Heart of the West

by Penelope Williamson

Genres: General Fiction; Romance; Western Romance

Synopsis

A classic sweeping tale of intense passion as wide as the open prairie, from the bestselling romance novelist Penelope Williamson. “There’s a bigness about Montana that tends to frighten a lot of people. But it’s not so big you can’t find what you’re looking for, if you know what that something is.” A handsome cowboy with laughing eyes, Gus McQueen sweeps like a Western wind through Boston’s staid streets. His big dreams capture the heart of proper young Clementine Kennicutt, whose zest for life has been stifled by fear of her stern father. When Gus proposes marriage, Clementine impulsively accepts. Montana is all Clementine has dreamed it could be...and far, far more. The harsh realities of frontier life are a shock, but it is Gus’s ne’er-do-well brother Rafferty whose raw masculinity steals her breath away. Gus is the man she married, though, and Clementine is determined that neither the frontier nor her marriage will defeat her. With her adventurous spirit set free at last, she overcomes every challenge...until Rafferty forces her to face him—and herself—and make her choice.

Release date: June 25, 2013

Publisher: Pocket Books

Print pages: 800

Sample

Heart of the West

1

HE WASN’T COMING. OH, God, he wasn’t coming after all!

Clementine Kennicutt paced back and forth across the shell-patterned carpet, kicking at her skirts with the patent leather toes of her walking boots so that the stiffened muslin whispered in the too silent night.

She paced her dark and quiet bedroom. Down to the black walnut wardrobe. Over to the four-poster bed, all swaddled in white chintz and eyelet lace. Across to the fireplace. A lyre clock sat on the green marble mantel, its pendulum silently swinging. She had to lean close to its porcelain face to see the time. Ten minutes past midnight, ten minutes late. He wasn’t coming, wasn’t coming . . .

Back to the window, where faint light spilled in from outside. She pushed aside the voile undercurtains to peer down at the street. The glass was smeared with rain, and moist air made halos around the streetlamps. Moonlight lanced through melting storm clouds. The iron fence around Louisburg Square cast spiky shadows onto cobblestones that were slick with water and deserted.

There—surely that was a coach light flickering through the elm trees across the square. She pressed her face against the pane, trying to see better, but her breath fogged the glass. She flipped up the latch and pulled open the window.

The hinges squealed and she froze, her heart thudding in her throat. She eased the window open more slowly then. She could hear the wind now and the harshness of her own breathing.

A gust ruffled the green velvet drapes, slapping them against the casement. Behind her the crystal lusters on the mantel lamps tinkled. She leaned out the window, feeling the wind cool on her face. It smelled of the rain and of coal smoke. The street, shining with the wet, was empty still. He wasn’t coming.

“What are you doing?”

She whirled, almost stumbling. Light from the silver chamber stick in her mother’s hand threw huge shadows on the cream silk-covered walls. Clementine’s heart beat hard against the clenched fist she had pressed to her breast. “Mama, you frightened me.”

The flame flared and jumped as Julia Kennicutt lifted the chamber stick. Her gaze traveled the length of her daughter, assessing the steamer cloak that covered a plain maroon walking dress, the kid gloves and black beaver bonnet, the bulging carpetbag at the girl’s feet. “You are running away,” she said. Her gaze went to the unlit candle waiting on the window seat and the china safe filled with matches. “With someone. You’re running off with someone.”

“Mama, don’t . . .” Clementine shot a glance to the open doorway, expecting to see her father looming there. He always seemed to swell when he was angry, and the air around him would quiver. “I’ll put everything away and go to bed, and no one but you and I need ever know. Only don’t tell—”

Her mother left, shutting the door and taking the candle with her, plunging the room once again into darkness.

Clementine sank onto the chintz-skirted stool before her dressing table. The fear she so despised within herself clogged her throat, thick and sour like old grease. She heard a scraping noise outside, and her head whipped around. But it was only the wind slapping a tree branch against the corner lamppost. She stared with hopeless yearning at the window. If he came now, it would be too late. He wasn’t coming anyway.

