Springwater Seasons

by Linda Lael Miller

  Besides, she had always wanted children of her own, and now she had them, even if they were her nieces and not her daughters. “This Dr. Parrish you referred to,” she began cautiously, holding all her emotions at bay until she could sort them out, one by one, in the privacy of her own mind. “Did he look after my brother? At—at the end, I mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Calloway said. He looked a mite grim, and had retrieved his hat from the floor to turn it slowly, round and round, between his fingers. “It isn’t possible to find better medical care than you’d get right here in Springwater. Pres did everything he could to keep Michael alive, but he was real sick. The fever took him down fast.”

  Jessica closed her eyes against the image of Michael breathing his last, slipping away forever, but it was imprinted on her mind and she could not escape the force of it. She would gladly have died in his place but, alas, she had not been given a choice in the matter.

  “I should like to speak with the doctor,” she said, when she was fairly sure she would not break down and sob as she had done the whole night through. “There are questions I want to ask. About Michael’s passing. And—of course—about Victoria’s, too. I trust this Dr. Parrish attended her as well?”

  The mayor of Springwater narrowed his eyes again, as if he were on the alert for a slur directed at the town doctor, who was obviously his friend. “Like I said, you won’t find a better man anywhere than Pres is.”

  It was then that Alma returned. “I declare,” she fretted, “that those two defenseless little darlings know they have”—she paused, perhaps for the sake of drama—“neither father nor mother to look after them.” By then, Jessica was looking at the visitor, and not at Alma.

  “They have me,” she said pointedly. Then she rose from her chair, all dignity and bravado. She wasn’t such a bargain, she reckoned, but she was a blood relation, and she loved those babies with all the scattered pieces of her heart. “We mustn’t keep you, Mr. Calloway,” she said. “You surely have a great many things to do.”

  Because Jessica stood, Mr. Calloway was, of course, forced to stand as well. She found she could not draw an accurate measure of his response merely by looking at his face, and that nettled her. He was a lawyer, she reminded herself, and that meant he had probably cultivated wily ways.

  “If there’s anything you need,” Mr. Calloway said, and though he glanced at Jessica it did seem that his polite words were directed more toward Alma, “you just let me know. The people of Springwater look after their own.”

  Once again Alma was almost blushing, and Jessica glimpsed in her the pretty and charming girl she had once been, long ago. It was Alma, in fact, who saw Mr. Calloway most graciously to the door.

  His departure was audible; his boot heels made a firm, even distinctive sound on the outside stairs.

  When Alma turned back to face Jessica, her color was still high, and her eyes were snapping with uncharacteristic fury. “Whatever possessed you to be so rude to such a fine man as Gage Calloway?” she demanded, with such spirit that Jessica was quite taken aback.

  She ignored the question, having no good response to make, and returned to her post at the set of windows overlooking the main street.

  As she watched Mr. Calloway stalk across the snowy street, his strides long and angry, she smiled. What a good thing it was, she thought, that she did not have to explain her reactions to this disturbing man, for she did not begin to understand them herself.

  Clouds were moving in from the west, heavy with still more snow, and the light was fading. Quickly Jessica hurried in to fetch her warm cloak.

  “You’re going out?” Alma asked, clearly surprised.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” Jessica promised, and made for the door. The wooden stairway was steep and slick, exposed as it was, and she was careful making her way down. If she fell and hurt herself, she and the babies would starve.

  Looking neither to the right nor the left, lest someone catch her eye and expect to converse, Jessica rounded the side of the humble newspaper building and made for the churchyard across the way.

  She had some trouble with the gate, for the metal latch had frozen in place, but soon, by sheer force of will, she had wrestled it open. The snow, ever-deepening, was heavy, and she had to push hard before she could enter.

  She raised her gaze briefly to look at the church itself. A small, trim structure, painted white, it boasted its own bell tower and mullioned windows. The double doors were closed fast against the cold—not that Jessica had any desire whatsoever to set foot inside. She and God were civil to each other, but that was the extent of the matter. Michael’s death had only served to widen the gulf.

