The Northern Devil Read online

  He leaned over and kissed Rachel gently on her forehead. “Wait here for me, dear. There’s no need for you, too, to face her malice.”

  Malice? Flabbergasted, she opened then closed her mouth, unable to think of a response to a son who’d use that word for his mother’s actions.

  He left without another word, striding out of the stateroom like a cavalry officer going into battle.

  Rachel promptly scrambled out of bed. Like hell—as Elias would have said—would she permit her husband to face any sort of appalling social scene alone and unaided. But if he felt this called for pearl studs and a diamond stickpin, she would need something more than her very simple dinner dress. Thankfully, she’d smuggled some of Elias’s more ostentatious gifts of jewelry with her from Boston.

  What else would she need?

  She surveyed herself in the mirror.

  Her braids and corset had survived Lucas’s lovemaking—more or less. She’d have to wash up, of course.

  She also looked exactly like what she was: A newly-married wife, who was deeply confident of her husband’s attentions. That was armor well worth having in any confrontation with another female, even his mother.

  She yanked the bell pull, hoping Lawson and perhaps some of the Union Pacific porters from next door were helping Braden cope with the current upheaval. She’d need every bit of Braden’s genius to reach the drawing room quickly.

  Lucas faced his parents across the drawing room, praying Rachel would have the good sense to stay in the stateroom and out of the line of fire. Any scene, however unpleasant, would be worth it, as long as her social position remained solid.

  To his surprise, he felt more relaxed than usual around his mother.

  In contrast to his father’s autocratic stature, Aurelia Grainger stood slightly less than average height and had retained the soft curves of a young matron. Her once-blond hair had seamlessly transmuted into silver, but her classic features and translucent skin allowed her to pass for a woman of less than half her age. She always wore either full or half mourning, depending on the occasion, and always in the latest Paris fashion. While his father was a power among the East’s great railroad and banking boardrooms, a word from his mother could make eastern society’s most rarefied circles tremble.

  She was wearing an evening dress made in Paris and styled in full mourning’s deep black, with what his sister called her dowager’s jewels of pearls and diamonds. She obviously wanted to gain the maximum amount of sympathy during this conversation, probably to burden him with guilt.

  “Welcome aboard, sir, Mother. Would you care for something to drink?” He wouldn’t invite them to join him for dinner unless forced. “Coffee, tea, or wine?”

  T.L. shifted slightly, an unusual admission of discomfort. Mother, however, pushed forward regardless—as usual. She’d been the Grainger matriarch since the day she married T.L., almost thirty-five years ago, and thus ruled her surroundings. “We’ll take wine, of course.”

  Lucas glanced at the Union Pacific steward, who nodded and withdrew, his expression impassive and his arms overflowing with fur-trimmed coats. Where the devil was Braden? Probably helping Lawson in the kitchen, who’d need every bit of assistance to cope with these guests’ expectations.

  “Please sit down,” Lucas invited.

  Mother shook out yards of ornate black silk ruffles and pleats, sat down on the central settee, and arranged her skirts and train in the most imposing fashion possible. All hail the queen, was what her children had always called that move.

  What blistering lecture did she plan this time? Surely the Old Man had said everything possible in Chicago.

  T.L. took up his station beside her, his hand on the back of her settee—in the perfect position to back or even increase her demands.

  Lucas moved to face them, also resting his hand on the back of a carved settee. Damned if he’d look like he was still a schoolboy, waiting to be whipped.

  Silence fell within the Empress. Outside, the faint sounds of a few hundred people competing to eat within a few minutes at the station could be heard.

  Lucas’s jaw tightened before he offered the first conversational gambit, his duty as host. “I hope you had a pleasant journey. The weather’s been quite gentle the past day or two.”

  “The wind was bad on the first day—” the Old Man began, accepting the need for social chitchat. After all, he was one of the country’s great bankers and had been through many difficult negotiations.

  But Mother broke in. “We’re not here to discuss the weather, as we all know. So let’s discuss substantive matters instead.”