The door opened. She stood, squaring her shoulders as she began to draw deep within herself, away from the hurt. So battened down was she against the gale of her father’s fury that it took Clementine a moment to realize her mother had come back without him.

Julia Kennicutt set the chamber stick among the glass bottles and enameled boxes on the dressing table. The beveled mirror reflected fractured light onto the two women. In her white nightdress and with her pale, unbound hair, Julia almost seemed the younger. “Clementine . . .” She lifted a hand as if to touch her daughter’s cheek, then didn’t. “You must take this with you.”

She gripped Clementine’s wrist, pressing something into her palm. The weight of the object surprised the girl, and she almost dropped it. It was a heart-shaped sachet embroidered with silk flowers and decorated with lace. The smell of roses clung to it, but it was too heavy and lumpy to be filled with sweet-scented powder or herbs. Clementine hefted it in her hand and heard the clink of coins.

“It’s not a lot,” her mother was saying in a strained whisper. “Not more than a hundred dollars. But it would be a good start for you, should you ever need to run away someday from this man you are running off with now.”

Clementine looked down at the small bag in her hand. She had a wisp of memory, of having seen it once years ago among her mother’s underthings—a place where her father was unlikely to go snooping, where a heart-shaped sachet smelling of roses would never seem out of place.

She looked back up to her mother’s white face. “You were going to use it yourself,” she said. “All these years you’ve just been waiting for a chance—”

“No, no.” Julia gave a sharp shake of her head, and her hair swung free, slapping against her cheek. “I won’t leave this house. I haven’t the courage.”

Clementine tried to thrust the sachet back into her mother’s hands. “But you can come with us. We’re going to the Montana Territory—”

Julia made a soft, strangled sound. “Montana . . . oh, my. What a whimsical, fey child you’ve always been. What would your young man think of a girl who dragged her mother along on their elopement? And to such a wilderness, no less. Can you imagine me among those horrid buffalo and Indians? Oh, child . . .” She lifted her hand, and this time she did touch her daughter’s cheek. “You are so very young. You think you’ll have such grand adventures, and you will—though not, I expect, the sort you’re dreaming of.”

“But, Mama—”

“Hush now, and listen for once. There is something to be said for safety and security, for staying close to the life you’ve always known. So at least take the money, since you’ll probably need every bit of it on the day your grand adventures cease to be so grand.” Her fingers slid off her daughter’s cheek, and she sighed. “I have only this one thing to give you, and even it was stolen from him.”

Clementine felt the hardness of the coins through the thin silk, felt their weight. And the weight of all the words that had always remained unspoken between them. She imagined pulling the hoarded words out of her heart, holding them out to this woman, her mother. This one thing I have to give you. Like coins in a silk cachet smelling of roses.

“Clementine, this man you are running off with . . .”

“He is nothing like Father.” She put the sachet into the pocket of her cloak, and put away those other words she didn’t know how to speak. “He’s a kind man, a laughing, gentle man. I am sure of it.” But she wasn’t sure of it, for she barely knew him; indeed, she knew him not at all. And she had this sinking feeling, like a weight of soggy dough in her belly, that he wasn’t coming for her anyway. She squinted, trying to read the lyre clock. “You won’t believe this, Mama—but he’s a cowboy, a real cowboy.”

“Oh, heavens . . . I think you had better spare me the details.” Her mother tried a smile, but the hand she laid on Clementine’s arm trembled. “No matter what sort of man you believe him to be, promise me you’ll keep the money as your own secret from him. Otherwise he will think it his by right and—”

The rattle of carriage wheels on cobblestones sent Clementine flying to the window. “Quick, Mama, douse your light.”

A small black gig rolled down the street, wavering in and out of the shadows and pools of lamplight. It was tattered and mud-splattered and missing its hood, yet to Clementine’s eyes it looked as magical as would a gilded coach pulled by white unicorns. She dropped one match and broke another before she managed to light her candle. She waved it twice across the window, then blew it out.

