“Then…?”
“House fire!” He took off running, and Ellie sprinted after him. He was moving so swiftly she barely had time to clamber onto the wagon in front of the mercantile.
“Stay here,” he commanded her.
She wasn’t about to do that. “I’m going with you.”
“You won’t be any damn use.”
She squinted at him in a fury. “Never mind that, just hurry.”
With no time to argue, he slapped the reins and the horse bolted down the street. They flew down the road toward the McMillan farm, yet the way had never seemed so long. Ellie’s breath was caught in a tight ball in her throat. Please don’t let anything have happened to Roy’s place, she prayed silently, over and over. And as they came ever closer to the farm, and the smoke still remained in the distance, she knew that her prayer had been answered.
Yet Roy’s face only grew more grim.
“What is it?” she asked in a voice tight with alarm. “It can’t be your farm, can it?”
“No,” he gritted out, slapping the reins again. “It’s Uncle Ed’s.”
The small house was fully ablaze by the time Roy pulled the wagon to a quick halt a hundred yards away. He jumped down and tossed the reins to Ellie. “Drive the wagon back to where the others are.”
Ellie turned toward the other wagons they’d passed on the way in and nodded in agreement.
“And for heaven’s sake, stay back,” he yelled after her, feeling a flash of dread that something might happen to Ellie or her baby. She shouldn’t have come at all, but damn it, he couldn’t push her off the wagon.
Several residents who lived in the vicinity had already arrived on the scene and the women and children had formed a bucket-line leading from the well to the house. At the bottom of this line was Isabel, and at its head, dousing the house with water, was the Reverend Jenkins. Ike and Leon O’Mara were running livestock out of the barn and emptying out the chicken house, both of which were, as yet, safe. Men, including Ed and Parker, wielded shovels to toss dirt and old snow through windows and doors. They worked frantically, diligently—and hopelessly.
Anyone could see that the old house couldn’t be saved. The structure was already an inferno. Flames from the roof licked the waning afternoon sky and sent fiery bits of ash floating through the air. Even while he worked to save the house, Roy could catch Ed’s worried gaze flicking back in the direction of his orchard.
“Don’t worry,” Roy said to him. “The orchard’s far enough away. If we can just get the flames under control….”
Ed shook his head. “I’m worried about your mother.”
Roy pivoted, and saw immediately that it wasn’t the orchard, but Isabel, who had been the object of Ed’s worried glances. More surprising still, he caught sight of Ellie dashing around with a shovel, a muffler wound round her face, heaving dirt through a broken window. What in tarnation did she think she was doing here? It was dangerous, foolish, irresponsible….
As he looked on in horror, a section of the roof collapsed, sending an explosion of embers billowing outward. Several shrieks of surprise went up, and men with shovels hopped back to avoid the fiery cinders.
Ellie stood her ground.
He muttered a curse and ran over to her.
“I told you to stay away from the fire!”
His bellowing didn’t break her stride. “But I can help!” She sent a spray of dirt toward a window through which plumes of black smoke blew back at her.
“The house is gone,” he told her. “Don’t risk your life.”
He was about to force her to at least go back with the women in the bucket-line, when suddenly her green eyes above her muffler widened with fear. “Roy, look!”
The wind was carrying fiery ashes from the collapsed roof closer to the barn.
Ellie took off running toward the outbuilding, and other men followed. The fight was now on to save the barn, and the bucket-line stretched and concentrated on wetting down its roof. Roy felt relief just to move a few yards away from the raging heat and smoke devouring the house, to be able to look away from the blazing torrent consuming the place where he’d grown up.
What must Ed be feeling, seeing so much of his past disappear in smoke?
What must Isabel be thinking, watching the house where she’d spent so many unhappy days go up in flames?
Roy felt a gargantuan lump building in his throat as he worked alongside the others, and felt hot tears sting his eyes.
He’d lost sight of Ellie right after she’d run to the barn, and not until the building had been doused with water did he slow down enough to look for her. At first he couldn’t spot her in the confused tangle of people dashing about the property, but then he spotted her near the head of a second line that had formed, creating a V running from the well to the barn. Her face was strained as she heaved the heavy wood bucket Isabel had handed her to the next person in line, but she was as fast as any of the volunteers.
