The Ballad of Hattie Taylor Page 9

  “How truly magnanimous of them,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Partly, I suppose,” Moses said, “that’s due to the realization if word ever got back to Jake, he’d kill them.”

  “How about the fact it simply isn’t true?”

  “Come on, Hattie, when has that ever stopped this town from talking?” Moses scratched his head and looked as if he wished he’d never started this conversation. “You know how Mattawa loves its gossip. You can’t take it personally.”

  “Can’t take it per— Oh no, I mustn’t do that. It’s only my reputation being ripped to shreds by a pack of lies, after all.” She stared at him incredulously. “Moses, you cannot get more personal than that!”

  “Well, the way you flirt with everything in pants,” he roared in response, “sure as hell isn’t helping your cause any!”

  “What in tarnation is all this shouting going on?” Mirabel poked her head out Hattie’s bedroom window. “Hattie Taylor, you get out of that tree this instant! And you, Moses Marks, present yourself at the front door like a civilized young man.” She leveled him with a steely gaze. “And that best not have been a curse I heard you yelling, sonny. You may have grown into a giant, but you’re not too big for me to wash your mouth out with soap. Hattie, come in here at once!” She disappeared back into the bedroom.

  “Meet me at the door,” Moses whispered, beginning to climb down the tree.

  “I think you’ve said enough,” Hattie replied stiffly. His comment about her flirtatiousness wasn’t untrue, but it hurt all the same to hear him say it. She had begun flirting outrageously this year, for it was the one area in which she’d found acceptance. The girls in their social circle had taken a dislike to her from her first day in school. The boys hadn’t, however, so naturally she’d found it easier to talk to them. As she’d matured, it had seemed a natural progression to take it a step further into harmless flirtations. But once again, it appeared her actions had backfired, embroiling her up to her lily-white, lightly freckled neck in trouble.

  “C’mon, Hattie, meet me at the door,” Moses implored from the ground, craning his neck to look upward. “I smuggled us a copy of the Police Gazette from Dad’s shop.” Pulling the tail of his shirt out of his pants, he flashed the paper tucked into his waistband.

  When her long, narrow nose remained up, he became indignant. “Fine, then. Be that way. It’s not me spreading stories about you. Heck, except for last night, I’ve stuck up for you plenty, and it isn’t fair to punish me for what others are saying.” But unable to sustain his anger, he cajoled, “Hat?”

  Moses watched her edge over to the house and angle headfirst through the window. “C’mon,” he called. “I’ll rent us a tandem bike from Armstrong’s Livery and we can ride out to the country for a while. Whataya say?”

  He glimpsed a flash of ankle when her round hips and long legs slithered over the windowsill as she disappeared into her room, and he exhaled gustily. Jeez, she was stubborn!

  But a moment later her head poked back out the window. Bracing her hands on the windowsill, she leaned out. “Five minutes,” she said and pulled back inside.

  “I know what I should do,” Hattie said a short while later as the two of them approached the livery stable. “I should make an appointment with Doc Fielding and then take out a full-page ad in the Clarion.” She tugged on the stable doors. “I’ll have them run a document with his signature on it and an official seal prominently displayed, kind of like our diplomas. It’ll say, ‘This is to verify Dr. Fielding has examined Miss Hattie Witherspoon Taylor and found her to be an intact maiden of sterling virtue.’ That would put a damper on all the talk.”

  As they stepped from daylight into the dim interior of the livery, Hattie bumped into someone. “Excuse me,” she apologized. Then, recognizing Aunt Augusta’s lawyer as her eyes adjusted, she added politely, “Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Lord.”

  His hands, which had reached out to steady her, tightened momentarily as Roger Lord coolly eyed her from head to toe. Then he released her and tipped his hat. “Miss Taylor.” He stepped out of the livery into the sunshine flooding the stable courtyard and strode away.

  “That man is the handsomest specimen I have ever seen,” Hattie murmured as she watched his departure. “But for some reason he forever makes my blood run cold.” Moses didn’t reply, and she turned to look at him.