  Ah, that was the mother he knew: Brusque, dictatorial, and self-centered. Lucas lifted an eyebrow and waited.

  She surveyed him like a disdainful butcher. “I understand you refused to marry the Tallmadge chit.”

  Lucas stiffened. Dammit, when would she accept that she had no right to order him into marriage, let alone for this reason?

  “You must understand that it’s your duty to do so, in order to provide another daughter named Martha to the Grainger family.”

  How many hundreds—thousands?—of times had he heard this demand for restitution before? Since he’d first grown old enough to attend a cotillion and be introduced to respectable females as an eligible partí. Nothing else about him mattered to her anymore, except as an avenue to replace the lost child.

  His fingers clenched but he managed not to grip the settee, especially when he wanted to lunge at her. He’d try to behave like an adult, even if his mother insisted on treating him as a child, whose every action could be ordered according to her whim. He was the spare to Tom’s heir, bred for family necessity not love.

  “No, I don’t understand that at all,” he said carefully. “Another woman named Martha would be exactly that—another woman, not the sister I once knew.”

  “She’d be a daughter for me—someone to go shopping with and share the latest gossip with, as only a daughter can be trusted. And unlike Hortense, who has always whined too much to listen to anyone else.”

  A muscle ticked in Lucas’s jaw. No, family life was something he’d glimpsed with Rachel—something strong and warm, something chosen by its members, that was strengthened every day. “If you want a daughter, adopt one. You have contributed generously to many orphanages and I’m sure one would help you.”

  He watched his mother warily; they’d never spoken so openly on this topic before.

  Her mouth tightened. “You’re responsible for the solution, since you caused the tragedy.”

  “It happened twenty years ago,” he said quietly, “and all of us have changed. No, I will not marry simply to introduce a woman named Martha into the family.”

  His mother swelled, looking like a puff adder getting ready to strike. Her mouth opened, words clearly taking form to strike.

  “Good evening, my dear,” Rachel’s gentle alto voice swept through the room like sweet summer rain.

  Lucas spun to face her and his jaw dropped. Behind him, he heard his father, ever a connoisseur of feminine beauty, whistle very softly.

  He’d taken to his stateroom a well loved but simply dressed wife. He beheld a ravishingly beautiful society matron in a stunning Parisian evening dress, with rubies and diamonds blazing at her throat and ears. Only her complicated braids remained from earlier, but even they were now adorned by glittering jewels. A queen would have been proud to call her friend.

  Nothing in her demeanor showed that she’d heard any of his mother’s demands.

  She’d also just trumped his mother’s attire of dowager’s black. Even the family matriarch would have to take Mrs. Lucas Grainger seriously.

  “My darling Rachel.” Lucas went quickly forward to her, kissed her cheek, and brought her forward on his arm, always keeping his hand protectively over hers.

  Rachel wanted to tell him that he was the one who needed help, not her, but settled for gently patting him.

  “Mother, Father, allow me to introduce you to my
wife Rachel.”

  “Your wife!” His mother came out of her settee in a rush, rather like a vicious kitchen dog who’d been deprived of a bone.

  “Rachel, my parents, Thomas and Aurelia Grainger.”

  Rachel swept her mother-in-law a curtsy, keeping her face composed. “Mrs. Grainger, Mr. Grainger.”

  So this was Lucas’s nightmare. Aurelia Grainger was probably sometimes called handsome, although her face was contorted and ugly at the moment. She’d certainly made some extremely selfish demands of a grown son.

  The older man gripped his wife’s hand very hard, making her stand still.

  “Impossible!” the elder Mrs. Grainger protested. “You weren’t married to her three days ago.”

  “No, we wed yesterday.” Lucas’s jaw set, visibly daring them to argue.

  “Then you’ll annul it immediately,” T.L. snapped. “If I’d believed that cable you sent, instead of dismissing it as folderol, I’d have already told you so.”

  Rachel blinked at her father-in-law’s demand. Aurelia Grainger had already shown her colors but she’d hoped for common sense from the head of the household.

