“The Indians wanted my scalp, but I was fierce to keep it.”
“There must be more,” the older woman prodded.
“Ah, the skirmishes?” He scratched his throat where his collar ringed too tight. “Behind schedule, we had two miles of track to lay by the end of the week. A bunch of Irishman were to be working on an outlying trajectory. Instead, they drank, including the guards. The Cheyenne used the opportunity to attack and take them prisoners.”
“Chen and I set off to get them back. Their trail was easy to track. We found two men had fallen beneath Comanche torture and mutilated. The nineteen-year-old was a favorite of mine. He had wanted a girl to hold in his arms not for a passing hour but for an eternity. To speak to her in the moonlight, a girl eager for the bright beauty of new love with ears to listen. The men had made fun of his dreams where he superimposed himself as a knight in dazzling armor who journeyed to find his golden-haired princess. Maybe he was a fool, a starry-eyed optimist, yet he was a brave young man with an honest dream.”
Louise dropped the binoculars to her lap. “What absurd tales you weave. I don’t believe a word of them.”
“Go on,” Elizabeth prodded him, eager to find out what happened.
“In the light of the hollow moon, we trailed the sound of the Comanches singing their death songs. We crawled across rough escarpment hidden by tall grasses. The Comanches were busy with their dancing and drinking. We untied our men. As I freed the last man, one of the Indians shouted an alarm.”
Zachary turned, inclined his head in acknowledgement of Mrs. Merriweather whose eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “What happened?”
Zachary skated his hands through the air, mimicking a gateway to that violent part of the world. “The liberated men had secured the Indians’ horses and were able to get away. Chen was caught. I couldn’t leave him behind. I fought to free him, and then was captured.”
Elizabeth’s eyes grew wide. “And?”
“The Comanches, or ‘Lords of the Plains’ they call themselves, are handy with their knives.”
“You were tortured,” Elizabeth said.
His eyes locked with hers. Was she mocking him? A knot grew in his belly. No. He saw admiration.
Louise rolled her eyes upward with the practiced ease of a stage heroine in a matinee performance. “Ridiculous. All of this is made up from a dime novel.”
Mrs. Merriweather masked her mouth behind her program. “The fact that earthworms have survived for billions of years without brains is evidenced in Louise.”
“He is being polite, Louise, and sparing our feminine ears,” Elizabeth said to her sister, and then faced him, placing her hand on her heart. “It seems you are in the habit of saving people at risk to your own life. You are not afraid of anything, are you, Mr. Rourke?”
It was a double entendre and they both knew it. He’d thrown himself into a raging, icy river to save her, and then delivered her child.
“No Ma’am. I did what any other self-respecting man would do.”
“I must say you are not the men of my acquaintance.”
“You have my pity.”
The opera began and Zachary had to admit, he was enthralled with the spectacle.
Near the end of the performance, Elizabeth swayed, her shoulder brushed his. “I have the highest respect for you.”
He turned to her, caught her earnestness.
And in that moment a new connection grew between them, linking an indefinable, palpable, rare bond like threads, thousands of tiny, tiny threads sewn together. A radiant glow filled her face with awe, her violet eyes bright and glossy, and his throat thickened, captured in the moving sea between the shores of two souls.
Mrs. Merriweather proved to be an illustrious matchmaker. She refused Louise and her husband and insisted on Zachary and Elizabeth to escort her home in her carriage. The sly woman begged to be let off first, ordering her driver to take the long way to their respective homes.
Zachary watched Elizabeth. The play of flickering gaslights rode across her face as the coach traversed through town. Elizabeth took a deep breath and tucked her lace handkerchief in her reticule.
In the deafening silence, Elizabeth cleared her throat. “You must say the opera was lovely. How was it for your first experience?”
Zachary swallowed. His first experience? He remembered how a group of Indian women initiated him. They had forced him on soft furs and through gentle laughter stroked him, until one with long, smooth legs slid down on him. He loosened his four-in-hand knotted necktie.
He stalled, lowering the side window, and leaned out for a better view. The buildings of the great city were spread in front of him like a swathe of inky black against the brilliant moonswept landscape. The skyline of Manhattan was a solid phalanx of thrusting iron and stone, and so was he.
“You must have felt something,” she prodded.
