“Did he tell you he’s been stabbed?” Bethann demanded. “Well, did you tell her?” she asked Griff.
“He did.” Momma frowned at Bethann. “I’m not much on that etiquette stuff, but I taught you better’n to interrupt a conversation like that. You can say howdy to all of us first.”
“How do you do, Mother.” Bethann spoke with exaggerated care in her words as though she were trying to imitate Miss Esther, then she started to curtsy like they’d seen some females do in a traveling player show, but her features twisted in pain and she staggered back a pace.
Griff caught her before she fell against the stove. “What’s wrong?”
“Wasn’t paying attention in the dark and got myself knocked off my horse by a tree branch.” Bethann rubbed her lower back. “Just hurts a bit.”
“Maybe you should go to your bed.” Griff’s gaze dropped to Bethann’s middle, not showing any evidence of his suspicions yet, at least not beneath her layers of skirt and petticoats bunched up with a belt to accommodate for being too big for her. “You weren’t well earlier.”
Bethann shot him a murderous glare. “I’m right fine, thank you.”
“I can rub some salve on your back,” Momma offered.
“No.” Bethann spun toward the door leading to the rest of the house. “Thank you,” she added as an afterthought as she exited.
The door slammed behind her, hard enough to rattle some pieces of crockery and china on the shelves.
“What’s amiss with her?” Momma asked. “You said she was sick.”
“Not for me to say. Miss Esther talked to her about it. She seems to know a lot about healing herbs and the like.”
“Does she?” Momma’s dark eyebrows rose. “Imagine that. I’ll have to ask her about it. But right now you need to get her that hot water and some food.”
Griff opened his mouth to argue again, but then shut it. No use arguing with Momma. She and her sister Tamar were determined that either he or Zach marry the schoolma’am. Momma, of course, thought Esther would be right for her son.
Griff wished he didn’t agree. He wished his heart didn’t feel stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat at the prospect of seeing her.
The attraction was only to her looks. He must remember that, tell himself that again and again. She didn’t love the Lord. She wasn’t particularly nice at times. She would grow weary of the mountains and go home within a month or two. All those things must convince him not to find her in the least attractive. They did convince him.
Until she answered the door to his knock and he saw her face, her form, the vulnerability in the shadows beneath her eyes, and a hint of redness suggesting she might have been crying.
“Do you have homesickness?” he asked, as though conversing with her was all right.
She blinked and gave her head a violent shake. “If I never again see Seabourne, Virginia, it will be too soon.”
That wasn’t a particularly bright thing for her to say. She knew it before she made the declaration, but the words slipped out anyway. Well, so much the better if they drove this unrefined yet too attractive mountain boy away.
“If that’s even slightly hot water,” she added as though she hadn’t made the remark about home, “I will count you blessed forever.”
“It’s hot water.” He smiled.
Esther winced. He shouldn’t have such a nice smile crinkling up the corners of his eyes and making the blue appear like a sun-washed sky.
“Lovely. You may set it up wherever it’s best.”
There, treat him like a servant. Not that she had all that much experience with servants. She was just used to giving orders when necessary.
Ensuring that Griff Tolliver didn’t like her was most definitely necessary.
“Do I get to eat?” she pressed on with her rudeness.
“I expect so.” He set the buckets on the floor with a thud. “After I’ve had my supper. That’s what I prefer hot—my vittles. The waterfall does well enough for me for bathing.”
“Waterfall?” In spite of her resolve, Esther took an eager step toward him. “You have a waterfall?”
“About a mile from here. It’s just a little one. I’ve heard tell of a big one in New York, but this is only twenty feet high or so. It has a pool as clear and deep as a crystal looks. It’s cold too. But nothing feels better after a hard day’s work than to dive in for a swim.”
“Swimming . . .”
