Prologue

Tucson, Arizona

The Drink ‘Em Up Saloon

April 1868

It didn’t matter which way she faced, Audrey Mair could see the eyes upon her, lingering upon her body where they had no business looking. Despite her discomfort at their lascivious scrutiny, she maintained the same pleasant, amiable expression on her face that Big Hank, the saloon owner, expected of his girls.

“Y’know, girl,” Big Hank said as he poured whiskey into glasses, “with that face and that figure, you could make a lot more money than what you get just serving drinks.”

It was at times like this that Audrey wished she had dull, nondescript hair and eyes instead of the golden blonde locks and blue eyes that the saloon cowboys thought of as an invitation to something more than just a refill on their drinks.

It was not the first time Big Hank had made what he regarded as a business proposition. Big Hank himself never dallied with his girls. He regarded the young women of the Drink ‘Em Up Saloon in the same manner that he regarded the bottles of whiskey and kegs of beer from which he never drank. They were there for his profit and for the pleasure of his customers, those wild, unruly and unwashed cowboys who were happy to squander their pay every week at his saloon. Big Hank was happy to let them. It was business.

Audrey maintained the practiced genial smile on her face as she picked up the tray of shot glasses. “You must be fearing that I’ll drop these drinks and you’ll have to replace them for free,” she joked as she turned around. “I haven’t dropped a tray yet!”

Big Hank grunted in assent and turned his attention to a table of cowboys in the corner who were starting to get quarrelsome over a game of cards. The bartender had the saloon crammed with as many tables as he could possibly fit. Wooden chairs encircled the tables with long-legged cowboys sprawled upon them. The floor was just rough planks nailed together—a trial to wash with the debris left behind after the cowboys finally went home—and chipped with the indentation of their boots. The smoky clouds of tobacco smoke mingled with the odor of spilled beer to create a thick, noxious smell that Audrey never quite got used to, even though she’d been breathing it all her life.

“C’mon, sweetheart,” called one of the cowboys awaiting his drink. “Don’t make a man wait. I’ve worked up a thirst after all day drivin’ cattle.”

Audrey deftly placed the tray on the table and, with a swirl of her blue skirts, evaded the lunging hands of the impatient cowboy. She had grown up in the saloon and she knew the clientele. She’d learned too early what the men wanted from the women they fondled, and the saloon girls, who had given her the only maternal affection she’d ever had, had warned her to keep her distance from those hands.

Lady Mag, a salty-tongued saloon girl who’d been at the saloon since it opened during the war and had a blunt way of talking, told Audrey about men’s hands. “They rope cattle all day, y’see, and danged if they don’t aim to rope a woman too, come nighttime. You stay clear of those hands, y’see, Audrey? Those hands are like lariats, and theys aim is to lasso you to the ground and break you, just like you was a cow. Stay away from those hands.”

Audrey had been young when she’d been given that advice, but Lady Mag had been looking out for her. Big Hank had done right by Audrey when her mother had abandoned her at birth and left her at the Drink ‘Em Up. He’d seen to it that she’d been sent to school to learn to read and write.

He’d even sent her off to church on Sundays, where she’d found comfort in the prayers and joy in the hymns. When she was old enough, she’d earned her keep washing the glasses, sweeping the floor, scrubbing the tables, and seeing that the saloon was clean as it could be, given the rowdy crowd of men who spent their time there, spitting tobacco, drinking liquor, smoking cigars, and getting into fights.

However, when she turned eighteen, Big Hank said it was time she started earning her own money serving drinks to the men. He told her she didn’t have to go upstairs with any of them—“Less’n you want to, there’s more money in it, and you’ve got that porcelain doll look that a man can’t resist”—but it was time for her to work and earn her wages.

He meant well. He kept order in the saloon the best that he could. He didn’t let the cowboys take a woman upstairs against her will and he made sure the cowboys paid his girls what was due them. As Lady Mag had said, a saloon girl couldn’t ask for more than that. Lady Mag had been at the saloon long enough that she could no longer be called a girl, and the saloon-girl life had aged her. She had lines on her face and her hair was no longer blonde by nature.