  He was staring at her in horror. “Jeez, Hattie, are you plumb crazy?”

  “I can’t help it, Moses, he gives me the shivers.”

  “Forget Lord. I’m talking about this ad business! Jake would probably take a buggy whip to your backside, and Mattawa? Shit, girl, the townspeople would run you out of town on a rail.” He glared at her. “Tarred and feathered.”

  “Why, Moses Marks, I’m gonna tell your—”

  “Shut up, Hattie!” he roared and grabbed her arm none too gently, dragging her out of Armstrong the blacksmith’s earshot. Moses shook her impatiently. “Jesus, girl, you don’t have the sense you were born with!”

  “I disagree. The examination would prove conclusively . . .”

  “Arrgh!” Clutching handfuls of his pale hair, he tugged viciously. With exaggerated patience, he said through clenched teeth, “Nice . . . girls . . . do not . . . discuss . . . Unmentionable Subjects . . . with any man. And . . . they . . . never . . . ever . . . take . . . out . . . full-page ads in the MATTAWA CLARION!” He shouted the paper’s name into her face, his nose a scant inch from hers.

  “All right, all right,” she replied sulkily, stepping back and putting some distance between herself and his anger. “Don’t get your tail in a twist. It was merely a thought.”

  “I have never heard such horse-pucky in my life.” He stalked away, still muttering, and Hattie went out into the livery yard.

  Criminy. If he was going to act all unreasonable and huffy, he could just handle the bicycle transaction by himself. She found a spot in a circle of sunlight, sat down, and, turning her face up to the sun, closed her eyes.

  10

  Across the road, kitty-corner from the livery, Roger Lord stood inside the swinging doors of Bigger’s Saloon, watching Hattie. Her lazy-cat posture infuriated him. That young lady was in serious need of instruction. She all but begged to be taught her place.

  Roger believed in man’s supremacy over woman and the upper classes’ right to rule the masses as they saw fit. He’d considered himself a member of the ruling class for so long now, his actual, lesser origins were but a dim memory. No one in this town knew his standing came courtesy of his marriage to Gertrude. And why would they? It would be clear to a blind man he ought to have been born into the social status he enjoyed. Marrying into it had merely been a formality correcting that which should have been his due from the day he was born.

  Self-righteous in his convictions, he was outraged at the remarks he’d overheard. The outspoken little bitch—place an ad declaring her virginity, indeed! Her arrogance galled him. Haughty chits failing to realize their proper status fairly begged to be given a dose of reality.

  Roger knew from experience that the most effective way of teaching proper respect in a recalcitrant was through pain and humiliation. Arousal beat in his loins as he visualized training Hattie to subservience. He’d thought the pinnacle of satisfaction would be in defiling a well-born young lady of timid nature. Watching her quiver in terror, viewing her helplessness.

  He’d been wrong. The ultimate hedonism, he now knew, would be breaking a well-bred lady of proud nature. Indoctrinating fear into one who’d harbored no fear before. Watching her terror, her revulsion, for an act he’d bet money she expected to reward her. After all, wasn’t that why virtuous girls sold their virginity? For a ring on their finger and all it implied? But damn few of them enjoyed the marital bed. He’d bet the farm, had he possessed one, that Hattie Taylor wasn’t among their numbers. Unfortunately, the same obstacles preven
ting him from debauching a timid, well-born virgin applied to Miss Taylor as well. Fate was damned unkind.

  Roger scowled as he watched her tow-headed, muscle-bound friend roll a tandem bike out of the big double doors of the livery across the way. The two teenagers mounted the bicycle, and Roger stayed to one side of the saloon’s swinging doors, staring after them until they pedaled beyond his range of vision. Then he slowly turned away and walked to the bar.

  Someday, somehow, an opportunity at his ultimate fantasy would come along. And when it did, he’d be ready. Until then he would simply dream of giving Hattie Taylor her just deserts.

