Touched by Fire

by Gwyneth Atlee

  To her surprise, John laughed. “Thank God you’re such an accomplished liar! Then he’ll be all right?”

  Hannah nodded against his back. She coughed, but the effort made her ribs flare with new pain.

  John’s voice grew somber once again. “You didn’t answer me about Aunt Lucinda.”

  When she could, Hannah spoke. “I’m sorry, John. She died. We spent last night in the river, but she’d been burned too badly.”

  She could hear the stifled sob inside his chest. “Dear Lord. ‘In the way of righteousness is life; and in the pathway thereof there is no death.’ I can only hope she didn’t suffer. We’ll miss her very much.”

  “She loved you too, all of you. A lot of people died last night. The men were gathering bodies when I left.”

  They rode on in silence for a long time, until the sky grew dark. Finally, he said, “I still don’t know why you came for me. It should be obvious, we have nothing now.”

  Hannah’s eyes fluttered open. She’d been half-asleep. “I did some bad things, but I’m not a monster. I care about your family.”

  The horse’s hooves sloshed through muddy ash. Nearly as exhausted as her riders, she stumbled on a hole left by a root.

  “Do you love my brother?” John asked quietly.

  “I’m not certain,” Hannah answered honestly. “I think I could, if the situation weren’t so . . . difficult. He’s a good man.”

  “He can be.” His voice sounded distant, as if he were remembering some other time. “He can be the best man that I know.”

  o0o

  By the time they arrived in what had been Peshtigo, John’s head felt clearer than it had since the fire of the night before. He felt Hannah’s breaths rasping against his back and thanked God for her warmth. He might have died down in that well without her. He still marveled that she’d come for him at all. Remembering his wretched insults and the way he’d struck her face, John felt sick with shame. Perhaps he had misjudged her, despite the lies she’d told. Surely, she must love his brother. Otherwise, why would she have ridden across this ashen wasteland to find him?

  The horse plodded toward the river, guided only by the thin light of a crescent moon. Poor beast, he thought, wishing he had feed to offer, or even strength to rub the mare’s tired legs. Neither was in his power now, but at least all three of them would soon find water.

  As they topped a sandy rise, men walked up to greet them.

  “We saw you coming. Are you hurt?” He recognized the voice. It was Gunderson, the owner of a hardware store.

  “John Aldman,” he identified himself. “We could use some help.”

  Strong hands pulled them both off the horse’s back. A wave of dizziness made John’s knees buckle and bright dots cloud his vision. When it cleared, he saw that two of the men were carrying Hannah to a tent. A thin shaft of fear restored him to alertness. Why hadn’t she awakened?

  “Hannah,” he called after her.

  “The ladies will see to her,” said Gunderson. “She doesn’t look too bad off. Don’t have enough tents for the men, but we can find you blankets and a dry spot underneath one of these wagons.” He gestured toward them. “Come over to the fire first. The ladies from Oconto sent some grub and coffee. I’ll bet we have some left. One of the fellows will take care of your horse.”

  With a weary nod, John took the arm Gunderson offered. Though he considered himself a religious man, right now he would have nearly sold his soul for the coffee, food, and blankets the man offered.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Daniel lay on a narrow pallet inside the elegant lobby of the Simonton Hotel. He only knew that because he’d heard someone call the place by name, for tonight it sounded like somewhere altogether different. Tonight it sounded like a hospital camp. All around him he heard those noises he most associated with the aftermath of battle: soft moaning, barked orders, calls for bandages, and constant reminders that everything needed to attend the wounded was in desperately short supply.

  After the bayonet incident, he’d volunteered to become a surgeon’s assistant. Though the mounds of sawn limbs and the blood were somehow more gruesome than combat, at least he’d had the satisfaction of knowing what he did was to help.

  The smells here, too, brought back the nightmare: death amid the whiskey, given to numb pain. Only this death had a burnt note to it, an ashen sharpness he would not forget.

