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  THE LILY OF THE WEST

  THE LILY OF THE WEST

  KATHLEEN MORRIS

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Morris.

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Morris, Kathleen, 1944– author.

  Title: The Lily of the West / Kathleen Morris.

  Description: First edition. | Farmington Hills, Mich. : Five Star, 2019. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018025318 (print) | LCCN 2018027298 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432847357 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432847340 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432847333 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4734-0

  Subjects: LCSH: Elder, Kate, 1850−1940—Fiction. | GSAFD: Western stories. | Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.O77335 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.O77335 L55 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025318

  First Edition. First Printing: January 2019

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-4734-0

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  Printed in the United States of America

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  THE LILY OF THE WEST

  PROLOGUE

  1881

  Strident voices drifted through the open window.

  “I’ll kill them sons a bitches this time, Ike, I swear to God I will. They won’t get away with treating us like dogs no more.”

  “Frank, you got to calm down. I don’t even have a gun. Them bastards took it.”

  As I leaned over and peered out the window, the book I’d been reading when I dozed off tumbled to the floor. Five men stood below with a couple of horses, and I recognized all of them—Cowboys.

  Movement up the street caught my eye. Three men dressed in black strode purposefully towards the corral, their boots kicking up little puffs of dust. I dropped the curtain and fumbled through some of the buttons on my dress.

  When I pulled back the curtain again, a fourth man—one I knew well—came around the corner, his long black duster doing little to disguise the shotgun in his right hand. He stood beside the other three, a silent choir of dark avenging angels.

  “Throw up your hands, boys. I’ve come to disarm you.” Virgil’s voice was clear and steady.

  Hell had come to Tombstone, and I was riding on its coattails.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mexico City, October 1864

  Sometimes a thing as simple as darkness makes all the difference between ease and pain.

  “Your chocolate, Miss Katherine.”

  I opened my eyes and promptly shut them again. Luisa deposited the silver tray with its wonderful-smelling contents on the small table beside my bed. She’d already pulled back the curtains, and the bright morning of a new day beamed into my bedroom.

  I rose up on my elbows and then fell back on the lace pillows. My head was pounding like the bass drum in the orchestra last night. The emperor’s ball. All of them, out of place and out of time, preening and pandering as though this could last forever. I had enjoyed my first glasses of champagne and from what I felt like this morning, my last.

  The delectable smell of cinnamon roused me as much as the chocolate, and I sat up again, ignoring the drumbeat in my temples. I took a sip of chocolate, and as the warm, dark liquid slid down my throat, I sighed with pleasure. It helped. Before I knew it, I’d finished the first cup, along with the cinnamon-and sugar coated pastries, and had poured another cup from the silver pot. Luisa bustled about the room, picking up my white, lacy ball gown from the floor where I’d thrown it off the night before. Getting to my bed was all I’d cared about then.

  The bedroom door opened, and my mother rushed in.

  “Katherine, you darling girl!”

  I loved my mother dearly, but she was a silly woman who thought of nothing but clothes, prestige, and our place in society. She bored me.

  “Mother.”

  “You made such an impression on the marquis last night! It was positively amazing, sweeting. Even in this godforsaken place, there may be hope of an advantageous marriage.” She was impeccably dressed (as always) in a gray taffeta morning dress, her carefully arranged coiffure bouncing beneath a lace cap. Her smile was dazzling, and I couldn’t help but wince.

  “Mother, I’m fourteen. Even the Virgin was older than that when she got a visitation.”

  She stopped, auburn curls and peacock feathers vibrating. How does anyone manage to get peacock feathers in their hair this early in the morning? The woman was a wonder.

  “Katherine.” She frowned. “Your attitude does you no credit. You have to think about your future. Don’t be obstreperous.”

  I sighed and took another sip of chocolate. She was as much a product of her environment as the rest of society. That I was an anomaly wasn’t her fault. “I’m just a child, Mother, studying my Latin and history in the schoolroom. I’m hardly ready for the marriage market.”

  She sniffed and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Do not play games with me, miss. You are of marriageable age and look at least sixteen. Your father will answer for this attitude. I told him education for young girls was dangerous nonsense, and look what it’s come to. Latin, indeed.”

  “Indeed,” I muttered, from deep in the chocolate cup. She had no inkling about French, English, Greek, history, or biological sciences and wouldn’t have grasped their dangers, anyway. The mistakes of Heraclitus were always repeated.

  She grabbed the cup and set it on the tray. Her nose was inches from mine as she glared at me. “That is enough. This evening we are dining at the Marquis de Montfort’s villa.”

  She directed her attention at Luisa, the shy maid hovering nearby. “See that she’s ready, girl. Choose the blue dress, and arrange her hair over the shoulders, as befits a maid.”

  First champagne and now this. I buried my head under the covers. Tonight was many hours away. Maybe I’d be dead of a headache by then.

  “Shut the curtains,” I mumbled when I heard the door slam.

