Ryan had vowed not to reveal what Maura had told him of her true situation. He simply nodded. “She’d likely be horrified if she knew she’d kept you awake at night.”
“’Twasn’t as bad as all that. She never woke me, but I heard it when I wasn’t sleeping. It sounded better toward the end of their time here, but tonight reminds me of the sound early on. I don’t like hearing it again.”
“She ought not to have pushed herself so much tonight.”
“You’d have had a difficult time convincing her not to,” Ma said. “I know a stubborn Irishwoman when I see one.”
A smile tugged at Ryan’s mouth. “She is rather fierce, our Maura.”
“Our Maura?” Ma pressed.
That was the wrong word. The only thing worse would have been “My Maura.” Heat stole up his neck at the thought. My Maura. Heavens, he liked the way that sounded. Liked it far too much.
“She’s rather stubborn, too.” Ignoring Ma’s curiosity seemed best. “I still can’t fathom that she’s living with her boy in a single room when she had so much space here. She could have at least waited until there was a better option.”
“But there isn’t. She is a woman alone, with a son to raise, and not a penny to her name. Has she ever talked to you about the building she lived in before, in New York?”
“Aidan mentioned it once. The Widow’s Tower, I think he called it.”
Ma nodded. “Filled to bursting with women, all alone, raising children with nothing to live on and an unreliable roof overhead. She learned there, no doubt, that life often snatches away opportunities, so it’s best to grab at whatever chance she has. Her current arrangement isn’t ideal, but it’s welcome to one who is still trying to save people she fears she cannot help.”
Ryan couldn’t entirely make sense of his mother’s words. “Who is she trying to save?”
“Who isn’t she trying to save?” Ma countered. “She has a friend there she speaks of often who wishes to come west, but who doesn’t dare until she knows if this place is survivable. She came west herself to save Aidan. She’s looking after Cecily now that her pregnancy has grown a bit difficult. She’s been caring for me. Giving you full claim to this land is her way of saving you. The one person she hasn’t energy or resources enough to save is herself.”
She was saving him? Did she truly feel she had to? He treasured her generous heart, but the thought of her sacrificing for him settled heavy on his mind. She deserved so much more than she was settling for, but life kept taking from her. She’d found a way to give Ryan the opportunity for which he’d been fighting for so long. He didn’t doubt she’d give Aidan all he wanted and needed, might even find a means of saving her friend from the run-down tenement they’d lived in.
But who would help her? Who would care for Maura?
Chapter Thirty-five
Ryan suspected no one in the house slept particularly well that night. Despite their tiny size, infants had the ability to wake even the deepest of sleepers. Throughout the night, he’d found himself thinking of this house filled with the sounds of his own children.
In the midst of it all, Maura kept coughing. She’d confessed it had indeed grown worse of late. Only with effort did he prevent himself from climbing down the ladder to check on her. Coughing at night was normal for her, he reminded himself. Expected. And sleep would do her more good than anything.
By the time he rose to begin his day’s chores, he was both exhausted and determined to find something he could do to ease her suffering. The Johnsons might have something in the mercantile that would soothe a cough. Mrs. O’Connor might know of a home remedy. Mrs. Talbert on the other side of town was nearing eighty and had likely come across stubborn coughs in her time; she might have an idea what would be helpful. What they needed was a doctor, but he couldn’t get Maura that.
He climbed down from the loft, trying to be as quiet as possible, not wishing to wake the house.
Maura was no longer sleeping on the floor, but sitting in the rocker with the new little one in her arms.
“I thought you’d be sleeping.” He kept his voice low.
“Your brother left, needing to tend to his animals. Poor Ennis was in desperate need of sleep.”
“Are you not in need of sleep yourself?”
She smiled softly. “I don’t often get to hold babies. Losing a bit of sleep is worth it.”
He hunched low beside her rocker.
“Have you met your nephew yet?” Maura asked. “He’s a dear little lad.”
“I was introduced last night while you were sleeping. I suspect the two of us will be fast friends.”
“I have seen how much your niece loves you, and the Archer girls. I’ve seen the kindness you show Aidan. I’ve not the least doubt this little bundle will love you every bit as much.”
He felt the strongest urge to pull her into his arms, to hold the both of them, to spend his morning pretending he’d no chores, no worries or pressing responsibilities. For a man whose entire life revolved around plans, ’twas a shockingly haphazard inclination. The feeling upended and confused him.
“I likely should get to my work,” he said. “The cow misses me when I’m late.”
She smiled a little. He took the opportunity to slip out quickly without having to examine too closely his befuddled thoughts and the growing pull he felt to Maura.
A lantern glowed inside the barn when he arrived. Odd. “Is someone here?” he called. He stepped fully inside. The light was in the cow stall.
“Over here.” Aidan. Had he trekked all the way from Archers’ so early? Sure enough, he sat on the stool beside the cow, bucket in place, milking.
“You didn’t need to do this.” Ryan stepped inside the stall. “’Tisn’t one of your chores now.”
“Finbarr’s going to do the milking at Mr. Archer’s this morning because I wanted to show you.”
“Show me what?”
