The Complete Oregon Series, page 33
“What did she say? Did she tell you why—?”
“We didn’t talk much,” Nora said. To tell the truth, she didn’t even want to talk to Bernice right now.
Bernice stepped around a small willow so she was face-to-face with Nora. “Aren’t you curious at all? Don’t you want to know why she lives in disguise? Why she asked you to marry her?”
Nora considered it for a moment. Yes, she was curious, but she had other feelings that ran so much deeper. “What would it change if I knew?”
Bernice’s brown eyes narrowed. “Change?”
“Yeah. What he…she has done, is done. Nothing that Luke or I say or do will change the fact that she can never be the husband that I dreamed of.” It occurred to Nora that she was basically grieving. Luke had survived the shooting, but Nora had still lost her husband.
“It’s unbelievable.” Bernice shook her head. “I always thought Luke was the perfect husband.”
Nora bit her lip until she tasted blood. It had all been an illusion.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” Bernice asked.
“No.” Nora knew Luke didn’t want anyone to see her in her weak, half-dressed condition. She grimaced as she noticed that, after all that had happened, she still felt protective of Luke. “I’ll go and see how she is.”
She tried not to make any noise as she climbed back into the wagon, hoping that she would find Luke asleep. It was easier facing a sleeping woman than to have these familiar gray eyes staring at her.
Luke’s eyes were closed.
Nora breathed a sigh of relief. She silently sat on a trunk at the end of the wagon and stared at the pale face.
Luke moved in her sleep and moaned. The blanket slid down a bit, baring a shoulder that was smoothly muscled but not as bulky as most men’s.
Nora stared at the fair skin and the bandage covering part of it. I should change her bandage before she wakes. She knew Luke would feel uncomfortable letting her see her body while she was awake, and Nora wasn’t exactly at ease with it either.
Slowly, not touching her more than absolutely necessary, Nora turned down the blanket. Her hand still gripped the edge of the blanket while she stared down. Living in a brothel, she had seen scantily clad girls every day, but for some reason, looking at Luke was different. Only when the fair skin of Luke’s chest broke out in goose bumps and her nipples stiffened in the cool air did Nora shake herself from her stupor and began to move again. She lowered her hand to Luke’s bandaged shoulder.
“W-wha…?” At the first slight contact, Luke jerked back from Nora’s touch, one hand gripping the blanket while the other searched for her revolver. Luke’s reflexes were astonishing for a woman who had nearly died last night.
“It’s only me,” Nora said.
Luke sank back but kept her tight grip on the blanket. “What were you doing?”
Nora felt the blood rush to her cheeks. Great. Now she thinks I was ogling her. “I need to change your bandage,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could.
“I-I can do it,” Luke stammered.
All the other times when Luke had refused to let her dress a wound now made sense. “I’ve already seen your body,” Nora said. “There’s no need to be shy about it any longer. I worked in a brothel, so I’ve seen it all before.”
Still, Luke lowered the blanket with obvious reluctance, peeling it back just enough to grant access to the bandage.
Nora concentrated solely on her task. When she unwrapped the bandage, the body under her fingers was stiff and unmoving. “Breathe,” she said. “I don’t need you to pass out on top of your other injuries.”
Luke took a sharp breath, then grew still again. “How does it look?”
Nora studied the wound. The area around it was swollen and discolored, but there were no signs of infection. She averted her eyes when she noticed that her gaze had followed one of the bruises that disappeared under the blanket. “Better than I expected.”
“Papa?” a small voice called from outside the wagon.
Oh, God. Nora and Luke stared at each other. Busy treating Luke’s wound and then trying to cope with her own feelings, Nora hadn’t thought about what this would mean for her daughter.
Wood creaked, indicating that Amy was trying to climb into the wagon.
“No!” Luke’s eyes widened. “Quick! Help me. I don’t want her to see me like this.”
