by Lynda J. Cox
He glanced down at the blood-stained shirt. No doubt about it, the garment was ruined. The bow in his tie separated with the hard pull he applied to one end. The length of black satin joined his frock coat. “I wasn’t going to let that snake call me a liar. I should have used more discretion. Abby, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t call me that. The only ones allowed to call me that are people I’ve told can use that name.” The air frosted with the ice forming her words.
“You told Robbie he can use that name?” If she was determined to have a row, a perverse part of him was more than willing to indulge her. “He seemed very surprised earlier to learn we were already married.”
“Everyone in this town, including Robbie, knew we were married by proxy. You were willing to die in front of your son because the biggest liar in this town called you one? You upset Ethan and scared me to death because he—how did you put it to Pastor Grisson—impugned your honor? That is just...just...” She let out a long, slow breath. “Everyone knows Robbie couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it. Why did it bother you so much?”
He’d scared her to death. Her anger wasn’t just because of Ethan. His willingness to give her the argument she seemed to want faded while her question forced him to ask the same thing. He unbuttoned the neck of the ruined shirt, using the time to form his answer.
“Other than Ethan, honor is all I have. I had to swallow my pride and accept charity to ensure Ethan wouldn’t go hungry.” Mathew choked on the words. He shook his head, angry with himself. “I have no pride remaining so, when my honor is questioned, I will defend it.”
Chapter Eleven
When she asked her husband Sam why he married her, when he could have just taken off for parts unknown and left her to deal with the consequences, his response startled her. He wanted to know what kind of a man she thought he was. She remembered stumbling over her words only to fall silent when he said the only manner to keep his own honor, after compromising hers, was marriage. A man might have to choke down his pride but any man who could surrender his honor wasn’t a man at all.
Abigail released her white-knuckled grip on the chair’s back and made her way around the table. She looked into Mathew’s face, his expression tortured with his own perceived failings. “You have more than just Ethan and your honor, Dr. Mathew Knight. You also have a wife who has already come to admire you. And, you have courage. It took either a very foolish man or a very brave man to face Robbie down.”
A slight grin teased a corner of his mouth. “Probably falling more to the side of foolish, truth be known.”
“I’ll agree with that.” She let a grin lift her lips to take the sting from her words. “Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again.”
He raised his hand to her face and brushed a tendril of hair off her cheek with the back of his fingers. “I give you my word.”
Abigail’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and her stomach filled with thousands of fluttering butterfly wings. Her skin warmed along the lingering trail left by his touch as he traced the line of her jaw and caught her chin. He tilted her head up.
“We’re not in public.” His voice deepened and seemed as heated as the sun in the middle of July.
The butterflies multiplied. Tearing her gaze from his face was impossible. Sam had never made her feel like this—as if warm honey filled her insides. Her limbs trembled uncontrollably, and her heart pounded so fiercely it should be beating its way out of her chest. Her breath caught at the back of her throat when he traced the length of her lower lip with the pad of his thumb.
“Abigail—Abby—if we continue along this path, there’ll be no turning back.”
The words wouldn’t come. She slipped her hands up his shoulders and entwined her arms around the back of his neck to pull him closer.
A loud banging on the front door drove them apart. “Dr. Knight!”
Ethan’s frightened cry rolled down the hallway from the front parlor. Mathew heaved out a frustrated sigh. Despite the interruption, Abigail couldn’t quell a soft chuckle. “I’ll go see to Ethan—”
“Dr. Knight!” The desperation in the voice increased and the banging grew in tempo.
“That sounds like Melody. Better take the quinine with you.”
“The quinine? Why?” Even as he asked, Mathew opened Sam’s small black medical bag and rummaged in it, finally withdrawing a small, stoppered, brown bottle filled with the bitter powder.
Abigail gestured to the hallway leading to the front foyer. “Her beau, Gideon, has intermittent fevers followed by severe chills. It appears to be malaria.”