  “You’ll have to find another way to obtain the Tallmadge money,” Lucas snapped. “Besides, Rachel’s children will inherit the Davis Trust. Given that and what I provide, the San Francisco branch of the Grainger family will be well funded.”

  Lucas’s father had wanted his son to marry for money? Of all the selfish, blind reasons! Worse, did he think that Lucas was a witless boy? Had he paid no attention to Lucas’s character and deeds these past ten years?

  “San Francisco branch?” T.L. queried, sounding startled.

  “Yes. I will never live in Philadelphia again.”

  “It’s your home!”

  “No, it is not—nor has it been for years,” Lucas snapped back.

  “What about visits?”

  “Rarely and only for Tom’s sake.” Lucas clearly saw little need to grace his decision with elegant words.

  Aurelia was studying Rachel, eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Rachel Davis?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rachel waited warily, her face calm. She’d faced the most supercilious circles in Boston society before. But she didn’t want to offend Lucas’s mother in front of him.

  T.L. hissed out a breath. “The bookseller’s granddaughter. Good Lord, Lucas, couldn’t you have done…”

  “If you insult my wife, sir,” his son purred in a deadly soft voice, “I will take the greatest delight in throwing you off this train—when we are halfway between stations. Need I say more?”

  The two men measured each other, almost as if they were in a pugilist’s ring. Finally T.L. flicked his fingers, looking as if a pit had opened at his feet that he needed to judge how to bridge.

  “Do you know what sort of man you married, girl?” Aurelia demanded, her voice dripping vitriol.

  Rachel’s gaze snapped back to her. “Ma’am?”

  “He’s a murderer.” She uttered the words with all the conviction of a town crier.

  Rachel shook her head. Good heavens, her husband hadn’t been joking about malice. “Not Lucas.”

  He shifted convulsively beside her and she tightened her grip on him, refusing to be moved. This confrontation—with his mother, for whatever reason—was why she’d come to support him.

  “For twenty years I’ve mourned what he did.” Aurelia’s voice dropped to a lament that would have done credit to King Lear. “Look at me, still wearing black! But not him—he’s built a happy life, all the while refusing to listen to our counsel.”

  Rachel tried to defuse the scene by offering some indisputable facts, couched as diplomatically as possible. “Twenty years ago, ma’am, Lucas was a child of only seven or eight years old. Nothing he could have done…”

  “He murdered his sister, Martha.” Aurelia Grainger unpinned a mourning locket and thrust it at the younger woman.

  Rachel would have been more comfortable handling a scorpion.

  “She was my mother’s namesake, a perfect angel sent among us by heaven above,” her mother-in-law said softly, producing a lace-trimmed, black handkerchief, “and she drowned because of him.”

  “She was a hoyden, who would obey nobody!” Lucas burst out. “She’d just gotten another governess fired. Don’t tell me she hadn’t because she was bragging about it.”

  “Lucas…” his father growled.

  His son whipped around to face him. “No, this has to be said. We have all been silent too long. Martha was eight years old, yet she’d had four governesses in that last year.”

  Rachel flinched, the locket nearly falling out of her fingers. Having raced after Mercy many times, she could vividly imagine what scrapes Martha must have gotten into.

  “Lucas, you’re reminding me of that dreadful day…”

  “Am I wrong?”

  His mother glared at him, but didn’t argue.

  “That’s why you left her with me at the lake, because everyone else had either failed before or refused to keep her out of trouble. I was only seven so I couldn’t refuse and I was taller than she was. I’d never failed because I was too young to have been entrusted with her before.”

  T.L. gasped.

  Rachel’s gaze shot to him. He’d gone very pale under his tan.

  “Mother was only going to be gone for a few minutes, to have tea with Mrs. Wilson. Tom was fishing and Hortense was playing croquet with school friends. But Mother knew Martha would walk across that fallen log because she always did what people had forbidden her to do,” Lucas accused his mother.

  “I did not,” Aurelia snapped.

