by Lynda J. Cox
His son angled his head to her, and though Mathew couldn’t hear a word of whatever conversation might be taking place, he had no doubt Ethan was talking. He struggled to take a breath past the sudden tightness in his throat and chest.
Mathew followed her to the back of the large home next to the hotel. She gestured for him to enter the domicile first. Ethan paused with her, and the smile beaming on the boy’s face renewed the tightness in Mathew’s throat. He’d only seen its like once or twice. In less than ten minutes, this woman had somehow found Ethan’s smile.
Mathew swept off his hat and took the few seconds before she followed him into the kitchen to take a quick measure of the room. Two cast iron skillets hung on hooks over a cook stove that gleamed with blacking. A large covered pot simmered on the back of the stove and filled the air with the aroma of beef stew, setting his mouth to watering. Cheesecloth covered two loaves of that just baked bread she mentioned. A pair of wire baskets hung on either side of the stove, one filled with onions sprouting long, green leaves and the other with a few potatoes. Those appeared to be past a point of salvaging, as not only did the tubers have eyes, but also stems and leaves. The transom over the backdoor, created of leaded glass crafted into a pastoral scene, was open, allowing the heat to escape.
The room was clean and airy, while also managing to convey warmth and comfort. He hoped there wasn’t a formal dining room in this house, because truth be told, he’d always preferred to take his meals in the kitchen. As that thought crossed his mind, Georgianna’s cutting remark that he belonged in the kitchen with the servants rang through him.
He forced those recollections away and watched Abigail guide Ethan to the sink. She lifted him under the arms, and then settled the boy on the counter. “My goodness, there is almost nothing to you.”
Mathew bristled, then forced his anger away. She hadn’t remarked on Ethan’s size as an insult. Rather it sounded as a simple stating of fact. There really wasn’t much to Ethan.
“Hand washing is required before eating any cobbler or ice cream,” she said, and she lifted the handle on the hand pump.
Too late, Mathew realized her intent. “Don’t!”
Ethan paled, and a thin, keening whimper broke from him. He leaped off the counter before Mathew or Abigail could halt him. He slid on the floor, scrambled to his feet, and sought an avenue of escape. Mathew dropped his hat onto the counter, twisted around, and caught Ethan at the back door. He snaked an arm around the boy’s waist and hoisted him into the air. Ethan clawed like a cornered and trapped wildcat, and when that didn’t have any results, kicked in his desperation. His heel caught with a glancing blow in Mathew’s ribs. Ethan maintained a disconcerting silence in his struggle, other than a low grunt of effort.
Abigail stood frozen at the sink, and stared wide-eyed at him, her mouth sagging farther open by the second. Mathew dropped Ethan to the floor and caught the collar of his shirt before the child darted out of reach. He could imagine just how disturbing this had to appear and racked his brain for a manner to explain it.
“What is happening?” Shock added a pained edge to her voice and her gaze lowered to the writhing child.
“He’s terrified of water.” Terrified was an understatement. When he found Ethan in the orphanage, the child was so filthy that dirt was ingrained in his skin and his hair hung in greasy, matted lengths. After determining the first order of business would be to clean the boy up, Mathew learned quickly how deep Ethan’s dread of water ran. He still carried the scar on his forearm where Ethan had sunk his teeth into him. “As far as I could ascertain, he’d only been bathed in freezing water before I found him, and I suspect he was held under in an attempt to subdue him.”
Ethan’s nails dug into Mathew’s wrist as the boy clawed and thrashed against the restraint in his frantic attempt to get enough purchase to make good an escape. More than anything, Mathew wanted to put the child over his knee for this behavior and knew from bitter experience that only made matters worse. Reasoning didn’t work, either. His only recourse was to hold the boy at arm’s length until he exhausted himself.
“What happens if you let him go?” She didn’t lift her head to meet his eyes; her gaze stayed riveted on Ethan’s struggles.
“He’ll run out the door and we’ll spend hours trying to catch him to calm him down.” Mathew shook his head and tightened his grip on the boy’s shirt collar, preventing Ethan from biting him. “I’d prefer not to chase him for half the night.”
