Laurie Alice Eakes - [Midwives 03]

by Choices of the Heart

  “He won’t die, Momma,” Hannah said. “Esther has a healing gift. You saw my hand.”

  Esther ground her toe into the floorboard. “A burn is far different from a stabbing, but I’ll do my best.”

  “And the Lord will use you according to His will,” Mrs. Brooks said. “Come in.”

  A number of lanterns added to the natural heat and stuffiness of a closed room in the summer. No curtains hung over the windows, but the shadow of the mountain and trees kept the room dark. In an hour or two, the light would be good. She didn’t have an hour or two, more than likely.

  “Please open the windows,” Esther said. “Fresh air is more healthful.”

  The two women stared at her.

  “No, ma’am,” Mrs. Brooks said. “The night ain’t healthy.”

  “It isn’t unhealthy. I’ve been out in it many times and am always well.” Esther marched over to the closest window and threw up the sash.

  Cooler, sweeter air streamed in, and she marched to the second and third until sweet, fragrant air from the garden swirled around them, dispelling the greasy odor of the tallow dips.

  Once she could breathe, she braced herself, schooled her expression to blandness no matter what she discovered on the mattress someone had carried into the room, and dropped to her knees beside Zach.

  His face was as white as the homespun pillowslip beneath his head. Once shining golden hair lay limp and dull around his head, and his eyes were nearly colorless.

  But those eyes were open and gazing right into hers. “You . . . came.”

  “As soon as I could. Where does it hurt?”

  “Right side. Above . . . bone.” His voice was breathy. His pulse was thready and too fast, his skin clammy and colorless.

  She glanced up at his mother and sister standing across from her, their hands clasped at their waists, the mother’s tiny, the daughter’s far more sturdy.

  Esther narrowed her eyes for a moment, but she shoved the thought aside and asked, “What have you done for him? Is he still bleeding?”

  “I stitched the skin together,” Mrs. Brooks said. “It ain’t bleeding much now, but it don’t look right. But I told him it ain’t right for an unmarried girl to look at him there.”

  “She’s . . . healer,” Zach whispered. His hand reached out, fingers groping.

  Esther covered them with hers, wishing they weren’t so cold, so clammy. He’d lost too much blood. He needed restorative broths, but she couldn’t recommend that until she saw where the knife had gone in. If the stomach had been compromised, food would only kill him faster.

  Which meant she didn’t dare administer a pain reliever yet.

  “I can’t help him if I can’t look, Mrs. Brooks.” She made her voice as authoritative as she could. “It won’t be the first time I’ve seen a male torso. I have four brothers and I extracted a bullet once.”

  Their eyes widened. Their jaws dropped.

  “My mother and her mother and her mother were all healers as well as midwives, and I have learned.” As she explained, Esther pulled back the quilt that covered Zach.

  She glanced over his bare chest, smooth and muscular, only long enough to note if any other injuries had occurred. All seemed well other than how he seemed oddly vulnerable without his shirt.

  Unlike his cousin—

  She clamped down a lid on that memory and focused on Zach’s belly. The bandage was dark with old blood. She touched it with her fingertips. Nothing fresh. Nothing else oozing. A good sign.

  “Hot water,” she directed. “Fresh bandages. Zach, I’m going to hurt you as little as possible, but this has to come off.”

  “It’ll start the bleeding again,” Mrs. Brooks protested.

  “It may. We have to take that risk.” Esther began to search through her bag for a heavier needle and stronger thread than she’d used on Griff.

  She located a tiny vile of clove oil and closed her fingers around it as though she had found a diamond the size of her palm. Clove oil would numb the wound area if she did need to rework the stitches. She should have remembered it and used it on Griff. That she hadn’t pricked her conscience. Yet surely she wasn’t so lost to propriety that part of her had enjoyed the stitch that made him flinch. If so, she needed to beg his pardon.

  And repent of such a wicked thought.

  Hannah brought in a kettle of hot water and set it beside Esther. She shook her head, sending her hair tossing back behind her shoulders, and set to work.

