Love and Adventure Collection - Part 1 (Love and Adventure Boxed Sets)

by Jennifer Blake

  It was cold there with the wind chilling her wet, shivering body and the rain beating into her face. By contrast, her lower limbs felt warm. But she hung on. In the growing numbness of her mind there was nothing else to do. Nothing at all.

  ~ ~ ~

  Somewhere in the deepest recesses of her sensibilities, Catherine resented the orange-red glow of a lantern shining directly in her face, the unceremonious way her grasp on her tree was broken and she was hauled into the bottom of a small boat. Words of protest, firmly voiced in her brain, never reached her lips however. The blanket that was thrown over her smelled strongly of fish. Beneath its smothering folds she found dusty oblivion.

  Time was a moving sea, a fluid existence. It rose and fell, ebbed and flowed around her, pulling her here and there, now hot, now cold, flashing with light or extinguished in the black velvet of night. Sometimes she floated upon it, light, larger than life; at others she was a tiny speck at the mercy of the deepest currents. She was often aware of voices, a soothing murmur and a deeper, more abrupt tone that held the flavor of concern mixed with something near awe. And yet she felt no curiosity. She drifted in a featureless lassitude and was content to have it so.

  It was with the greatest reluctance that Catherine finally opened her eyes. Confusion clouded her mind. The place, the room, was totally unfamiliar. It was small, a mere cubbyhole. Warmth and light pervaded it, coming from a window thrown wide to the sun. A gentle breeze entered at the same opening, lazily lifting a set of faded muslin curtains. Through the square she could see a stretch of silver-brown water, edged with the tender green of willows, and a tall tree with dead, outstretched limbs. The limbs were loaded with black lumps, like huge decaying fruit. A moment of frowning concentration and Catherine identified the lumps. They were birds. Buzzards.

  The walls of the room were unpainted. Little attempt had been made to relieve their bareness; the only ornament was a crude, time-darkened portrait of a child with a dog upon its lap. A sagging curtain made a recess in one corner for a collection of limp dresses of handwoven cotton and butternut. A gray, much-mended mosquito baire was the only pretense to bed curtains at the head of the plain iron bedstead on which she lay.

  Staring about, trying to collect herself, Catherine was conscious of a faint rocking sensation. If she was on a boat, however, it was like none she had ever seen. Nothing was quite like anything she had ever seen.

  “Awake, are ye?”

  Catherine turned her head toward that soft, yet faintly rasping, voice. Dazzled by the light, she could just make out the shape of a woman standing in the outside doorway. Beyond her was what appeared to be a railing-enclosed porch and a stretch of the river.

  “Didn’t mean to scare ye, lass.”

  “Not — at all,” she replied, surprised at the thinness of her voice and the effort it took to articulate that commonplace.

  “How do you feel?”

  The woman advanced into the room, tall, raw-boned, with strong features, weather-beaten skin, and iron gray hair pulled back into a hard knot on the nape of her neck. She wore a print dress with long sleeves and no determinate style, topped by a bibbed apron. The length was shorter than usual, showing the fringed Indian leggings and moccasins on her feet. Studying her, Catherine was late in answering her question.

  “Well enough,” she said finally. The truth was, she had no idea how she was. She only knew she had no pain.

  The old woman nodded. “You’ll be wondering where you are, I expect. You’re aboard my shanty boat. She’s got Jonathan James wrote on her side, but I call her the Mud Turtle.”

  “A — houseboat.”

  “That’s it. We — my grandson and myself, pulled you out of the river.”

  “I’m most grateful, I’m — sure.”

  “Maybe ye are, maybe ye ain’t. You’re not to talk just now. You’ve been a sick girl, I can tell ye.”

  “How long—”

  Divining the question, the old woman answered before she could complete it. “A matter of near three weeks. Congestion of the lungs. Don’t think about it. You rest now. If you need anything, call out for Aunt Em. That’s me.”