Still, she had a saucy manner that the men found pleasing, and in her own way, she looked out for the younger girls who were new to the trade. She was especially attentive to Audrey and insisted that she was never to go upstairs with any of the cowboys who’d pay for her time. Lady Mag had made it clear to Big Hank that Audrey wasn’t that sort, and the bartender had enough respect for the blade-edge of her tongue to heed her words.

“Hey, pretty girl, how’s about you come over here and sit on my lap?” suggested the cowboy as he leered at her over the rim of his glass.

Audrey adroitly picked up his emptied glass and twirled away from those lariat hands that Lady Mag had warned her about. “Too many laps for one small girl,” she replied, picking up another glass. “Refills, boys?”

Of course there were refills. The cowboys wouldn’t be satisfied as long as they were still capable of sitting up in their chairs. It was payday and the wages they’d earned from a week of riding the range in the hot, dry sun were like little fish, Lady Mag used to say, lured by the bait of the bottle and unable to stay put where they were safe.

Big Hank was ready with the whiskey bottle when she brought the tray up. “Rough crowd tonight,” he commented. “Drinking hard.”

She knew that Big Hank’s comment was a query. Could she manage? The other girls were likely to be busy as the night progressed, leaving Audrey the only one free to serve drinks

“It’s nothing we haven’t had before,” she said as if it didn’t matter to her.

It did matter, though. Audrey hated the nights and dreaded them. Her one respite was on Sunday morning when, fresh from a bath and with her hair washed and pinned up, dressed in her yellow church dress and her good straw bonnet, she left the saloon, crossed the dirt street, walked half a dozen blocks, and quietly stepped into the back of St. Swithin’s Episcopal Church.

Father George Eastwood had a rich, resonant voice that sounded, Audrey believed, just as the prophets of old must have sounded as they railed against the sins of the people. His sermons were not particularly comforting, leaving Audrey feeling often as not as if her work as a bar girl would forever consign her to hell because she worked in a sinful place. However, the hymns lifted her spirits and provided consolation that, sinner though she was, Jesus was a friend to sinners. There was a place for her in heaven. Heaven, that would be the home she’d never had and never was likely to have as long as she was known as a bar girl. There would be no bars in heaven, she was sure of that. However, God knew what she was and would welcome her all the same.

She heard the saloon doors swing open and inwardly groaned. The saloon was already full and now there were more men, thirsty and amorous, with their lariat hands to dodge.

Audrey sighed and reached for the tray. Maybe she’d meet some of these same cowboys in heaven one day, but at least she could be certain she wasn’t going to be serving them whiskey.

“Go in the back and stay there,” Big Hank told her. His big handlebar mustache concealed his upper lip and Audrey wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. But his hands were holding the tray, preventing her from taking it. “Now!”

Quickly, Audrey obeyed, although she had no idea why he was ordering her to the back. It wasn’t time to wash the dishes yet.

She had barely slipped into the kitchen which led to the back room when she heard the sound of gunfire. Bullets, perhaps intentionally aimed to strike the floor or tables rather than bodies as a warning, thudded into the wooden planks.

“Hank Lester!” a voice called out, growing rapidly louder as if the man speaking was coming near to the bar. “I’ve come for my money!”

“I’ll have it, end of the month, Frank, just like I told you.”

Big Hank’s voice remained level, yet Audrey thought she detected an inflection of fear in the burly bartender’s tone. Who was it who had come into the saloon on this crowded Saturday night to demand money?

She heard the sounds of disruption in the saloon. That wasn’t anything unusual, but there was something different in what she heard but could not see. Something ominous, as if the cowboys—who when liquored up feared neither God nor man—were wary of this intruder.

More bullets fired. Glass shattered. Audrey heard the shards falling to the floor. She heard a gurgling sound coming from someone’s throat, someone close to the kitchen entrance. Gripped with horror, Audrey realized that the sound must be coming from Big Hank.

She peered out from behind the door. A burly, bearded man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat stood at the bar. He began to laugh. “Iff’n you can’t pay Frank, Lester, I reckon he won’t mind if we take some of your property for instead. Boys, see what you can rustle up in the way of soiled doves. I’ll just help myself to some of these bottles back there.”

Audrey could not move. Fear beyond what she had ever experienced in dealing with the cowboys paralyzed her and she remained rooted to the floor, out of sight from the saloon, but perilously close to the bar.

