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—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Flame avoided her father’s glare as he sat at the far end of the dining table from her. He had met her at the gate when she had arrived from her outing—from her lovemaking with White Fire. He had told her that he was just getting ready to send the cavalry out to look for her.
She shivered even now at the thought of how it might have been had the soldiers arrived at White Fire’s cabin in their search for her while she and he were making love.
The soldiers might have surrounded the cabin. She could even envision them firing at the cabin in rapid bursts of gunfire.
Her thoughts so morbid, so frightening, Flame forced them away and again gazed at her father, whose eyes still had not left her. In them there was such a coldness, such annoyance.
“Reshelle, I’m thinking of sending you back to St. Louis,” he said, his voice a monotone. “You are out of hand here in the wilderness. You won’t listen to anything I say. You ride off on that damn horse of yours at the drop of a hat. All I have to do is look at you crosswise and you are off to only hell knows where.”
The threat to send her away was real enough for Flame. She had worried that the strained relationship between herself and her father would make him seek the easiest way out. To be rid of her altogether was his out.
Knowing that she might say the wrong things if she did not take the time to think before she spoke, Flame picked up her fork and began eating the roast pork from her plate. All around her candles glowed from fancy candle holders, wall sconces, and the chandeliers. The large oak table was covered with a lacy, fine linen tablecloth. Goblets of sheer crystal, china from France, and gold flatware from Italy, graced the table, along with piles of rich foodstuffs on fancy gilt-edged platters.
On a side table, cream puffs, cherry and apple pies, and cinnamon rolls covered with gobs of white icing, waited to be chosen for dessert.
“Reshelle, did you hear what I said?” Colonel Russell said, banging the dull end of his fork on the table to draw her attention.
Her hair swirled into a fancy chignon atop her head, with diamond combs glittering from the folds, and wearing a low-swept green satin gown, with rubies sparkling at her ivory throat, Flame looked quickly at her father.
“Yes, I heard,” she murmured, her cheeks flushed pink from the strain of the moment. “And, Father, your still calling me Reshelle is only one way of proving how little you care about what I want, or desire. Yes, you can think you might rid yourself of the bother of having me around by sending me back to St. Louis, to force me on some unwilling relative of ours, or by locking me away in a convent. But you know that is not at all what I want.”
She placed her fork on the table. Her fingers trembled as she twined them around the stem of a goblet. She slowly turned the goblet around as she gazed with defiance at her father.
“Father, do you truly care about what I want?” she asked softly. “Do you truly care about me at all?”
Colonel Russell’s face flooded with color. His eyes narrowed and squinted as he gave Flame a dark frown, the sleek lines of his uniform and the shine of its gold buttons a sight that Flame had grown to resent. The uniform meant authority. That seemed to be her father’s guideline in life. He had to be the one who gave orders. He expected everyone to obey them.
“I see that you are having trouble answering my questions,” Flame said, sighing heavily. “You know that you would not be able to say what I would like to hear.”
“You are wrong,” Colonel Russell said, clearing his throat nervously. “I do care for you, Resh—er . . . I mean . . . Flame. It’s just that I always have so much on my mind I find it hard to show my feelings toward you.”
His jaw tightened. “And your behavior warrants scoldings more than my confessions of how I feel about you,” he was quick to interject.
“Don’t you know, Father, that you cause much of the behavior that you resent?” Flame said, sliding her hand away from the glass. She fidgeted with the white linen napkin that lay across her lap. “If you would just once treat me like . . . like . . . a daughter instead of the soldiers under your command, I truly believe I might not be so hasty to—”
He interrupted her. “To go and meet with the ’breed?” he said, his voice low and measured. He laughed shrewdly. “Of course you weren’t going to say that, were you?” he said menacingly.
Flame rose so quickly from her chair it toppled over behind her. “You see?” she cried, her voice breaking. “Just when I thought we were beginning to have a civil conversation, you have to turn into that ogre of a man who just . . . who just . . .”
She couldn’t find the words she wanted to say quickly enough. Yes, he was right to accuse her of meeting with White Fire. Yet it was the way in which he threw the subject of White Fire in her face which hurt her to the quick.
Brushing past the fallen chair, Flame rushed from the room. Blindly, she climbed the stairs that took her to the upper floor. She then ran to her room and closed the door behind her.
As she leaned against the closed door, tears flowed across her cheeks as she thought of White Fire and how she wished to be with him.
And she hadn’t even been able to talk to her father about their marriage plans.
“But he wouldn’t listen, anyhow,” she whispered, brushing the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Then she thought of what White Fire had told her about her father, about him surely being sent from the fort in the next few days, or perhaps even arrested.
“I have to set things right now, or perhaps never,” she whispered.
But then again, she recalled how her father had only moments ago threatened to send her back to St. Louis to live with relatives, or to a convent.
“He can’t do that,” she sobbed. “He . . . just . . . can’t!”