  She was gone almost before Catherine realized her intention. There was much she wanted to ask, much she did not understand. Before she could marshal her thoughts to decide what exactly she wished to know, she fell asleep.

  The days fell into a pattern of waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking. Catherine was tended as lovingly as a child by the taciturn woman who called herself Aunt Em. She spent long hours, sitting with her hands folded, in the rocker beside her bed, and gradually Catherine learned what there was to know.

  Aunt Em was of strong Scots descent. She had come with her husband to America some fifty years before, fleeing from some English tyranny. They had worked their way into the Blue Ridge Mountains where they stayed until their son, James, the child in the painting, was a man grown. He had married a young mountain girl and fathered a son, then he became involved in a feud between his wife’s people and another hill family. He was killed. Aunt Em, her husband, and the grandson, then a boy of six or seven, had left the hills. They had put their worldly goods on a raft and started down the Cumberland River, arriving eventually at the Mississippi. A few miles upstream from where the Jonathan James was anchored, they had run into a storm. Trying to work to shore, Aunt Em’s husband had been struck by lightning. The raft had hurtled downstream and, like Catherine’s sawyer, came to rest in this quiet backwater in a wide bend of the river. A trick of the current brought many things into the backwater; lumber, hogsheads of rum and molasses, bundles of furs, and other odds and ends — including an occasional body. The old woman and the young boy became scavengers.

  “I can see you don’t think it’s much of a life, taking pennies from the pockets of dead people, but its peaceable, and it don’t hurt nobody. I get to thinking there ought to be more for my grandson, Jonathan, my James’s boy, but what? He’s got no money to get a start. He’s got no learning, no trade. There’s land to be had — and Jonnie grows a mighty fine stand of corn — but that don’t make him a farmer. All he knows is the river. I never thought, all them years ago. I just wanted to stay here on the river, where his grandpa was buried.”

  A slight movement of the head signified Catherine’s understanding. It was all she had to offer, all that was expected.

  The grandson was not much in evidence since she had regained consciousness. She heard his cheerful whistle from the other room of the tiny, two room flatboat cabin, saw him from a distance, a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped young man with the burning red hair of a Scotsman. But, perhaps out of consideration for her modesty, he did not visit her while she lay abed. The first time she saw him at close quarters was the day she was allowed to leave her room, and then the proximity was close indeed, for he was instructed to carry her out onto the railed-in deck.

  He placed her carefully in a rocker with a cowhide seat, then stepped back. “All right?”

  “Perfect,” she answered, her pleasure at being up lighting her thin face. It was a beautiful day, hot, but with a breeze from the water. It was good to be alive; she did not even mind the sight of the buzzards flapping heavily about the dead tree further along the curving bank. In consequence her smile was warm.

  There was an audible catch in the young man’s breath. At the sound a flush came and went on the high bones of his cheeks though his expression did not change. “Then I’ll leave you,” he said. “Grannie will be out in a minute.”

  “Don’t go — unless you are terribly busy?”

  He paused with one foot on the plank which bridged the space between the flatboat and the sandy riverbank. “Nobody is ever terribly busy on the river,” he said, a slow smile lighting his gray-brown eyes.

  “Someone has to catch all those catfish I’ve been eating.”

  He moved his shoulders in a shrug. “I’m sure it’s not what you are used to. I’d get you something else, if I could.”

  “I wasn’t complainin
g,” Catherine said hastily, “only pointing out the fact that you have been put to a deal of trouble and work on my behalf.”

  “It was no trouble.”

  The words were said so simply that Catherine could not doubt them. In an effort to bring back his smile, she said, “Besides, I have had ample variety in my meals. Haven’t I dined on white perch and blue gills, crawfish and frog legs, as well as catfish? And, I am quite willing to credit my return to health to the curative properties of cornbread, dandelion greens, and pot-likker.”

  “Don’t let Grannie hear you say that, or we’ll have them for supper again tonight.”

  “You mean we’re having something different?”