  * * *

  —

  With no destination in mind, Hattie and Moses headed out of town. Pedaling as fast as they could one moment, then lazily coasting the next, they meandered aimlessly. Hattie found it difficult pinpointing their exact location with Moses’ wide shoulders blocking everything in front of her. But when she said as much and demanded he exchange seats with her, he refused, claiming her steering was too erratic. So, the next time he began to pump furiously, grunting at her to pick up speed as they approached an incline, she instead raised her feet off her pedals and braced them on the cross section of her handlebars. Sweeping the back of her dress skirt up, she tucked its voluminous fabric between her knees to prevent it from tangling in the spokes.

  Hattie grinned as she watched perspiration rapidly spread across the cotton shirt stretched between Moses’ shoulder blades. He stood to attain maximum leverage from his efforts, and by the time he glanced over his shoulder at her at the top of the hill, his breath was uneven from the exertion. “Christ Almighty,” he gasped, steering them off the road into a meadow.

  By mutual consent, they hopped off the bike and watched it roll upright for a couple of feet before toppling into the high grass. “No wonder that was so much work. I shoulda known you’d taken a holiday.”

  They strode through tall grass to the creek bisecting the field. It was still too cool for wading, but they lay on their backs in the grass and absorbed the warmth of the late spring sun. Eventually, Moses pulled the Police Gazette out of his waistband and smoothed the wrinkles out of the paper. Rolling onto their stomachs, they pored over lurid tales of murder and mayhem.

  Hattie was still reading an article when Moses began tickling her neck with a blade of grass. She brushed the stalk aside, but he kept whisking its tip from her ear to the neckline of her gown. “What’s this?” he asked, brushing the grass blade back and forth over a gold chain showing at her nape.

  Hattie sat up, the article forgotten. Hooking the chain, she pulled it from her bodice. The fine, delicate gold supported a small gold locket. “Aunt Augusta gave it to me for graduation. Look at this.” Smiling with pleasure, she popped the locket open and extended it as far as possible for his inspection. Inside was a miniature daguerreotype of a woman with soft dark hair. “My mother.” Smiling, she gazed at the image. “Mirabel told me that since I arrived in Mattawa, Aunt Augusta has written to my mother’s people in San Francisco at least once a year to request a likeness of my mother for me. For reasons known only to them, the Witherspoons consistently ignored her entreaties.”

  Hattie beamed. “So, this year Aunt Augusta sent a letter demanding they either send a miniature of my mother, or Jake would begin proceedings on my behalf for a portion of the Witherspoon estates. Mirabel said the picture arrived quite speedily after that. Isn’t she the best? And I never heard a word of this from Aunt Augusta herself. She only said she was sorry she couldn’t locate one of my father as well.”

  “She is one fine lady, all right,” Moses agreed. He pointed his forefinger at the small timepiece pinned above her left breast. “This is new, too, isn’t it?”

  The dainty watch on her chest was attached to a retracting chain, enabling her to check the time without unpinning the artfully crafted bow-shaped clasp securing it to her bodice. “It’s from Jake and Jane-Ellen. Since her confinement kept her from everything last night, Jake gave it to me.” Her eyes gleamed with hero worship. “Hand to God, Moses—his timing couldn’t have been better. When you let Florence-May say nasty things about me, I felt lower than a snake’s belly. I’d just walked away from overhearing that when Jake asked me to waltz. It was a relief to dance with someone who didn’t expect clever conversation. I was in no mood to be witty.”

  Hattie pulled out the dainty watch to admire it, smiling with dreamy satisfaction. “After the waltz, he escorted me to the veranda for some air and gave me this.” Closing her eyes, Hattie lay back in the tall grass. “Jake Murdock,” she vowed solemnly, “is the most wonderful, honorable man in the entire world.”

  Moses looked away. He had worked in his father’s barbershop after school and Saturday mornings since he was twelve. Customers took him for granted as he swept up, straightened magazines and newspapers, and ran errands for the clientele. Given his size, he didn’t blend into the woodwork. But he’d started his first growth spurt when he was fourteen, and men didn’t bother monitoring their conversations around boys the way they did around females.

