless attitude. “Then maybe we should set a place at the table for Belinda every night!”

  “Well! You have a lot of nerve, Mrs. Becker!”

  “A living creature has more worth than an inanimate object like a tablecloth! The living must be given greater consideration than the dead!” Mercy, she was actually shouting back in this ridiculous but vicious argument. “Have you no heart?”

  At that moment, Luke walked in. He’d heard the yelling from the yard and came up the steps in one jump. He didn’t know what was happening, exactly, but one look at Emily’s face told him that his mother-in-law had overstepped her bounds one time too often. He felt as if he’d plunged his head into the spinning blades of a windmill.

  “Cora!” he barked.

  “Tell her, Luke!” she demanded, whirling to face him. Her hat was askew on her head. “Tell her we don’t need her here! She’s done nothing but cause trouble.”

  All the years of resentment that he’d bottled up and tamped down, all the words he’d swallowed to keep the peace and give Rose a stable home, finally boiled over. Though his own home life had been one of constant arguing, his old man’s drunkenness, and abuse, he’d fry in hell before he saw that happen to Rose. “The only person causing trouble is you, Cora Hayward, and I’m goddamned fed up. I want you to pack up and go home.”

  She pressed her hand flat to her ample bosom, wearing the look of insulted dignity that he’d come to so despise. “Me? You want me to leave?”

  “The sooner the better, Cora. This day has been coming for months. I’m going to have peace under this roof. This is my house, not yours, and Rose is my girl, not yours.”

  “She’s more my blood than she’ll ever be yours.”

  “Cora.” The warning in his voice carried a threat that no one, not even his thick-skinned, block-headed mother-in-law could have mistaken. Even Emily’s eyes widened.

  Cora lifted her nose. “Well, what should I expect from the man who killed my daughter?”

  From somewhere under the table, Luke heard his own daughter sobbing. Cora had never come out and made that accusation until now, and he knew she was using it as a last resort. But she’d said it in front of Rose and Emily. God, would this nightmare never end? Luke wondered. And that smell, he thought irrelevantly, what the hell was it?

  “I think we know the truth about that, don’t we?” he ground out. “Who’s house did Belinda die in?”

  She gave him a poisonous look. “I’ll be gone in the morning. And there’s no point in trying to make me stay. I wouldn’t live here now if you got down on all fours and begged me.” With that, she spun on her heel and marched to the hall and up the stairs.

  Rose’s sobbing quieted to an eerie moaning.

  Emily pushed aside a corner of the tent. “Cotton has taken a turn for the worse,” she told Luke. “He can’t breathe.”

  “He’s not breathing at all now,” Rose announced, her voice teary and yet dull-sounding.

  Luke stooped down and looked at his daughter on the floor under the table. She had the lifeless, dirty sheep on her lap and while she held his head over a steaming bowl of some concoction. “Oh, hell, Rose, honey—I’m sorry.”

  “Daddy, you’ll save him won’t you? We’ve already tried everything we can.”

  The stricken, pleading look on her face made him want to promise just about anything, but he couldn’t save Cotton. The animal was dead. He climbed under the table with her, trying not to bump his head on the low overhead. Rose’s hair hung in dark, damp strands around her face. The air was thick with humidity and the combined smells of medicine and wet, dirty wool. He pulled Rose and the lamb onto his lap and wrapped his arms around them both.

  “He’s already gone, honey. I can’t do anything for him.” From the floor above, he could hear Cora opening and slamming drawers, and stomping around with great drama.

  “Oh.” Her chin began quivering again. “He was so little. What’s going to happen to him?”

  Luke’s heart ached for his daughter. No child should have to endure the kinds of losses and turmoil she’d suffered. What could he do? How could he make this better?

  Emily lifted the tablecloth and sat down cross-legged on the floor. It seemed so out of character for a woman who didn’t even let the back of a chair touch her spine. “Rose, would you like it if we have a little funeral for Cotton?”

  “Could we?” She turned to her father. “Oh, could we?”

  Luke thought it was a silly idea, but blessed Emily for her kindness and insight into the workings of a small girl’s heart. “Sure, honey. We’ll have a funeral.”

  “Can we bury him beside mama?”

  “What?” Luke started.

  Emily shot him a look and then said, “Wouldn’t you like it better if we bury him here on the farm, so he’ll be close by?”

  Rose thought about this and then nodded. She let Emily take the lamb from her arms. “Come on. Your father will help you find a nice piece of old blanket to wrap him in.”

  “Thanks, Emily,” Luke said, and even though tears stood in her eyes, he swore there was a smile in them.

  ~~*~*~*~~

  The sun was just a crimson ribbon on the western horizon by the time Emily made her way to the front porch. The evening stars were beginning to come out and she settled herself on the stool, feeling as creaky and tired as an old woman. Her black dress, the one that had already suffered through the visit to the chicken coop, was filthy again. Between holding Cotton and dragging her hem through the mud beside his grave, the dress was probably a loss.

  Rose had chosen to put Cotton’s gravesite under the oak. Luke had suggested something farther from the house, but in the end, he dug the hole under the tree and they’d had a brief service for the expired lamb. Rose had asked Emily to read a little Bible verse over Cotton, but she couldn’t think of one. Instead, she’d recited a stanza by Cecil Frances Alexander that seemed appropriate.

  All things bright and beautiful

  All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful,

  The Lord God made them all.

  While she supposed that it might be sacrilegious to commend a sheep’s soul to God’s keeping, she had asked anyway. It comforted Rose and what could it hurt? Emily held fast to her belief that kindness and consideration of others’s feelings were not a “blame-fool” waste of time. They were part of what made life bearable. Patently, Cora Hayward did not share this belief. A miserable, manipulative woman, she seemed bent on making those around her miserable as well.

  After Cotton’s funeral, Emily had scrubbed the kitchen table and put together a quick dinner of cold roast beef sandwiches. It wasn’t much, but no one’s appetite had been very keen. Cora had not come downstairs, but Emily made a sandwich for her too and left it covered with a clean napkin on the table.

  What a dreadful day it had been. Until now, Emily’s life had not been particularly happy, but it had been, for the most part, peaceful. Even though her circumstances had changed over the years from privileged to penurious, and included a liberal ration of heartache and los
s, voices in the Cannon household had been moderate and the emotional manipulations more subtle. She hadn’t grown up in a family that had been demonstrative of temper or given to the kinds of outbursts she’d seen under the Becker roof. This was all new to her. She found it to be very disturbing and exhausting.

  Behind her she heard the screen door squeak on its hinges. Luke came out and flopped on the top step near her feet. On the porch next to his thigh, he set down a whiskey bottle and a glass. Emily supposed he’d earned the right to a drink. She half wished that ladies were allowed to take a drink too.

  “How is Rose?” she asked.

  “She’s not asleep, but I think she’ll be all right. God, what a day.” He put his head in his hands for a moment, then began massaging the back of his neck. Watching this, Emily yearned to take up the task for him, to work out the tension in his muscles and feel his warm skin under her fingers. But it seemed too forward. “I guess I didn’t do a very good job of picking out that lamb and ewe. He was probably sick before I brought him home. If we lose the mama too, I don’t know what it’ll do to Rose.”

  “Is the ewe sick?”

  “No, at least not yet. Maybe she’ll be fine.” He poured a half-inch of amber liquor into his glass and drank it down in one swallow. He sucked a low breath through his teeth and turned tired gray eyes up to her face. “I want to thank you for everything you did today. If you hadn’t been here, well, Cora wouldn’t have been any help.” He stared at the step under his feet. “She wasn’t before.”