With a grin of pure mischief, he sent a stream of milk not into the pail but directly onto the toe of Ryan’s boot.
A laugh leapt from him. “Well done, lad.” He shook the droplets off his boot. “You’ve mastered it.”
Aidan’s look of mischief turned to pride and glowed from him. He returned to milking, managing the task with great confidence, though without the ease of years of experience. “Finbarr says I’m a fast study. He’s been helping me learn things, but there’s some things he can’t do. Because of his eyes.”
That was understandable.
“But the way I look at it, Mr. Archer says Finbarr’s worth his weight in gold, and if he can be that helpful even though there are things he can’t do, then I can be helpful too while I’m still learning to do things.”
Wanting to offer his support without interrupting Aidan’s work, Ryan set a hand on the back of his shoulder. “An eagerness to help is a commendable trait. It’ll serve you well.”
“Ma says it’s important to leave a place better for having lived in it. She says if you haven’t helped someone, you’ve wasted your life.”
That wasn’t the first time Aidan had told him about this admonition of his mother’s. The more he knew Maura, the more he saw that very philosophy behind the things she did. “She does, indeed, make the world better,” Ryan said. “She makes the people around her better.”
Aidan’s milking slowed. His movements grew more distracted.
“Is something the matter?” Ryan asked.
“I was only thinking that she tries so hard to help other people, but it seems that no one helps her.”
Ma had said much the same thing.
Ryan lowered himself beside the lad. “Is there something she’s needing?”
“Rest.” Aidan seemed reluctant to say as much. “She works so hard, but she’s sick. She won’t admit how much, but I know what her cough is. Almost everyone we lived near worked in the factory. I know the sound of brown lung. I know it.”
“Oh, lad. I’m sorry.”
Aidan focused on his milking, the
pace picking up again. “It’s not as bad as most I heard. But it’s not going away, and who’s to say it won’t get worse?”
How he wished he could offer more comfort and reassurance. “And is rest what helped the people in the factory do better?”
Aidan didn’t answer for a moment. “Nothing really helped them get better. Not working at the factory was the most important thing to keep the brown lung from getting bad so quickly.”
“She’s not there any longer,” Ryan pointed out.
Thought pulled at the boy’s dark brow. “True.”
“And she’s relatively new to working at Archers’. She’s likely still sorting out the right balance of work and rest.”
Aidan smiled a little. “Ma’s never been good at resting.”
“I can’t say I have been either.” Ryan could laugh a little at the truth of that realization. “Maybe if we had the two of you over for supper now then—supper my ma and I had prepared and had ready before you arrived so your ma couldn’t possibly tax herself making it—she’d be forced to rest for an evening.”
“She would like that,” Aidan said.
“So she isn’t good at resting, but she does like it.”
“I didn’t mean she’d like the rest.” Aidan grinned up at him. “She’d like being here for an evening.”
“Would she, now?” His heart bounced against his ribs at the thought.
Aidan nodded. “Don’t tell her I told you, but she’s missed you. She talks about you more than I think she realizes. And she liked being here with you.”
That was more encouraging than Aidan probably realized. Ryan stood and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Thank you, lad, for doing my milking.”
“I like milking. I just wish the cow would be patient enough to wait until the sun’s up.”
Ryan chuckled. “You and me both.”
He took his lantern, leaving the one Aidan had brought with him, and hung it on a peg in the middle of the small barn. He needed to fork some hay into the cow’s stall. A few other quick chores would see him ready to begin the task of gathering up the hay he’d harvested first that was already dry and waiting. He’d take it out to the ranches now and deliver the rest once it was ready.
Before he could take up his pitchfork, the familiar sound of coughing met him from just outside the barn.
“Is that Ma?” Aidan asked from the cow stall.
“Sounds like it,” Ryan said. “She was situated very cozily when I left the house. Why would she venture out into the cold?”
“She’s not good at resting,” Aidan repeated, keeping at his task.
“I’ll see if I can convince her to try.” Ryan stepped out of the barn.
Sure enough, there Maura stood in the chicken coop, lit by the earliest rays of dawn, tossing feed to the barely awake birds.
“You know, you and your lad are two regular peas in a pod.”
She looked over at him as she tossed another handful of feed. “Is he feeding chickens as well?”
“Milking the cow.” He pulled the coop gate open enough to slip inside without letting any birds out. “You both had the luxury of a warm house you could have stayed in, but here you both are.”
“The baby is sleeping very deeply.” She tossed a last handful and wiped her hands against each other. “He’ll let his mother rest a bit longer before rousing her.”
Ryan moved to her. “Aidan knows what your cough is. He said he recognizes it from watching it claim your neighbors who worked at the factory.”
She paled a bit. “I’d hoped he wouldn’t realize. He will worry, and that will weigh on him.” She rubbed at her temple. “I want so badly to not be a burden to him, or anyone else. It is one of my greatest frustrations.”
“You’re not a burden,” he insisted. “With all the people you help and the good you do . . . being ill doesn’t negate all that.”
Maura set her hand lightly on his arm. “You are a good man, Ryan Callaghan.”
“You should come back here, Maura.” He set his arms about her. “Aidan would have room. You’d have someone to help you, and a chance to rest.”
