Tracie Peterson - [New Mexico Sunset 03] Read online

  ❧

  “I’ve certainly enjoyed myself,” Maggie said, then nodded towards Angeline. “Looks like she has, as well.”

  “Yes,” Lillie replied and looked at where Gavin had stood only minutes before. Should she say something to Maggie? Maybe she should asked her how she felt about them finally being joined as in-laws?

  “The children always seem to love these get-togethers. I wish Daughtry lived closer. I miss her so much when she’s gone, and it seems like when she and Nicholas come for a visit, all we do is talk about Kent and what new thing he’s doing. I never seem to get to talk about what she’s doing or thinking.”

  “I know what you mean, and I have Angeline here all the time. It just seems as if she’s drifting away. Did you know that she wants to travel abroad?”

  “Not a healthy time to do that,” Maggie replied.

  “No, but she reminds me so much of myself. Remember when I nagged my mother into taking me to London?”

  “Do I ever! I was green with envy.”

  Lillie nodded. “Now it’s our children. Now, instead of things happening to us, it’s them. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  Maggie laughed. “It does indeed. I remember thinking when Daughtry was expecting Kent that it used to be me bringing the new lives into our family. All of the sudden, I changed places with my child and she was a child no more.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Lillie said as though the thought were a revelation. “I felt that way tonight, almost as if I were an outsider looking in. I used to be that young lady,” Lillie said, pointing to her daughter.

  “Yes, I remember you telling me all about it,” Maggie agreed.

  “You’d never come to the parties because you were sworn to never marry.” Lillie couldn’t help but laugh. “Now, just look at you.”

  “God had other plans,” Maggie replied softly. “I thank Him, too, that He did.”

  “The same goes for me,” Lillie happily seconded. Then completely changing the subject, she reached out and took hold of Maggie’s hand. “Gavin is so much like Garrett. He’s a good man, as are all of your sons.”

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed at Lillie’s sudden praise. “What is it?” she questioned. “What are you trying to say to me?”

  Lillie looked across the short distance to Angeline, then back to Maggie. “Gavin told me tonight that he intends to marry Angeline.” Maggie’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “He told me not to worry about her,” Lillie continued, “because he intends to take care of her.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” Maggie finally breathed the words. She couldn’t help but get a mischievous look to her face. “His brothers will never let him hear the end of it for this. Has he asked Angeline yet?”

  “I think so, but he said she needed time to get used to the idea.”

  Maggie laughed heartily. “Sounds like his father. Poor Angeline.”

  Lillie smirked a grin as she glanced at her daughter. “Poor Gavin.”

  Chapter 4

  Angeline returned home from Denver a changed woman. Her vocabulary was expanded to include words like suffrage, franchise, and equal rights. Furthermore, she now quoted women who had made their marks in history—Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to name a few. In short, Angeline had a new cause. Women’s suffrage! The right to vote!

  “Mother, you wouldn’t believe what I learned,” Angeline rambled in animated excitement. “Colorado agreed in 1893 to allow their women to vote and Wyoming even entered the union fully granting suffrage rights to their women!”

  Lillie took it all in stride. Angeline was always at one cause or another. It was really a small wonder she hadn’t been bitten by the suffrage bug sooner. It wasn’t until Angeline announced her plan to join the suffragist Willa Neal on her lecture tour through New Mexico that Lillie stopped dead in her tracks.

  “You what?”

  “Oh, Mother,” Angeline’s voice oozed excitement, “I’m going to fight for the suffrage cause! I’m going to be a suffragist and win us the right to vote!”

  Lillie eyed her daughter carefully. “Angeline, we need to discuss this more thoroughly with your father. I doubt he’ll be very enthusiastic to the idea of you traipsing off with strangers.”

  “It won’t be the idea of strangers that will bother him. He’ll be narrow-minded like most men and not see a need for women to vote.”