A vision of the Atlantic surged across her mind’s eye. Blue-green waves swelling up to white peaks foaming like the cream on syllabub. Her brothers showing her how to catch those waves and sail into the sandy beach with nothing holding her up but that power of water so cold and refreshing—after a day helping Momma preserve strawberries or her precious sugared violets, and later delivering a baby—with all the heat and effluvium of the birthing chamber washing away with the undertow.
Esther’s stomach cramped, and she bent forward with the pain before she could stop herself. She grasped the bail of one bucket to cover up the impulse to ask Griff for the waterfall right then and there. On this warm May evening, ice-cold water would do well to wash away the grime of the trail.
Griff took the bail from her. “I’ll get it for you.”
“Thank you.”
Either he hadn’t noticed her moment of weakness—homesickness she wished she didn’t feel—or he pretended not to have seen her pain. She liked him the better regardless of what he saw and his choice of reactions.
When he had gone and she scrubbed away dust and sweat and mud, she adored him for bringing the water. Adored him as she adored the farmer who had delivered cream just when she needed it most for something she was cooking, of course. She wouldn’t like anyone here except for her students.
The younger Tollivers and Brookses were her reason for being in the mountains. Her new calling, if she must use that term Papa thought so appealing. He talked of the trouble he had caused when denying his calling, how Momma’s calling had changed lives, how Esther had that calling too.
“No, I don’t,” she had cried out in January when refusing to go out on any more visits to expectant mothers. “I’ve failed in too many ways to enter another birth chamber.”
Her bathwater, fragrant with her precious violet-scented soap, suddenly grew cold and greasy. She stood to rinse out her hair with a pail of decidedly cold water and stepped onto the smoothed floor to wrap herself in her dressing gown in lieu of a towel. Her supper, she’d been told through the locked panels of the door, would be awaiting her convenience on the stoop.
If some wild animal hasn’t gotten to it.
She opened the door to find a wooden bucket covered with a length of cheesecloth waiting for her.
It was a cold meal of ham and corn bread. Esther devoured it as though she hadn’t eaten in a month. It filled up the empty places inside her for the moment. And the easing of the emptiness made her sleepy enough to want to sleep.
Perhaps she did sleep. The bed proved comfortable, the crickets in the grass and the distant hooting of an owl a lullaby.
The crack of a rifle shot was not.
She bolted upright, heart racing. The sharp report echoed off the hills and cliffs like more gunfire, growing distant. Then the night fell silent. Not even the crickets and owl had ceased their activities.
A scream pierced the stillness like a dagger through the heart. Gasping, Esther flew to the door. She stood with her hand on the handle before she realized how stupid it was to go into the darkness after a gunshot and then a scream.
And no one in the house had come to investigate. Through the dim glass, she saw no light, no movement by the moon’s glow. She heard not so much as door hinges creaking.
“Didn’t you all hear that?” she whispered. “Shouldn’t someone go see what’s happened?”
The scream had followed the gunshot rather a long time later. Surely the person shot wasn’t the one who had screamed.
Shivering, she wrapped her dressing gown aroun
d her shoulders and retreated to her bed. Even beneath the quilts, she shivered, her ears straining for another crack of a rifle, dreading the shrieking scream again.
Instead, the wind kicked up, hissing through the trees like the soft hiss of the sea against the sand. The quiet soughing lulled her back to sleep.
Another scream yanked her awake moments before dawn edged its way over the treetops and a rooster crowed its greeting.
She gave up trying to rest. How everyone else could sleep through the shrieking that crawled across her skin like a colony of spiders, she couldn’t comprehend. They should all be awake, running out to find whoever was being . . . well, surely ripped to shreds.
Or perhaps they were all cowards like her.
With her face washed, her hair neatly coiled at the back of her head, and her person tucked into a gown and petticoat for the first time in weeks, the horror of the screams faded and she was ready to face the day. The tiny mirror above the washstand showed her eyes with dark circles beneath and red-rimmed lids above. She hadn’t meant to weep the night before. Fatigue and hunger had been her excuse then. In the light of day, she admitted to homesickness. She missed her parents. She missed her brothers and nieces and nephews.
