The Legacy Read Online Free PDF

that she almost reached out to brush it back. He watched her with light brown eyes, and she thought she saw a startled kind of happiness there.
    As the dance ended and he took her hand to escort her from the floor, her glove snagged against the roughened skin of his palm. On impulse, she turned his hand over in her own and studied it, pushing her thumb into the callous at the root of each finger, comparing the width of it to her own. Her hand looked like a child’s in his, and she drew breath and parted her lips to say this before realizing how inappropriate it would be. She felt childlike indeed, and she noticed that he was breathing deeply.
    “Are you quite well, Mr. Massey?” she asked.
    “Yes . . . I’m fine, thank you. It’s a little confined in here, isn’t it?”
    “Come over to the window, you will find the air fresher,” she said, taking his arm to steer him through the crowd. The air was indeed close, heavy with sweat and breathing, thick with smoke and music and voices.
    “Thank you,” Corin said. The long casement windows were shut against the dead cold of the February night, but that cold radiated from the glass nevertheless, providing an area of cool where the overexerted could find relief. “I’m not used to seeing so many people under one roof all at once. It’s funny, how quickly and completely a person can become unaccustomed to such things.” He hitched one shoulder in a shrug too casual for his evening coat.
    “I have never left New York,” Caroline blurted out. “That is, only for my family’s summer house, on the coast . . . I mean to say . . .” but she wasn’t sure what she meant to say. That he seemed foreign to her, a figure from myth almost—to have gone so far from civilization, to have chosen life in an untamed land.
    “Would you not like to travel, Miss Fitzpatrick?” he asked, and she began to understand that something had started between them. A negotiation of some kind; a sounding out.
    “There you are, my dear.” Bathilda bore down on them. She could spot such a negotiation from quite a distance, it seemed. “Do come along, I want to introduce you to Lady Clemence.” Caroline had no choice but to be led away but she glanced back over her shoulder and raised her hand in slight salute.
    “D on’t be ridiculous, girl!” Bathilda broke into her thoughts and returned her to the present, and the lunch table at La Fiorentina. “You are acting like a lovesick schoolgirl! I, too, have read Mr. Wister’s novel , and it has clearly filled your head with romantic notions. I can think of no other reason why you would choose to marry a cowboy . But you will learn that The Virginian is a work of fiction and bears little relation to the reality of it. Did you not also read of the dangers, and the emptiness, and the hardships of the frontier land?”
    “It’s not like that any more. Corin has told me all about it. He says the land is so beautiful you can see God’s hand in every blade of grass . . .” At this Bathilda snorted, inelegantly. “And Mr. Wister himself acknowledges that the wild era he described is no more. Woodward is a thriving town, Corin says—”
    “Woodward? Who has heard of Woodward ? What state is it in?”
    “I . . . do not know,” Caroline confessed, pressing her lips together resentfully.
    “It is in no state at all, that’s why you do not know. No state of the Union. It is uncharted land, full of savages and uncouth men of all kinds. Why, I heard there are no ladies to be found west of Dodge City at all—only women of the worst kind. No ladies! Can’t you imagine how godless a place it must be?” Bathilda’s chest swelled within the confines of her burgundy gown. A flush mottled her face all the way to her hairline, where her steel-colored hair was gathered into a soft bouffant. She was moved, Caroline realized, incredulously. Bathilda was actually moved .
    “Of course there are ladies! I’m sure such accounts are exaggerated,” said