  “Angeline, I don’t care for your tone. When has your father ever given you cause to believe that he doesn’t esteem a woman’s opinion?” Lillie asked her daughter in genuine concern. Who had put such ideas into her little girl’s head?

  “Mother,” Angeline began very patiently, as though she were talking to a simpleton or small child, “women have been made to believe for a very long time that they were incapable of sound judgement. We marry and give birth to men, raise them to adulthood, but somehow when it comes to logic and sense, men believe us totally null and void—completely uneducated and without a hope of making responsible decisions. Yet who do they think trained them up? On who’s knee did they learn their first words?”

  Lillie stared at her daughter in complete shock. Angeline was unconcerned with her mother’s surprise. It was to be expected, she reasoned. Hadn’t Willa told her that women were as much to blame, maybe even more so, for their own lack of rights?

  “Mother, this is a new age, and the men and women of this world need to wake up to the realization that the world is growing up and moving on.” Angeline voiced the practiced words she’d heard at one of the many suffrage lectures she’d attended in Denver. “We have the automobiles being mass produced on an assembly line where workers are paid five dollars a week! There are aeroplanes that fly men in the air and moving pictures that can record things as they happen. And with all this technology and progress toward a better world, woman are still suppressed and treated as though they are second class citizens!”

  “Enough!” Lillie cried and put her hands on her hips. “Angeline, I’m happy to know that you spent your time learning about the world, but honestly, you rant this suffrage cause like you had been made to endure some horrendous ordeal. Your father and brothers have only treated us with the utmost of respect. Your father, a college-trained doctor, often seeks my opinion in cases of his female patients, simply because I am a woman. You have only known kindness and respect from the men in this community, and I resent the fact that you act as though it has been otherwise.”

  Angeline was taken aback by her mother’s outrage. “While it is true,” Angeline countered, “that our menfolk have offered certain deference to our opinions, they still see us as frail, weak creatures who need to be sheltered from the pains of the world.”

  “I don’t think I understand why you feel this way,” Lillie said a bit softer.

  Angeline came to her mother and took hold of her hands. “Mother, you wouldn’t believe the things that are done to women every day all over the world. Women, who because they have no voice and no chance to make changes, are put upon to be all manner of things for all manner of men. Some are bought and sold for the pleasure of others, and when they dare to raise a hand in their own defense they are maimed and often murdered!”

  Lillie sat down at her kitchen table, pulling Angeline with her to take the chair beside hers. “Angeline, I know full well of the ugliness in this world. I have chosen not to make it an issue in your upbringing because I hopedI could shelter you from it for as long as possible. Perhaps it was naïve of me. Perhaps it was unwise, but nevertheless, it had nothing to do with equal rights and whether women should or shouldn’t have the right to vote.”

  Angeline took in her mother’s words and weighed them against her newfound knowledge. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh,” Angeline began, “but Willa Neal told me that often women are a worse enemy to our cause than men.”

  “You mean she doesn’t get the reaction she wants from women and so she calls them an enemy?”

  “No, of course not!” Angeline exclaimed.
“She simply means that sometimes women are too misinformed and need to be educated.”

  “Sounds like the same argument you told me that men give for why they won’t approve women’s rights to vote.”

  Angeline was temporarily silenced at her mother’s logical argument. Finally, she decided she needed to put the conversation on a more positive track and switched to another related, but seemingly neutral topic. “I did so enjoy being around learned women, Mother. I always knew that you and Aunt Jenny and Maggie were women of knowledge, but these women have attended college and they seem to know so much.”

  “Wisdom is a powerful thing, Angeline. Solomon was wise and he still struggled to make the proper judgments.”

  “Proverbs 7:4 says, ‘Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman.’ Willa told this to me, Mother. God, Himself, gave a clear picture that wisdom is a feminine virtue.”

  “Is that all you perceive in that verse? Did you pay any attention to what came before it or went after it? You can’t rip pieces out of the Bible to fit your causes, Angeline.”

