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.
Zachary could still remember how he'd felt that day, seeing a boy his own age with a mother like that. All he could think to do was make that perfectly clean boy feel as bad as he did, so he'd acted as though he thought Mrs. de Longe was one of Legend's ladies. How good it had felt to fight with the boy, even if he was a much better opponent than Zachary would ever have thought! Later, he couldn't refrain from taking a bottle from a lady and drinking half of it down. He knew the city boy wouldn't know that the ladies filled their bottles with cold tea.
So now, returning to the house, Zachary was smiling in memory and anticipation. What delicious thing had Mrs. de Longe cooked for him tonight? But when Zachary reached the house, he found the front door to his own house locked. Since when was there need to lock the Jordan house, he thought. His father had armed guards patrolling the Jordan Line, and who would dare attack their house anyway? He pounded on the door, but no one came to answer it. In the end he had to climb up the porch post, walk across the porch roof, then climb across two windowsills before he reached his own bedroom window.