  Although Mrs. Brooks’s stitching had stopped most of the bleeding, she had only sewn the skin together, and blood had pooled beneath the surface. This might mean something vital had been struck and his bleeding would never stop until he slipped away. She must find out.

  She snipped away the stitches. Fresh blood poured out onto the quilt beneath him and like as not through to the mattress.

  And behind her, Hannah fainted.

  “Get her out of here,” Esther said without looking around. “I don’t have time for someone who faints at the sight of blood.”

  Zach had fainted too. Good. Easier to work on him.

  With smooth efficiency, Esther mopped up what she could and pulled the wound apart. She smelled nothing bad. Perhaps a good sign. She didn’t have enough experience with knife wounds to know for sure, but logic and her knowledge of anatomy said she might smell foulness if the knife had glanced off the hip bone and cut into the belly cavity. And blood didn’t continue to flow. Indeed, the knife hadn’t gone all the way through. The wound was serious but, if no infection set in, wouldn’t be fatal.

  Thrown from a long distance? Deflected off his hip bone? She couldn’t ask Zach until he woke, but the latter seemed likely. He was still alive, weak, too weak, but had been alive for hours after the wound.

  “God, I need direction . . .” The prayer slipped out unbidden.

  “Amen,” Mrs. Brooks said. She knelt beside Esther. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll give it to you.”

  “Shouldn’t you see to Hannah?”

  “She’ll come around soon enough.”

  Most likely. Few people stayed in a faint for long.

  Esther sprinkled a few drops of the clove oil on a clean cloth and dabbed it onto the wound. The pungent aroma of the spice filled the room, blotting out other less pleasant smells. Her nostrils flared, stung. But her eyes focused on the task, and her hands were steady.

  “Hold him in the event he wakes,” she directed Mrs. Brooks.

  Momma, you’d be proud of me.

  “You have such a healing touch, Esther,” Momma had said often. “I wish you could be a physician.”

  But she hadn’t been good enough to save Mrs. Oglevie, only the baby, that dear, sweet baby boy so alive, as his mother was not.

  If I can save Zach, I’ll have paid for some of my wrongs, my failures.

  She stitched. She mopped. She murmured soothing nonsense to him when he woke and groaned with pain. She drew the last stitch tight and wound a bandage around his body with Mrs. Brooks’s help.

  “Now it’s up to the Lord,” she pronounced, smoothing damp hair from Zach’s face.

  He caught hold of her hand. “You won’t run away?” he pleaded in a murmur.

  “No, I’ll stay,” she promised.

  And as she spoke the words of reassurance, she accepted that she didn’t want to run for the first time in months.

  24

  Griff found the empty stall first. His favorite horse had disappeared in the night. His heart a lead weight in his belly, he sprinted from the barn and across the yard to the cabin.

  The empty cabin.

  The door stood ajar, her night things strewn across the unmade bed. Clothes still hung on their pegs, books laid on the table, one open with a sketchpad beneath. All that was missing was her precious satchel.

  “Oh, Esther, you didn’t need to run.” He raised his hands to shove his fingers through his hair, wincing as he brushed the cut and bruise on his face. His left eye was swollen shut and suddenly bega
n to burn along with the right. “I’d’ve gone away from you if you’d only stayed.”

  “Griff,” Liza called from the schoolroom, “you shouldn’t be in here with—” She stopped in the bedroom doorway. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, and Sunset’s gone too.”

  Liza gasped. “Did someone steal her along with your horse?”

  “I don’t think so. She took her doctoring bag.”

  “Then maybe someone was sick and fetched her.” Liza tiptoed to the desk table as though Esther were sleeping across the room. “She draws pretty pictures.” She drew the sketchpad from beneath the book. “Look, it’s the waterfall.”

  “Liza, put that down.” Griff snatched the pad from his sister.

  The pages fanned open, and he caught a glimpse of himself on the page beneath the waterfall. He was wielding an ax to chop wood, and he looked like a wild man or some warrior going into battle, before guns were used for fighting.