  He thanked God for Uncle Phineas. After a kind-hearted, half-grown boy had fetched the old man, Phineas took Amelia from the frightful experiences of this temporary hospital. Daniel had been worried for her. Though she seemed unhurt, she’d grown all too quiet. The only things she’d asked for were her lost doll, Sally, and the missing kitten, Spice.

  Though Phineas might have little use for most of his kinfolk, every woman in Wisconsin, and any mule who’d ever drawn breath, Daniel trusted him to take good care of Amelia. And God help anyone who tried to stand in his way! During the short time he was here, Phineas had browbeat the overworked doctor into checking Daniel right away.

  “Oh, I expect he’ll be all right,” Dr. Heinrich told the old farmer after a quick examination. “The burns look superficial. We’ll try some salve a couple of times tonight and check him in the morning. But I think a few days rest will set him right.”

  As if he could rest. “What time is it?” he asked aloud in the direction of the feet he heard shuffling nearby.

  He recognized the woman’s sigh. She’d been helping Dr. Heinrich since he’d been brought here, hours before. “You’ve been asking me all day,” she snapped. Her voice sounded young and tired. “I have more to do than check my watch. It’s after ten o’clock and high time you were asleep. Didn’t you hear the doctor say to rest?”

  He snorted, impatient with his discomfort and the endless hours of waiting. As irritating as he found her, he couldn’t blame the woman for getting fed up with his question. He’d probably asked the time on at least a dozen occasions already. He couldn’t help it, though. How could he relax, not knowing if his brother was alive? How could he abandon his worries over Hannah and how Aunt Lucinda’s body had been handled? How could he stop wondering about his daughter or what any of them would do now to survive?

  Not far away, a woman screamed shrilly. “We’re on fire! We’re on fire! Throw more water on us!” She’d been screaming it all day, just as he had asked the time. Daniel had heard the doctor and nurse whispering that her four children had all died. Though the woman had survived, her hands had burnt to nothing but charred bone.

  Was he like that poor woman, obsessed with the passage of time, worried for a brother he would never see again? He thought about the farm and tried to imagine last night’s flames burning around all the plowed acreage, ignoring fields and house. Perhaps John slept there tonight, exhausted and filthy, yet safe in his own bed. Maybe Hannah had persuaded a rescue team to search for him, but instead they’d found John, safe and sound, and all enjoyed a drink to his good fortune.

  Perhaps, Daniel tried hard to believe, it was all still there: his brother, the farm, and his old life to return to. He stared the image down in his mind’s eye, then let the focus soften into an exhausted sleep.

  o0o

  Some time after dawn, Gunderson shook John’s shoulder. “I think you’d better come. The ladies couldn’t wake your wife. They think we better get her to Marinette.”

  John brushed dried grass from his hair and shook his head. Wife? What wife? Where? He sat up and banged his head on the wagon’s underside. With that jolt, yesterday rushed back, and he realized the man squatting down beside him had meant Hannah.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as his hand rubbed at the sore spot. He grimaced as he accidentally brushed the bump he’d received in the huge fire.

  “I haven’t seen her, but my wife says she’s pale as milk and her breathing’s rough. You better come with me.”

  John nodded. “She’s not my wife. She’s my brother’s —” On short notice, he couldn’t imagine how to
term Daniel and Hannah’s relationship. He settled for, “—She’s my brother’s lady friend. He’s laid up in Marinette as well. Can I help you hitch the horses?”

  Several had sickened during the night, so Gunderson and John ended up taking Hannah, a young mother with a badly wheezing infant, and an old man who, like John, had come in from an outlying farm last evening. Much of his body had blistered where his clothes had been burned off.

  John’s heart sank when he saw Hannah Shelton. Her breath rattled in her chest, not unlike the sick baby. He could feel heat rising from her body even before he laid his hand to her pale cheek. How had she managed to ride to find him and crawl out of that well last evening?

  A guilty thought crept through his consciousness. If she died, that would at least keep her from his brother. Finally, the woman who had stolen all his hopes would forever be out of his life.

  The idea withered as quickly as it came. Though he still harbored some anger, he couldn’t really wish her dead. Not after she’d rescued Amelia from the speeding wagon. Not after she’d saved his life. Not after he remembered Mary’s death.