She shook her head without even pausing for thought. “This is your home. You deserve it to be yours. Aidan and I are making ours.”
“A single room in someone else’s house. Do you not think the two of you deserve something better?”
She was unmoved. “We’ve been in worse straits than this. Cramped quarters won’t do us in.”
Standing there, looking into those deep brown eyes, hearing her speak with such strength and determination about circumstances that would have broken nearly anyone else, he had to admit to himself that he was falling ever more in love with her.
“Please, come back, Maura.”
She offered a sad sort of smile. Rising on her toes, she placed a kiss on his jaw. “You have a good heart, but distance is best.”
“Distance?”
As if demonstrating, she stepped back, pulling from his arms. “The longer we’re here, the more attached we’ll grow.”
“That isn’t a bad thing.”
She took another step away. “I know what it is to have thoughts and plans for a future, only to have death steal them away. That is a bad thing, Ryan. ’Tis a painful, difficult, soul-shattering thing. I won’t do that to you.”
She moved to the gate, pausing only long enough to tell him she would fetch Aidan and that they would head back to the Archers’ together. Ryan remained behind, his spinning thoughts attempting to make sense of what she’d said.
As the sun peaked fully over the mountains, he had a moment of pure clarity. Thoughts and plans for a future, she’d said. I won’t do that to you. To him. She understood that his invitation to return was more than an act of compassion for her health or worry about her circumstances. She understood that he wished her to return because he missed her, because he wanted her in his life. Because he loved her. And, he suspected, his feelings were not entirely one-sided.
She was dying, and meant to keep her distance to save him the pain of losing her.
He hadn’t the first idea how to convince her that this grief would only be made worse by the regret of not having her in his life while he could, that reaching for love was worth the risk of losing it.
Chapter Thirty-six
For Maura, the next weeks moved at a crawl yet seemed to fly by as well. She had found a balance in her duties at the Archer home that didn’t overtax her. Aidan split his time between Ryan’s house and Joseph’s fields and barn. The two men always had work for Aidan, and were patient as he learned the skills he hadn’t yet acquired. The younger children continued attending school, but the older ones were home every day to help in the fields. Harvest had arrived fully, and every set of able hands was needed.
Maura saw Finbarr more during the busy harvest days than she did before, an unexpected turn she didn’t know how to account for. He did work around the Archers’ barn and house. He spent a lot of time sitting on the edge of the back porch, silent and still.
Not wishing him to withdraw further into himself—a real risk with the often-unreachable young man—she said nothing as the harvest continued. But day after day, she watched him and worried.
At last, when the crops were nearly all in, she took the risk of speaking to him. She stepped onto the back porch and sat beside him. “It’s been a busy little while, hasn’t it?”
He nodded. “Harvest time is always busy.”
“I’m not overly familiar with the work,” she admitted. “Aidan has tried explaining it. Seems there’s a lot to be brought in all at the same time.”
“There is.”
‘Twasn’t the liveliest of conversations, but he was talking more than usual. She’d encourage that. “And next the crops are taken to the train depot to sell?”
“They keep what they can afford to keep. The rest gets sold. They make land payments and buy things they need. That’s the cycle, every year.”
There was a pattern to life here. She h
oped she wasn’t about to alienate him further, but she wanted to understand his situation. “Is sitting here waiting for them to bring in the harvest and return from the depot your cycle every year?”
Discouragement tugged at his features. “It is now.”
Now. He missed being part of the effort. “You helped Ryan Callaghan with his hay this year.”
He shrugged. “I only held a lantern while everyone else worked.”
“Was the lantern needed?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Then you helped,” she insisted.
He slumped forward a bit more. “I shouldn’t grumble, I know. I just—I used to be able to do so much more. It gets . . .”
“Frustrating?” she guessed.
“Very.”
How well she understood. Perhaps it would help if he knew that. “My lungs aren’t healthy as they once were.” This likely would never grow easy to talk about. “That’s more than I’ve admitted to most anyone here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Why would you tell me of all people?”
“Because I think you ‘of all people’ would understand.” He knew this struggle, after all. “I can’t work as long or as hard as I used to. Honestly, I hate the change. ’Tis difficult not to be bitter about.”
“Cecily says trials can either make us better or bitter. I’m trying to be better.” He pushed out a puff of air. “But I’m not doing so good at it lately.”
Having nothing to keep his mind off his frustrations likely wasn’t helping. “Is there nothing you can do in the fields during this part of the harvest?”
He shook his head. “I’d just get lost in them. Cecily hasn’t figured out what I can do about that yet. I’m beginning to think there’s no answer.”
The lad needed a purpose of some kind. He needed work.
“Would you be willing to do something for me?” she asked.
He didn’t answer verbally, but grew still leaning the tiniest bit toward her. He was listening.
“I’ve some tasks around the house I’m struggling to get done,” she said. “My lungs fall to bits when I try carrying heavy things. There’s a hole in the wall of my room that needs patching. Given a moment to think on it, I could make an entire list of things that need doing, but I’m either not strong enough to manage them or don’t know how to do them.”
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