Mathew led the way with a small lamp. “You know this won’t do anything to reduce the fevers or the chills. If it is malaria, it has to run its course.”
“But, it gives Melody something to do and makes her feel as if she’s helping him.” Abigail sat on the edge of the velvet covered loveseat where Ethan had been sleeping and gathered the boy into her embrace. He flung his arms around her waist and buried his face against her. She gently shushed the child and assured him everything was all right, all the while drawing her palm down his thin back in a soothing manner.
Mathew paused, and she watched his gaze skip around the garish room before settling on her and Ethan. “The only thing missing is the full-length painting—”
“There was one. That did leave.” She nudged her head at the door.
Mathew lifted the lamp a little higher and opened the door. Melody stumbled into the foyer. Without even acknowledging Abigail, she blurted out, “Do you have any quinine?”
“Do you know what time it is?” Mathew glanced over his shoulder. “Your incessant pounding on the door woke my—”
“I don’t care what time it is.” Melody snapped the words.
Abigail shook her head. Maybe, she should have warned Mathew how easily Melody became concerned for Gideon’s well-being.
“There is a man sick at my house.” Melody finally seemed to see Abigail, and she managed a slightly sheepish nod of greeting. “He has malaria.”
Mathew leaned his shoulder into the doorjamb. “Unless your patient has progressed to jaundice, you could have waited a few hours. Daylight would have been preferable. The fever will abate, which is why I’m assuming you had to be here and pound on the door loud enough to wake my son. That man’s fever will go down, and he’ll be fine in a few hours.”
Abigail winced with the sarcasm Mathew placed on the word “patient” and decided she needed to talk to him about his bedside manner.
“He’s not fine now!”
Ethan cringed and burrowed his face deeper into Abigail with Melody’s shout. Abigail continued to stroke his back and murmured, “It’s all right. Melody is just worried.”
“Unless he has jaundice, he will be fine, though the fever and subsequent chills are not pleasant,” Mathew said.
“What’s wrong with you?” Melody stamped her foot. “Don’t you care that someone is ill?”
“The illness has to run its course. Willow bark tea will give him some relief from the fever and chills. Turpentine works too, or so I’ve heard.” He handed the brown bottle to Melody. “Small doses, no more than an eighth of a teaspoon. It’s very bitter. I suggest administering it mixed in a shot of whiskey or some other alcohol. If he loses his sight or his ears ring, the dosage is too great.”
“He can go blind?” Melody’s voice took on a strained note.
Mathew’s instructions and precautions were the exact same things she had told Melody. Either Melody had been too distraught the first time Gideon’s fever spiked, or she didn’t take Abigail’s warnings and guidance seriously.
“It’s only temporary if he does.” Mathew’s voice softened and took on a more calming tone. Maybe he did have a bedside manner. “Blindness or ringing in his ears is the result of an overdose. Be careful when administering the quinine. The fever will fade in a few hours, with or without it. Let him rest and he’ll be fine.”
Melody looked
down at the bottle in her hand. She then snapped her head up and spun on a heel. Without even a good-bye, she stormed from the house. Mathew closed the door, let out a long, slow breath and pressed his forehead to the frosted glass.
Abigail waited until he lifted his head and turned to her before she said, “It was like this when Sam was alive. I know that doctors have to be available at all hours of the night and day.”
“You’ve seen her beau. Do I need to get my coat and go tend to him?” He crossed the foyer into the parlor and set the lamp on an end table.
“Not tonight, but it might be helpful if you made it a point to go see him tomorrow. He’s never had a yellow cast to his skin or eyes. It’s just the cycle of fevers, chills, and general achiness.” Ethan relaxed against her, his head growing heavier on her ribs.
Mathew’s gaze met hers before he lowered his sight to the child curled against her. He slowly scanned the room. Abigail studied the parlor, looking at it anew, and wondered just how horribly garish he thought it was. “How did you know there was an indecent painting hanging in this room?”
