Chapter One — La Conquistadora, Summer 1946

The sky was still. La Conquistadora knew better.

Sophie Louisa Degarrin, named quite properly for a grandmother and her own mother, woke on a May morning in 1946 to the smell of coffee and bacon drifting through the thick adobe walls of Casa Blanca. For a moment she lay still. She was home. After a whole year in Virginia, she was home, and through the open window the New Mexico sky was already that high, clean, heartbreaking blue that she had missed every single day she’d been gone.

Her room was exactly as she’d left it, but a year away made everything visible again: the child’s lariat coiled on its hook by the door, the faded ribbon from a barrel race she’d won at thirteen on a horse that had since gone to pasture, and on the windowsill the jar of arrowheads she’d spent whole summers collecting across the mesas, chipped from flint by Comanche and Kiowa hunters who had tracked buffalo over this same land centuries before anyone called it La Conquistadora. Things she’d stopped seeing long before she left. She saw them now.

A letter lay on her bureau, propped against the mirror. She recognized the handwriting, a boy from a spring dance in Lexington, pleasant enough, forgettable. The envelope had been opened. Sophie pulled the page out and scanned it. Something about hoping she’d had a safe journey, hoping she’d write, hoping to see her again in the fall. A lot of hoping. She folded it back into the envelope and set it down.

Her mother had opened her mail. That was new. Or not new, exactly. Maybe just the first time she’d noticed.

Sophie dressed quickly: stiff new Levi’s, her father’s hand-tooled belt, and a light blue cotton blouse scattered with tiny white flowers that she’d brought back from a shop in Richmond. She hadn’t thought much about it when she bought it. She just liked it. She tucked the tail in neatly and left the collar loose, a couple of buttons undone against the warmth of the morning. Her grandmother’s small gold locket glinted at her throat, where it always was. She’d worn it since she was ten and never thought to take it off. She pulled on her boots and headed for the door.

Casa Blanca was an old rambling Spanish adobe whose rooms opened one onto the other at different levels, a hodgepodge that some people found completely charming and others deemed an appalling mishmash. Sophie loved every crack and creak of it.

She went out along the portal, the long covered porch that served as the house’s true hallway, canopied by ancient trumpet vines, their green leaves and orange blossoms vivid against the old whitewashed adobe. The morning air carried that thin, dry sweetness she had ached for all winter: sage and sun-warmed earth and the faint clean bite of piñon. She let the screen door bang behind her.

“It’s good to have you home.” Michael Degarrin smiled at his daughter.

“It’s even better to be home,” Sophie told him.

Her mother, Louisa, gave a mock sigh. “I’d hoped my old home state would have been more to your liking.” Her gaze touched the open collar of Sophie’s blouse, the scattered flowers, the small gold locket catching the light against her daughter’s skin, something quick and guarded that came and went before Sophie could place it. “I love your home state, Mamma,” Sophie assured her. “I just love mine more.” “Actually,” her mother said with a laugh, “so do I.”

“It was silly that you made me leave New Mexico, you know,” Sophie said.

“We have been over this many times, as you very well know,” Louisa said. “Your father and I were not about to consider sending you to a co-ed school with the war just ending and the G.I.s returning in droves. Besides, it didn’t hurt you one bit to spend a year at my old Randolph Macon, now did it?”

“No, ma’am, it didn’t,” Sophie said. “In fact it buffed up my social graces so I can just be a proper belle for all those G.I.s at the University in Albuquerque this fall.”

“I’d still feel better if you were going back to Virginia,” her father said.

“Now, Daddy, you just said you were glad I’m home from there,” Sophie reminded him, “and besides, a deal’s a deal.”

“I know.” Degarrin sighed. “But we were hoping you would change your mind when we agreed you could finish up at the University of New Mexico if you went back east to a girl’s school for your freshman year.”