  Angeline seemed genuinely deflated, and Lillie felt sorry for her daughter. “Look, I would very much like the right to vote.” Angeline perked up at this declaration, but Lillie waved her into silence and continued. “However, I will not fight a cause that degrades the rights of one to boost the rights of another. Nor will I see God’s hand in a fight that leads people into civil disobedience and self-declared war against one another.”

  Daniel chose that inopportune moment to come whistling through the back door entrance. Lillie fell silent as she heard

  Daniel cast aside his doctor’s bag. Entering the kitchen, Daniel noted the stern expression on his wife’s face and an even more troubling look of composed anger on his daughter’s.

  “What are you two arguing about this time?” Daniel asked seriously.

  Lillie got up and went to embrace her husband, while Angeline stood and waited by the table. “It seems,” Lillie told Daniel softly, “Angeline wants to accompany a leading suffragist on her lecture circuit.”

  Daniel grinned. “Suffrage, eh?” He looked at his daughter with genuine affection, but she saw it as a patronizing gesture.

  “I know what both of you are thinking and you’re wrong!” Angeline declared. “I believe in this cause and I intend to fight it for all I’m worth. I may not be old enough to benefit from it yet, but in a few years I’ll be twenty-one, then I’ll be able to hold my head up high on the way to the voting place.”

  “Whoa, Angeline,” Daniel said, stepping away from his wife. “There’s no reason for you to get so upset.”

  “You and Mother think I’m a child,” Angeline protested, “but I’m not. I’m a grown woman and I have rights, and I intend to fight for those rights. Willa Neal is a wonderful woman. She has a great deal of knowledge, and she’s graduated from a very fine college back east.” She paused long enough to point a finger at her mother. “And while I might have expected this from Father, I thought you would understand. But I see you’re just as misinformed and naïve as Willa said most women are.” Turning to leave, Angeline paused at the door. “I believe in this cause, and I believe what she says in regards to what needs to be done. With or without your permission, I intend to join her.”

  Daniel’s face changed instantly from compassionate to fiercely stern. “That’s enough, Angeline. You’ll do no such thing until we deem it acceptable and in your best interest. Now, apologize to your mother.”

  Angeline turned up her nose and stormed from the room. There was no way she intended to apologize. Not when she was right!

  Feeling very much the martyr, Angeline threw herself across her bed and pounded the mattress in rage. Willa had warned her that this would happen and Angeline hadn’t believed it possible. Was the entire world blind to the needs of women?

  ❧

  Lillie’s astounded expression exactly matched her husband’s. When Daniel opened his arms to her, Lillie eagerly sought the refuge he offered.

  “She’s so different now,” Lillie said near to tears. “I thought maybe we could talk through it, but she just kept getting more upset with each thing I said.”

  “Shh,” Daniel soothed. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “She thinks I’m stupid,” Lillie said, and a sob escaped her. “Stupid and oppressed and blind to my womanly rights.”

  Daniel smiled over his wife’s head. “Yeah, you seem real oppressed, Lillie. Have I managed to keep you chained to my side unable to achieve your God-given potential?”

  Lillie pulled back and looked at the amused twinkle in her husband’s eye. “Oh, Daniel,” she grinned and wiped at the tears in her eyes, “I’ll take oppression if it’s with you.”

  Daniel took Lillie’s face in his hands and kissed her soundly on the lips. “I feel the same way about you, my dear.”

  Lillie melted against her husband, perfectly content that after twenty-some years of marriage, they could still argue together, work together, and joyfully love together. They had weathered many storms and would undoubtably face many more.

  “What are we going to do about Angeline?” Lillie whispered the question against Daniel’s chest.

  “Give her time to cool off and come to her senses. Maybe she’ll get interested in one of the local causes and forget about her suffragist friend.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Lillie said, wrapping her arms tightly around Daniel’s neck. “I hope you are.”

  “If not, there’s always my idea about a convent.”

