The Queen of Cherry Vale Read online

  THE QUEEN OF CHERRY VALE

  Behind the Ranges, Book I

  By

  Judith B. Glad

  Something hidden. Go and find it.

  Go and look behind the ranges--

  Something lost behind the Ranges.

  Lost and waiting for you. Go.

  Rudyard Kipling: The Explorer

  Uncial Press Aloha, Oregon

  2006

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Queen of Cherry Vale

  Copyright © 2000, 2006 by Judith B. Glad

  Previously published by Awe-Struck E-Books

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-009-0

  ISBN 10: 1-60174-009-3

  Cover design by Judith B. Glad

  All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author or publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Uncial Press,

  an imprint of GCT, Inc.

  Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

  Dedication

  To Neil with love.

  If you hadn't believed, this book would never have happened.

  * * * *

  Author's Note: Cherry Vale doesn't exist, but if it did, you would find it along the South Fork of the Payette River. I would never have discovered it without the many wonderful folks who've shared the splendor of Idaho's mountains and forests and rivers with me.

  Prologue

  1845

  The women wept for family and places to be left behind while the men spoke of new lives and unexplored lands.

  The women dried their tears and sorted the minutiae of their lives, discarding memories and treasures, weighing each thing against the knowledge that it must be carried two thousand miles and more. Food was more important than foofaraw, needles and pins more valuable than velvet bonnets and shoes with French heels. Chests and trunks were packed with sturdy clothing and underwear, potions and simples. They mourned the chiffoniers they left behind and made room for the chests and chairs they took. And if an empty corner was found for grandmother's china platter or the family Bible, well, no one would know until they reached Oregon.

  They learned much along the way. Shoes made for country lanes were too frangible for the mud and rocks and endless miles of the trail. Food tasted just as good cooked over buffalo dung and dusty bodies felt clean when washed in a cupful of precious water. A circle of spread skirts was enough for privacy, and no one noticed soft cries of completion when the ever-present wind soughed around the wheels and canopies of clustered wagons.

  The prairie and the mountains taught hard lessons. That life was more precious than the china platter or the butternut cabinet, that a plowshare might mean survival while a silver teapot did not. That there were hardships far worse than leaving behind all they knew and loved, for Oregon was far away and many of them would never see its rich green valleys.

  For Hattie Rommel, the journey West was but one more move in a life filled with moving. She hid her tears from Karl, for he had no patience with women's vapors. A wife went where her husband did--it was her duty.

  Perhaps, in Oregon, she would find a home.

  Chapter One

  "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And may God have mercy on your soul."

  The muted chorus of 'amens' still shivered in the chill of early morn when Colonel Whitehead shut his Bible with a snap. "Let's get rollin'," he said.

  A light touch on her arm roused Hattie from her stupor. She let dusty soil dribble from her fingers onto the blanket-wrapped form that had been her husband. A gentle arm turned her away from the grave. The women around her murmured their sympathy. She let them lead her back to the waiting wagons, didn't resist when she was urged to climb onto the high seat of hers.

  Dust choked her as the first wagon slowly swung into the broad track across the empty prairie. The oxen stepped out in line, big, gentle Odin not needing the touch of the goad carried by young Japhet Stone. The white ox was so intelligent that he hardly needed guidance, but Colonel Whitehead had nearly had a conniption fit when she said as much, back when Karl had first taken sick.

  She was so tired, so numb. So empty. It seemed like she'd been nursing the sick forever. The cholera had caught up with them along the Platte and Annie had been one of the first to sicken. Poor little tyke, she'd not suffered much. It had taken her so quickly. Hattie still looked for her among the children of the train, until she remembered once again that the child she'd raised from babyhood was gone, left in an unmarked grave beside the trail. Karl hadn't grieved any more for his daughter than she had. Than she did, for her arms were still empty, her heart still aching.

  And now Karl was gone too. She grieved, but she was angry too. With him. With herself.

  He'd promised to protect her, to give her a home. Then he'd left her alone, halfway to Oregon, where she hadn't wanted to go in the first place.

  No one had taken sick for more than a week now, so maybe they'd left the bad water and the miasmas behind them. The air in these high valleys seemed cleaner somehow than it did back home, or even on those endless plains before the divide.

  Soda Springs tonight, the colonel had said. Hattie had promised Japhet and Silas some of her precious store of sugar to sweeten the soda water that was supposed to gush from the ground. They, at least, were still young enough to be able to laugh and play at the end of a long, hard day. She was too tired, too old, even though she was scarcely twenty. She felt a hundred and twenty.

  She could still turn back. Almost every day they encountered a group returning to the East. To civilization. To safety.

  No. She could not--would not--go back. She'd left nothing behind. Her future, no matter how bleak, was somewhere out there. Toward the sunset.

  In Oregon she could put down roots and build a place of her own, somewhere she would belong for the rest of her life.

  * * * *

  Emmet topped a rise and halted, looking across the rolling countryside. A line of white shapes in the distance marked still another wagon train. Would they never stop coming, these seekers after paradise?