  Holding her cloak more tightly around her, Jessica began slogging laboriously toward the small graveyard on the left side of the building. It was guarded by towering maple trees that were bare of leaves but lined with a fine tracery of frost and snow.

  Her knees were wet by the time she gained the place where Michael had been buried. The snow was shallower there, hardly covering the still-raw earth of the grave. The wooden marker looked even more forlorn up close than it had from the apartment windows.

  She blinked back stinging tears and breathed slowly and deeply. She was torn between kicking at the mound in pure outrage, and throwing herself down upon it in a fit of sobbing. Neither option was acceptable.

  “I’m here,” she said, and sniffled. Her nose was turning red—she could feel it—and her eyes were puffy. Her whole face felt swollen, in fact. “I’m here, Michael, and I’ll look after the babies and the newspaper, I promise. Somehow, we’ll all get by.”

  There was no reply, naturally, only more snow drifting down from the charcoal sky, and a wind that prickled even through her clothes. Jessica was seized by such a sense of loneliness that she might have been the only person in the universe, lost and wandering.

  “You can depend on me,” she vowed, in a whisper. Then she touched the cross once, where Michael’s name was carved, before turning to make her way back to the gate.

  CHAPTER

  2

  “GIVE THE GIRL some time,” June-bug McCaffrey counseled as she set the station house table for one of her legendary “plain” suppers. Her blue eyes gleamed with what struck Gage as tender amusement. “She’s new in town, and she’s just lost a close relation, into the bargain. ’Sides, those babies are her own kin, and it’s a natural thing for her to want to raise them up herself. Poor little things. Why, I do believe I would think less of her if she’d turned her back on her own brother’s children.”

  A bachelor used to being on his own, Gage was a competent cook, but he preferred June-bug’s meals to his own concoctions and enjoyed passing an evening before the McCaffreys’ fire, swapping tall tales with old Jacob. Especially a cold, snowy evening like this one. The big white house around the corner was as lonely as a tomb, and not much warmer, for all its fancy furnishings.

  He’d been a fool to go to all that trouble and expense. For one thing, it reminded him too much of the place he’d grown up in, an echoing San Francisco mansion that was either empty or full of shouting and strife, but never peaceful and certainly never warm, the way the Springwater station was. He’d left California after one last shouting match with his tyrannical old grandfather, and he was never going back—not that he’d been asked. He’d ended up in Springwater purely by accident, liked the place, and stayed.

  He thrust out a sigh. “I know you’re right,” he said to June-bug, recalling her assertion that it was only right for Jessica Barnes to raise her own nieces, “but Pres and Savannah are going to be disappointed that they can’t adopt those little girls.”

  “Pooh,” June-bug scoffed, with a wave of one competent hand. That was about as close as she ever got to swearing, at least in Gage’s hearing. She and Jacob had been running the Springwater stagecoach station for a long while before the town grew up around it, and both of them were clear thinkers who generally spoke their minds. “Savannah and Pres have little Beatri
ce, and they know they’re blessed. Why, the Lord may yet see fit to send them a whole passel of kids anyways. They’re still young.”

  Jacob, a powerfully built man with a head full of dark hair, only lightly threaded with silver, had been holding his peace throughout the conversation, though he had a way of listening that made it seem like he was taking the sense of the words in through his very pores. Seated by the fire, he seemed intent on his whittling, but June-bug’s remark inspired him to look up. The wooden horse he was carving looked minuscule in his big, callused hands. “I reckon Miss Barnes must have chosen not to sell you the newspaper,” he said. “Seems to me, that’s what’s got you so riled, most likely.”

  Gage thrust a hand through his hair, which was still damp from walking hatless through the snow. “She took a dislike to me right off,” he confessed, and wondered why it bothered him so much. Miss Jessica Barnes was a skinny little bluestocking with a snippy disposition, and her opinion oughtn’t to matter the way it did. “She doesn’t want to run a newspaper—probably doesn’t have the first idea how to go about such a thing. No sir, I’d bet my best shirt that Miss Barnes had no plans to get into the newspaper business until she found out I wanted it. Then she got downright contrary.”