She did not miss Seabourne—the looks, the whispers behind hands, the occasional spit as though the sight of her left a bad taste in the person’s mouth.
“Lying harpy,” they’d said.
“I didn’t lie.” Esther closed her eyes. Her stomach cramped.
Not to the people of Seabourne, she hadn’t. But she had a bit to Griff Tolliver. She did want to go back to Seabourne, but only if she could go back in time too, back before January. Other than aching for a family of her own, to find a man who loved her as much as Papa loved Momma, she had been happy, contented with her life, loved.
But she couldn’t go back in time; therefore, she must go forward. Breakfast with the Tollivers, a look around the area in the daylight, a close inspection of her school.
A door slammed in the direction of the house. Childish voices rose in the misty morning light, then footfalls raced across the hard-packed earth. They ran toward Esther’s room and schoolhouse, the giggling and squeals announcing the children intended to awaken her or fetch her to breakfast. She decided to let them knock first and waited for them in the doorway to her chamber.
Nothing happened. The voices stuttered to a halt. Feet scraped against the stone stoop, but no one spoke. No one knocked.
Stomach convinced she hadn’t eaten a mouthful of food since the day before yesterday, Esther grew weary of the apparent game and yanked open the door. The two boys stood there on the threshold with scrubbed faces and water-slicked hair, clean shirts and trousers in a homespun fabric, and identical expressions of bewilderment.
“May I help you?” Esther asked in imitation of a lady of the manor.
They shook their heads, dark curls bouncing out of their momentary control from a ruthless comb, and pointed behind her.
“Look,” the older one said. “I don’t read good, but I think that ain’t nice.”
“What . . . isn’t nice?” Slowly Esther turned and followed the youth’s pointing finger.
Someone had tacked a scrap of dirty paper to the door of the school. In a scrawling but surprisingly fine hand, the person had written, Keep running.
9
Griff noticed his brothers Ned and Jack standing more still than he ever saw them, even when they slept, and staring at the teacher. She too stood motionless, poised on the balls of her feet as though she were about to gather up her wide skirt and run.
“What—?” He saw the note pinned to the door and stopped.
Run indeed. She was running away and someone knew it. He had guessed it. Females who looked like Esther Cherrett didn’t take positions in the mountains unless they thought they were doing some kind of missionary work as if none of the people in the Appalachian Mountains knew about God’s grace. They were poor and uneducated, but they knew the Lord.
Whoever had written that note wasn’t uneducated. The handwriting was clear, even if the paper looked torn from another sheet of something and the pen needed trimming to get rid of the blotches of ink.
“Did you just find that?” Griff asked.
Esther jumped as though he’d pulled her hair down. She turned on him. “You shouldn’t creep up on people.”
“I’m right sorry, Miss Esther, but I never creep anywhere.”
“He just walks quiet,” Ned said. “I wanta walk quiet too. Better hunting that way.”
“Do you know where this came from?” Griff kept his gaze fixed on Esther’s face, her eyes with their gold lights in the morning sunlight, her skin flawless and glowing as though some of that sunlight shone from within, her hair shimmering with hints of copper and bronze amidst the glossy deep brown like polished wood. It all made his mouth go dry. And if he dared look at her mouth or her form, he would want to take the advice of the note writer and keep running.
She clasped her arms across her middle, held on to her upper arms, and gazed past his shoulder. “I don’t know. I found it when the boys came to fetch me.” Her vibrant voice had taken on a bit of a tremor. “I don’t know who wrote it or where it came from or when it got here or—or anything but what you see.”
“It don’t—doesn’t look like the writing of anybody around here.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you—Ned, Jack, go back to the house and get your breakfast.”
“We have to gather the eggs,” Jack said.
“Then gather them and go back to the house.”
The boys, raised more by Griff than their father, obeyed.