“South, Michael, South. Not East.” Louisa, whose people had been Virginians since before the Revolution, and who had never quite forgiven herself for falling in love with New Mexico, chimed in to defend her abandoned homeland. “Besides, I can’t really say I blame Sophie for wanting to come home. This place really does grow on you. And, as she says a deal is a deal.”

“Hear, hear.” Sophie raised her glass of orange juice. “I’ll drink to that.” The three Degarrins clinked their glasses and downed their juice.

Sophie sat back and smiled at her parents.

“I can hardly wait for things to get started,” she said. “I lived all winter for this, the wagon, the riding, being out there under those skies. You know what I mean.” Sophie paused, suddenly hit with a new thought. “Daddy, you two are still going to let me ride with the crew, aren’t you? Just because the boys are back from the War won’t change anything, will it?” Sophie’s flood of anxious enquiries was stanched momentarily by a bite of bacon and biscuit.

Degarrin’s and Louisa’s eyes met and locked fleetingly over their child’s head.

Sophie had no intention of staying at headquarters and missing anything. Still, parental approval always made for smoother sailing, so she promptly fell back on childhood charm.

“Well, I’m still your best hand, aren’t I, Papa?”

“I guess so, Punkin, I guess so.” Degarrin sighed a little, unconsciously falling back on his childhood name for her. He carefully avoided looking at his wife. Degarrin cleared his throat and continued with an attempt at parental firmness and authority. “But I’ll tell you what, Sophie, your Mamma is getting a little worried about you spending too much time on a horse and not enough at the piano and in the kitchen. It might be about time you started learning how to act like a lady. Besides, hanging around those cowboys can be a bad business. They’re just drifters, most of them. They’ve got no future, won’t any of them amount to much.”

“Oh, good lord, Mamma!” Sophie turned disgusted eyes on her mother. “I’m not going to run off with some saddle tramp.” Then, eyeing her mother, “Besides, like I’ve always told you, I intend to settle for nothing less than the governor’s son or a prince or something — I just never can decide which. So you don’t have to worry about that…”

“Now, Sophie…”

“Now, Mamma, don’t try to act so astonished and innocent. I know that is exactly what you are fretting about, and without any reason whatsoever. All I want to do is laugh and ride and have a good time, just like I always have. All right? As for acting like a lady — I am a lady. How could I be anything else with you two for parents? Besides, when forced, I can make a cake, heavenly light biscuits, and play a waltz as well as anyone. Now, isn’t that right?” Sophie tipped her head and twinkled, first at her mother and then at her father, “Well, isn’t it?”

Charmed, as ever, by their only offspring, Degarrin laughed. After a moment Louisa did too, though her smile arrived a beat late, and Sophie might have noticed if she hadn’t been so pleased with herself. “Yes, yes it is true,” Louisa acknowledged.

Degarrin smiled at Sophie. “You remind me of my cousin, Laura. Laura was the prettiest girl in town, and everyone knew it.”

“Well, Missy, as for you and the ever mythic ‘Cousin Laura,’ just remember, pretty is as pretty does,” Louisa interjected tartly.

“Now, Louisa.” Degarrin smoothed his wife’s ruffled feathers with a sly wink. “Laura was just lucky you weren’t in the same town.”

“So who would have been prettiest?” Sophie asked.

Degarrin turned an innocent gaze on his daughter. “Your Mamma, of course,” he said with another wink and a sidelong glance to check his wife’s response.

Louisa just rolled her eyes.

Through with food and teasing for the moment, the little family rose from the breakfast table. As they made their way along the portal, the early morning sun lit their world with a hint of gold and the promise of a beautiful day.

All in all, Sophie felt breakfast had been a success. In spite of her mother’s considerable misgivings, she was going to be allowed to ride with the crew one more time. If there was one thing Sophie had learned in her nineteen years, it was to never rush her fences, and to choose her battles carefully, particularly where her mother was concerned.