  Was that how she saw him, all wild hair and fierce expression, not a bit of softness in him? No wonder she ran, after the night before. He’d kissed her, then accused her of being a wanton because she kissed him back and used her female wiles on him.

  His ribs squeezed around his heart, and he set the drawings on the table. “I gotta go find her. She can’t go out on the mountain alone. Even on a horse, it ain’t safe.”

  “Isn’t,” Liza said.

  He stared at her. “What?”

  “Isn’t.” She set her hands on her nonexistent hips. “Miss Esther always says isn’t, not ain’t. If you don’t want to sound like an ignorant mountain man to her, you gotta—have to say isn’t.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tugged the single braid she wore down her back.

  She touched his face. “What happened?”

  “Zach didn’t like something I said.”

  “Did you hit him back?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I deserved it.”

  “Huh.” She glanced around the room, then back at him. “Did you kiss her? Is that why she ran away? She’s in love with you and don’t—doesn’t want to be?”

  “I think part of that’s the truth. Now run back to the house and tell Momma I gotta go looking for Miss Esther. If she’s alone, she’ll never find her way into anything but trouble.”

  “And if she’s not?” Liza tossed over her shoulder.

  “He’d better start running before I catch him.”

  Griff glanced around the room. Odd she would leave it in such a mess. Every time he saw her, she was as neat as the kitchen after being washed up, except the night before. Her ruined dress lay in a crumpled heap, half kicked under the bed. He bent to look at it. Maybe Momma or the girls could use some of the fabric for quilting. It sure was pretty with all those blue flowers on it, and in it Esther had looked like some princess from another land, so graceful in her dancing she seemed to float over the ground. He’d watched from afar and hadn’t dared ask her to dance. She seemed quite content with Zach as her partner most of the time. Too content and happy for Griff’s liking.

  But she had kissed him, and his heart had been so full he wanted her to be as perfect as Zach thought she was.

  He retrieved the dress, caught a whiff of her sweet flower scent, and started to shove the gown back under the bed.

  That was when he caught sight of the slip of paper.

  Maybe she hadn’t simply run off with his horse and no other word. Maybe she had written a note, and his racing into the cabin had sent it sailing beneath the bed.

  He reached to retrieve it and felt a stack of papers there. Wrong to look, of course. But she had gone without taking these, which seemed strange if she were running off. Leaving clothes behind was one thing. A body could get new clothes. But these looked like letters, and folk liked keeping letters from family, from sweethearts. Momma had one from her great-grandpa to her great-grandmomma when he was off fighting the English. Nobody could hardly read it now, but Momma kept it anyway.

  Griff drew the bundle toward him. He would put these where he could send them to her family if, God forbid, he didn’t find her.

  A word on the top sheet of paper leaped out and struck him as though Zach’s fist had landed squarely on his nose. Jezebel. That was all. The single word scrawled with thick, black lines.

  He couldn’t stop himself from glancing through the other letters after that. Some said more. They couldn’t say less. The meanings were the same, the message clear.

  Esther had run from Seabourne for a reason.

  Something bad, he’d told Momma. The letters before him were proof. They just didn’t say why.

  And now she’d run again.

  He shoved the letters between the mattress and bed frame, feeling more paper already there, and charged to the barn. He would take the other horse they’d bought for riding. Bethann used it often, though not so much lately. Of late, she’d been walking out alone, though Griff suspected she was meeting someone. He supposed he should have been following her to find out who was responsible for her trouble this time, but he knew what was expected of him if he learned the truth—a forced marriage at the end of a shotgun if necessary. Unless the man wasn’t free.

  Griff didn’t want to know the truth if it was that last possibility.

  He tossed a saddle on the mare. She was a bit small for him, and he couldn’t ride her far. He hoped he didn’t have to ride her far. He headed for the gate.

  “Griff,” Momma called from the house, waving a bundle.

  He rode up and took it from her. “I’ll find her, Momma, never you fear.”