  He’d never really cared for the young woman Daniel loved. Her English was broken and her ways strange to his family. His brother could do better, he had reckoned. He pictured her pretty face, the sprightly way she’d moved, even when she’d been carrying his niece. Though they’d never spoken very much, he did recall her ready laughter. Musical, it flowed like the moonlit river of her golden hair.

  He saw her still, sometimes, in Amelia. Amelia, who he treasured as if she were his own. Amelia, to whom he showed the love he had so long withheld from Daniel’s wife.

  Too long. Too late now to make amends for all of that.

  John found some cool water and a cloth to take with them.

  “And be ye kind one to another,” he whispered as he wet the scrap of blanket. As Gunderson drove, he washed Hannah’s hot face. For himself far more than her, John finished the verse. “. . . forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

  Daniel cared for her, John reminded himself, and so did Amelia. His disapproval of the woman would exact too high a cost. John swore to himself he would tell his brother he would support him in any relationship that might develop with Hannah Shelton.

  That is, he would if he could now keep her alive.

  o0o

  Hannah’s head banged against something hard. She tried to look to see what it had been. But her eyes seemed stuck together, and the feeling of movement, jolting and bumpy, nauseated her.

  Instead of opening her eyes, she grasped at the cloth that served her as a blanket. Horse blanket, most likely, from the smell. Still, it protected her against the chill and kept her from shivering so violently.

  “Just a couple of more miles, Hannah.” A voice —her father’s? —loomed near and above her.

  That couldn’t be her father, could it? Wasn’t Father dead? An image of his unconscious form assailed her. Blood was dripping from his ear. That’s right. The horse had kicked him. Father couldn’t be here now.

  Then had that voice been Malcolm’s? It seemed even less likely. Malcolm despised illness, and she was sick now, wasn’t she? He would have found some aunt to tend her, or hired a girl from town.

  More blood dripped through her memory, the blood that she had sloshed across the wooden floor.

  No, Malcolm would never care for her again. Then who? She forced herself to look.

  “There’s the girl.” John Aldman put a fresh cloth on her forehead. “It won’t be long now. You have a fever of some sort, but there’s a doctor in Marinette. Daniel’s there, too.”

  Hannah tried to process the events of the last few days, but they were swept up like playing cards caught in a tornado. Try as she might to grab at one, it spun off in the wind.

  Her eyelids sank as slowly as a cat’s beside the fire, and she let the last cards flip away.

  o0o

  A voice rumbled into Hannah’s consciousness, a woman’s voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Daniel Aldman? I’m sorry, but he’s gone.”

  Hannah tried to force herself fully awake, to bellow out denial, but she had no strength to do so. She felt as if the stranger’s words had robbed her of her will.

  Daniel. Gone. How could he have died?

  Hannah moaned miserably. Her head pulsed painfully, and tears squeezed through her lashes.

  Daniel. Gone. Had he, too, taken ill? Had they survived the fire only to succumb to the aftereffects of smoke or river water?

  Dear God, why hadn’t she ever told him how he made her feel? Why hadn’t she promised what he’d wanted that night at the Barlows’?

  As with Robert, her strength had once more cursed her. She had forever lost her chance to love this man.

  o0o

  The doctor, a sharp-nosed, tired-looking man, took John Aldman by the arm and pulled him out into the hall. “We’ll keep her here, alone. She’s probably contagious. Fever like hers could sweep through these burn victims in no time.”

  John glanced anxiously toward the half-closed hotel room door. “What will you do for her?”

  The middle-aged physician ran a hand through thinning brown hair and sighed. “What we can. Tepid sponge baths, and perhaps she’ll take a willow bark tea. The rest is up to her.”

  “Will she live, then?”

  The doctor peered at him through a smudged pair of spectacles. “Does she want to?”

  “What?”

  “So many have lost children, husbands, parents. She’s very ill. If she doesn’t wish to live . . .” An attractive young blond woman who’d been helping Dr. Heinrich waved for his attention down the hall. “Please, excuse me, Mr. Aldman.”

