Jason, Veronica

by Never Call It Love

  CHAPTER 42

  At the last moment, just before he stepped out into the predawn darkness the next day, she was able to overcome her bitterness sufficiently to go into his arms and return his kiss warmly and tenderly. Then he held her close, his cheek against her hair. "I'll return very soon, Elizabeth. I promise you."

  She moved back in the circle of his arms and looked up into his face, grave in the candlelight. Did he mean that promise? Probably, at least at this moment. But she still had that terrible sense that she might never again look up into that thin dark face.

  "And it is not as if I am really leaving you alone," he went on. "Colin will be here to watch out for you and Caroline."

  He kissed her again and then gently put her away from him. "I must get started. Good-bye, Elizabeth."

  She managed to smile. "Good-bye Patrick."

  In the days that followed, she became glad that she had been able to send him off, not with bitter reproaches, but a kiss and a smile. Because almost as soon as he had stepped through the doorway into the darkness, all her anger was lost in her longing for him. Let him give away their money to his fellow diehards, if he felt he must. Let him do anything, as long as he came back.

  The days, with plenty of work to do in the house, and outside autumn sunlight warm upon pines and golden maples and scarlet oaks, were not too unpleasant. It was the nights that were hard to get through. When with Caroline on her lap she sat at the table, eating her own supper and spooning food into the little girl's pink mouth, her awareness of that vacant chair opposite was like a weight upon her.

  True, all her neighbors had invited her to have supper with them "whenever you like." But she could not impose upon them every night. Better to get used to loneliness. Many nights, though, she thought of Colin, cooking and eating his own solitary meal in his little house. It seemed sad that they could not take supper together, as they had on so many otherwise lonely nights at Stanford Hall. But no. It would not do to arouse even a shadow of suspicion in the minds of their kind but sternly moralistic neighbors.

  Apparently Colin also realized that. The first evening after Patrick's departure, Elizabeth heard her brother-in-law stabling the horses in the lean-to behind the house. Then he came around to the front door and knocked.

  When she had opened the door, he asked, "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "No, Colin." She looked into the face that was so like that other, beloved face, and yet so unlike it—the planes of jaw and cheekbones less pronounced, and the dark eyes softer, with that hint of sadness in their depths. "But thank you very much."

  "Whenever you do need anything, tell me. Good night, Elizabeth." Quickly he turned and limped toward his own little house.

  Each evening from then on, once he had stabled the horses, he came to the front door to learn how she and the baby were faring. But he never stepped across the threshold, let alone hinted for a supper invitation.

  Patrick had been gone almost three weeks, when, one afternoon, Caroline caught hold of a chair's edge to pull herself up from the floor, stood there for a moment, and then took three tottering steps to catch hold of Elizabeth's outstretched hands. As she lifted her triumphantly gurgling offspring into her arms, Elizabeth wished that Patrick had been there to see his daughter's first steps. But no matter. He would be back in a week at most. And how surprised he would be to find the infant-in-arms he had left toddling about with that look of proud glee on her little face.

  But Patrick did not return the next week, or the next. Then, on a morning in late November, a French trapper knocked at her door. He told her he had a message from her husband. It had been given to him by another trapper, who in return had received it from still another. Heart pounding, she unfolded the creased, soiled piece of paper the Frenchman handed to her.

  Not all the men he wished to meet had yet arrived, Patrick had written in his tall, distinctive hand, and so he might not start his return journey for another week. "But even so, I will surely be there by the twentieth of November."

  The twentieth had been two days before.

  Bitterness in her heart, she thanked the trapper and closed the door. She wished that she could rip Patrick's note to pieces and toss it onto the fire. Instead, after a moment, she thrust the folded piece of paper down the bosom of her dress.