Griff turned back to Esther, who hadn’t moved. Even the light tendrils of hair framing her face seemed to hang motionless in the breeze off the ridge.
“Do you have enemies, Esther Cherrett?” he demanded. “Did you bring trouble to my family?”
“No.” She didn’t meet his eyes at first, then shifted her gaze to hold his with an intensity that turned his insides to pine sap. “I can’t say I have friends either, Mr. Tolliver, but I couldn’t bring more trouble to your family than you already have.”
“You’d best be right.”
“A warning of some kind, Mr. Tolliver? Or else what?”
He shrugged. “You can find your own way back east, and fast.”
“You’re telling me—” Her voice rose in pitch, and she paused to take a deep breath. “You have someone stab you. You tell me there’s a feud. Your older sister isn’t married and is likely . . . in trouble she shouldn’t be in, and you’re concerned about me bringing you trouble? I have never in my life known anything like this, and gunshots in the middle of the night and women screaming in the woods without anyone caring to find out—you’re laughing at me.”
He was. He couldn’t help himself. “Women screaming in the woods?” He held his side, which suddenly didn’t feel as healed as he thought it was. “Oh my, that’s a good one.”
“What is so amusing?” She took on that high and mighty city lady voice, and surely her nose went a bit elevated. “I did not imagine it.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t.” Griff made himself stop grinning. “I expect the gunshot was someone keeping a fox away from their chickens, and the screaming was a mountain lion.”
“A mountain lion?” Her cheeks took on the same rosy hue as the sunrise. “Only a mountain lion?”
“You wouldn’t say only if you came face-to-face with one when it’s hungry and you’re hunting.”
“But they don’t hurt people, do they?”
“Not usually. They just kind of make the skin crawl when you hear them.”
“Yes, that’s just it. Like spiders all over.”
Griff grimaced. “I don’t much care for that. Don’t much like spiders.”
“Me either.” She smiled, and tension seemed to drain from her. “Did you say something about breakfast?”
“Yes, ma’am. Momma said to bring you to the house so it’ll be hot. And you ca
n meet Pa.” Griff hesitated. “I should warn you that if Pa’s in pain, he can be kind of ornery.”
“People in pain usually are.” She spoke with the authority of someone who held experience in that area.
Griff opened his mouth to ask, then thought better of it. He was leaving her to Zach. The more Griff talked to her about herself, the more difficult that could be.
Except he needed to know a bit more to understand why someone would pin that note to the schoolroom door. No, he’d tell Zach and leave that to him. The less Griff had to do with her, the better, which meant he should be taking his meals somewhere else. Seeing her over the dinner table three times a day might be a bit too much time looking at her face, listening to her voice.
Could she sing? With a voice that rich, she should be able to sing. If he pulled out the dulcimer one evening—
He drew himself up short and turned his back on her. “Come on. The day is wasting.” He didn’t wait to see if she followed him but strode across the hard-packed earth of the ground between the old cabin and the new house, scattering half a dozen cats feeding on something feathered. He wished he had one of those fine gardens like some of the houses close to town had, not herbs and vegetables like Momma and the girls kept, but flowers and bushes and useless things. Everything here was for use, not beauty.
And he’d never cared until the woman behind him had stepped from the cloud of fire smoke and leaf shadow and into the sunlight before him.
Esther’s cheeks felt too warm for the temperate morning air. Likely she would blush forever over being so panicked about a mountain lion’s cry. Not that she wanted to encounter one. The idea sent a shiver up her spine. They might not have much to do with people, but they were still potentially dangerous wild animals. The most she’d had to worry about before was the occasional poisonous snake—easy to spot, easier to avoid, and not terribly difficult to kill. One couldn’t outrun, outclimb, or outkill a mountain lion.
Tangling her feet in her petticoats to keep up with Griff’s long stride, Esther rubbed her arms inside their narrow sleeves. Woman in peril or not, those screams were going to give her nightmares.
Laurie Alice Eakes - [Midwives 03] Page 8