  “You’d better.” Momma scowled up at him. “And you’ll do right by her when you do.”

  “I can’t do that. She’s made it more than clear she don’t want me.”

  “Doesn’t,” Liza called from inside the kitchen.

  Zach’s fever started in the middle of the afternoon. Dozing on a sofa, Esther started up at the sound of his restless thrashing and mumbling about heartless wenches.

  “I’m not heartless, Zach.” She dropped to her knees beside his makeshift bed and touched his brow.

  It burned like a sunbaked stone.

  “Water,” she called to whoever might overhear her. “As cold as you can get it.”

  Ice would be better, but they got precious little of it there in the winter months, certainly not enough to save for the summer.

  “And lots of cloths,” she added.

  Footfalls pounded down the hall, those of a child from the sound of it. Someone had been assigned to sit outside the sickroom parlor and wait for her instructions. Esther had gone out only once to freshen up with some cold water on her face, a trip outside, and a bowl of stew. The rest of the time, she remained with her patient, watching, waiting, knowing the fever would come. He was young and strong and he might overcome it, but fevers took a body without warning. They sapped the greatest of strengths, and Zach had lost a great deal of blood, weakening him already. Beef or other red meat broth would help eventually. For now, however, he seemed able to stomach only sips of water.

  Hannah entered with a pitcher of water and a stack of cloths. “Is this enough?”

  “If you keep replenishing it every few minutes.” Esther took the pitcher and dipped a cloth into it. “He’s burning up.”

  “That’s bad, ain’t it?”

  “I won’t lie to you. It isn’t good. But you don’t look well yourself.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I’ll do.” She sank onto the sofa with a yawn. “Tired, is all. We didn’t none of us get much sleep last night.”

  “Did any of you get anything out of him about what happened?” Esther began to bathe Zach’s face and chest with the cold water.

  “You mean like who did it?” Hannah returned. “No doubt about it. It was a Tolliver.”

  “Did he say so?”

  “It weren’t no Gosnoll or Brooks. Might have been a Neff since they’ve sided with the Tollivers, for all they’re my mot
her’s people too.”

  “Why are there sides, Hannah? You’re all family. This isn’t medieval Scotland.”

  “What?”

  “Scotland a few hundred years ago when the clans feuded with one another for territory. There’s lots of land here.”

  “Not good land. Can’t hardly grow a thing here, and the ferry don’t bring passengers all the time.” Hannah curled her legs beneath her on the hard cushion of the sofa. “The trees might be valuable. Walnut makes for fine furniture. But they’re too hard to get out to folk.”

  “So there’s the mine.” Esther continued to sponge cold water over Zach.

  He continued to mutter and try to thrash.

  “He’s gonna break open that wound,” Hannah said, her voice tight.

  Esther nodded. “I’m concerned about that too. It’s like he’s trying to get away from something.”

  “He was trying to get home,” Hannah said. “He kept saying he had to get home for his lesson. Don’t know what he was talking about.”

  “His reading lesson.” Esther’s eyes swam just a little. “Didn’t he tell you I’ve been giving him reading lessons?”

  “No.” Hannah shook her head, grimaced, and pressed her hand to her brow.

  “Headache?” Esther asked.

  “Like a horse galloping through my skull.”

  “I have some willow—horse!” The cloth dropped onto Zach’s chest with a splat. “What’s happened to Griff’s horse?”

  “Griff.” Zach spoke loud and clear. “May that horse break his neck.”

  “Zachary Brooks!” Hannah exclaimed. “I don’t care if he is a Tolliver, you don’t talk thatta way if you’re a-dying.”

  “He’s not dying,” Esther said to convince herself as much as Hannah.

  The fever had come on too fast, too strong for her comfort and skill.

  “But you still shouldn’t talk that way.” She recommenced bathing him in cold water. “He’s your cousin.”

  Clarity shone in Zach’s eyes at that moment, a good sign. “He stole you.”

  “I’m not yours, Zach. I’m not Griff’s either.”

  “He kissed you.”