  Less than a week later, the unseasonably warm weather broke. On a day that began as brightly as any that preceded it, clouds blotted out the sun around noontime, and a chill wind began to strip the trees of the last of their colorful autumn foliage. By two o'clock, heavy rain mixed with hail began to fall. Unhooking the deerskin covering at a window to look out at the clearing, muddy now and strewn with hailstones, Elizabeth felt a new fear clutch at her heart. Like the other men, Colin had wanted to clear as much more land as possible before the onset of bad weather. Consequently, he had not shot any game. And thanks to the sales of salted meat and fish that Patrick had made to those trappers, the supplies in the cellar were running low.

  Colin must have realized that she would be anxious. At dusk, with the cold rain still falling, he knocked at her door. Standing there in the inadequate shelter of the little roof above the step, he smiled at her and asked, "How is your food holding out?"

  "I have plenty cornmeal and potatoes and dry onions. But there is only a third of a barrel of dried fish left, and a little venison."

  "Don't worry. I'll spend one more day clearing. Then I'll go after partridge for you. Perhaps I'll even get a deer."

  Again he smiled at her. He looked so much like Patrick at that moment—a gentler, kinder Patrick—that it was almost all she could do to keep from saying: Come in, Colin. Don't leave me.

  "Well, good night, Elizabeth." He started to turn away.

  "Colin!"

  He turned back to her. She wanted to say: Do you think Patrick has sailed for Ireland? In spite of that price on his head, in spite of his promise to me? But she could not, even to Colin, voice the growing fear to which she awoke each morning.

  And so instead she asked, "Why do you think it is that Patrick has not come home?"

  His smile died. Anger leaped into his dark eyes. After a disconcerted moment she realized that the anger was not for her, but for his brother. Then he said, once more smiling, "Perhaps the meeting lasted overlong. Anyway, I would not worry about something bad happening to him. My brother is like a cat. He always lands on his feet. Good night," he added, and again turned away.

  The rain stopped a few hours later, but the temperature plunged so steeply that, for the sake of warmth, Elizabeth took Caroline into the big bed that night. In the morning, the skies were leaden gray, and in low spots the clearing was covered with crusts of ice, milky white against the dark frozen ground.

  Late that afternoon, while she was peeling potatoes for a fish stew, she heard voices in the clearing, men's voices, and the high, excited voices of children. Heart swelling with hope, she went to the door and looked out.

  But Patrick had not arrived. Instead, young Jessup and the red-haired Duncan MacPherson, followed by Thompson and Wentworth and by the children who had been playing in the subfreezing temperature, carried a litter of lashed pine boughs toward the Thompson house. Colin lay on the litter, and his blood was dripping from it onto the dark earth and the patches of gray ice.

  Cold with alarm, she lifted Caroline into her homemade high chair, lest in her absence the child venture too close to the fire. Then she snatched her red knitted shawl from its hook beside the door, flung it over her head, and as rapidly as she could over that treacherous ground, crossed to the Thompson house.

  Mrs. Thompson opened the door for her. "He's hurt his foot badly. They've put him in the lean-to."

  "How...?"

  "He was chopping down a tree. He slipped on the ice, and the ax blade came down on his left foot."

  His left foot, the sound one. Colin was crippled indeed now.

  "Just how bad is it?"

  "I'm not sure. My husband is getting his shoe off now. You
'd better sit down. You're white as a ghost."

  Elizabeth sat there, aware that Mrs. Thompson had gone into the lean-to, and that her husband had come into the big room to take a sheet from the linen press against one wall. At last Mrs. Thompson stood before her. "I've bandaged his foot. You can see him now."

  "Is it... ?"

  "It's quite bad. It may be many weeks before he walks again."

  Elizabeth rose, moved into the lean-to. Colin, covered with blankets, eyes closed in a face grayed with pallor, lay on the bed where she and Patrick had slept during their first weeks in New Canterbury.

  His eyes opened. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth."

  She dropped to her knees beside him. "Sorry! What are you talking about?"

  "You and the little one need me. And now I—"

  "Colin, don't think about it. Just get well as fast as you can."

