His voice was tender and his face full of love. It was like looking straight into the sun to look into his eyes. She could hardly bear it.
She swallowed hard, feeling the need to stop him before he said anything else, before events had moved past her reckoning.
Somehow the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth.
“You’ve got to know how I feel about you, Betsy. I’m not much with my damaged leg, but I’d work hard for you and our family. You’ll never go without and I’d feel the most privileged man in Texas if you’ll just say yes to me.”
She looked around at the little cabin with its toilet out back and few little sheds where he’d once kept animals, at the overgrown acres and the lovely setting of trees and creek. She could hear birds singing in the distance.
“Caleb,” she choked out the words, “Are you asking me to marry you?”
He laughed, but the fear that she would say no was in his eyes. “That’s right, Betsy darling. I’m asking you to be my wife.”
As they drove home, his arm wrapped around her shoulders as he drove with the other, he kept thinking over and over, she said yes!
Betsy had actually said yes, she would marry him.
He couldn’t believe it. Something this good could never happen to him.
His insides had turned to jelly as he watched her face after he’d actually said the words out loud asking her to marry him. She’d looked pale and thoughtful, not exactly tremulous with joy and he’d been sure the next word that came out of her mouth would be a polite no. She’d probably say something about thinking of him as a brother or always wanting to be friends.
You could have knocked him over with a feather when the answer was positive.
He squeezed her shoulders, so full of happiness he thought it must be running out of his ears. He bent to kiss her and she screamed. “Look out, Caleb. You’re about to run into that tree.”
So he pulled the team over to the side of the trail so he could give all his attention to kissing her properly.
Chapter Seventeen
It wasn’t until they were home and Caleb excitedly broke the news of their engagement to Doc and Hetty that Betsy came to her senses.
She loved him so much. She wanted to marry him, but when she saw Doc’s quick questioningly glance in her direction, she knew she had do her best to make Caleb understand the situation.
She waited until after supper when Hetty had gone to put the two children to bed before saying, “I plan to explain things to him, Doc.”
“Want me to take a walk?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I need you here to help convince him.” Caleb took on a worried look, but he didn’t say anything.
She went over to sit by him, taking his hand.
“If Doc thinks I shouldn’t expect to marry you, my being maimed and all . . .”
She couldn’t help breaking in. “It’s not you, Caleb. It’s me. Doc thinks you ought to be made to realize that I may not be able to stay here.”
He laughed uneasily. “You’re not trying to tell me you have a husband and children somewhere else?” It was meant to be a joke, but somehow it didn’t come out funny.
Betsy looked helplessly at Doc. “What she’s trying to tell you, son, is that she can travel in time, sometimes whether she wants to or not.”
He frowned. He’d heard them talk this way before. “That’s impossible,” he said shortly.
“Surely you’ve noticed that she comes and goes rather abruptly.”
Caleb considered that. “Sure, I’ve noticed, but I figured there was some logical explanation.”
“Caleb, you can’t know that the reason why I virtually was kicked out of my profession in the old country was because of my wild ideas about time and a few other subjects. It’s a scientific possibility that there are those who can move in time as Betsy does. She comes back to us by crossing the doorway into this very cookshack, and sometimes without any intention of her own she goes out or comes in to find herself in another time where little Evan is a grown man.”
Caleb stared from one to the other. “You’re both out of your minds,” he said bluntly.
“It’s the truth,” Betsy said gently.
“She’s my granddaughter,” Doc added, “at least by marriage. Evan is her stepfather.”
Caleb tried to laugh. “Evan is just a little boy.”
They both sat silently, letting him take it in.
He started to say something, then stopped. He got to his feet, grabbed his cane and hobbled out the door.
Betsy looked at Doc. “Where do you suppose he’s going?”
Doc leaned back thoughtfully. “It’s out of character, Caleb isn’t a drinking man. But if he was anybody else I’d figure he was going out to get good and drunk.”
Doc refused their offer to take Evan and raise him just until Forrest came home. “If anything should happen to me, then I know he can count on the two of you. But in the meantime with Hetty’s help I’ll keep him here at home waiting for his papa.”
Hetty nodded, smiling. “Forrest will be home soon as this war is over.”
Caleb knew that leaving Doc alone with just Hetty and the children would stir up more trouble for both of them, but the boy was his grandson and it was his decision to make.
He was a little ashamed of his all night’s spree on the evening of his engagement, but somehow he’d managed to work things through and it had only taken him a week to talk Betsy back into the idea of marrying him. He wasn’t sure what he believed about this time travel thing, but two things he was sure of—Betsy hadn’t come from another time and she was as sane as he was. Which didn’t say a whole lot.
She had agreed to go live with him on his farm and if her acceptance had come with less than whole-hearted enthusiasm, he tried to ignore that fact by telling himself that he could keep her safe back in the woods in ways that would not be possible in Lavender.