Nora couldn’t even imagine what it would do to Amy if she found out that her beloved “papa” was a woman. She quickly rewrapped the wound and drew the blanket more tightly around Luke’s shoulders.
“Papa!” Amy pulled herself up and scrambled over various piles of supplies in her haste to get to Luke.
“Please be careful, sweetheart,” Nora said. “Luke has an owie.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to call Luke “Papa.”
Amy stopped and stared at the half-reclining woman. “Is it a bad owie?”
“No, not bad at all,” Luke said. “I’ll be healed in no time.”
She’s the best liar I’ve ever met—and Lord knows, I’ve met quite a few good cheats in Tess’s establishment, Nora thought but said nothing. For once, she was glad about the small lie because Amy tended to worry too much for an almost four-year-old. She didn’t need to fear for her “stepfather’s” life on top of that.
“I kiss it and make it better,” Amy said. Before Luke could stop her, she stepped forward and gripped the blanket, wanting to lift it so she could reach enough bare skin to press a healing kiss to it.
Nora was the first one to react. Quickly, before the blanket could reveal Luke’s bosom, she pressed the blanket down and held it in place. When Luke grew very, very quiet, Nora realized that her hand was resting on the upper swell of Luke’s breast. She wanted to tear her hand away in a spurt of panic, but then Amy would lift the blanket and see more of Luke than Nora wanted her to, so she kept her hand where it was. “Sorry,” she mouthed.
“It’s all right,” a red-faced Luke mouthed back.
“Do you see this big bruise on Luke’s cheek, sweetie?” Nora pointed at one of the marks that Bill Larson’s fists had left behind on Luke’s face. “I think you should kiss him there because I’m sure that bruise hurts a lot.” It wasn’t all that hard to remind herself to use male pronouns when referring to Luke, but still, it felt like a lie now that she knew.
Finally, Amy let go of the blanket and kissed Luke’s cheek. “There. All better,” she said as she had heard from Nora before.
“Thank you, darlin’.” Luke reached out a trembling hand and gently smoothed back an unruly strand of Amy’s hair.
Everything else about her might have been a lie, but Nora believed Luke’s feelings for Amy to be genuine. She knew exactly what faked affections looked like, and this wasn’t it.
“I’ll pick pwetty flowers for Papa,” Amy said and climbed back down from the wagon.
Nora jerked her hand away from Luke’s chest. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Yeah, you do,” Luke said. “My name is Luke Hamilton.”
“Your last name might be Hamilton, but parents don’t name their little girl ‘Luke,’” Nora said.
“My mother did. Well, she named me…” Luke lowered her voice to a whisper. “Lucinda, but most people called me Luke anyway. There are no pleasant memories tied to the name Lucinda.”
Nora nodded slowly. Growing up as a girl in a brothel wasn’t a pleasant experience. “So that was why you didn’t want me to name the baby Lucinda?”
“Something like that, yes. I left that part of my life behind, and I didn’t want to be reminded of it.”
She studied Luke. Her gaze was open, without guile. Finally, Nora felt calm enough to ask. “Why do you live like this? Hiding your true self away behind a disguise?”
Luke looked down at herself. “My true self? Disguise?” She shook her head. “There’s no other life for me. This is how I feel most comfortable.”
After thinking about it for a while, Nora found a few parallels between their lives. Working as a “lady of the evening,” Nora had to pretend and hide away parts of herself too. But this was where the similarities ended—Nora couldn’t imagine voluntarily choosing a life where she constantly had to hide. Luke seemed to prefer living her life as a man, though. “Do you…” She swallowed. “Do you think of yourself as a man?”
Luke shrugged, then groaned and clutched her shoulder as the movement tugged on her wound. “I guess, for the most part I do. I just know I’m not like other women.”
“No, you’re not.” There was no disgust in Nora’s voice. “But you’re also not like other men.”
Luke hung her head. “Look, I know I shouldn’t have married you, and you have every right to—”
“Why did you?”