A hand touched her sleeve and Audrey started.

It was Lucy Wheeler, one of the saloon girls, now in the family way and unable to perform her usual function. Big Hank had set her to housekeeping tasks, keeping her out of sight because no cowboy intent on his amorous pleasures wanted to be reminded of the consequences that might result.

Wide-eyed, Lucy put her finger to her lips and pointed to the back entrance.

Audrey wavered. There was nothing she could do, but Big Hank, Lady Mag, Elsie, and the other girls were like kin to her. How could she abandon them to whatever the intruder had in mind?

Lucy tugged at her sleeve, her fingers insistent. “Come now or they’ll take us too,” Lucy whispered urgently. She put one hand on her belly. “I can’t offer my baby much, but I have to try.”

“Hey!” shouted a familiar voice, one of the cowboys who was a regular at the Drink ‘Em Up. “Who do you think you are!”

His query was answered by a gunshot. There was a scuffle, followed by the grunts and thuds of men fighting. It was far from an unfamiliar sound in the saloon, but now there was an ominous anonymity to it as voices and screams mingled.

Lucy was right. Galvanized by the pragmatic saloon girl, Audrey moved to the back room. As she did, she heard footsteps nearing the kitchen entrance. Then she heard more gunshots. A woman screamed. Chairs jostled, their wooden legs scraping against the floor as they fell.

Audrey needed no further urging. She and Lucy reached the door, left open to let an unlikely breeze inside the sweltering back room, and darted out.

“I don’t know where to go!” Lucy whimpered, her assurance gone now that they needed a destination.

“The church,” Audrey said with certainty. “We’ll go to St. Swithin’s. We’ll be safe there.”

Chapter One

Tucson, Arizona

September 1869

Audrey ladled soup into another bowl, the latest in an endless procession. It was not always easy to keep a smile on her face as she helped feed the people who came in to the church fellowship room for a meal.

There was no danger of being groped by rude cowboys at the church’s food kitchen for the needy. Here, she had to force herself to smile because there was so much despair. Older women, widowed and with no one to provide for them, came for the food because otherwise they would starve.

War veterans, wounded in battle, limped to the line or needed help managing their bowl. Children who were too old for the orphanage that the church ran, and too young to be on their own, approached the food line, their cheeks drawn in from hunger and their eyes too big for their lean faces.

“Thank you, miss,” was the grateful refrain when Audrey ladled generous helpings of soup into their bowls. The soup was good; Mrs. Eastwood, the priest’s wife, was an excellent cook and knew how to prepare meals from her own long-past days as the mother of four sons and a daughter. All of them had left Tucson behind, but as far as Audrey could tell, Mrs. Eastwood had taken it on herself to feed the poor instead of her children.

“You’re very welcome,” Audrey answered as she gave a grateful smile in return for the unexpected praise from someone as exalted as the priest’s wife.

Mrs. Eastwood surveyed the tables arranged in rows in the room. “I think we’d best bring out more bread,” she decided. “Audrey, can you take care of that? It should be out of the oven and sliced now. I’ll see who needs more coffee.”

Audrey nodded. Although Mrs. Eastwood was always polite, Audrey was somewhat daunted by the older woman. She was the priest’s wife, after all, and an important person in the town and in the community. Mrs. Eastwood’s wardrobe was not ostentatious, but her garments were well made and professionally sewn. She did nothing to draw attention to herself, but her tall, slender form, upswept brown hair lightly dusted with white, and her unrevealing brown eyes commanded notice.

Audrey did as the priest’s wife instructed. Two other women were in the kitchen, putting fresh butter into crocks.

“Here’s the bread,” Abigail Whitley told her, lifting two baskets for Audrey to take.

Abigail and the other woman, Primmy Fletcher, worked in the food kitchen during the day. At night, they returned to the orphanage so that they could be with the children they had borne out of wedlock. It was not easy for them to be separated from their offspring all day, but Audrey thought it had to be preferable to Lucy Wheeler’s fate. Lucy had gone back to the saloon, now in the hands of a new owner, to earn a living. She wanted to save up her wages so that she could leave Tucson one day and go back home to Texas.