She snatched up the carpetbag, its weight dragging against her arm. She had crammed as much as she possibly could into it, for she couldn’t begin to envision all the things she would come to need in a wilderness like Montana. She almost laughed aloud. He had come. Her cowboy had come for her after all.

She turned away from the window. Shadows obscured her mother’s face. Yet she heard Julia’s sharp intake of breath as if she were choking back her own unspeakable words. “Go with joy, child,” Julia said. She gripped the sides of her daughter’s head, squeezing hard. “Go with joy.”

They stayed in this awkward embrace a moment before Clementine pulled away. But at the door she turned. “Good-bye, Mama,” she said softly to this woman, her mother, who stood in silence. A shadow among shadows.

Clementine’s feet made no sound on the hall’s thick runner, and she gripped the heavy bag against her chest to keep it from banging against the wainscoted walls. But the servants’ stairs were narrow and twisting, and she caught her toe in the hem of her skirt and tripped, dropping the valise. The bag thumped and clattered its way into the kitchen, spilling open. Trinket boxes, balls of cambric stockings, and a fluting iron rolled beneath the big block table and behind the icebox, getting lost among the coal scuttle and lard buckets.

Clementine’s breath left her in a gasp. She had made enough noise to rouse all of Beacon Hill, to awaken her father surely. Her father . . . She stuffed what she could find back inside the bag, managing to refasten only one clasp.

A row of copper pan bottoms reflected her white face as she ran to the door that led to the mews out back, where her cowboy was to go after he had seen her signal. Her bootheels clicked on the brick floor. The sachet of coins in her pocket bounced heavily against her thigh.

The bolt stuck, and she bruised her knuckles trying to force it. The door scraped like a rusty chain as she yanked it open. She spilled out onto the stoop and came to a stumbling and breathless stop in front of a tall man, made taller by the deep crown of his wide-brimmed hat.

“Mr. McQueen . . .” She had to stop to suck in a deep breath. “I am here.”

His laugh was young and carefree, and his teeth flashed white beneath the long drooping curve of his mustache. “I heard you coming, Miss Kennicutt. Me and all the rest of Boston.” He took her valise, trailing a petticoat and corset laces, and tossed it into the gig. He stretched out his hand to take hers.

“Wait, there is another,” she said, pointing. “Over there behind the dustbin, beneath that pile of old gunnysacks.” The rotting sacks hid a calfskin trunk fitted with brass hardware and banded with copper. A piece at a time she had smuggled its contents through the house and out to the mews.

“What’ve you got in here”—he grunted as he wrestled with the trunk, trying to wedge it into the narrow space between the small gig’s leather seat and the splashboard—”bricks and cobblestones?”

“It’s just a camera,” she said quickly, afraid that he would ask her to leave it behind, that she would have to choose between her new life and the only part of her old life that mattered. “And glass plates and chemicals and such things. There’ll be room for it, won’t there? It’s not too heavy, is it? I can manage—”

He turned and gripped her face the way her mother had. Only he kissed her. A man’s kiss that was hard and fierce and left her feeling excited and breathless. “I knew you’d come with me, girl. I just knew it.”

His strong hands spanned her waist and lifted her into the cart. He leaped onto the seat beside her, spanked the reins against the horse’s rump, and they clattered out of the alley, turning toward the river.

Clementine Kennicutt looked back to the house, to the window of the room that had been hers for all of her life. A flickering light flashed once and was gone—her mother lifting a candle in a brief and lonely farewell.

She watched the dark window until the house was swallowed by the shadows of the elms. She turned and there ahead of her, floating above the mansard roofs of Beacon Hill, was the moon, round and plump as a Christmas orange.

Her head fell back and she laughed softly into the night sky.

“What?” said the young man beside her. He tugged at the reins, and the horse high-stepped around the corner. Louisburg Square and her father’s house disappeared forever, but the moon stayed with her.

She laughed again, stretching out her hand to the moon, her fingers spread wide. But it remained just out of reach.

—

If one’s life, Clementine Kennicutt had often thought, could be written out like a tale in a yellowback novel, then in her story she was fated to end up married to a cowboy.