“I treated more than one man who had found ‘horizontal refreshment’ in a bawdy house and brought something back to camp that he never anticipated. Most of them discussed the art work. Seems every house had a nude painting of some sort.” To her surprise, a deep crimson flush crept up his cheeks. He cleared his throat and added, as he lifted his sight to the exact spot where that picture had been, “Where the painting apparently hung, the wallpaper is a little brighter. The outline is still visible.”
Abigail snapped her head to the spot on the wall. She had never noticed it before.
“Is he asleep?” Mathew raked a hand through his hair, a yawn breaking from him at the same time.
“I believe so.” She cautiously maneuvered Ethan’s head onto the small pillow. With a last brushing of her hand over his hair, she pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. The fullness in her heart expanded. Yes, in a manner of speaking, her prayers for a child had been answered.
Mathew’s gaze drifted to the wide staircase ascending to the darkened second floor. Abigail twisted her hands in her robe, suddenly feeling awkward, shy, and backwards. To force herself from wondering what he thought as he continued to look up the stairs into the utter darkness, she said, “If you give me your shirt, I have some strong lye soap. I should be able to scrub most of the stains out.”
“What?” He twisted his head around to her. “Oh, yes...I suppose that needs to be done.”
“If I don’t scrub your shirt tonight, the stains will set, and it will be completely ruined.” Looking at anything, anywhere but at him seemed to be the safer alternative.
The thick Oriental rug muffled the sound of his footsteps. Forcing herself to breathe became a priority. The butterflies in her stomach fluttered to life when he leaned in closer to her and tilted her head up.
“If you have a blanket and a pillow to spare, I’ll sleep in here near Ethan.”
She swallowed and licked her suddenly arid lips. “Sam made the second parlor into our bedroom—I guess it’s my bedroom, now—so that he could be close to his patients if any of them had to spend time under his immediate attention.”
Mathew cocked his head to a side, even as he dragged the pad of his thumb along the slope of her cheekbone. “What are you saying, Abigail?”
“I don’t know.” She tilted her head into the caress, admonishing herself to stop being silly. She’d been married before. “I’m sorry. I...I...I don’t know if I’m ready.”
“It’s not easy to let go of someone you once loved.” Instead of moving away from her, he slid his hand to the back of her head and pulled her in closer and pressed a light kiss to her forehead. “When you’re ready, if that was an invitation to join you in your bedroom, I’ll take you up on that offer. In the meantime, I’ll make myself comfortable in here for the night. Tomorrow, we can get Ethan and me settled into one of the other rooms.”
To her utter mortification, she burst into tears. To hide her distress, she tried to turn away from him, only to have Mathew catch her elbow, pull her back to him, and enfold her into his embrace. Her tears became long, deep sobs with her surrender to the comfort he offered.
Somehow, though she wasn’t sure how, they ended up on the front porch, on the glider swing while she continued to sob. No doubt about it, a complete and utter crying jag had her in its grip. With her tears finally exhausted, she didn’t have the strength to leave his embrace. A shiver whispered over her, mitigated by the warmth of his arms around her and the heat seeping into her from their close contact.
“This is the first time you’ve really faced he’s gone forever, isn’t it?”
The effort to lift her head off his chest was too much. “I thought I had accepted it. I was so angry when I first heard he was gone. I was angry with him. Angry with God. Angry with everyone who wanted that blasted war. And the bargains I tried to make with God...”
“You promised to do anything, give up anything, your own life, even, just so it wouldn’t be true.” The depth and timbre of his voice spoke of a shared attempt to bargain with the Almighty.
“Yes.” She sniffed away the last of her tears but didn’t make any attempt to lift her head from his chest. She needed to hear his heartbeat, feel his chest rise and fall with each deep breath. Her hand traced his left arm from shoulder to wrist. Withered muscling defined the length. “How did this happen?”
