For a moment she closed her eyes and thought back over the last several days, and involuntarily, she gave a bit of a shudder. Zachary Jordan was afraid of no one and nothing. There was nothing she could threaten him with that made any difference to him. She couldn't intimidate him with, "I'm going to tell your father," because he knew very well that his father wanted her to fail—if for no other reason than to be able to say, I told you so.
She had talked to Zachary twice to try to persuade him of the value of an education. Like his father, he had just laughed at her, then turned away and left the house.
She had tried to make a home for him. Well, truthfully, maybe she had tried to make the Jordan house into a home for her and Jeremy, but Zachary lived there too. It seemed that Cole Jordan only had male employees, and cleanliness was not something they considered important. Neither was good food. They fried everything in lard, poured it onto platters, then put them into the middle of the table.
For her and Jeremy's own health, she had started cooking for the two of them and young Zachary, who, she quickly discovered, had an appetite that matched the size of him. And of course Kathryn couldn't cook in a kitchen as filthy as that one had been, so she'd cleaned it. Then she'd cleaned two bedrooms for herself and Jeremy, and since their rooms turned out to be next to Zachary's, she cleaned his too, even sending the sheets out to the Legend laundry.
"There is nothing I can do to force him to study."
"Too bad you can't starve him," Jeremy said as he bit into his apple. "The boy eats as much as the town blacksmith, who, from what I hear, might be his father as well as any other man. And he certainly likes those shirts you had ironed."
Days ago Kathryn had stopped correcting Jeremy's unpleasant comments about Zachary because she'd found out that his jealousy was stronger than her attempts to inhibit him. No, she wasn't worried about Jeremy; her concern was Zachary. How did she get him to agree to be her pupil? She had figured out that that's what it would take with Zachary because he was too willful to be forced to do anything he didn't want to do.
"You can see that he looks just like Cole Jordan," Kathryn said, her chin resting on her hands and thinking about what Jeremy had just said. She might not have been able to get Zachary to open a book, but she had made inroads into other parts of his life. Who would have thought that such a grubby little boy would actually be a hedonist?
Over the last few days Kathryn had seen the pleasure he had taken in putting on freshly washed and ironed shirts. She'd seen him flick a speck of dust off his newly polished boots. Maybe she couldn't get him to want to learn geography, but she'd had no trouble getting him to bathe.
And Jeremy was right about the food. The first night when she and Jeremy had sat down to a dinner of roast chicken and tiny vegetable tarts, Zachary had scoffed and ridiculed the meal even as he was filling his plate. That night Kathryn had been past exhaustion and she had snapped at him, "Either you mind your manners and act like a gentleman or you eat in the bunkhouse with the men." After that Zachary had quietly sat down across from Jeremy and had watched everything Jeremy had done and imitated it perfectly.
At least I taught him something, Kathryn thought. Then, suddenly, her head came up and she stared, wide-eyed, at her son. "What did you say?"
"That the town blacksmith could have been his father. I was told that his mother—"
"Jeremy, you must stop listening to gossip. No, what did you say before that? Something about food."
"Oh. I said it was too bad you couldn't starve him into submission."
"Yes," Kathryn said as she stood. "That's it. Jeremy, I want you to go into the bunkhouse and get the dirtiest sheets you can find."
"The men don'
t have sheets, just blankets."
"Then get the dirtiest blankets you can find. And I want you to have the men use Zachary's clothes to wipe down their sweaty horses this evening."
Jeremy stopped chewing his apple as he looked up at his mother in disbelief. It was one thing for him to think up hideous things to do to Zachary, but his mother was a firm believer in returning good for evil.
"And I want you to get Manuel back in here. I want him to cook dinner tonight."
"Mother! You can't mean—"
"Go! Do it! Now!"
Jeremy dropped his apple and began running.
As Zachary Jordan rode home that night he was smiling in anticipation of the hot dinner waiting for him and the smell of lemon oil that now filled the house. Every time he'd entered the house in the last week he congratulated himself on his cleverness. It was due to him that Mrs. Kathryn de Longe was now living with them. If it had been left up to his father, they'd now both be imprisoned by that bull of a woman his father had wanted to hire.
But Zachary had foiled him. With a little help from his friends in Legend, Zachary had been able to hire the sweetest woman he had ever met. And in the last week he had lived in heaven. He would have died before he admitted it to anyone or let the men see how he actually felt, but he loved the cleanliness of the house. He liked being able to put on a clean shirt every day.
And he loved the food the woman cooked. Instead of two-pound beef steaks that took a Bowie knife to cut, he now ate beef cooked in wine, chicken wrapped in herbs, trout smothered in slivered almonds. She served salads and cooked vegetables with delicious sauces ladled over them. There were desserts that made him nearly weep when he put them into his mouth.
And all he had to do to get this wonderful food and service was to sit at the same table with that little prig, Jeremy, and mirror everything he did. Which, of course, hadn't been difficult. What great intelligence did it take to pick up one fork instead of another?
He did feel a tiny bit bad about his refusal to comply with Mrs. de Longe's other request, that he spend his days with his nose in a book, but how could he give up life for something like that? How could he stay away from mountain streams of water so clear you could see fifty feet down? How could he forgo hearing the eagles songs or sitting around a campfire and listening to old Golden Hawk's stories of the old days? Was he supposed to give up shooting lessons from the 'Frisco Kid? Maybe he was old now, but he could still shoot and still spin a yarn about gunfighters and what it had been like long ago. And then there were what he considered his duties in Legend. The ladies told him what their problems were and he told his father and, most of the time, his father fixed what was wrong. His father had banned more than one bad-tempered cowboy, from town because he was mistreating the ladies.
Smiling, Zachary remembered the day he had first seen Mrs. de Longe. A lot of the men of Legend thought Mrs. de Longe was one of the ladies, but Zachary knew she wasn't. She was beautiful, true, but there was an air of quality about her. The ladies were fool's gold, but Mrs. de Longe was like twenty-four-carat gold. The real thing. He'd known that when he saw her photograph, and he'd been even more sure of it when he'd seen her in person.
On that first day, as he'd stood on the sidelines and seen the way she had held on to her son, a wave of jealousy so strong had overtaken Zachary that he could hardly bear it. All his life he'd heard too many rotten stories about his own mother. She had been one of Legend's ladies, but she had also been ambitious and had set her cap to become Mrs. Cole Jordan. After Zachary had been born, he knew his father had refused to marry her, so she'd dumped her baby on the doorstep and run off. She hadn't been back or even enquired about the son she'd left—or probably sold—since.