Seeing Ellie, the woman he’d been willing to dismiss weeks ago as scheming and deceptive, toiling impassionedly alongside Isabel, the woman he’d written off for years as being cold and heartless, he felt his own heart swell uncomfortably in his chest. Isabel, a woman who looked for all the world as if she’d never lifted anything heavier than an embroidery hoop, and Ellie, eight months along in her pregnancy, labored as quickly and tirelessly as the youngest and strongest among them. And with more heart.
With the unity of movement of a school of fish, the fire-fighting citizenry sensed when the barn was safe and turned back toward the house—a blackened, blazing skeleton now. Nothing would be saved, but the property wouldn’t be safe until the last of the flames were extinguished.
Many stayed till the bitter end, and the faces of Ed’s neighbors and the expressions of sympathy of those who had come out from Paradise held both relief and sorrow. Fire could and often did kill; this time they had thwarted its deadly efforts. But the flames had taken a house that had stood for over thirty years, one that had been a vital part of Paradise’s history.
As people retreated back to their wagons, they could only speculate on what had caused the blaze. Had he not banked the fireplace properly? Left burning cinders in his oven?
Ed looked more distraught than Roy had ever seen him. “Thank God no one was hurt,” he kept telling Roy. “I worried about all those people so near that fire.”
“’Most all your neighbors came,” Roy observed.
Parker, beside them, nodded. “There were nearly forty people here. Someone from every house hereabouts, I would say.”
He and Ike were getting ready to go back to the farm. “You could come with us,” Parker suggested to his uncle. “We’ve got plenty of room.”
Ed shook his head. “I’ll get by here. I want to look after things.”
But mostly, he was looking after Isabel, who was still standing by the well.
Parker nodded, then turned to Roy. “See you back at the house.”
Roy nodded, distracted. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Ellie in ages. His heart drummed heavily in his chest.
Where was she?
Parker and Ike set out for their farm on horseback.
“I bet it was that oven of his,” Ike speculated. “He keeps that thing blazing all autumn long, and you know your uncle—absentminded.”
Parker nodded, then frowned. Up ahead, he could hear the sound of a rider coming right toward them, but it was so dark he couldn’t discern who it was. No doubt someone coming to see about the fire. But wouldn’t the folks heading back toward town have told the rider that it was all over?
The question was just running through his head when suddenly a large white horse came barrelling into sight—and atop the impressive animal was Clara!
“Christmas!” Ike exclaimed as Clara just missed galloping headlong into him.
Parker wheeled his horse and thundered after her, calling her name. They’d travelled several hundred yards before he could catch up to her, and when h
e did, her eyes looked into his frantically. She sawed on her reins, causing her horse to rear. Parker couldn’t tell if she was thrown or simply slid off the horse, but he dismounted quickly to check that she was all right.
“Clara,” he said, bracing her by her shoulders, “what’s happened?”
She still had a wild-eyed look about her, and her blond hair was flying in all directions. He’d never seen her so out of sorts. For that matter, he’d rarely seen her on horseback.
“I rode all the way from my granny’s,” she said, her chest heaving for breath. “We saw the smoke!”
“Ed’s house burned to the ground,” he informed her. He still held her because she looked as though she would collapse without some support. And no wonder! Her grandmother lived almost twenty miles away.
“I thought for sure it was your house—I was wild with worry!”
She looked wild. Smiling, he clasped her to him in a tight hug. “You shouldn’t have come all this way by yourself.”
As she looked into his eyes, her bow lips turned down in their old familiar pout. “Oh, I know, you’ve got that Fitzsimmons woman to worry about you now. But I just had to know that you were all right. I guess I just…”
She closed her mouth before she could say more.
“You just what, Clara?”
Shaking off his grip, she stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “I just love you, if you must know! Heaven only knows why. My house could have burned any time in the past year and I doubt you would have come running to see that I was okay.”
“Yes I would have.”
She laughed mirthlessly. “I doubt it. You’ve been too busy with that Fitzsimmons woman to notice anybody else. But I notice she’s not here.”
“She’s back at Ed’s.”
Clara’s smirk disappeared. “Oh.”
“But she wouldn’t have galloped twenty miles to check on me.”
Clara kicked her toe in the dirt. “Then what do you want to go and marry her for?”
Parker smiled. “I don’t.”
Her lips twisted in disbelief. “Then why did you buy her a ring?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then who—?”