  “Roast corn, the first of the season,” he informed her as he removed a fern planted in an old wooden bucket from a crude, handmade stool, and took its place beside her.

  “Sounds lovely. I must be getting well, all I think about is food.”

  “You need it,” he said with unselfconscious candor. “But, tell the truth, don’t you miss the good things to eat you could be having if you were — where you belong?”

  “I don’t belong anywhere,” Catherine protested, avoiding the question.

  It was a moment before Jonathan spoke, then his voice was quiet, and there was a subdued expression on his strong, square-jawed face. “That can’t be so.”

  “Can’t it?”

  “Not for someone like you,” he said, and waited.

  It might have been unfair but Catherine had told Aunt Em and her grandson little of herself other than her name. Sometimes she wondered how much Aunt Em knew, how much she might have given away in her delirium. She did not ask. She did not want to know. She only wanted to forget — or perhaps more accurately — wanted not to remember. While she had been ill the events through which she had passed had seemed far away, the happenings of a dream, though she knew the pain and degradation of them hovered near, like the patient buzzards about that buzzard tree. To think of them was hurtful, to speak of them was more than she could bear. Her throat closed upon a hard knot at the idea.

  Reaching out, Jonathan placed his hand over hers.

  “Never mind,” he said softly. “There’s time enough and more for that. Time enough for everything.”

  It seemed that he was right. The days came and went with a majestic slowness. They were empty days, and yet full ones, containing a myriad of small tasks, fishing from a comfortable chair on the deck of the flatboat, mending with her tiny convent-taught stitches, stirring a pudding sweetened with molasses over the fire in the cabin fireplace.

  As her health improved, she went farther afield, searching for poke salad and blackberries with Aunt Em while Jonathan scouted for deer or squirrels to vary their menu. Gradually she fell into the way of moving quietly through the woods, and under Aunt Em’s patient tutelage, identifying herbs and other edible roots and berries. The old woman taught her, too, the best method of skinning and cleaning game, and while she was about it, a few other tricks with a knife. Catherine learned to love the smell of tasselling corn and to watch closely the color of the silks as a way of telling where the ears were ready to pull — and which were to be left to dry for Jonathan’s special corn whiskey.

  The process which turned corn into hard liquor was as fascinating as any recipe, Catherine found, hearing it while she helped wash and scald the demi-johns and small barrels used to hold the results. Privately she thought Aunt Em’s blackberry and muscadine wine sounded more potable, though she had to admit they were hardly likely to appeal to river boatmen, the major market for the liquor.

  Much of what was distilled could be disposed of to passing boats, but Jonathan did not like to encourage all and sundry to stop at the flatboat. Moreover, a better price could be had at Natchez. Suppose greedy barkeepers added the juice of crushed jumper berries or burnt sugar and sold it for gin and brandy; was that his fault, Jonathan asked?

  If both the corn crop and whiskey run were good, and if a tow from a passing keelboat could be arranged, it was usual for Aunt Em and Jonathan to make the trip upriver in the fall of the year. The money made went toward winter provisions, often spelling the difference between a comfortable season in front of the fire or an uncomfortable one beating the cold, wet woods for game.

  Clothes for Catherine proved no problem. Away from all who knew her, she cared little how she looked. One of Aunt Em’s butternut gowns with the sleeves rolled above the elbow did well enough. With her hair in plaits and her feet in moccasins she had the look of an elusive, golden-haired Indian. Her skin, without a bonnet or veil, took on an apricot tint, a sun-kissed dewiness. The hollows left her cheeks, the color bloomed across them. And if the shadow of remembered anguish never quite left her eyes, it was overlaid by a quiet peace. Life on the river was not unlike the unconsciousness of her illness. It asked nothing of her, expected nothing. With such a bargain, she was, for the moment, content.

  18

  “Catherine, you’re a darling. I do love you.”

  The quick pressure of Jonathan’s lips upon her forehead that accompanied the words was nothing; it was the caressing note in his voice that disturbed her so that she stared after him over the load of dried corn in her arms. They had been stripping the bleached and rustling stalks in the field and she had volunteered to carry the last armful while he brought the final high-piled bushel basket.