“I tried to stop a guard from clubbing another prisoner. The guard drove his point home with a bayonet and pinned me to a wall for several hours.” He took an unsteady breath. “The point almost destroyed my shoulder joint, did irreparable damage to the nerves, and compromised the blood flow. This was the result.”
She made herself lift her head. A dawning horror gripped her. “Was that kind of brutality allowed at all the Union prisons?”
“By the end of the fighting, yes. Word had gotten out about the conditions in Camp Sumter—”
“Andersonville.” The very name of the place sent renewed shivers over her. As sheltered as Brokken was from much of the War, word of even that particular hell made its way into town.
“Plans were put into motion by certain members of Lincoln’s cabinet, mostly by Edwin Stanton, for retaliation against captured Confederates.”
“The Union wouldn’t do that.” She shook her head, unable to conceive of anyone who would deliberately condone such barbarism. “It’s inhumane.”
“That’s what we all thought, too. We thought they were just rumors, until rations were cut, and then cut again. We stopped receiving letters from home and were told no letters would be allowed to leave the camp. When I requested even the most basic of medical provisions, bandages and blankets, I was told to make do with what I had. I had nothing.”
“Sam was wounded and captured at the Battle of Nashville.” Abigail twisted her nightgown between her hands, and even though she recognized the action, she didn’t stop it, this time. “He was sent to Camp Chase and died just a few days later. I heard he had been shot in the stomach.”
Mathew sucked in a harsh breath. “Even with the best medical care, a gut shot from a minie ball is almost always fatal. It’s a fifty-four caliber, soft lead projectile fired at low velocity. As soon as it hits anything with any substance, the ball spreads out.”
She continued to twist the fabric, struggling to find the words to ask the one question she hadn’t been able to speak for almost four years.
Mathew slid his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his chest again. “In his last few hours, he probably wasn’t suffering. He would have been incoherent and in and out of consciousness with sepsis, but he wouldn’t have been suffering.”
“Thank you,” Abigail managed on a whisper. “It’s little comfort, but at least I can stop wondering.”
Chapter Twelve
Mathew reasoned he hadn’t exactly been untruthful about whether Sam’s final hours were spent in agony. Odds were, the infection and resu
lting sepsis would have left him out of his mind with delirium. Most of the men caught up in that war became utterly cavalier about their own mortality. “Keep marching until you stop one and die” he heard from more than one footsore, hungry, and tired soldier. To a man, though, their greatest fear was a gut shot.
He’d done what he could for the men brought to him in the surgeon’s tent with bullets buried in their abdomen. Usually, all he could do at the start of the war was a strong dose of morphine to allow them to slip quietly from this life. It didn’t matter whether the uniform was blue or shades of grey or butternut, the terror and finally resignation haunting their eyes had been the same. He refused to see either uniform or skin color when they were brought into that tent, often screaming in agony. There were many times he thanked God he never knew any of their names. The faces, with or without names, haunted him and their voices and pleas blended into a single deep moan of grief in his memory.
Somewhere on the outskirts of town, a dog barked, shattering his foray into a blood-drenched past. The challenging bark stirred Abigail. She murmured something unintelligible, then stretched, and sat up.
“My goodness...I’m sorry. I almost fell asleep.”
“I wasn’t complaining.” He rolled his head back, easing the tightened muscles of his neck. “It’s been a long time since I’ve shared a swing on a quiet, warm, spring night with a beautiful woman.”
The crescent moon cast enough illumination that the immediate, heightened color staining her cheeks was visible.
“However, while I won’t object to remaining here, we run the very real risk of both of us falling asleep on the glider, and we could inadvertently scandalize the whole town, especially as you’re in your nightgown.” He stood, turned to her, and held his hand out.
Abigail wrapped her fingers around his but hesitated to stand. He waited for her, holding her hand but not pulling her forward.
“You don’t have to sleep on the floor of the parlor, unless you think you have to sleep that close to Ethan.” Her color deepened even though she never looked away.