Linda Miller - The Rustler

The mattress was bare, since no one had used the room in months, with a faded quilt folded at its foot. Briskly, Sarah fetched sheets from the top drawer of the bureau and made up a bed for Owen.

The process was bittersweet. Tonight, her son would sleep in this room, dreaming, she hoped, little-boy dreams. But there was a disturbing truth in Wyatt and Doc’s teasing—young as he was, Owen was more man than child. He’d lived in hotel rooms by himself, and God knew what other places.

She yearned to keep him, raise him openly as her son. She wouldn’t mind the scandal that would surely ensue, the extra expense, the inevitable work of bringing up a child. But she must not allow herself to think such thoughts, she knew, because Charles would come back and take him away again.

Under the law, she had no rights. On his birth certificate, Marjory Langstreet was listed as his mother.

Some of the starch went out of Sarah’s knees.

She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed, fighting back tears of hopelessness.

She’d been so young and foolish—only seventeen and far from home—when she’d given birth to Owen, in an anonymous infirmary room, a decade before. Charles, fifteen years her senior and sophisticated, a friend of her father’s, had been her “protector,” met her at the train when she arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, taken her by carriage to the women’s college in the rolling green Pennsylvania countryside.

Homesick, regarded as a bumpkin by the other pupils in residence, most of whom had been raised in cities and not crude frontier towns, she’d quickly become besotted with Charles. She’d studied hard at school, majoring in music, but on weekends, he often came to collect her in his elegant carriage. It was all innocent at first; he escorted her to museums, to concerts, to fine restaurants.

And then he took advantage.

He said college was a waste for a woman, and suggested she leave school so they could spend more time together. He’d set her up in a fancy hotel, persuaded her not to tell her father that she’d dropped all her classes.

That was when the lying had begun. She’d written weekly letters to her parents, describing books she hadn’t read, lectures she hadn’t attended, field trips she hadn’t taken. Someone Charles knew in the college office mailed the missives, and forwarded the replies. Sarah returned the funds her father sent for tuition and textbooks, claiming she’d won a scholarship. Her grades were forged, with the help of Charles’s friend, and for a long, blissful time, the deception passed as truth.

Sitting there in Owen’s moonlit room, Sarah blushed. Charles had been right earlier when he’d taunted her about enjoying his attentions in bed. Just sixteen, her body in full flower, she’d lived for his visits, reveled like some wild creature in his caresses.

Even when she realized, one eventful day, that she was carrying a child, she hadn’t worried. Charles would be pleased. He would surely marry her, straight away.

She was awaiting his visit, full of her news, when a grand woman in tailored clothes presented herself at the door of Sarah’s suite. She’d been tall, imperious, exuding angry confidence.

“So this is where Charles is keeping his current mistress,” Marjory Langstreet had said, sweeping past a startled Sarah into the sumptuously furnished suite. “And how gracious of him to support you in such style.”

Sarah had stared at the woman. “M-mistress?” she’d echoed stupidly.

“Surely you understand,” Marjory had said, “that you are a kept woman? A bird in a gilded cage?”

Sarah’s mouth had fallen open. This was surely some kind of cruel prank. Charles wasn’t married. He loved her—hadn’t he said so, over and over again? Hadn’t he given her jewelry, bought her trinkets and clothes?

“Who are you?” she’d managed.

Marjory ran a gloved hand along the keyboard of Sarah’s treasured piano. The sound was discordant, and bore no resemblance to music. From there, she proceeded to examine a painted porcelain lamp, a novel bound in Moroccan leather, a delicate Chinese fan with an ivory handle—all gifts from Charles.

“You really don’t know?” she trilled, after several long moments. Then she’d turned, hands resting on her hips, and shattered Sarah’s world with a single sentence. “I’m Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third,” she said, the words slicing through Sarah with the stinging force of a sharp sword.

Then, as now, Sarah had been unable to stand. She’d dropped into a chair, blind with confusion, pain and fear. Unconsciously, she’d rested a hand on her abdomen.

“Pack your things, dear,” Mrs. Langstreet had said. “As of tomorrow morning, you won’t be living here any longer. A backstreet whore belongs, you see, on a backstreet. If Charles wants to continue this dalliance, that’s his business, but I won’t be footing the bill.”

With that, she’d gone, leaving the suite door standing open to the hall beyond.

Sarah had been too numb to move at first. She simply sat, waiting for Charles to come and say it was all a mistake. That she, Sarah, would be the only Mrs. Charles Langstreet the Third.

All day she waited.

But he didn’t come.

Sarah had finally closed the door, gone to bed and lain staring up at the ceiling throughout the very long night to come.

In the morning, a tentative knock sent a surge of hope rushing through her. She rushed to the door, opened it to find, not a smiling Charles, with a credible explanation at the ready, but one of the hotel’s porters. The fellow stood in the corridor, clearly uncomfortable.

He’d offered an anxious smile as two maids and another porter collected themselves behind him. “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving us,” he’d said. “Mrs. Langstreet asked that we help you gather your belongings. There’ll be a carriage waiting to take you to your new residence at ten o’clock.”

Sarah had not protested.

She’d simply watched, stricken, as her clothes were folded into trunks and boxes, her books taken from the shelves, her jewelry stuffed into valises Marjory Langstreet had evidently provided for the purpose.

By noon, she’d been settled in a seedy rooming house, one door of her tiny room opening onto a rat-infested alley.

And still there had been no word, no visit, from Charles.

Sarah waited a week, then began pawning jewelry, a piece at a time, to buy food. Twice, she wrote long letters to her unsuspecting father, telling the shattering truth, but she’d never mailed them.

She was too ashamed.

Too heartbroken.

Several times, when hunger forced her out into the narrow, filthy streets, she’d considered standing on the tracks when the trolley came. It would be over, that way.

In the end, she couldn’t do that to the baby, or to herself.

She finally sent a wire to her father, reading simply, I am in trouble, and listing her address at the boardinghouse.

Within ten days, he’d arrived, bent on taking her home to Stone Creek. She’d told him everything but the name of the man who’d sired her child, and patently refused to return to Arizona Territory. As much as she yearned for her own room, the sound of her mother’s voice, the soothing touch of her hand, Sarah simply hadn’t been able to face the inevitable gossip and speculation.

Resigned, Ephriam had enrolled her in another college, a small, private one where secrets were kept, and moved her into the dormitory.

She hadn’t seen Charles again until a week before Owen’s birth, in the college infirmary. They met in the library, Charles and Sarah and Charles’s lawyer. Charles had stiffly informed her that he meant to raise the child as a legitimate heir, with Marjory listed as the legal mother.