Luke blinked. “What?”
“Why did you marry me?” Nora asked. Why did a woman marry another woman, knowing full well that it was a sin before God’s eyes? “Was it because you can claim twice the amount of land as a married man?”
“No. The land had nothing to do with it. That was merely a nice side effect,” Luke answered without hesitation. “I knew that having a wife and a child would help to make the people on the wagon train assume that I’m a man. And, most of all, I didn’t want Amy to grow up the way I did. I could see that you are a caring mother, and I wanted to give you the chance at a new life that my mother never took.”
If that was true, then Luke really was the honorable person that Nora had thought her to be. “How long have you lived like this?”
“Since I was twelve.”
Twelve? God, no wonder she’s so convincing. She practically grew up as a boy. Nora thought back to the conversation about Luke’s mother that they’d had just a week ago. A week that felt like an eternity. “Since your mother died?”
“Yeah. I was on my own, with no family or friends to provide for me, and I knew no one would employ a twelve-year-old girl—except maybe as a girl of the night,” Luke said. “So I dressed as a boy and told them I was fifteen. I worked as a stable boy, then as a ranch hand, and four years later, I joined the dragoons.”
“So you disguised yourself as a man to avoid ending up as a prostitute?” Nora could certainly understand that. She wished it had been an option for her four years ago, but she could have never hidden her pregnancy.
“Yes. And no,” Luke said. “It’s not just a means to an end. It’s how I feel most comfortable.”
Nora still didn’t fully understand. How could Luke feel comfortable living a lie?
Luke sighed. “I’m weird, I know. I’ve been told before.”
Nora lifted her head. “Who else but Tess knew?”
“Just Nate.”
“Nate? That friend of yours who died in the Mexican War?” The one I’ve wanted to name the baby for.
Luke nodded.
“Did you tell him?” Nora asked.
“No. He found out the same way you did. I was injured, and he tried to help.” Luke tucked the blanket more tightly around herself as if wanting to protect herself from the memory.
So another person has been in the same situation? Well, maybe not the exact same situation, but still… Nora wanted to hear more. Maybe it would help her cope with this unusual situation. “How did he react?”
“After a few weeks, he got used to it,” Luke said. “He realized that nothing had changed just because he now knew my true gender. I was still the same friend that he had known before.”
Is that a message for me? Friend. Nora tried to picture Luke and another young man in uniform, fighting, eating, and sleeping side by side. A man and a woman living in close quarters during wartime? She knew from experience that war often seemed to intensify emotions and fuel passions. “Nate and you…were you ever…?”
Luke looked up at her with one raised eyebrow. “What?”
“Lovers?” Nora asked softly.
Luke coughed, then clutched her wounded shoulder.
Nora waited until the coughing spell had passed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No, no, it’s all right. You’ve got a right to know these things about me. You know my biggest secret and you didn’t tell anyone, so I should trust you with everything else, right?”
Trust? Is there really any trust left between us? There had been too many lies between them from the start. Just when they had built a reluctant relationship, one of them had shattered the other’s trust and they had to rebuild it again. How many times can we continue to do that until we can’t put the broken pieces back together any longer?
“Nate was my best friend,” Luke said into the silence that had fallen between them like a chasm. “The only friend I ever had other than Tess. He was like a brother to me, but no, there was never anything else between us.” Luke seemed to be genuinely surprised that she would assume that, as if she had never even considered that possibility.
“But if he was the only one who knew your secret, does this mean you’ve never been with anyone?” More and more, Nora had the feeling that Luke had led a life that was even lonelier than hers had been. At least, she had Amy, Tess, and a dozen other young women who were her friends. And sometimes, she had shared her bed with a customer who had been gentle and truly seemed to care about her.
Luke turned her face away and stared at the wagon’s cover, but Nora could still see the blush rising up her face. Her life has also been a lot more sheltered than mine. Nora hid a grin. After a few weeks in their line of work, prostitutes stopped blushing about carnal matters.