  It was hot and dusty. They had started before the sun was up, but now it rode high in the blue-hot metal sky. Perspiration covered them with an itchy film, making the old, faded gown Catherine wore cling to her and darkening Jonathan’s hair to auburn.

  Going first along the trail, he glanced back to see how she was faring. Catherine smiled without quite meeting his eyes. She had not noticed before quite how attractive he was. She had looked on him as something in the nature of a cousin, and she had thought he saw her in much the same light, with the addition of a protective instinct because of her illness. His preference for her company had not gone unnoticed, but she had put it down to his need for companionship nearer his own age. Now she was not so sure.

  It would not do for Jonathan to become too fond of her. An uncomplicated friendship was one thing; she well knew she had no more than that to offer any man.

  Is that precisely true?

  The question whispered through her mind. Frowning, she looked up from the trail and saw Aunt Em at the rail of the flatboat watching them, her eyes shaded by her hand against the glare of the sun.

  “The land and the river are great healers,” the old woman said later that evening. She finished rubbing the hard kernels from an ear of corn with her gnarled old hands, and tossed the cob in a bushel basket sitting beside her. Before she took up another, she reached for her snuff and took a liberal dip.

  Catherine waited. She had learned that Aunt Em seldom said anything for effect; there was usually a sound reason. Carefully, she raked the kernels in her lap into a pile, noting with a rueful grin the cornstarch clinging to the roughness of her hands with their practical, if childish, short nails. She did not mind particularly, but she wondered what her mother would say.

  In fact, she wondered what her mother had to say about the entire situation, if she knew of it. Would Rafael have communicated with her by now? He must have. No doubt her mother thought she had run away with Marcus, just as Rafael—

  No, she would not think of it. Not yet.

  “You are looking well again,” Aunt Em went on at last. “Better, I think, than you have looked in quite a spell.”

  Catherine smiled her acknowledgment. “With due respect to the land and the river, I believe I owe it to you and Jonathan. I can’t begin to thank you enough.”

  “Now, no more of that, if you please. It’s been a pleasure. But, I hope you won’t mind if I speak my piece?”

  “You know I won’t — and I promise not to interrupt again.”

  A smile flitted over the wrinkled, brown face, but the softening was momentary. “You’ve helped out, you’ve pitched in and
done your part, I have to give you that. Still it’s as plain as the nose on your face you just ain’t used to working like this. I don’t know where you came from, Cathie, but you don’t belong, not to our kind of people, not to the river. From the things that surprise you, the things you take for granted, I’d say you was used to servants and a big house. From the ring on your finger and the look in your eyes, I guess there was a man involved. For a woman with looks like yours that’s safe enough. There’s always a man, ain’t there? You needn’t answer. I know. But — there’s this. I don’t have any idea why you left the life you was used to — and I’m not asking — but if you figure on going back, I think now’s the time.”

  Catherine had nothing to gain by pretending to misunderstand her. “For Jonathan’s sake?”

  “For Jonathan. I’d hate to see him hurt any worse than need be.”

  “So would I,” Catherine agreed, staring out over the river. “But suppose I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Not likely — even so, it’s no reason to stay on when your heart’s not in it.”

  Stung by the truth of that statement, Catherine said, “You seem very certain that my heart is not — involved.”

  The old woman sighed. “I wish I wasn’t, I truly wish I wasn’t.”

  They shelled corn in a silence broken only by the thud of corncobs filling the basket. They would be used in the fireplace in place of kindling. Aunt Em wasted nothing. Not corncobs. Not words. Not sympathy.

  “You and Jonathan should be ready to make the trip to Natchez before long,” Catherine said at last.

  “That’s right.” Aunt Em leaned forward to spit with considerable expertise over the rail.

  “I have a friend who lives there. She might be persuaded to give me bed and board until I have contacted my mother.”