A Touch of Flame

by Jo Goodman

“You’re right.” Ben saw immediately that surrendering his position so quickly did not ease the minds of either woman. They were both frowning. He looked to Remington for help, but his brother was pretending to be occupied in a finger game with Colt. He exhaled deeply. “All right,” he said finally. “There are objections from other quarters.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Ridley.

  “He’s talking about Fiona,” said Phoebe.

  “Mrs. Frost?”

  “Yes, the other Mrs. Frost.”

  Remington lifted Colt and passed him without ceremony to Ben. “Make yourself useful,” he said, and then addressed Ridley. “Fiona is my father’s wife, but in her defense, Ben’s also talking about my father. Thaddeus has it in his head that you’re too young and too inexperienced to be at Phoebe’s bedside when his grandchild is ready to be born. Experience colors his reasoning.”

  “I see,” said Ridley. “Then he doesn’t object on account of me being a woman?”

  “No. Fiona would have already kicked him to the barn if he’d said something as foolish as that. Look, none of this is Ben’s doing. He asked me right off when I saw him after you arrived if Phoebe and I would think about you attending her. He said there were women planning to see the doctor up in Liberty Junction or engage a midwife. He thought it’d help you gain acceptance if you were there when Phoebe delivered. I didn’t disagree, but I let him know Thaddeus’s opinion, and—”

  Phoebe interrupted. “And you decided that your father’s opinion was more important than mine.”

  “No,” said Ben over the top of Colt’s head. “We decided that peace trumped conflict.” He looked sideways at Ridley. “That’s why I didn’t introduce you when they were in town. Remington and I figured we could avoid this conversation.”

  Remington offered a wry observation. “You see how well that turned out.”

  Phoebe’s frank gaze shifted to Ridley. “Has it been your experience that men generally are of limited intelligence in these particular matters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. Mine also. I’ve often marveled that they can find socks in the sock drawer.”

  Remington said, “That’s unfair. One has nothing to do with the other.”

  Phoebe reached for his hand, squeezed it, and feigned an adoring glance. “We are not done here, you and I. We will continue this conversation on the ride home.”

  Ridley frowned. “Surely you’re not leaving this evening. It’s already dark.”

  “They’re staying at my place,” said Ben. “If you hear shouting from that direction, it means that the conversation Phoebe plans to have started early.”

  “We don’t shout,” said Phoebe.

  “She gets very quiet,” Remington told Ridley. “You might want to drop in if you don’t hear anything.”

  Ridley smiled because she knew he was attempting to lighten the mood. She did not feel light at the moment. In spite of telling herself that she was not really at the center of a family argument, that what Phoebe objected to was having no voice in something that concerned her so greatly, it was difficult to embrace the notion. It made her stomach churn.

  They got up from the table when Colt announced that he was tired. No one needed to see him yawn to prove his point. Ben helped him into his coat, got his own, and then hoisted his nephew on his shoulders. Colt leaned forward and crushed Ben’s hat. Ridley was struck by the fact that the man who set such store by his hat that he fiddled with the brim every time he put it on did not cringe when the crown collapsed.

  Ridley bade them all good night when they reached her gate. Ben offered to walk her to the door, but she told him there was no need. She stood on her porch, watching them cross to his house. Colt waved to her, no doubt prompted by one of the adults. She waved back and went inside.

  Mrs. Rushton had long since gone, but the housekeeper had left a note on the kitchen table informing her that she had taken delivery of two soup bones, one ham, and one beef, and they were in the cold box on the back stoop. Laughing, Ridley set the note aside. So it had begun. For the first time since coming to Frost Falls, she felt part of the whole, not apart from it. Perhaps she would be queen of the festival after all.

  Before she started planning her speech and what she would wear in the parade, Ridley thought she better take in the state of her surgery. While she was prepared to find it in a sad condition after sending Hitch to retrieve the items on her list, what she discovered was something more than that. It looked as if he had ransacked the room. She was taken back to the moment she had first visited the surgery after Clay and Hamilton Salt had been there. At least Hitch hadn’t broken anything. She supposed that was a blessing.

  She circled the room, straightening the chairs and the examining table, taking inventory of the drawers and cabinets before closing them, rerolling bandages and restacking towels, righting a bucket lying on its side, and replacing the lids on the canisters of soap, wads of cotton, and toothpicks. It seemed Hitch had left no stone unturned.

  Ridley carried a lamp to her office and set it on the desk. She removed a leather-bound journal from the middle drawer, opened it to a blank page, and began making notes on the Gordon brothers, detailing Michael Gordon’s symptoms related to consumption and the surgery she performed on his older brother. Assuming the men were found guilty, a judge might take Michael Gordon’s medical condition into account when passing sentence. She made her journal entry with that in mind, though she was less certain that she was doing the dying man any favors. It wasn’t that he was not prepared to die, only that he didn’t want to hang. Ridley didn’t have a good answer for the problem; she could hardly recommend a firing squad. As for the other Gordon, she thought she’d done her work well enough that he would walk to the scaffold without a limp. Years of hard labor were not out of the question; he was healthy enough for that. She would always choose life over death, but it was impossible to know what a judge would decide.

