Maddie smiled broadly at that. “So you didn’t love her anymore?”
“Not much.”
“But you haven’t told me how she caused you to join the army.”
“After she left Warbrooke I heard the men talking about how my father fished his Montgomery brats out of the sea. I bet my mother wished that were true. She had a difficult time delivering the last child. Anyway, when I saw my life all laid out for me, I realized I didn’t want that life. I didn’t want to be eighty and still planning how I was going to get away from the responsibilities of the business. I could have climbed aboard any of our ships and gone around the world, but I decided I wanted to see the desert, and also I was sick of responsibility. I wanted to be one of the crew, not one of the bosses. I wanted to know what it felt like, that if things went wrong, it wasn’t my fault. So I joined the army as a private and applied for the western campaign.”
“And they sent you where you wanted to go?”
“It wasn’t so difficult. All I had to do was demonstrate that I could ride a horse.”
“And to think: Toby said that he had been hired by your father because you weren’t interested in women.”
“Toby doesn’t know all there is to know about me. He complained that I wasn’t interested in the women available to soldiers. The forts are surrounded by places called ‘hog ranches.’ They’re named for the women who inhabit them and the women in them are as clean as their name implies. Everywhere in the army the men are dying of the pox. The only other white women a man sees are those brought in from the East, and they’re either the wives or daughters of the officers. You get into trouble with one of them and all kinds of awful things can happen.”
“But Toby said you weren’t interested in the women he introduced you to.”
“The first woman he ‘introduced’ me to in a little town outside Warbrooke was named Bathless McDonald.”
“Bathless? What an odd name. It sounds as though she’s never had…”
“She hadn’t. She bragged about never having had a bath in her life. She was quite pretty, but when she started sticking parts of her body in my mouth, I…ah, well, anyway, I found the experience less than enjoyable. I tried to explain to both my father and Toby, but both of them thought I was too finicky.”
“Are you? Finicky, I mean?”
“Very. I want only the best. The very, very best.” He tightened his arms around her and put his face in her neck.
“Are you ready to go to sleep?” he asked after a while.
She didn’t nod or give him any signal that she wanted to sleep, but her body was pliant as he lowered her to the cold, hard ground and wrapped her snugly in his arms. Maddie was far from asleep. She was thinking about the time she’d known him. Only a short time, but it seemed like a lifetime.
She turned a bit in his arms so that she could look at him, look at the way the firelight played on his cheekbones. She thought he was asleep, so she brought her free hand up to touch his lower lip. He didn’t open his eyes.
“I am beginning to love you, you know that, don’t you?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“You are beginning to take up as much of my thoughts as my music does.”
He didn’t say a word, but she thought he smiled a bit. “Not many men love their rivals.”
She wanted to ask him what he felt about her, but she was afraid of the answer. How could she love someone, especially someone like him? He was a man who needed freedom, a man who had no connections with the music world.
“When do you get out of the army?”
“Next year.”
“And what will you do?”
“Go home to Warbrooke. My father needs me.”
She sighed. And I shall go to Paris or Vienna or Florence, wherever people want to hear me sing. “Good night, my captain,” she said, and closed her eyes.
’Ring opened his eyes and looked at her for a long while before falling asleep. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be holding her. He’d wanted to since he’d first seen her. Making love to her could wait until she was sure about him, as sure about him as he was about her.
By the end of the second day it seemed almost natural to Maddie that she should be chained to this man. They learned how to move together, how to give each other privacy when needed, how to talk and how to be silent.
’Ring’s stories of his family had awakened Maddie’s curiosity, and she began to ask him all about himself, about Warbrooke and the inhabitants. He told outrageous stories about his cousins the Taggerts, who, along with the Montgomerys, seemed to make up most of the town.