Abigail sidled away from the sink to the heavy door. She eased it closed, then threw the bolt into place. “Let him go, please. We can stop him from leaving the kitchen now.”
“Stand in the doorway.” Mathew nudged his head over his shoulder at the entrance to a hallway that he assumed led to the rest of the house. “If he gets out of this room and finds an open window or door, we’ll be chasing him.”
She didn’t argue with him and moved to block the only other avenue of escape from the room. Mathew released Ethan’s shirt collar.
As soon as he realized he was free, Ethan scrambled to the locked door, pulling futilely on the knob. The transom rattled in its frame with the force of Ethan’s desperation to open the door. Broken, frightened sobs ended his silence and punctuated his repeated attempts to pull the door open. When he couldn’t open the door, he kicked it and then spun around, seeking another route to flee. Even though neither Mathew nor Abigail did anything to halt him, Ethan continued to dart around the large kitchen as if he was a cornered wild thing. His cries sounded as howls of frightened frustration.
What felt to be an absolute eternity passed before the child took refuge under the table. Only Ethan’s heavy gasps and whimpering moans broke the strained silence. A clock somewhere in the house tolled the bottom of the hour. When the silence continued, Mathew risked a glance at the woman still standing guard in the doorway to the rest of her home.
Disbelief and horror twisted her features into a frown. How difficult would it be for her to annul a marriage by proxy? Surely that was what she had to be thinking. Legally, they were married, but without a consummation, there wasn’t a marriage.
Mathew braced himself for the demand he knew would be coming forthwith—that he remove himself and his feral child from her house immediately. He quickly calculated how much of the twenty-dollar gold piece remained. If he was extremely frugal until the next train, whenever that was, he should be able to purchase a ticket for himself and Ethan to another place farther on down the line.
Maybe, he could make his way up into the Dakota Territories. In a hell-on-wheels community, no one would expect Ethan to be clean and washed. As with any large group of men, there would be the women who followed that community. He wouldn’t ever consider leaving Ethan in the “care” of some of those women, but a laundress might be hired to tend to the boy while he was engaged in the utterly back-breaking labor of laying track.
Demanding, physical labor had never put him off. He could get a job working on the railroad currently being constructed through the territories, if he could swing a sledgehammer with one hand. If not that, there had to be other jobs to be done in laying train track. Maybe, just maybe, the railroad would hire him as a physician to treat men injured on the line.
Abigail’s rigid stance softened. Her gaze dropped to the floor for several long seconds, and then she blew out a short breath. Without a word, she went to the sink. Water splashed into the washbasin as she wrung out a rag. She set the small scrap of cloth on the counter, pulled a covered dish closer to her, and scooped out a large portion of the promised cobbler into a small bowl.
Still without a word, she picked up the bowl and the rag and made her way to the table. As if she handled delicate bone china, the cobbler and a spoon were set on the table. With a squaring of her shoulders and another harsh, short exhale, she picked up the rag and fell to her knees.
Mathew’s jaw dropped when she flipped up the oil-cloth cover and crawled under the table with his son. He braced himself in
anticipation of Ethan’s next effort at escape. He’d have to scramble quickly to catch him before the child reached the hallway leading to the rest of the house.
Murmuring from under the table reached him, but he couldn’t discern the words. There wasn’t another attempt at escape either. He forced himself to relax ever so slightly.
When Ethan emerged, the dirt smudges on his face were gone and Ethan himself held the damp rag. Though bright color from his exertion to escape marked his little cheekbones and his eyes were red-rimmed, he seemed calm. Mathew allowed himself to release the breath he suddenly realized he had been holding. Abigail followed his son and assisted him into the chair with the cobbler in front of it. Ethan picked up the spoon. She touched his wrist and held up one finger, a clear signal to wait.
Ethan twisted in the seat to watch her when she went to the ice box. A tenuous smile started when she returned to the table with the afore mentioned ice cream. The smile grew with the generous dollop of the cold treat she placed on top of the cobbler.