  The blond woman stared at John for several moments, until she saw him looking back. Then she hurried after Doctor Heinrich.

  John watched them both recede into another nightmare, another person’s need. Cautiously, he opened the door to Hannah’s room. Now she lay alone, thrashing uncomfortably in a hotel bed. No one here had time to tend a woman who might well be contagious.

  “Don’t take my farm, Malcolm,” she muttered. “You’ve taken everything. Please don’t take my father’s farm.”

  He went to the washbasin and dipped a white cloth into cool water. After wringing it, he laid it on her brow. She tried to push his hand away, though her eyes never opened.

  “Lie still, Hannah,” he said quietly. “Rest easy, until I can come back.”

  o0o

  John borrowed a horse and rode out to his uncle’s farm. He was relieved to see how well it had fared. The same rough log house glared stubbornly across fields now barren after harvest. The same dairy cattle and black mules grazed untroubled on brownish grass refreshed by yesterday’s rains. A nearby barn stood like a monument to everyday farm life.

  One of the mules looked up and brayed a greeting at John’s borrowed mount. A minute later, Uncle Phineas burst out of the house, doing something John had never seen before. The old man was laughing. He called into the house, “I told you he’s like me! That John’s too stubborn to burn up!”

  Squealing, Amelia pushed past the gray-bearded bachelor and raced toward her uncle. John slid from the bay gelding and lifted her up into his arms in a fierce embrace.

  “Uncle John!” she cried. A few moments later, Phineas clapped him on the back so hard he nearly choked.

  “God bless you, boy, you made it!” shouted the old man. “Here, let me take your horse, and you go see your brother.”

  Eagerly, John relinquished the reins and carried Amelia inside the cabin. Daniel was standing, peering through swollen eyelids that leaked tears. Without a word, he crushed his brother in his arms.

  “You’re squashing me!” cried Amelia. John put down the child, and his brother hugged him even harder.

  “Daniel, your eyes. Can you —?”

  “A little,” Daniel answered. “They’re getting better by the hour. Where’s Hannah? Is she with you?”

  So
quickly, the mood of their reunion changed. “She’s at the big hotel in town, where you were. She’s pretty sick. I think you’d better come.”

  “Sick? What happened?”

  “She came alone to find me yesterday,” John said. “It was raining hard, and she fell into the well where I had hidden. I’d taken a good hit to the head. I was just sitting there, sort of dazed. Hannah made me climb out to where she had a horse. If she hadn’t come, I’d be there still.”

  “So how did she get sick?”

  “I don’t know. Exhaustion, rain. It poured all the way to town. By the time we made it back to what was Peshtigo, she was burning hot. She didn’t even wake up when they pulled her off the horse. Doc Heinrich called it fever. He asked me if she’d want to live. I don’t know how to answer that. I thought that you —”

  “—What are you saying, John?”

  “I’m saying that I won’t stand in your way. Maybe Hannah hurt me, but like you said, I think she had her reasons. And maybe,” he glanced toward Amelia, “maybe I’ve learned some hard lessons about being quick to judge. I’ve been so quick to spout scripture, I’ve forgotten the Good Book’s warnings on that very subject. Daniel, I believe Hannah Shelton saved my life. That ought to be enough to buy her one more chance.”

  Daniel grinned and again reached out to hug his brother. John quickly stepped aside. “My ribs can’t take another one,” he said. “You save some of that for Hannah, but don’t be too long.”

  “You sound tired, John. Stay here with Amelia. I’ll get Uncle Phineas to drive me into town.”

  John nodded and slid tiredly into a rocking chair. Before him, gray ashes lay inside the hearth, remnants of a tamer sort of fire.

  o0o

  A broad-hipped woman blocked Daniel’s way into the room. “I’m sorry,” she began.

  “I have to see her,” Daniel interrupted. Through the haze clouding his eyesight, she looked like a woman cast in iron. Certainly, she might weigh as much.

  “She’s delirious. She won’t even know you’re here. We’re taking care of her. I’m Mrs. Brannon. You ask for me, and I’ll let you know how she’s doing.”