Actually whenever she’d done her imagining, it was she who had chased wild mustangs across the range, taken a bead on a stampeding buffalo, and whooped it up at the end of the trail in Dodge City. Still, one had to be practical. Even in daydreams little girls did not grow up to be cowboys. But they did grow up to be wives, and if . . . well, just suppose . . . But even that, she knew in her most practical moments, was stretching things for a girl whose father was minister to Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts. A girl whose way of life was as different from a cowboy’s as was cheese from the moon.

The union of her parents had been a marriage of convenience and money. Julia Patterson had brought with her to the altar an inheritance of fifty thousand dollars and a house on Beacon Hill. The Reverend Theodore Kennicutt brought his fine old Boston name, along with his godly self. Clementine was their only child, and the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt did know his duty as a parent and a servant of God. Daughters were weak vessels, prey to vanity and instability. A pretty face didn’t mirror a pure soul. No one was allowed to coddle or pet or make a fuss over little Clementine.

Sometimes, when she was supposed to be contemplating her sins, she would follow her thoughts back as far as they would go, back even before she knew about the cowboys. She thought she must have been four that summer her grandfather took her to the bleachery and she discovered what life could be.

Grandfather Patterson had a smiling face, ruddy as an overripe apple, and a great booming laugh that jiggled his big belly. He owned numerous textile finishing plants, and on that day he took Clementine and her mother on an outing into the country where he had his bleachery. It was an enormous brick building with a belching smokestack. Inside, great bubbling vats emitted billowing clouds of steam. Hundreds of pipes crisscrossed like netting over the ceiling and dripped onto her head. Fumes pinched her nose and made her eyes water. Mama said the bleachery put her in mind of the cauldrons of hell, and Clementine loved it. The clattering noise, the fearsome stink, the hustle and bustle of it, the life of it. Even now when she thought of the fullness of what life could be, she was put in mind of that noisy, smelly bleachery. She had loved that place and she’d waited with barely controlled excitement to go back, but they never did.

Yet that summer held its magic anyway, for Mama smiled a lot and began to get a big belly like Grandfather Patterson’s. Cook said her mother was growing a baby, but Clementine didn’t believe it until the day Mama took her hand and let her feel the baby’s foot kicking against the tautly stretched yellow dimity of her mother’s morning dress.

She laughed at the wonder of it. “But how could a baby get inside you?”

“Hush,” her mother scolded. “Never ask such naughty questions.” Yet they laughed together when the baby kicked again.

She always smiled when she remembered how she and Mama had laughed together. But thoughts have a way of flowing one into the other, and the laughter could become screams and footsteps pounding down the hall in the middle of the night, and a pair of servants whispering outside her nursery door, that the Mrs. Reverend was surely dying and little Clementine would be a poor motherless child come morning.

Clementine had lain stiff in her bed that night, listening to her mother’s screams. She watched the shadows melt and sunshine filter through the sawtoothed leaves of the elms in the park. She heard the chirp of sparrows and the rattle and clatter of the milk wagon.

And then she heard the screaming stop.

By morning, the whispers had said. By morning her mother would be dead and she would be a motherless child.

The sun had been up for hours before the Reverend Mr. Kennicutt came to her. Although he frightened her at times, Clementine loved the way her father looked. He was so tall it seemed his head must surely touch the top of the sky. His beard was long and thick, parting and curling up on the ends like a pair of milk jug handles. It was the same color as his hair—the shiny black of spilled ink. His eyes shone, too, especially on the evenings he came to pray with her. He made words with his deep voice that were like the songs the wind made in the trees. She didn’t understand all the words, but she loved the sound of them. He told her how God judged the righteous and was angry with the wicked every day, and she thought he must be God, for he was so large and so splendid, and she longed to please him.

“Please, Father,” she’d said that day, careful to keep her eyes humbly downcast, although her chest felt pinched for air. She wasn’t sure what dying meant. “Am I a poor motherless child?”