  She finished her work, sat back, and removed her spectacles. Closing her eyes, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. Images from the day appeared in her mind like photographs in a stereoscopic viewer. She could see them in great detail but only for a moment. There was Amanda Springer sipping tea and announcing in no uncertain terms that her husband had lost his mind, and her son sitting at the sheriff’s desk saying much the same thing about his mother. She saw Mary Cherry’s grief shimmer in front of her like a watery reflection and Jim Springer’s thoughtful turn as he considered his wife’s fears. As though she were a spectator rather than a participant, she watched herself accept the neatly wrapped soup bone and step out of the butcher shop, and then she was in the bank. She could hear the air crackle and feel the hair rising at the back of her neck. The images began to pass more quickly. They were a blur right up until the moment Tom Gordon dove toward her, his hand on the butt of his gun. It seemed that he was coming at her slowly, ruthlessly, but she had no fear for herself. She was never his target. He had Ben in his sights, only Ben. The bullet he meant to deliver was for the man sworn to protect them all.

  Ridley could not let that happen. She swung the soup bone with all of her might. She watched the trajectory of her arm, felt the recoil in her shoulder when she connected, heard the dull thud of bone on bone, and then . . . nothing. The quiet was absolute for as long as it lasted. The image shifted and she saw Mr. Washburn coming out of his office. The look of triumph on his face as it dissolved into stupefaction would always have the power to make her smile.

  Chuckling softly to herself, Ridley replaced her spectacles and chose a book on the advanced practice of assisting at childbirth to carry to the front room. She curled in the corner of the sofa closest to the stove and loosely pulled an afghan around her. The illustrations captivated her more than the text, but after half an hour they were not of sufficient interest to keep her eyes open. She told herself she only had to stay awake long enough for Hitch to arrive with her med
ical bag and miscellaneous supplies. Ridley looked at the mantel clock for the time and assured herself he couldn’t be much longer.

  She never felt the book slip from her hands or heard it drop to the floor. Likewise, she was unaware that the deputy quietly entered her home when she did not respond to his knocking, saw her sleeping on the sofa, and left what he was charged with returning—along with a meaty soup bone that he took from his father’s shop—on the floor of the vestibule.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It was still dark when Ridley woke. The oil lamp had not yet extinguished itself, and Ridley could make out the time. Two hours gone, but it wasn’t terribly late. On any less eventful day, she would only now be preparing for bed. She wondered what had happened to Hitch.

  She uncurled her legs, raised her head, and rolled her shoulders. She was stiff all the way to her toes. Throwing off the afghan, Ridley bent and retrieved the book that she’d dropped and placed it on the trunk. Later, she promised, she would read more when her bed was not calling to her.

  She walked through the house, turning back lamps, checking the flue, and came across proof that Hitch had been there when she stood in the vestibule. She also found his gift. It would serve him right if she clobbered him with it the next time she saw him. To keep it from spoiling, she took the bone to the back stoop and placed it with the others in the cold box, then she headed for her room.

  Halfway up the stairs, she stopped. Somebody was clamoring for her attention at the surgery door. She could have only just missed seeing the person when she was on the stoop. Sighing, moved to wonder if it was a fact of the medical profession that people would always require her attention when she was sleeping or preparing to, she retraced her steps to the surgery.

  “Who is it?” she asked through the door. “And what do you need?”

  “It’s Remington. Phoebe’s going to have—” He grabbed the door when Ridley began to push it open. “A baby.”

  Ridley stepped aside. “Come in. Calm yourself.” She pulled the door shut behind him. He was not wearing a hat, and his thatch of dark hair had been plowed many times with his fingers. He did it again now, and she thought of how Ben did it in a similar fashion, only with Ben there was generally improvement. Remington’s hair was standing up six ways from Sunday.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s now. The baby’s coming now. I think it’s all been too much today. The excitement of the robbery. She fell on her backside at the bank, you know.”

  “I remember. Let me get my things and we’ll see what’s what. You go back and sit with her. I promise I’m right behind you. Oh, and put a kettle on.”

  “Right.” He took a step forward and then halted, looking vaguely perplexed. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “To clean my instruments in the event I need them.” She gave him a push and then he was gone.

  True to her promise, Ridley followed quickly, though she suspected that Remington had vastly exaggerated the speed at which Phoebe was going to introduce Winchester—or Winnie, if she was a girl—to the world. Thaddeus Frost was correct in that she did not have a lot of experience with deliveries, but she had assisted at enough of them to know that the husbands and loved ones were often more frantic than the mother.

  She also knew that for as long as women had been delivering babies, the risks had never been substantially reduced. Everyone knew someone who had lost a wife, a mother, a sister at childbirth or shortly after. It accounted for much of a woman’s anxiety as her time neared and the effect on her husband was no less real. But, Ridley reminded herself, Phoebe had delivered a healthy baby four years ago, and she appeared to be in good health now. There was no reason to believe there would be complications, only reasons to prepare for them.

  Ridley let herself into Ben’s home by the back door. Remington was waiting for her in the kitchen. The kettle was on. She was prepared to ask him why he wasn’t with his wife, but he stopped her by speaking first.