  Moses admired Jake Murdock nearly as much as Hattie did. But he’d heard the talk. Hell, he’d probably known within two days when Jake once again began frequenting Mamie Parker’s place. Moses didn’t judge. But he knew perfectly well that Hattie, who tended to view situations as either black or white, would be destroyed if she knew. Not that there was the remotest possibility it would be brought to her attention. Gossip of this nature did not circulate in Mattawa parlors. The men in town all adhered to a code of silence when it came to protecting their own.

  In a way, Moses almost wished it wasn’t so. Much as he admired and respected Jake, there were moments he fiercely resented him. Hattie thought Murdock walked on water, and who could compete with that? Jake was just a man, not a ten-cent hero like that Fred Fearnot character in Work and Win magazine. It made Moses a little testy to know, while Hattie had no problem believing the worst of him at times, her precious Jake was forever inviolate.

  But it was senseless to hold a grudge against Murdock. The man hadn’t asked for Hattie’s single-minded devotion. And, hell, Moses liked Jake. He liked him a lot. So, as he’d done many times before when Hattie began raving about her hero, he changed the subject. “My folks got me a timepiece, too.” He pulled it from his pocket and passed it to Hattie to admire. He hesitated a moment, knowing he’d regret telling her this, but it was too exciting to keep to himself. And Hattie wasn’t like most females. She neither wanted nor appreciated being sheltered from life’s steamier aspects. “My old man also promised to take me to Mamie Parker’s place.”

  “What!” Hattie sat up like a puppet whose strings had been jerked. She stared at Moses with huge eyes. “When?”

  “I couldn’t pin him down. Sometime soon.”

  “You must promise to describe it to me in detail once you’ve been there!”

  “Describe what, exactly?” Moses had visions of being expected to describe all the sweaty details of his sexual education before Hattie’s relentless quest for knowledge was satisfied.

  “You know! How it’s decorated, what the harlots wear, what they look like, everything! I have seen the outside, of course, but never the inside.”

  “Okay, yeah, I can do that.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose. But it’s not like seeing it for myself.” She tossed her head. “I’m going to sneak out there and see it on my own some night, I declare I am.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “You can’t stop me, Moses Marks. If you won’t take me, I’ll simply go on my own.”

  “Fine! You do that! For God’s sake, sneak inside one day? No wonder they talk about you in town the way they do. No decent girl would ever suggest the things you do!”

  He wished the words back as soon as they left his mouth, even before glimpsing the look of betrayal on her face. He reached for her, but she shook off his ha
nd and stalked through the high grass to where they’d left the tandem bicycle.

  It was a struggle to see the handlebars through her tears, but by the time Moses reached her, Hattie had the bike upright and herself under control. She felt as if she were bleeding inside, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Never! Ignoring every apology he attempted, she helped him push the bicycle through the grass to the road. When he offered her the forward seat, she declined with cool courtesy and climbed on the rear one.

  “Hattie, I didn’t mean it,” he tried once again. She refused to look at him. “Sometimes I just get so frustrated I say things without thinking.”

  “Could we not talk, Moses?” she requested quietly. “I want to go home.”

  “Listen,” he said desperately. Her politeness was killing him. Hattie yelled and screamed and called him names. She didn’t resort to cool social manners. “I’ll take you by Mamie’s place, okay? We’ll take the shortcut and go by there right now.”

  “Why?” She nearly screamed the question. She did slug him between the shoulder blades. “Because I’m not a decent girl, so it really doesn’t matter where you take me?” She hit him again and the bike swerved as Moses brought it to a halt. “Just take me home, you hypocritical sonovabitch!” Hating that she couldn’t prevent it, she burst into tears.

  Moses froze. He’d seen Hattie spitting mad and he’d known the talk that followed her wherever she went had to hurt, though she rarely let it show. But never, in all the years he’d known her, had he seen her cry. And in typical Hattie fashion, she didn’t cry in half measures. No, sir, no dainty sniffling for her. Huge tears spilled down her cheeks, her eyes and nose reddened, and her entire body shuddered with the force of her emotions.