Unwilling to break this unforeseen peace from Ethan, Mathew didn’t move, other than to turn his head to keep Abigail in his line of sight. She reached a hand out to his son. She smoothed her palm over his head, clearly a comforting and calming gesture. Her smile held a hint of sadness when Ethan looked up at her, spoon poised over the dessert. She nodded, and he dove in.
The thud of a larger bowl onto the table broke the silence. She turned to him and Mathew knew he was in it deep. Anger glittered in her eyes and the only color remaining in her face highlighted her cheekbones with vivid splashes of bright rose. One hand lowered to Ethan’s slender shoulder.
“Who did this to him?”
Mathew recoiled. There was the accusation he’d heard too many times, as if the charge wasn’t who had done it, but why he had done this to his own son. As if he was a monster who took delight in tormenting children.
Chapter Five
Abigail didn’t allow Knight to answer before she demanded “Was this the reason you didn’t tell me about him when you wrote?”
She noted Knight’s shoulders tightened, and his lips compressed into a thin line. He took a step back and spoke in an undertone, “I assumed most women wouldn’t want to take on a child that isn’t theirs, much less a child who isn’t normal.”
Abigail sucked in a breath, struggling to keep her anger in check. Knight’s undertone cautioned her this wasn’t a conversation to have where Ethan could hear them. She glanced down at the child. Ice cream dripped from his chin and bits of cobbler crumbs outlined his lips. It wasn’t a battle to soften her tone to say, “Wipe your mouth, Ethan.”
She rubbed the tips of her fingers back and forth over her lips and chin, gesturing where he needed to clean. Dutifully, Ethan picked up the damp rag and scrubbed the sticky mess from his face. She smoothed the curls covering his head again before she answered the veiled accusation in Knight’s words. “You’ve made an assumption about what I would or would not be willing to take on, Dr. Knight.”
In her struggle to keep her backwoods accent from her words, Abigail realized she had tightened her fingers on Ethan’s shoulder. He grew as still as a statue, barely breathing. She released the pressure but didn’t remove her hand. Instead, she ran her palm down his painfully thin arm, bent to look into his face, and smiled. She glanced meaningfully at the remaining cobbler and ice cream, and he resumed eating.
All the times she and Sam had tried to have a child of their own came in her memory, filling her with a sense of loss so deep and profound she felt as if she was sinking into a bottomless well. How could anyone harm a child? Children were to be treasured, cherished, and protected. She made herself address Knight in a level tone. “I would like to speak with you on the back porch.”
“I can’t leave Ethan. He becomes hysterical,” Knight said, the words nearly a monotone, as if he had repeated that warning often.
Abigail knelt next to the child and waited for him to turn to her. “Sweetie, your father and I need to have a grown-up talk. We are going to go outside onto the back porch. We are not going to go anywhere but the porch. Will you stay here and finish your cobbler? When you’re finished, you can come out, too.”
Ethan’s dark eyes shaded. He shifted his gaze from her to his father and then back.
Abigail’s heart twisted with the fear and panic darkening his eyes. “I promise, Ethan, we’re just going out onto the porch. I’ll even make sure you can see your father through the doorway.”
Again, Ethan looked from her to his father. When his gaze returned to Abigail, the fear faded from his eyes. He nodded and spooned up another bite of his treat.
Abigail jerked her chin toward the bolted back door. Knight scooped up his hat, paused long enough to leave a lingering gaze on his son, squared his shoulders, and walked to the door. Abigail followed him onto the porch. Before she spoke, she looked into the kitchen.
Ethan sat rigidly, his face turned to the opened doorway, his gaze darting from side to side. Without a care for proprieties, she grabbed the front of Knight’s frock coat, tugging him several paces to a side so he stood directly in the boy’s line of sight.
“How can you not know who terrorized that child?” She growled the words in a low undertone, not wanting them to carry into the kitchen.
“I can’t hear you.” Knight shook his head. “I’m...I’m deaf in my left ear.”