Her parents turned in to the sitting room. Sophie slipped through the screen door and back onto the portal, catching it before it banged, something she’d forgotten while away but quickly remembered. She knew her mother’s habit. Louisa would stand at the sitting room window after breakfast, gazing out across the hill-rimmed meadow to the dirt tank, water filled for once this spring, catching the sky so that from here it looked like a pretty pond of blue, fringed with new grass. Up close it was just brown muddied water in a scraped-out hollow. But Louisa had always had a gift for standing at exactly the right distance from things. So as Sophie neared the open casement she moved quietly, keeping to the far edge of the porch.

Her father’s voice carried through first.

“Louisa, if you really object just say so. If it’s really not proper, I won’t let her do it.”

Sophie stopped.

“She would never forgive you,” her mother said.

“After a while she would. It’s up to you, yea or nay. Either way I’ll back you up.”

A silence. When her mother spoke again her voice had gone soft, the way it only did when she called him Mike. Nobody else on the ranch called him that. Sophie sometimes wondered if anyone else even knew his name.

“I know you would, Mike, and I thank you.”

“Well? It needs to be settled.”

Her mother sighed. “Oh, let her ride. It means so much to her. But I don’t like it. Kitten and Christine are hardly the type of girls she needs for bosom buddies. As for her close association with the cowboys, don’t like that at all. They and their lifestyle can appear very romantic to a girl like Sophie. Putting a young girl, a young woman really I suppose…” A pause. “…in their midst can be very dangerous.”

“Now, Louisa, no one on the Conquistadora crew would dare hurt Sophie, or even want to.”

“Mike, that is not what I mean, as you very well know.”

Sophie’s face went warm. She should have kept walking.

“I know, dear, I know. You are right, though. Sophie isn’t a little girl anymore. She really is a young woman, whether we are ready for her to be one or not. She’s a smart girl, Louisa. She knows what she’s about. Besides, we’ll keep a close eye on her. Everything will be all right.”

One more sigh, quieter than the others. “I suppose you’re right. I worry about her too much. Anyway, she will be going to Albuquerque and the University in the fall. Maybe this will be the last summer of this nonsense. Hopefully by this time next year she will have outgrown all of it.”

Sophie moved then, quickly and quietly. Out across the meadow, a cow and her calf were meandering toward the pond of blue for a drink.

Back in her bedroom she stood before the full-length mirror on her closet door. Her eyes went to the belt at her waist, the flowing, twining pattern of rosebuds and blossoms her father had carved for her last February. La Conquistadora was a country unto itself. A single pasture could swallow most ranches whole, and there were dozens of them. Her father’s days were long, their hours crammed with the many duties, great and petty, that came with the captaining of such a vast endeavor. That he had found the time to sit somewhere quiet and carve flowers into leather for his daughter’s birthday, she didn’t know when he had done it, couldn’t imagine when. It touched her more deeply than she had ever told him. She cherished the belt and wore it on every possible occasion.

A young woman, her mother had said. Not a girl.

Sophie studied her reflection. Over the years her baby-fine platinum cap had thickened and darkened to become the dark blonde cascade now caught back, unceremoniously, into a single fat ponytail. In the last year or so her face had changed, leaner, more defined, the soft roundness of girlhood giving way to something she wasn’t quite sure of yet. She looked at herself through pure blue eyes and for a moment she saw what her mother saw, not the tomboy scamp who had ridden these hills since she could stay in a saddle, but someone new. Her grandmother’s locket hung on its thin gold chain between her breasts, the same locket that had once lain flat against a little girl’s chest. It didn’t lie flat anymore.

Her boots were looking pretty ratty. Maybe she should polish them sometime. Not today though, not just now.

Sophie stepped out onto the portal and headed for the bunkhouse to tell Old Toby he was once again to be saddled with a petticoat crew. The trumpet vines hummed with early bees above her, the morning warming around her. Out past the corrals the land opened up, the mesas standing blue in the distance under a sky so big it could break your heart or fill it, depending on the day.

Sophie Degarrin knew exactly what this summer would be.