As 1863 turned into full-fledged spring, none of the news from the war front was good and still no word came from Forrest. Doc was quieter these days, not saying much about his views on the war, almost as though offering courtesy to the southerners in their dark hours. People still grumbled about him and his odd views, but he’d seen them through a number of serious winter illnesses and had set at more than one deathbed.
“The rascal is too damned useful to hang,” Bolter Jackson, who was looking a whole lot older these days, was heard to say down at the store. “Reckon you have to allow him a degree of senility.”
Bolter’s older son had run away and joined the army of Northern Virginia and died at the first small skirmish. Bolter wasn’t the same after that and seemed to depend on the young son and daughter that were all the family he had left.
A few of the people who now called themselves freed didn’t linger around Cottonwood Creek Planation but set out to find jobs or places of their own, some of them even going to work for small wages at distant, kinder farms.
Bolter was facing possible ruin since most of his wealth had been in land and slaves, but Caleb couldn’t find it in him to feel sorry for the man even if his whole world was dying away.
Vigilante activity still continued on its merciless way and near Lavender northern loyalists and the men who said they were no longer slaves still met cruel ends. As for Caleb, he saw the handwriting clear as anything on the wall and only wished sadly for the war to be over and Forrest to come home. He wondered if the man who was the closest he had to a father even knew that he’d lost his young wife.
Considering how dramatic life could be, Betsy half-expected that any day, either right before the wedding or just after, she would cross into the cookshack one more time and find herself back in the pink and gray house in the Lavender where she lived with Papa and Mama. If that place still existed. In a way it was becoming daily more of a memory, locked away in some cedar chest to be taken out and examined when she was very old.
Poor Papa and Mama, they had lost both her and Eddie when she left. Her siste
r could not return to Lavender without Betsy’s guiding hand.
Caleb spent the summer and fall getting the farm back into working order, even managing to clear enough area to plant a late vegetable garden, putting away root vegetables in a cellar he dug himself, and drying the rest. Betsy and Hetty went out to clean the little cabin and stock it with some jars of canned food.
By the time winter came, he’d repaired the shed for housing the heifer Doc had given them as a wedding present and a middle-aged plow horse, and bought and fixed up an old wagon to which the horse would also be hitched as transportation. The house was poorly furnished, but he had a plow for spring planting and began to feel rich in possessions.
Betsy, endowed with a feeling that she was getting into something unimaginably hard by moving to the farm, couldn’t stall any longer. She loved Caleb and couldn’t picture life without him so on Christmas day they were married at the house in Lavender by the old minister from the church and with only the closest of friends present.
Afterwards they drove through a cold clear day in the old wagon pulled by the plodding horse and spent their first night together on a mattress stuffed with chicken feathers.
When Betsy awoke early the next morning, she heard rainfall against the roof and looked at Caleb sleeping beside her. The predominate thought in her brain was that she must avoid the cookshack from now on because she could not go back to live forever without Caleb.
Caleb couldn’t help being surprised at how well Betsy took to country living. She not only covered her cotton dress with an apron to cook and clean the little cabin, keeping it spotless, but she went out on cold winter days to feed scraps to the chickens and gather the few eggs they laid. She took pleasure in telling him that once their heifer had her calf, she knew how to milk as well.
“When Mama and I first came to Lavender, she found out the money she brought with her was no good, and you’ve got to understand that she’d always had money. Mama grew up in the lap of luxury, but she determined not to be independent on Evan and his family and took a job working for a farm family and moved us both out in the country.” She paused to look around at the frosty glaze on the bare-limped trees of their farm, than laughed. “Of course it wasn’t nearly as far out as this.”
He couldn’t guess that she was thinking about that farm Cynthia Burden, later to become Cynthia Stephens, had thought so primitive. It had been downright comfortable compared to this Spartan existence with plenty to eat and drink, warm rooms in winter, and the company of the farm family that had come to be their longtime friends.
“I loved it out there,” she said thoughtfully. “Mama learned to do everything and I trailed along.”
He put down the ax with which he’d just felled a slender sapling as part of his on-going struggle to regain his land. “But you didn’t stay out there?”
She shook her head. “Mama married Evan and we moved into his house in town and she started helping him with his doctoring. He needed help because he was the only doctor in town.”
“Well, Lavender’s not a very big town,” he said reasonably.
She laughed a little, thinking about the size of the cities in the future where she’d been born and lived the first years of her life. “Bigger than now by quite a bit,” she said.
He went silent and she knew he didn’t like it when she talked like this. He hadn’t reconciled in his own mind what seemed to him the contradictory facts that he trusted Betsy and couldn’t believe the stories she had told him. He’d rather they just didn’t talk about these things.
He looked around instead at the tall oaks. “Thought maybe come spring we’d cut some of those and maybe add a room on to the cottage.
“That would be nice,” Betsy agreed, “then we could have a separate bedroom.”
“Privacy,” he said.
“What?” she teased. “A room for each of us. Am I getting on your nerves already?”
He swung her up in his arms, balancing by leaning back against a tree trunk. “Never,” he said, kissing her breathless.