  ❧

  Angeline’s tantrum was spent, and now she felt more determined than ever to leave Bandelero and assist Miss Neal. She pulled out a calendar and noted the day when Willa planned to be in Santa Fe for her first speech. With any luck at all, Angeline would find a way to join her.

  “I’ll show them that I’m more than a simpleminded female,” Angeline whispered to the room. “I’ll show them that I’m capable of bettering the cause for women! I’ll show them all!”

  ❧

  For the next few days, Angeline was the epitome of cooperation and genteel refinement. She didn’t utter a single word about suffrage or equal rights and went about her chores as a dutiful daughter. She was content in the fact that no one was wise to her plans. She reasoned away any feelings of guilt, telling herself that even people in the Bible often had to step out of line in order to accomplish God’s will.

  On what was to be her last evening at home, Angeline sat quietly sewing while her father discussed one of his cases. Her mother was quite engrossed in the conversation, adding her own thoughts on Daniel’s procedures. All in all, Angeline thought it a perfect evening. It was the way she wanted to remember her parents. It was the way she wanted to remember her home.

  Getting up and excusing herself for bed, Angeline went to her room and double-checked her suitcase. Everything was ready. She opened her window and cautiously lowered her case to the ground by using a rope she’d managed to hide beneath her bed. Then securing that same rope to the leg of her bed, Angeline prepared to descend in the same manner.

  She cast a quick look around the room and smiled. She was leaving a child, but when she returned, if she returned, she’d be a worldly, wise woman. She double-checked to make certain they would see her letter of explanation, then pulled on her jacket and hat, and climbed out her bedroom window.

  Reaching the ground, Angeline heard the train whistle blast it’s announcement that final boarding was taking place. She picked up the suitcase and ran for all she was worth, managing to pat her pocket and reassure herself that her ticket and money were both still within.

  She approached the train depot cautiously, for the first time worried that someone might see her and try to stop her. Thoughts of Gavin came to mind more than once. She’d only been home for four days and no doubt Gavin planned to see her Sunday at church. Poor Gavin would be so surprised, she thought and stepped up onto the train car’s platform. They would all be
surprised, she smiled as she took her seat.

  Chapter 5

  Angeline was filled with anticipation as she rode away from Bandelero. The adventure of what she was doing made her giddy, and she couldn’t help but succumb to her own joy.

  “I’m really doing it!” she whispered, staring out into the pitch blackness of the night.

  In spite of her excitement, the gentle rocking of the train against the rails made Angeline sleepy, and without meaning to, she slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  “Miss, this is your stop,” a gentle voice was calling to her.

  Angeline sat up with a start and immediately winced at the stiffness in her neck. She looked up into the face of the conductor and nodded rigidly. “Thank you,” she offered and glanced out the window into the predawn.

  “Do you have folks to meet you?” the man asked her.

  “No,” Angeline responded as if it was unimportant. “I’m catching the southbound train to Santa Fe later this morning.”

  “Well, you’ll have a bit of a wait,” the man offered.

  Somehow, Angeline hadn’t considered this possibility. “I’ll be fine,” she said with a false sense of courage. Taking her case in hand, Angeline followed the man down the aisle and allowed him to assist her from the train.

  “You can wait in the depot,” he suggested. “At least the ticket agent will be nearby, if anyone tries to bother you.”

  “Thank you,” Angeline replied and made her way into the dimly lit building.

  The room was seemingly deserted, and Angeline swallowed hard to keep her nerve. She made her way slowly to a long empty bench and took a seat with a wary glance into the shadowy corners. She clutched her suitcase close and thought to whisper a prayer.

  She stopped, however, before uttering the words. Would God listen to her? She was, after all, disobeying her parents, but wasn’t that a verse for children? Didn’t God intend that to be a guidance for when you were young and didn’t know how to care for yourself? Deciding that she was completely within her rights, Angeline offered a simple prayer and waited impatiently for time to pass.