“Your mother lies near death,” he said, “and all you can think of is yourself. There is a sinfulness in you, daughter. Such a wildness and a willfulness that at times I do fear for your immortal soul. ‘If thy eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’ ”

Clementine flung her head up and clenched her fists. “But I’ve been good. I have been good!” Her chest hitched as she stared up into his face. “And my eyes have been good, too, Father. Truly they have.”

He heaved a deep, sad sigh. “You must remember our Lord sees everything, Clementine. Not only all we do, but what is in our thoughts and in our hearts. Come now, we must pray.” He led her into the middle of the room and pressed her onto her knees. He lifted his big, heavy hand and laid it on her head, on the plain rough cotton cap that always covered her hair to keep her from vanity. “Dear Lord, when in thine infinite mercy, thou . . .” His voice trailed off. His daughter’s head was not bent in prayer. His fingers tightened their grip, but he said gently, “Your baby sister has passed on, Clementine. She has gone to the glory of heaven.”

She cocked her head beneath his hand as she considered the meaning of his words. She had never been able to picture heaven very well, but she thought of what Mama had said about the bleachery and the cauldrons of hell, and she smiled. “Oh, I do hope not, Father. I hope she went to hell instead.”

The reverend’s hand jerked off his daughter’s head. “What manner of child are you?”

“I am Clementine,” she had said.

Clementine was forbidden to leave the nursery that day. In the hour before bed, her father came again and read to her from the Bible about a lake of fire and brimstone, and a righteous anger that would show no mercy when she died. Even the angels who had sinned had not been spared, the reverend told her, but had been cast down into hell to suffer for all eternity.

Her father came again and again over the next two days, morning, noon, and evening, to read more to her of hell. But it was the upstairs maid who told her that her mother would live.

On the morning of the funeral all the mirrors and windows of the house were draped in black crepe, and flowers filled the hall, choking the air with their smell. A hearse pulled by horses sporting curling black plumes carried the tiny casket to the Old Granary Burying Ground. The wind stung cold on Clementine’s face and slapped dead leaves against the gravestones. She knew all about hell now, and it was nothing like her grandfather’s bleachery.

—

Sometimes the thoughts would flow on to that Easter when Aunt Etta and the twins came for a visit. These boy cousins, who were seven years older than Clementine, had just returned from a trip to Paris, where they had acquired a miniature guillotine. Clementine was excited to see this marvel, for she was allowed few toys of her own to distract her from her lessons and prayers.

The boys had offered to show her how the guillotine worked. And she, so pleased with the attention they were paying her, had smiled at the wonder of it. And was smiling still . . . until they set it up on the table where she took her morning porridge and milk, and they cut off the head of her only doll.

“Please, stop,” she said, careful to be polite and careful not to cry as she watched the porcelain head bouncing bloodless across the white painted surface. “You’re hurting her.” But her cousins only laughed, the tin blade fell with a shriek, and a pink dimpled arm went rolling onto the floor.

Clementine didn’t hurry, for she was forbidden to run. She didn’t cry. Stiff in her starched pinafore and cap, she walked soundlessly through the big house in search of someone to stop the slaughter, while her little chest shuddered, and her eyes stared wide and unblinking.

Lilting laughter floated out the open doors of the morning room. She stopped at the threshold, so enthralled she forgot about the murder of her doll. Mama and Aunt Etta sat knee to knee in white rattan chairs, heads bent over teacups. Aunt Etta had brought Easter lilies, and their thick sweet smell mixed with the melody of laughter and chatter. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, gilding her mother’s hair.

Julia leaned forward and gripped her sister’s arm. “Then Dr. Osgood said in that gruff-kind voice of his, ‘If you want to go on living, madam, you are not to try to have any more babies. I’ve told Mr. Kennicutt that if he cannot reconcile his conscience to birth control, then he must reconcile himself to abstinence. To behave otherwise is tantamount to murder, and I have told him that as well.’ Oh, Etta, the good doctor broke this news as if it were a tragedy. How could he know the utter, utter relief I felt?” Julia laughed, then her shoulders hunched. Aunt Etta gathered her into her arms. “The utter relief,” she sobbed into Aunt Etta’s plump bosom. “The utter, utter relief.”