  “My mother died of childbed fever,” he said. “My sister died not long after she was born, my mother a few days later. I was five. I wanted you to know. Doc understood and wouldn’t let me near Phoebe until Colt was bawling as loudly as a newborn calf. He called me a lunatic. My father called me a drunk, but then so was he.”

  Ridley nodded. “I understand,” she said gently. “Would you like to have someone with you? You could go and get Ben. I think he’d want to be here. He can leave his prisoners for a few hours.”

  “I don’t think it will be a few hours.”

  “It will be fine,” she assured him. “Bring the kettle upstairs after the water boils and then you can go.”

  Ridley found Phoebe sitting up in bed, a pillow at her back and two others on each side of her that she was using as armrests. Her hair was brushed back from her face and wound in a coil at the crown of her head. She looked like royalty.

  “I chose the wrong room at first,” Ridley told her as she removed her coat and put it aside. “Colt didn’t stir so I think whatever excitement there has been thus far, he’s unaware of it.”

  “The only person excited here is my husband, and it is not in a good way.”

  “He told me about his mother.”

  “That’s something at least. He was insane when I went into labor with Colt, and my father-in-law didn’t set a better example. That has a lot to do with his opinion regarding you.”

  “That’s clear to me now.” She approached the bed. “How long ago did your water break?”

  “It happened when we were walking from the hotel to Ben’s.”

  Not so long ago, then, Ridley thought. “And you didn’t say a word,” she chided.

  “I couldn’t, not then. Remington would have handled the news badly. I envisioned him insisting that you attend me right then and there, so I excused myself when we reached Ben’s and took care of it. Remington’s used to me having frequent and urgent needs. The baby dropped Saturday a week ago.”

  “I bet you didn’t mention that to him either.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have brought me to town, and you and I both know it’s not a sign that labor’s imminent. Colt sat on my bladder nearly a month before he showed himself.”

  “What about this labor? When did it begin?”

  “Just around the time I cleaned myself. It was hardly more than twinges at first. I couldn’t have hid it from Remington otherwise, and frankly, I didn’t recognize the pain for what it was. I did fall this afternoon. It didn’t seem out of the question that the back pain I felt was related to that.”

  Ridley thought it was just as likely that Phoebe didn’t want to believe she was in labor. This thought was confirmed when Phoebe regarded her with a hint of anxiety in her features. “What is it?” asked Ridley.

  “Is it too early? Can my baby live?”

  “You told me Doc calculated that you’re due between Christmas and January first. That’s only fifteen or so days from now. I’ll make sure your baby’s lungs are clear and that Winchester or Winnie has a healthy cry, maybe one to rival Colt’s.”

  Phoebe’s smile was a little uncertain, a little watery. “I want to hear that cry.” The smile became a grimace as a contraction seized her uterus.

  Ridley counted out the length of the contraction. Forty seconds. She asked, “How long between contractions?”

  “Fifteen minutes, I think. I’m not sure. I told Remington there was time. I had a long labor with Colt.”

  “I don’t think he could hear you, and you probably shouldn’t compare this labor to Colt’s. The progression can be very different. I’m guessing that your husband knows that.”

  “Hmm. He took out books from the library.”

  Ridley chuckled. “Of course he did.”

  “They raise horses at Twin Star. Did you know that?” When Ridley nodded, Phoebe continued. “He’s been present at the births of hundreds of foals, and helped with
more than a few distressed mares. I’m quite certain there wasn’t anything in those books that experience hadn’t already taught him. And the illustrations? I thought they were disturbing. I made him return the books.”

  Ridley thought of the medical text she had been reading earlier. She was glad she’d left it behind. “Remington is bringing me hot water to sterilize my instruments. Afterward, at my recommendation, he’s going to the sheriff’s office to get Ben. I hope that’s all right with you.”

  “God, yes.”

  “Good. We’ll wait for him and then I’ll have a look at you.”

  Remington arrived when Phoebe had just begun another contraction. He stood at the foot of the bed as pale as salt, the kettle in one hand and a large basin under an arm. Ridley pointed to the washstand in the corner but wasn’t surprised when he didn’t move. She mentally counted out the seconds. This contraction was no longer than the previous one. There was definitely time for Remington to leave and return with Ben.

  When it was over, Phoebe sipped air through pursed lips. She smiled at her husband, although the effort was stiff. “In the corner,” she said when he continued to stand there staring at her. “Like the doctor said. The things you’re carrying. Not you.”

  He nodded and still didn’t move.

  “You’re making me nervous, Remington. A woman preparing to give birth does not want to be looked at by her husband as if he’s memorizing her face. I will be here when you get back and for years after that.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “I love you.”

  “And I love you, you ridiculous man.”

  Remington nodded again, this time with a slender smile edging the corners of his mouth. He carried the kettle and basin to the washstand and then returned to Phoebe’s bedside opposite the doctor. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Ben won’t let me drink too much.”

  “I’m counting on it.” She caught his hand, moved it to her mouth, and pressed a kiss against his knuckles. “I love you,” she said again.