  “But that morning, the log was wet, there was a river underneath, and Martha’s skirts dragged her under,” Lucas went on, his deep voice the sound of a judge’s wrath. “Her governess had always told her to ‘be careful, next time you’ll slip and drown.’ Well, that time it did happen. But I’m damned if I’ll take the blame for the rest of my life.”

  “Oh, dear Lord, I hadn’t known all the details before,” T.L. whispered. It was a prayer, not blasphemy.

  The mourning locket fell open in Rachel’s hand and she glanced down. A smiling face looked up at her, full of quicksilver merriment and deviltry. A child who’d have disobeyed every command given her and laughed at the consequences, not an angel meant to move sweetly and quietly at her mother’s side.

  Tears filled her eyes, blurring the childish features and their likeness to Lucas. She closed the locket, making sure the latch was tightly fastened.

  “You’re wrong,” Aurelia cried. “Wrong!”

  Lucas’s features could have been carved out of granite, for all the compromise they offered. Deep brackets were etched from his nose to his mouth, lined in white. His eyes were as coldly blue as light glinting off a revolver’s muzzle.

  “Perhaps. But I won’t fail my children, as you failed her. I’ll always guard and protect them to the utmost, no matter it costs me—because that’s what Martha’s death taught me.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was a few hours after dawn and the air was harshly cold, carrying the raw bite of deep winter at more than seven thousand feet above sea level. The wind was laden with sagebrush, backed by the tang of snow and ice from the distant mountains.

  Every writer called it the finest grazing land in this part of the continent, a place of flat, open plains full of running antelope. Yet it stood only one hundred fifty miles from the Continental Divide and Utah’s brutal mountains. Collins strongly suspected that, given the heavy clouds hanging above the mountains, snow would start falling within a few more hours.

  All around him, clouds of steam, touched with sparks and cinders, rose from the great wooden machine shop and roundhouse. Workmen pounded with massive sledgehammers as they labored over the great locomotives and their attendant equipment, all designed to take passenger trains safely to and from Utah and Nebraska. A massive woodshed flanked the roundhouse on one side, while an equally enormous coal shed flanked it on the
other, ready to feed the great locomotives’ appetites for fuel.

  Dozens of laborers, traveling aboard the work train to shovel snow, piled into the station house, intent on eating a hot meal made to their taste, rather than the Union Pacific’s budget. Two of them, at opposite extremes of life—a half-breed, sinewy and weather-beaten by the years, and a rawboned young man—came last out of the work train’s barracks. They chose to devour their scant rations standing in the sun near the woodshed, rather than with the other laborers—and down-wind of the supervisor’s office.

  Collins leaped up the stairs to the office and heartily shook hands with Leventhorpe, the Union Pacific’s assistant supervisor at Laramie.

  “A pleasure to meet you again after all these years, my dear Alexander,” he exclaimed, genuinely delighted. “I do hope the lumbago isn’t treating your father too poorly this year?”

  The well-dressed man beamed. “Not at all, not at all. The hot baths you recommended have worked wonders for him. Indeed, he hasn’t been so free of pain in years—even if he did have to go north, into Yankee territory, to find it.”

  Collins slapped him on the back and they laughed companionably together. Savannah’s Leventhorpe family had always found it amusing that one of their most profitable business partners was the very northernmost Collins shipping line. Collins had sponsored his third son into a Yankee college, where he’d gained enough mathematics to earn an excellent series of jobs with the railroads. The two families had stayed in touch, of course, although little business had been conducted during the past few years, given the War’s ravages.

  Maitland came slowly up beside his father. His wound had swelled considerably until he could barely speak and only eat bread soaked in milk. His head was wrapped more in bandages than scarves. He was in agonizing pain but had refused all laudanum, claiming it dulled his mind.

  Collins swallowed another instinctive demand to send his son back to their private Pullman. “Alexander, may I present my son, Maitland?”

  His son bowed slightly, mumbling something polite.

  An appalled expression washed over Leventhorpe’s face, quickly disciplined into a gentleman’s civility.