  Luisa complied, and I tried to go back to sleep. Instead, I thought about my future. Ha. What sort of future could a girl have in the court of Emperor Maximilian, trying to survive in Mexico City? My father had brought us here when he was appointed the emperor’s personal physician, and so far, it had been not exactly what he’d hoped. I longed for the green hills of our estate in Hungary, left behind when he’d brought us to America, following his dreams and the wishes of the royal family. Mexico was beautiful, especially Chapultepec Palace, where we lodged close to the emperor and his family, but it was so different from the pine forests I’d grown up with in Europe. Here, lush tropical flowers t
wined upwards on the balconies outside my window, and every afternoon sweet breezes blew the scent of cinnamon and gardenias. But the beauty was accompanied by the sounds of violence on the streets far below, where the native Republicans and Imperial troops of the emperor fought continually, providing a constant reminder that this was not our place. The Europeans here would soon be gone, if history was any judge, and even I, with my limited studies, had learned that usually it was.

  For me, the best thing here was still being able to attend the lessons offered by the royal tutor. My father had always thought education of any kind was beneficial, even to girls. This was a novel attitude and one I loved him for, whatever his other faults. My younger sister, Wilhelmina, was not of my persuasion. She was a sweet girl, Mina, but typical of her sex. I knew I was what was politely called “precocious” in some circles, although I preferred “intelligent.” Phrased either way, it was not a particularly marketable marriage quality in women. I had been an avid reader since age four, and my father delighted in my prowess, supplying me as many books as I could digest, much to the dismay of my mother, who thought girls should only study needlework, housekeeping, and readying themselves for a husband. It was an ongoing battle but one I kept fighting, despite her attempts to make me, as she put it, “a gentlewoman with traits suitable to a good wife” rather than the wild-eyed termagant she feared.

  Here in this microcosm of a European court, so out of place on this wild side of the Atlantic, Mother was determined to secure for me an advantageous, even noble, marriage, due to the scarcity of suitable women available to the aristocratic hangers-on of the emperor. She’d settled on the Marquis de Montfort, an aging roué with a taste for young flesh, especially mine. I didn’t think he had marriage in mind, but only a romp, although convincing my mother of this was beyond my skills at this point.

  She was not a worldly woman, and she was easily shocked by the evils of sophistication. She was blinded by the sumptuousness of the court and didn’t see that Emperor Maximilian’s faux world was crumbling around him. The utter ridiculousness of a European royal coming to the New World to style himself an emperor over a country as foreign and fractious as this one never occurred to her and apparently hadn’t occurred to Maximilian and his backers, either. I knew my father saw it, and his increasing dependence on the emperor’s excellent port, after dinner and well into the night, hadn’t escaped me. The man felt helpless, well beyond concerned, and rightly so.

  While statecraft had not been expressly taught by my tutors, I hadn’t wasted my powers of observation in the last ten years. I’d been brought up in the courts of the Hapsburgs and had seen politics and intrigue swirl around the household and palace, their tentacles reaching even into the schoolrooms I’d shared with young princes and dukes. I’d witnessed more intrigue and falsehoods under the guise of smiling faces and gentle hands than most, and I’d learned a thing or two about trickery.

  “Miss Katherine.”

  The maid’s soft voice roused me from my slumbers. Usually I never slept well during the daylight hours, and I turned over, throwing off the bedclothes, the late afternoon sun faint through the gap in the curtains.

  “I’ve had a bath brought,” Luisa said. I blinked, pushing my hair away from my face. The copper tub sat beside the tiled fireplace, steam rising from its depths, and rose petals floating on the surface of the water. I stepped in and found it was just what I needed, the water enveloping me in its warmth.

  An hour later, I was resplendent—clad in the desired blue taffeta, golden bronze ringlets around my face and satin slippers on my feet, ready for an evening of festivities with the court of Emperor Maximilian and his divine Empress Carlotta, not to mention the lascivious Marquis de Montfort and my grasping mother. The face that looked back at me from the mirror was not what anyone would term conventionally pretty. My chin was strong and my nose a bit too long to be called pert, but given a tilt to the mouth and a sidelong look of green eyes under long lashes, it was a face that definitely intrigued and attracted, and I knew it. At least the headache was gone, and my skin felt soft under the corset that pinched rather tightly, thrusting my still-burgeoning breasts some inches higher than they had a natural whim to be. Still, what a wasted day I’d had. The last week we had been studying Catullus, and I’d missed his journey to Capua, as I’d been drowsing in a stupor. Never again, I vowed. The more I learned, the better equipped I was to avoid a vapid, stifling life as someone’s wife, stuck in a country manor breeding children and doing nothing more complicated than ordering foodstuffs and planning dinners for visiting courtiers. That was something I vowed would never happen.

  The latch clicked, and my father entered, shooing Luisa and the undermaids away, their skirts fluttering in their haste. They were confounded by the gentle manner that belied his strong words and took every opportunity to hie themselves to other regions of the palace when he arrived.