  He'd been looking forward to a bath in the hot pools at Soda Springs. There was still a sliver of castile soap in his possibles, left from a long ago week in Paris. He had a hankering to feel its spicy scent on his skin, instead of the reek of wood smoke and horse. He'd been in the mountains too long.

  He nudged his horse into a walk, letting the gelding find its own way down the hillside. Back when he'd come up the Mississippi with Clymer and Jones, he'd figured a year or two in the wilderness would be enough. The life had suited him, though, and he'd stayed until the itch in his feet grew too intense to resist. He'd found a certain peace in the cold, wet, difficult work of running traplines in frozen forests, a contentment in long winter nights in a smoky log cabin while he and Buffalo Jones spun impossible tales and repaired gear.

  But it was time to move on again. He wanted music and laughter and most of all, he wanted silky, clean women who smelled of flowers, not of fish and bear grease.

  Emmet waited until dark for his bath, certain t
he emigrants would be in bed almost as early as the chickens they carried in cages tied to the sides of their wagons. His moccasined feet made no sound on the hard-packed ground, nor did his well-worn buckskin pants rustle as wool would have. The sounds of the night were soft around him, usual sounds, nothing to alarm his well-trained perceptions.

  Until he heard the splash.

  It was not a fish, not a beaver. He froze, each sense on the alert.

  Another splash, followed by a formless cry. Emmet stepped off the path, into the sagebrush. Slipping from one tall shrub to another, he approached the bank that overlooked the creek.

  In the moonlight, white shoulders gleamed with droplets of water, slim arms lifted a dark cloud of hair, dripping, from the water. Even as he watched, she stood, her body tempting and perfect in the pallid light. She wrung water from her hair, stepped carefully toward the shore. As she bent and turned, patting herself dry with a tattered linen towel, he almost wept at the beauty of her. His sex strained at buckskin, demanding, hungry. His body all but trembled at the force of his sudden desire.

  She was within three feet of him as she climbed the path. He could have reached out and grabbed her, could have silenced her alarmed cry and carried her far from the security of her wagon, there to ravish her until his body was drained and empty. He could almost feel the satin of her warm skin, taste the sugar of her hot mouth.

  She smelled of lilac and he let her walk on.

  * * * *

  For the first time in weeks, Hattie felt almost alive. The long sleep, almost all day, as the wagon jolted and swayed along the trail, had healed her body of its crippling exhaustion. As for the other, the loneliness that she was all too familiar with, well, there was no cure for that. She'd known it before and survived. She'd survive again.

  What a relief it was to feel clean once more. Karl had never understood her love of swimming, and had forbidden her to bathe in the pond, even wearing her chemise. As if anyone but him and Annie would have seen her, but that hadn't mattered to Karl. It was indecent, he'd insisted, for her to want to undress herself like that. If she had to immerse her whole body in water, a tub before the kitchen fire was enough, just as long as he was warned so he wouldn't embarrass them both by walking in on her.

  "Silas? I'm back," she called softly as she approached the wagon.

  "Yo," the lad answered, and she saw him lay down the shotgun he'd carried ever since the day Karl took sick. He crawled under the wagon, to the thin pallet where he slept, a boy who'd done a man's work for too many of his fourteen years.

  Hattie climbed into the wagon, grateful that Karl had insisted that no wife of his was going to sleep on the ground. Now that he was gone--she tasted the word again. Gone. It was bitter on her tongue. Karl was gone, just like everyone else she'd ever cared for, and she was alone again.

  She forced her mind away from self-pity. Now that Karl was gone, she was going to have to be careful. Already she'd seen hunger in male eyes, read speculation and intention.

  Japhet didn't come to her wagon in the morning. Hattie helped Silas hitch the oxen instead of fixing breakfast. She gave him cold biscuits with bacon and milk instead of coffee.

  Before she could do much more than finish loading up, the colonel blew the starting horn. She wished someone would steal that blamed bugle. It was bad enough that the colonel--an honorary title, she was sure--ruled the train like a petty martinet. His not having a bit of music sense was the final straw. He hadn't hit a true note since they left Westport.

  Without Japhet, Hattie had to walk alongside Odin. She had no chance to check on the boy, so was relieved when Eli Stone slowed his big gelding beside her later.

  "Mornin' Mrs. Rommel," he said, his leathery face solemn. "I hope you're feelin' more yourself today."

  "I am, thank you, Mr. Stone. I think it was all that time nursing...." A sob caught in her throat and she bit her lip to hold it back. "I didn't get much rest, those last few days," she said, after a moment. "Karl was so restless, you see, and...."

  "Well, glad we could help out," Stone said. "Japhet appreciated the chance to earn some money all his own."

  "He's not sick, or anything?"

  "Fit as a fiddle. The colonel put him and some of the other boys on the herd today." Then, as if the idea had just then occurred to him, Stone said, "You didn't need him any longer, did you? The colonel said...."