This was, she decided, the most glorious feeling. Since they’d moved out here in the country, the war seemed distant and very far away.
The next day they heard the sound of an approaching buggy bouncing over the rough little road outside while they were still frying their eggs for breakfast.
Betsy’s heart began to pound. Nobody came visiting out here, even their family expected them to come into town. Something must be terribly wrong.
She ran out of the house to find Doc just climbing down from the buggy. Hetty and the children were with him, little Evan bouncing excitedly as Doc lifted him down. “Papa! Papa!” he yelled.
Poor baby, he couldn’t even remember his father. He hadn’t even been born when Forrest went away to win the war that was only supposed to last ninety days.
A wide grin marked Doc’s face and he looked about twenty years younger. Instinctively Betsy looked to Hetty, still in place on the high seat. Doc nodded to her, giving her permission to break the news.
Caleb, moving more slowly with his cane, took his place behind his wife, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder.
“A letter from Forrest,” Hetty said, the words spoken like a prayer.
“He didn’t actually write it,” Doc added quickly, “a nurse wrote it for him. He’s been released from prison and is back in a hospital behind our own lines. It was part of a trade.”
“He’s alive!” Caleb shouted right above Betsy’s head, the sound piercing through her eardrums. “Alive and all right.”
“Alive and probably in bad shape,” Doc said. “The nurse didn’t say much but that he’d been starved and was weak and sick, but he wanted us to know that he was free and would be coming home soon as he was able.”
“Forrest wouldn’t come home if he was well enough to fight,” Caleb commented softly.
“No,” Doc agreed. “No. He wouldn’t. But this is good news. I was very much afraid we’d never hear from him again.”
“Papa,” Evan said again.
Betsy picked him up to hold him tightly in her arms. “That’s right, sweetie. Your papa is coming home.”
Chapter Eighteen
Doc wanted to go after Forrest, but torn between his concern for his son and his responsibilities to his patients in and around Lavender, he was finally persuaded to leave that task to Caleb.
Betsy hated the idea that her husband, with his permanently damaged leg, should go off in the direction of some of the fiercest battles looking for the man who had given him a home when he had none, but knew she had no right to say so.
“I hate to leave you alone, honey,” he told her the night before he was to leave.
“I’m not alone,” she tried to sound brave. “I’ve got Doc and Hetty and all the neighbors and I know how to shoot a pistol.”
He chuckled into her hair. “Hope you don’t have occasion to use it.”
They made love that night as though they might never see each other again.
He set off the next morning on the back of one of Doc’s horses, a second carrying supplies behind him. Hidden under his jacket were a few gold coins Doc had given him to buy what he would need for himself and Forrest on the journey back, if such supplies were to be available at any price in the war-torn south. A rifle was strapped to the saddle of the pack horse and he carried a smaller weapon in a holster. These were meant to be sure he kept the gold and, hopefully, his life and that of Forrest safe.
He was headed to Atlanta, the besieged city where Forrest’s nurse had written he was being treated in a makeshift hospital.
Fearfully Betsy watched him ride away. Lamed or not, she could see for perhaps the first time just what sort of man he was. He had grown up hard on the Texas frontier and knew well how to take care of himself.
It wasn’t until he was out of sight that she allowed herself to turn and cry in Doc’s arms. “I should’ve gone myself,” he said helplessly.
One thing she no longer had to fear. With
both of them living at Caleb’s place in the country and it being still winter, the cookshack had been closed up, it’s door and single window boarded up to keep the cold wind out. Now they cooked their food on a little stove and washed dishes in the dining room of the white house.
As she settled into the tiny third bedroom in, she vowed never to go into the old cookshack. She would not risk inadvertently separating herself from Caleb.
Now if he only came back safely, bringing Forrest with him.
The first few days of travel were relatively easy and he tried not to worry too much about the folks at home, though he couldn’t help missing Betsy so much he ached.
The countryside was familiar enough; he’d traveled this way twice before. Once when he’d gone with Forrest to join up in the first enthusiasm over defending from the invasion from the north, and then slowly and more soberly, as half-conscious and desperately injured, he’d come home, a broken man.
He didn’t feel broken anymore. Oh, his leg hurt like hell, especially after a long day on the trail, but he knew that was a part of life from now on. His body had mended over the long months and through hard work, especially these last times at home with Betsy, getting the farm started all over again.
He would go to Georgia, find Forrest and be back in Texas with Betsy as quick as he could. He had too much to live for to die now.
He dismissed the idea from his mind that she might not be there waiting for him when he got back. Maybe he didn’t understand exactly what was going on with her, but he was damn sure she wasn’t about to be swept off to another time and place while his back was turned.
The news they’d gotten from the most intensive areas of battle were anything but up-to-date, so he moved cautiously, knowing he could find himself in the midst of a skirmish at any time, but that first week or two, he only came across little towns occupied mostly by women, children and old men where he was accepted as just another beaten soldier and given what help their little community could offer when he explained his mission.
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 12