  June-bug gave a sigh of mock impatience. It had been a hard day and, frankly, the delicious scent of the elk stew she’d made for supper was about all that kept Gage from heading for the Brimstone Saloon to make a meal of hard-boiled eggs and beer. There were nights, and this was one of them, when he just couldn’t face going back to that house by himself, that house he had so foolishly built for a bride who chose, in the end, to remain in San Francisco and marry his half-brother, Luke.

  “Horsefeathers,” June-bug said, jolting him out of his sorry reverie. “Michael fully expected his sister to help him put out the Gazette. He told me himself that he’d asked her to stay on permanent. He hoped she might even marry up with somebody from around here.”

  Jacob’s dark eyes seemed to sparkle, but that might have been a trick of the lantern light. “She’s a fetching little thing, Miss Jessica Barnes,” he allowed. For Jacob, the most taciturn of men, this was unbridled, raving praise.

  June-bug put her hands on her hips and tilted her head to one side. For all her sixty-odd years, she looked as coquettish in that moment as any dewy young maiden flirting by the garden gate. “Why, Jacob McCaffrey,” she accused, half laughing, “I do believe you are smitten!”

  He laughed, a sound like two great armies waging war in the distance, all but shaking the ground and rattling the windows. “I am smitten,” he admitted. “Indeed, I am. With my bride of many years.” He crossed the room, took June-bug’s hand, and bent his head to kiss it. “That would be you, Mrs. McCaffrey.”

  June-bug flushed like a schoolgirl. “Jacob McCaffrey,” she said, “you stop carryin’ on that-a-way.”

  There was a moment of perfect stillness, during which something private passed between husband and wife; some elemental, unspoken language known only to them. Love them both though he did, Gage felt a brief and acidic sting of envy, looking on. Once, fool that he was, he’d thought he had that same affinity with Liza. He’d trusted her utterly, shared the most secret, the most fragile of his dreams and, ultimately, she had betrayed him. Sided with Luke and his grandfather. No doubt, it had all been a joke to Liza, from the first, but Gage had a network of soul-scars to show for the experience, and no other kind of risk scared him the way that one did. Love, to him, was a dangerous undertaking.

  But Jacob and June-bug had been married for more than forty years, and in that time they had raised and lost twin sons and faced innumerable other trials and tribulations as well. In the not too distant past, Jacob had suffered a heart condition that had nearly killed him, but they’d overcome that, too, and now the old man was as healthy as the mules that pulled coaches for the Springwater stage line. It seemed to Gage that every sorrow, every joy, had merely served to draw them closer, until their very souls were fused, one inseparable from the other.

  Gage wanted what the McCaffreys had and feared with his whole heart that he would never find it. Maybe, God help him, Liza had been the only woman he would ever dare to care about, but down deep he wanted passion and fire. He wanted love.

  Indeed, whatever mark he might make in the world, Gage knew he would be a failure if he did not find that one right woman. It would help like hell, he reflected grimly, if he had any idea where to look.

  “Sit down and eat, both of you,” June-bug commanded, breaking the spell as she reached back to untie her calico apron. “And where’s Toby run off to, just when I’ve got supper on the table? That boy don’t stay put any better’n a basket of kittens.”

  Toby, the McCaffreys’ fifteen-year-old foster son, was much taken with young Emma, daughter of Trey and Rachel Hargreaves, and spent most of his spare time across the road at the Hargreaves house, according to Jacob, “getting underfoot.” Trey and his pretty missus didn’t seem to mind, though—they nearly always had a houseful anyway, what with the two smaller children of their own and the Wainwright kids coming and going whenever they had the yen to pass some time in town.

  “Toby’ll be along,” Jacob said. He and June-bug took their places at the table, and Gage joined them as soon as they were both seated.

  Sure enough, Toby burst in while Jacob was offering the blessing, about as subtle as a snowstorm in July. The boy washed hastily and sat down next to Gage just as the resounding “amen” was raised.