“I didn’t say that,” Luke finally mumbled.
Nora blinked. She fell back against the keg of pickles. “You mean…? You really had relations with Tess? You didn’t just say that to bolster your manly image?”
Luke still didn’t meet her gaze. “Everything I told you was the truth. I just lied about my gender, but not about anything else.”
Nora chewed on her lower lip. She didn’t know what to say to that revelation. She had worked as a prostitute, so there wasn’t much about carnal pleasures that was a foreign concept to her. She had heard that there were people who preferred the company of their own sex, but she hadn’t given it much thought. It had been just a theoretical possibility that didn’t matter in her everyday life. She studied Luke with curiosity. “So you paid Tess for—?”
“No. Money was never an issue between us,” Luke said. “I was her friend, not a customer.”
“Did Tess know who and what you are when you first came to her bed?” Nora couldn’t keep herself from asking. The sudden revelation had thrown her thoughts and assumptions into a turmoil, and she wanted to put them back into order and make her head stop spinning.
Luke sighed. “She knew, yes.”
And still she invited Luke into her bed, without even taking her money. Nora knew that as a madam of a brothel, Tess was a clever businesswoman first and foremost. She never did anything she didn’t want to unless she profited from it in some way. She took Luke to bed because she wanted to. But why did she send me upstairs with Luke? Did she think that I’d like it too? Instead of clearing up her thoughts and feelings, their conversation made her even more confused.
“I know this must seem strange and shocking to you,” Luke said, her gaze still directed at the wagon’s cover, “and it’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but that’s the way I am, and I can’t change that. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
Nora looked at the clenched jaw, the rigid back, and the averted face. Luke Hamilton was a picture of shame. Still, Nora was not ready to let her off the hook and change the topic of conversation. She wanted to understand this. “Did you always prefer the company of women, or do you think it’s because you lead the life of a man?”
Luke shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve lived in male apparel since I was old enough to be aware of carnal desires. I can’t imagine being with a man…that way.” She shuddered.
Studying Luke’s features, Nora tried to imagine Luke in bed with a man, but the mental pictures just wouldn’t come. She had gotten so used to thinking of Luke as a man that it somehow seemed wrong to picture her with a man. Instead, a mental image of Luke in a passionate embrace with Tess popped into her mind. Now it was Nora’s turn to blush.
Someone cleared her throat just outside of the wagon, announcing her presence. “Nora? Luke?” It was Bernice’s voice. “Are you…decent?”
Luke stuffed the blanket more tightly around herself, trying to hide any signs of her femininity.
Nora stuck her head out of the wagon. She knew Luke would be more comfortable if Bernice stayed outside. “Where’s Amy?”
“She’s with Jacob,” Bernice said. “He took the children down to the river to watch the wagons cross. Listen, we have to break camp and move on. We can’t wait any longer.”
Nora knew she was right. It was almost September, and the emigrants worried that the snows would come early and they’d get stranded in the mountains. Every man and woman on the trail had heard of the Donner Party, who had frozen to death or resorted to cannibalism because they were stuck in the snow. That thought followed the travelers as they continued west.
“What will you do?” Bernice asked, nodding at the wagon where Luke rested.
“I don’t know.” Nora looked forlornly at her friend. For the first time since the beginning of their journey, it was “you” and not “we” as if she was no longer a part of the wagon train. “I’m not sure if Luke is strong enough to travel.” And she also wasn’t sure if the other emigrants would still want her to travel with them.
“You’re always welcome to join us, you know? We could make room for you and Amy in our wagon,” Bernice said with her trademark kind smile.
For me and Amy, but what about Luke? At first, she had never wanted to see Luke again, but now her anger had faded, leaving behind only grief, confusion, and fear about her uncertain future. Her life’s path had seemed so clear to her just a few days ago. She had dreamed of raising her children with a kind husband and loving father. Now that dream had been shattered.