When she made that choice, Father Eastwood declared that she had chosen the path of sin over the road to redemption. Her child might as well have been an orphan, for Lucy was not allowed to visit her daughter at the orphanage.

“If we’re finished here, Mrs. Eastwood,” Audrey said after the fellowship room had emptied out and the tables cleared, “may I go over to the orphanage now? I have a new song to teach the children.”

A faint smile broke the stern visage. “Yes, Audrey, that will be fine. The children gain much comfort from your songs, I am told. God has given you a talent. You must continue to use it to glorify Him.”

Praise was seldom forthcoming from the Eastwoods. They were dedicated to charitable works and the small congregation of St. Swithin’s supported a number of projects for those in need in Tucson, but Audrey could not help feeling as though the minister and his wife measured souls by the amount of labor they provided for the benevolent agencies of the church.

Audrey willingly worked all day on the church’s behalf, grateful that she had a place to live and food to eat. It was not a home, living in the dormitory adjacent to the orphanage with the other women who would otherwise have been destitute, but it was shelter.

The September day was still warm with the heat of summer. Audrey didn’t need her shawl to ward off cold air, but the Eastwoods were firm on the appearance and deportment of the women who worked on behalf of the church’s ministries. They must be neat and clean, simply dressed with no ornamentation. Although Mrs. Eastwood always wore little pearl earrings that hung from her smooth earlobes, the girls were forbidden to wear jewelry of any kind. Not that it mattered; none of them owned any.

Audrey enjoyed her daily walk to the orphanage. Even though she was known in Tucson as one of the recipients of St. Swithin’s benevolence, she felt it was better than being known as a barmaid at the Drink ‘Em Up Saloon. Sometimes people recognized her and greeted her with a nod, which she was happy to return.

Tucson was still a frontier town, but even so, there were the more affluent citizens, who did not acknowledge her when they saw her. There were also the ordinary men and women, the shopkeepers and the housewives, who smiled when they saw her. Sometimes, she saw one of the cowboys to whom she’d served drinks, but they generally looked away, abashed to see her outside of their preferred element.

When she arrived at the orphanage—an unassuming, two-story structure which housed children whose parents had fallen victim to disease or an Apache attack, or whose mothers had died in childbirth and whose fathers had left town rather than raise a motherless child—Audrey slipped in the side entrance. Her first stop was at the nursery, where she could look in on little Mary Wheeler, Lucy’s daughter.

The little girl was just learning to walk, but she was old enough to recognize Audrey from her daily visits. When Audrey entered, the child’s face erupted into a huge smile. It pained Audrey to think that Lucy was denied the right to see her child, but she knew that there was no bending of the rules when Father Eastwood made them.

Victoria, an expectant mother who worked in the nursery, smiled when Audrey entered. She was near her time, and getting out of the rocking chair was not a simple task.

Audrey laughed and, making her way through the array of wooden cribs, went over to her, extending a hand. Victoria accepted it with gratitude and was able to get up from the chair.

“That li’l gal, she sho’ ‘nough takes a shine to you, Audrey,” Victoria said as Mary, having abandoned her wobbly walk for the faster pace of crawling, was heading straight for Mary.

Victoria, with her soft, rounded drawl and her golden ringlets, had the looks and honeyed voice of a Southern belle. She was jolly and good-hearted and kind to the children in her care. Audrey wondered whether Victoria would be able to submit to the strict, moral regimen of the Eastwoods after her baby was born. Victoria had worked at the saloon as a singer, and fallen in love with the piano player. The piano player still worked at the saloon, but had not done the honorable thing and married Victoria. Audrey suspected that he would be more than willing to resume his romance with Victoria, but not if it included fatherhood.

Audrey bent down and picked up Mary, who chortled with laughter. “Ma ma ma ma ma,” Mary babbled.

Audrey felt a pang. Poor Mary, who, like Audrey herself, would likely never know the woman who had given birth to her, even though Lucy worked just a few blocks from the orphanage.

“She calls all of us ‘Mama’,” Victoria said. “I reckon she’s just lookin’ for the right one.”

Impulsively, Audrey gave Mary a kiss on the child’s plump cheek. “She’s lucky that you’re here,” Audrey said sincerely.

“I’m as close to being a mama as she’ll ever know.”