“Hush, Jule, hush. At least from now on, you’ll be spared his bed.”

Clementine hadn’t understood the words they spoke, but she so had wished she could be Aunt Etta. She wanted fiercely to be able to wrap her arms around her mother and make her smile. But she wanted to be Mama, too, to be stroked and held and comforted, to feel safe and loved. She wanted, wanted, wanted . . . Yet she had no words to describe the things she wanted.

That was the first time she could remember feeling them, those yearnings that were to come to her more often as she grew older. She felt and wanted things, but she didn’t know what they were. At times she would be almost choked with a tumult of feelings, of wantings, she couldn’t name.

—

She was nine when she first learned about the cowboys.

It came about when Cook hired a new scullery maid. Shona MacDonald was her name, and she had hair the bright red of a fire wagon and a smile that beamed from her face like the summer sun.

The first time they met, Shona knelt and pulled Clementine to her breast in a crushing hug. The smell of lavender water filled Clementine’s nose almost making her sneeze, and rough, work-chapped hands rubbed circles on her shoulders. Then Shona gripped her arms and leaned back, smiling. “My, what a bonnie lassie ye be,” she said. “Never have I seen such eyes. Like a loch at dusk, they are. All stormy green and brooding, and filled with secrets and mysteries.”

Clementine stared at her, mesmerized by the lilting words and the brightness of her smile. No one had ever hugged her before; she wished the girl would do it again. She tried a smile of her own. “What is a loch?”

“Why, a loch is a . . . a gret big puddle of water, ye ken?”

Shona laughed. The sound was like rose petals, sweet and soft. Clementine studied the shiny black toes of her shoes, afraid to look, almost afraid to ask. “Do you think you could be my friend?” she said.

Shona’s strong, bony arms enveloped her again. “Och, ye puir wee thing. Of course I’ll be yer friend.” And Clementine was almost giddy from the happiness that came from these words.

Sunday afternoon was Cook’s time off. It was a quiet time in the house, between church services, and Clementine was supposed to spend the hours at prayer. Instead she spent them in the kitchen with her friend. My friend. How she loved the sound of those words. She would say them to herself as she crept down the servants’ stairs: My friend, my friend . . . I am going to visit my friend.

Shona had a passion for yellowback novels, and she spent most of her meager salary on weekly editions of the Five Cent Wide Awake Library’s Wild West series. The books were a treasure trove of dreams, and she didn’t mind sharing them on those secret Sunday afternoons.

Clementine would sit on top the flour bin, swinging her legs, reading aloud these tales filled with gun-toting cowboys and wild mustangs, wicked cattle rustlers and scalping Indians. Shona would scrub the copper pans with a paste of lemon juice and salt, stopping to peer at the pictures and interject comments in her Scottish burr. “And who cares whether that cowboy was caught red-handed thievin’ them horses? The man is too bonnie to hang. A guid woman is what he needs. A wife to love him and turn him away from the pathways of sin.”

“I think I should like to marry a cowboy when I grow up,” Clementine said, almost shivering with the wonder of the idea.

“Och, wouldna we all, Miss Clementine? But cowboys, they’re like wild horses, them mustangs. They love their roamin’ ways too much. There’s no harm in dreamin’ about lassoin’ such a man, though, no harm t’all.”

The odor of the lemon paste would mix with the other kitchen smells, of yeast and coffee beans and salted cod. But Clementine’s nose wouldn’t be in Boston. It would be on the prairie and filled with the smell of sagebrush and buffalo hides and woodsmoke carried on the western wind.

One Sunday Shona was given the day off to be with her family, who lived a ferry ride across the Charles River. Clementine spent the precious hours that they normally shared by herself in the kitchen. She sat at the block table, her elbows on the knife-scarred wood, her cheeks on her fists, poring over Shona’s collection of souvenir cards of famous bandits and cowboys. And dreaming.

She didn’t know her father had come into the room until his shadow fell across the table. She tried to hide the cards beneath a pile of freshly laundered towels. He said nothing, simply snapped his fingers and held out his hand until she put the cards into it.

She sta