  She went back into the main room. "Mrs. Thompson, when can he be moved to my house? It isn't fair that you should have the care of him."

  "No, child." Her voice held a trace of sternness. "It would not be fitting, you a young woman, and your man not there. Besides, I have more experience in these matters. You had best get back to Caroline now."

  Elizabeth went out in the gathering dark. A more selfish fear than her concern for Colin clutched at her now. As soon as she reached her house, she lifted the trapdoor and went down into the cellar. With the lamp held high in her hand, she inspected her dwindling supplies of meat, fish, and winter vegetables.

  Well, despite Colin's accident, everything would be all right if Patrick returned within a few days. Even if he did not, her neighbors could supply her with food—that is, if they could spare it from their own families' needs. But all of them, made optimistic by last winter's good hunting, had sold food to those Mississippi-bound trappers, although not as recklessly as Patrick had. And if heavy snow fell, or if the deer and rabbits and game birds had become too few after last year's heavy hunting...

  Don't think about it, she commanded herself, and climbed the ladder.

  When she awoke in the morning, the air was ice-cold. Caroline lay huddled against her back. By a certain glimmer of the light that filtered through the semitransparent window coverings, Elizabeth knew that snow had fallen. Careful not to disturb the sleeping child, she got out of bed and dressed, shivering with cold, not taking off her nightshift until she had drawn on her stockings and petticoat beneath it. When she had put on her gown, she opened the door a crack and looked out. Yes, at least two inches of snow lay in the clearing, and an iron-gray sky promised that more would fall.

  She had a fire going when someone knocked. It was her nearest neighbor, Duncan MacPherson, a coonskin cap covering his red hair. "I've been over to the Thompsons'. Colin seems to be doing all right. He's pretty weak from loss of blood, but there's no fever, and that means no blood poisoning."

  Elizabeth thanked him. He said, "We're all taking to the woods today. We ought to be able to bring back some game, if the snow holds off."

  Well before noon, Elizabeth opened the door a crack and saw the first big white flakes spiraling down. When she again looked out, about an hour later, snow was falling so thickly that she could scarcely make out the MacPherson house. By that time she was hearing, now and then, gunfire in the woods. She imagined the men on snowshoes out there, trying to aim at dim animal shapes through the thick smother, and then, with half-frozen fingers, ramming powder and shot into their flintlock barrels for another attempt.

  She walked back to the fire, a thriftily small one. The stack of firewood in the lean-to that sheltered the horses and wagon was still high, but she had decided it was best not to burn it recklessly. Caroline sat on a pallet close to the hearth, shaking the rattle, a gourd filled with dry peas, which occasionally interested her, even though she was a year old now. Standing beside the child, Elizabeth stared into the fire and thought of a grim story she had heard at the first of the settlements at which she and the Stanford men had stopped on their way here. A dozen years earlier, a woman told her, other families had occupied those log houses. But they had suffered a bad harvest, followed by a winter of snows so high that the houses were cut off from one another. In the spring, French trappers had found them all dead of starvation and cold, each family in its separate house.

  She shivered, wrapped her arms around her, and looked down at her child. The small face, rosier than ever in the firelight, wore an absurd look of concentration as she wielded the rattle. If, because of Patrick's prolonged absence, something happened to Caroline...

  Stop that, she commanded herself.

  Again she went to the door. The snow had slackened, at least enough that she could see the MacPhersons' house and the dark, wind-flattened streamer of smoke from its chimney. Best to start clearing the short path between the house and the privy before it became impassable. She went out to the combination stable and woodshed and grasped the long-handled wooden shovel.

  Shortly before dark, someone knocked. It was Duncan MacPherson again, his fur cap white with the still-falling snow. From thongs he held dangled two rabbits and two squirrels.

  "We've divided up what we shot today." Despite his smile, she could see the anxiety in his face. "We didn't have very good luck. Not much game about, and with the snow failing... Anyway, here is your share."