  “And how are Trey and Rachel keeping these days?” Jacob asked with a smile in his voice. His rugged features were as solemn as ever. “And Miss Emma, of course?”

  Toby, a good-looking kid with straight blond hair and the kind of impudent manner girls always seemed to take to right off, colored a little as he took a biscuit from the platter Jacob passed his way. “They’re all right,” he said and, after only a moment’s hesitation, helped himself to a second biscuit before handing the rest on to Gage. “I could have stayed for supper, but I told them I wouldn’t miss one of Miss June-bug’s meals for anything.”

  Gage suppressed a smile. The kid was a charmer, that was for sure.

  “Did Emma wear that pretty new dress her mama and I made for her last Saturday afternoon?” June-bug asked. Her eyes were bright with affection for the boy, but he squirmed a little all the same, well aware that he was being teased, and suitably self-conscious.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and summoned up a winning grin. “She looked mighty good, too.”

  “Well,” said June-bug, “of course she did. As for you, Toby McCaffrey, I will expect you to be on time for supper after this just the same. It ain’t good manners to make other folks wait for their victuals.”

  Not, Gage thought with a private smile, that they’d been going to wait.

  Toby ducked his head. Abandoned by his father as a lad and found living alone in the woods by the town’s first official schoolmarm, Rachel Hargreaves, he had been staying with the McCaffreys ever since. His father, a no-good specimen if Gage had ever heard tell of one, had tried once to reclaim his son, though not because of any paternal devotion. Instead, Mike Houghton had wanted someone to mind the horses while he and his gang robbed banks, stagecoaches, and telegraph offices. That had all been settled five years back, however, when Houghton had been killed prior to going to prison, and Toby had taken his foster parents’ name as his own. Gage, arriving in town about six months later, had done the legal honors himself.

  Now, probably to deflect the topic of conversation from his own penchant for the company of pretty Emma Hargreaves, Toby turned a grin on Gage. It wouldn’t work as well on him or Jacob as it did with June-bug, but he had to give the kid credit for the attempt.

  “Well,” Toby demanded cheerfully, “did you sweettalk the newspaper lady, tell her you were sorry about her brother dyin’ and all?”

  It was beginning to dawn on Gage that he had indeed been too hasty in approaching Miss Barnes about the newspaper. He and Mi
chael had not been friends, precisely, but he had served as Barnes’s attorney, being the only one in town. As the executor of his will, he understood the state of the family’s finances only too well, and he had hoped to ease the burden by purchasing the struggling business at a fair price. Apparently, though, if Toby had heard about Gage’s plans, the matter must be the subject of considerable talk around Springwater.

  “I guess I could have given her a bit more time to get her bearings,” he admitted. Had he offered Miss Barnes his condolences? He didn’t rightly remember, given that she’d had an effect on him similar to being butted in the belly by a ram. He might well have committed such an oversight and, worse still, he’d offered to take her infant nieces off her hands as though they were a pair of secondhand buggy wheels. As though she were incompetent to raise them.

  He groaned out loud. No wonder she hadn’t taken a shine to him.

  “What did I say?” Toby asked in an aggrieved manner, looking from Gage to June-bug to Jacob.

  “My boy,” Jacob replied sagely, “you see before you a man who has just seen the error of his ways.” While he imparted this wisdom, he buttered another biscuit.

  *

  Jessica would not have slept at all that second night in Springwater, except that she was utterly spent. When she awoke in the chilly light of a winter morning, feeling rested, it was to a chorus of squalling babies.

  After bracing herself, she got out of bed and set her bare feet on the icy floor. Jupiter and Zeus, she thought, if she was this cold, then those poor children must be nearly frozen to death.

  She hurried to the large cradle, which was situated at the foot of the bed Michael and Victoria had shared in what was now her room, and peered anxiously down at the pair of squirming, shrieking bundles tucked and swaddled in their blankets.

  Both infants were fair, with wide, cornflower-blue eyes. The one at the far end of the cradle was Mary Catherine, Jessica decided, which meant that the other must be Eleanor Lorraine. Or was it the other way around?