The mortification and humiliation in his voice hung between them as palpable as a living being. Shame tightened her chest. She stood on his left side and had been on his left at the train station. It wasn’t just the train that had made it impossible for him to hear her at the station. Just as every other man who had answered the plea from the town of Brokken to come and assist in their struggle to keep the town alive, this man was broken.
She shifted so she was closer to his right. “What do you know about what happened to Ethan?” She deliberately softened her tone, hoping to take any accusation from her voice and words.
Mathew turned and glanced over his shoulder at the boy. He gave a nod, as if satisfied Ethan was still calm, lifted his head and stared across the distance. “I know very little. I sent my wife to her family outside of Atlanta for the laying-in and delivery. I was granted an emergency leave when word came Georgianna had delivered him. There had already been two major skirmishes close to our home in Tennessee and I wanted her away from the fighting. I thought that deep into the Confederacy, they would be safe.” He paused, and his eyes slid shut. Every nuance of his posture screamed defeat. “I was wrong.”
The pain marking Mathew’s voice found a receptive audience in Abigail. This time, when she gripped his lower arm, he didn’t fling her hand away.
He looked down with another deep breath. “Shortly after Ethan was born, I was injured and captured and sent to a prisoner camp in Illinois. When I was paroled at War’s end, I went to Atlanta to bring my wife and son back to our home in Tennessee—or what was left of it. Her family home had been razed to the ground, and none of the people left there knew where she or Ethan were.”
He fell silent, as if unable to continue.
The hammering on the façade of the butcher’s and candy maker’s shop ended. A few disconnected notes from a fiddle drifted closer. Distant shouts of laughter and camaraderie made their way from the other end of the town, from the direction of the Brokken Arrow Ranch. A dove cooed from the roof, answered by another.
She shouldn’t be standing this close to him, her hand on his arm in such a familiar manner, but to pull away now would be just as wrong. And just as damaging as if she struck him.
“I found Ethan in an overcrowded orphanage about six months ago. He wouldn’t speak when I first found him. He wouldn’t look at anyone. He was more of a wild thing than a child.” He took a step back, breaking the physical contact between them. “He’s still more wild than anything else.”
“No, he’s not. He’s a frightened little boy.” She glanced into the kitchen. Ethan sat quietly at the table, h
is cobbler finished. “What happened to his mother?”
Mathew twisted around to stare at Ethan and spoke without turning to Abigail. “She tried to flee with Ethan in advance of Sherman. Her body was found almost a week later. Ethan was discovered near her.”
“So, he saw her...” Abigail swallowed the painful lump in her throat, her heart aching for the small child sitting at her table. “He saw her killed.”
“That would be the safe supposition, especially in light of his very physical reaction to anyone wearing a blue uniform.” Mathew craned his head over his shoulder. “I’ll get Ethan and go to the hotel and set about getting this marriage annulled. We will be on the next train as soon as the marriage is ended.”
The whole world tilted. “You’re making an assumption, again, Dr. Knight.”
“Am I?” His hand twisted around the back of his neck. “There’s no assumption that Ethan is a difficult child.”
Abigail wanted to grab him by his broad shoulders and shake him. At least enough to make him turn around and look at her. She made sure her words were aimed at his right side. “You’re still assuming what I am willing to take on.”
His slumped shoulders straightened in degrees with each word she said. Encouraged, she added, “Even though our vows were said by a proxy, we both promised to stay with one another for better or for worse. What would it hurt to agree to continue this proxy marriage for a trial period?”
“Ethan. It would harm Ethan if at the end of your proposed ‘trial period’ we decided to go our separate ways.” He still had his back to her. “Were it not for Ethan, I would have never even answered your advertisement.”
“If you answered that advertisement simply to find a mother for Ethan, I can accept that. Stay in Brokken.” A strange tightness entered her chest and closed her throat. She recognized the desperation rising in her—her desperation to be a mother, to end the loneliness of her empty evenings, and to ensure her friends and neighbors would have a competent physician. “Ethan needs a mother. Brokken needs a doctor.”