  She looked at the small creatures. She thought of the MacPhersons, with two children to feed, and the Wentworths, with four. She thought of the young Jessups, already with one child, and Sally Jessup pregnant again. She thought of the Thompsons and of Colin. A man weakened by loss of blood would need good nourishment to get through the winter.

  "Just give me the rabbits. I don't need much food, and Caroline even less. Besides, our supplies are holding up."

  "You are sure?" She could see the relief in his face.

  "I'm sure." She took the thong upon which the rabbits were strung, thanked him, and closed the door quickly, lest more heat escape.

  Almost three more inches of snow fell during the night, although by the time she awoke it had slackened to an occasional flurry. Dressed in the greatcoat Patrick had not taken with him, head wrapped in her shawl, she took the shovel and again cleared a path to the privy. Despite the icy temperature, by the time she came back into the house, she was sweating.

  Out in the clearing, other shovels scraped. She opened the door a crack. Except for Colin, all the men were out there, shoveling paths between the houses.

  About an hour later she became aware that the shoveling sounds had ceased. When she went to the door, she saw why. Snow was again falling, faster than anyone could hope to shovel away. To the distance of about a foot, she could see the individual flakes falling straight downward. Beyond that, the snow was a gray-white wall.

  If snow kept piling up, Patrick would not be able to return, even if he wanted to.

  With a sense of helpless terror, she closed the door.

  CHAPTER 43

  A mourning dove had landed on the windowsill. Huddled in Patrick's greatcoat beside the unlighted fireplace, Elizabeth could see the bird's shadow, cast by the bright, subzero sunlight on the deerskin window covering. She looked at it listlessly.

  As she sat there, she had been trying to figure out what the date was. Around the end of February, she had decided. That meant that four months had passed since Patrick had left her, and about two months since Duncan MacPherson had handed her the two rabbits. A few times after that she had seen the men trying to clear paths between the houses, only to retreat indoors as more snow fell. Now about four feet of it blocked her door and those of all the other houses. For a while Mr. and Mrs. MacPherson had called out a window once every day, asking her how she was, and relaying the news that Colin was "getting better." But for more than two weeks she had not had even that small contact with her neighbors. She knew, though, that they were still alive. Opening the door a crack each morning, she had seen smoke rising from the chimneys of the other houses. Perhaps her neighbors, like her, had been reduced to using fire
wood only for cooking. If so, they would not want to open their windows to the icy air just for conversation's sake.

  She found herself thinking of the Jessups. Sally must have given birth by now. Had she remained sufficiently well nourished so that there was enough milk for her baby?

  The thought reminded her of her own child. She turned and looked at Caroline, asleep beneath the heavy layer of blankets on the bed. So that she would be warmer, Elizabeth kept the child in bed as much as possible. At first Caroline had protested. But for the past week she had been docile, frighteningly docile, as if she had no energy to expend in rebellion, or even in staying awake for more than a few hours at a time.

  And no wonder, Elizabeth thought. For nearly three weeks now they had subsisted on cornmeal plus a meatless soup made of onions and the potatoes she dug from where they were stored under a pile of earth in one corner of the cellar. How could a young, fast-growing child stay well on such a diet? With fear crowding her throat, she looked at the pale little face with its faint shadows under the closed eyes.

  A cooing noise made her turn her head. The dove was still on the windowsill. Her heart leaped with sudden hope. Hunger and cold must have rendered her stupid, she realized now, because right there outside the window, if she were quick and clever enough, was a means of bringing a little color back into Caroline's face.

  She got up and went into the lean-to, where the horses, breath steaming in the frigid air, stood in their stalls. With a familiar bitterness she reflected that it was lucky for those animals that the voyageurs hadn't offered Patrick money for field corn. Otherwise the horses might have starved by now. Then she reflected grimly that one of them might soon be dead anyway. Important as they were to a family trying to carve a living out of the wilderness, she would not hesitate, if driven to it, to feed horse-meat broth to her child.