  "No, I won't be needing him," Hattie said, wondering how on earth she and Silas would manage, without any help at all. But she'd seen what had happened to Elizabeth Wright after her husband died. It was not going to happen to her. The colonel wasn't going to force Hattie into anything she didn't chose to do. Nobody was, ever again.

  Having expected him all day, Hattie was not surprised when the colonel appeared as she was preparing supper.

  "Evenin', Mrs. Rommel." Winston Whitehead made himself at home, sitting on the tongue of her wagon as if he had a right to be there.

  Hattie wiped her forearm across her face, knowing she was leaving streaks of dirt but not particularly caring. "Good evening, Colonel." She used the poker to replace the cast iron lid on the Dutch oven, squinting her eyes against the heat from the coals. The coffeepot sat at the edge of the fire, still hot, still partly full, but she'd be blessed if she was going to offer him any.

  Not after he'd decided she no longer needed Japhet's help.

  He sat silently for several minutes, watching while she finished the supper dishes and put them back into the chest at the back of her household wagon. She turned the spider upside down on a rock near the fire, after rubbing it with lard to maintain its season. Hattie wondered if he ever did anything but look important. Certainly she'd never seen him turn his hand to a task more strenuous than blowing his fool horn.

  "You recall the agreement about single women?"

  Hattie had almost forgotten he was there. She still had milk to skim and a big tear in Silas' second best shirt to mend.

  Cautiously she nodded. Surely the agreement didn't apply to her?

  "Well, then, I don't need to explain your duty to you, now do I? It's been four days since your husband passed on. I calculate that gives you until the fourteenth, but I'll not pressure you."

  "You'll not pressure...." Hattie sputtered, clenching her fists and her jaw.

  Hattie had signed no agreement, had been completely unaware of its contents until just the other side of the Chimney Rock when, in the course of forty-eight hours, strong young Leland Wright had died of the cholera and the colonel had insisted his grieving and pregnant widow be wed within two weeks. Dazed, lost, Elizabeth had complied, and now she was married to a dour, middle-aged wheelwright who'd been the only man willing to take her and her little brood of three on, given that everything she owned was in the single wagon pulled by three oxen and one old milch cow.

  Yes, Hattie knew about the agreement, signed by all the men in the train, but affecting the women so much more. And she knew her only alternative was to leave the train at Fort Hall and hope that the next one to come by would take her on. Or she could go back.

  Back to Missouri, where they'd wintered, waiting for the spring? Back to Pennsylvania, where Karl's farm now belonged to someone else? Or back to New York, where all that was left of her family was a line of headstones in a cemetery?

  No. She would get to Oregon, come hell or high water. She was more than halfway there already.

  Her aunt Nettie had always said she'd catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Hattie forced herself to smile. "I didn't think... well, we're so close to Oregon. I guess I figured I wouldn't need to remarry. After all, Silas...."

  "Now, Mrs. Rommel, you know better than that." The colonel's voice was soothing, patient. "It's just not fair to the other men in the train, having a pretty young woman like you alone and needin' help with her stock and her wagon. Why, what would happen if you broke a wheel, or your cattle strayed? Without a man of your own, you'd be forced to call on the others, with no way to pay them back."

&nb
sp; "I have money!"

  "Money don't make much difference out here in the wilderness," he said. "What's needed is help in kind. Your neighbor helps you, you help him. But you can't. You're just a woman. It takes a man to do what's needed about a wagon."

  "We've been managing," she said, knowing they hadn't. Both she and Silas were near to dropping from exhaustion. It was all she could do to cook them a decent meal at the end of the day, and they hadn't had anything but cold collations for breakfasts and dinners since Karl took sick. Two wagons, fourteen oxen, a horse and a milch cow were simply too much for a woman and a boy to manage. Hattie tested the bread, tipped it out onto the dishtowel she held. She set it on the wagon seat to cool.

  The colonel went on as if she hadn't spoken. "We'll be getting to Fort Hall tomorrow. It's been a while since we took a day of rest, so I'm thinking about a layover there. We'll have a dance, kick up our feet a bit. It's time you got to know your neighbors better, so you'll come along to it instead of sitting here and brooding."

  "I don't dance." Karl hadn't held with dancing, although she'd often thought it sounded like fun. Imagine prancing around in time to music, just for the enjoyment of it.

  "Well, you can't learn any younger. There's four or five real nice fellas who'd be willing to take you as a wife. This'll give you a chance to look 'em over without makin' any promises." There was steel in his voice, for all its unctuous tones.

  "I'll be there," she said, knowing if she wasn't, he would send his wife to fetch her. He nodded in satisfaction and departed, no doubt to bedevil some other poor unsuspecting soul.

  She'd seen the "nice fellas." There wasn't a one she'd marry, not if her life depended on it.

  There would be men eager to marry her, she knew. She was rich, by the standards of this train. There were only a few families with more than one wagon, even fewer by now with extra oxen. The gold Karl had hidden in his tool chest was a secret, but her wealth was nonetheless obvious.