  “Kate,” he said, kissing my cheek and standing back to observe my magnificence. He frowned, obviously unimpressed, and began to pace back and forth from the window to the dressing table, hands clasped behind his back. The illustrious Dr. Haroney was dressed conservatively, as always—black waistcoat and trousers, stiffly starched shirtfront, beard trimmed neatly. His brown eyes were deep in thought, but he was clearly agitated by more than my appearance.

  “What is it, Father?”

  He continued pacing, but shook his head. “All of it, dear girl, all of it.”

  I waited, knowing there was more to come.

  “This place. These people. The emperor. Foolishness that has led to disaster. Not yet come, but it will.”

  He gazed at me under brows newly frosted with gray. “It is not safe for us here anymore. I know you understand that, even if no one else does, Kate.”

  He was right; I did. Mexico City was a hotbed of unrest, from Benito Juarez and his rebels to the recalcitrant nobles, some of whom danced in the evening with the emperor and nervously booked passage on trains leaving the next morning. It was a powder keg waiting to explode—not a place that gave ease to those who saw through the façade.

  “Perhaps that is true. But where are we to go, Father? Back to Hungary? Vienna? Paris?”

  All my life, we had lived at the whim of the Hapsburgs. My father had been court physician to archdukes and kings, and now the emperor. Life had been elegant, comfortable, and prosperous for the Haroney family—my mother, sisters, brothers, and I went wherever Father had been bid by his noble masters. Until now, no threat or harm had touched us, but this was a different world with different rules, and it was proving to be a different brew altogether.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, my dear, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the United States. They don’t have kings there; it’s a place where a man is made by his own merits. I could start my own medical practice. It would be different from the life we’ve known, but I believe it would be beneficial to us all. We could send for the other children once I’ve established myself, and we’d all be together again.”

  He resumed pacing, but I was intrigued in spite of myself. Only Wilhelmina, Alexander, and I had journeyed to Mexico, while my younger siblings had stayed with relatives. I did miss them, and I knew he did, too. “I’ve heard about it,” I said, watching him carefully. “It’s a wild place, at least in the West, so they say, but more civilized farther north and east. But there’s a war going on there, isn’t there? Between slave owners and northern businessmen?”

  “That doesn’t concern us, Daughter. I met a man from a place called Iowa the other day. Good families, decent farming folk, just the sort of place a gentleman of breeding could make a home and a profession, and somewhat removed from this war they’re so concerned with. Besides, the war will be over soon, and that’ll only be to the good for a doctor who’s knowledgeable with injuries and such as the soldiers return home. It may even be just the place for a doctor’s daughter who’s entirely too smart for her own good.”

  My father was nothing if not pragmatic w
hen thinking about his earning capabilities, but I wondered if years of royal support had blinded him to the practicalities of everyday living. I was irritated, both by his short-sightedness and by the fact that he was discussing this with me. I needed him to be strong, not asking for advice. Even so, the whole situation had frightened me for some time, and hearing his summation of the situation we were in, I was scared to the tips of my toes. Having been raised at court had taught me not to show emotion. When I was frightened, however, I tended to be unpleasant. I stood up and brushed my blue taffeta free of wrinkles.

  “Perhaps. At any rate, it doesn’t concern me.”

  He stared at me, clearly disconcerted. “Why is that, miss?”

  “I’m likely marrying the Marquis de Montfort within two months, and we’ll take house in his chateau at LeBrun,” I said, watching my father’s face pale. He deserved that and more for this mess he’d embroiled us in. I smiled brilliantly, brushing my skirts past his shoes as I swept out the door to the evening’s entertainment.

  CHAPTER 2

  Davenport, Iowa, March 1865

  “Next stop, Daaavenpooort, Ioway!” crowed the conductor.

  I peered blearily out the window, wincing at his cheery voice. We’d left behind Maximilian and his court of fools, but I hoped whatever new frontier our small family was headed to was a benevolent one. For the last two weeks, we’d passed through the emptiest, bleakest countryside the world had to offer, and I held little optimism for any place named so drearily as Davenport.

  Since leaving Mexico City on the heels of the Republican army, we’d traveled steadily for a month, my mother crying at the slightest annoyance, my little brother Alexander whining, my sister Wilhelmina sniveling, and my father snarling at us while struggling to maintain some shreds of paternal dignity. All of this transpired in a country that may have welcomed immigrants at one time, but whose inhabitants were clearly in the grip of their own troubles as a civil war raged. Only my ability to speak English had gotten us this far, and my skills were rudimentary at best. I’d been tutoring my family, but my father and Wilhelmina had been the only students I’d managed to inspire, my mother and six-year-old brother oblivious to my talents. In my opinion, taking a ship to any port on the other side of the Atlantic would have been a wiser choice, but my father was following his dream, or at least his hope, of a life in America, where a man could make his fortune. My personal hope was that my mother had pocketed some of the Emperor’s serving silver, because we would have need of it.