Chuckling, Parker reached into his coat, pulled out the tiny box he’d been carrying with him since he bought it, and dangled it in front of her. “You never asked me who it was for.”
“You said it was going to be for the woman you were going to marry!”
He stepped forward and pulled the ring out. “I said if she’d have me.” Slowly, he took Clara’s hand. “Will you, Clara?”
Her eyes rounded as she saw the ring being slipped on her finger, and then, slowly, tears formed in them. She looked back up at him, her lips still parted in disbelief. “You mean…you bought it for me?”
He nodded.
“And all this time you’ve just been carrying it around? Waiting?”
“Uh-huh.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she let out a howl of dismay. “Ooooh! I ought to kill you for this!”
He laughed, and pulled her into his arms. “Marry me first. Then you can kill me.”
As his head dipped down for a kiss, she whispered, “I’ll marry you, Parker McMillan. But be prepared to suffer!”
He laughed. “You don’t have to worry about me suffering—your mother will see to that.”
At first, seeing his house in flames, Ed had felt as if the very earth were being torn out from under him. His family’s house, the place where he’d first met Isabel, where his brothers had lived and died, where he had gone on alone for so many years…it just disappeared before his eyes.
Now, staring at the charred skeleton, he felt strangely composed.
Isabel, on the other hand, sobbed with anguish. “I’m so sorry, Ed. Sorry we couldn’t save it.”
He put his arm around her and pulled her to his side, pressing his lips to her temple. The soapy smell of her soft hair had given way to acrid smoke, yet to him right now it was a sweeter scent than perfume. “It’s all right, Izzy. No one was hurt.”
She blinked up at him through tears. “But you’ve lost everything!”
“I’ve got my barn, my orchard.” He looked into her face, feeling an almost unbearable tenderness overwhelm him. “But I’ve got a confession to make.”
She looked alarmed. “What?”
“Every tree could have burned down, right down to the last cooked apple, and it wouldn’t have mattered one whit to me as long as I have you, Izzy.”
She sagged against him a little then. “Oh, Ed—who ever knew you were such a romantic fool?”
“Not me,” he said, chuckling lightly. “Not me.”
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I guess I can sleep in the barn.”
“Nonsense,” she said, straightening. “You’ll come back to Paradise with me.”
His eyes narrowed. “People will talk.”
“I don’t care two cents about what people say.”
He looked into her lovely blue eyes and knew it was true. “Then again…I suppose I know a surefire way to stop the gossip.”
She grinned. “What’s that?”
“Marry me, Isabel.” Her eyes registered wariness, and he added in a rush, “Marry me and let’s start over. New house, new life together. I know you’ve been married twice, but never to a man who loves you as much as I do. Never to a man who’s waited almost thirty years to win your heart.”
Her eyes were wet with tears, and she nestled her head against his chest. “You didn’t have to wait. You had it long ago.”
For some reason, hearing those words moved him as nothing else that evening had. More than his burned house, more than the idea that forty good people had pitched in to help him. “Then…?”
She looked lovingly into his eyes. “Of course I’ll marry you, Edward McMillan. It will be an honor.”
He was so flooded with feeling he didn’t know how his legs continued to hold him upright, except that having Isabel’s love made him strong. And complete. And as happy as a man had a right to be.
Chapter Seventeen
Ellie leaned against the chicken coop, more emotionally than physically exhausted. They had all soldiered so valiantly against the fire, and yet Ed’s house was gone.
Staring blankly at its blackened remains in the moonlight, she realized that a house was something she had never known. A home. Ed’s house held more memories for her than anywhere. More happy memories. She’d relived every second she and Roy had spent there a million times in her mind. As she stood there now, she tried for a million and one. Images paraded through her mind. Roy meeting her in front of the house as she rode up in the snow. Sitting in Roy’s lap at the kitchen table. Uncle Ed and all his loose catalog pages in the kitchen. She and Roy running through the orchard, playing like children. She knew she should banish such thoughts from her mind, but she couldn’t. The poignant memories would live forever in her, as fresh as yesterday.
A lone sound caught her ear, and she looked up to see Ed and Isabel leaving in his wagon. Apprehension darted through her. She’d seen almost everyone driving off, but hadn’t worried about getting back because she’d assumed Isabel would offer her a ride back to their house in town. Now the horizon was troublingly bare.
She darted toward the house, circled it, then ran back toward the barn. To her relief, she noted one of Ed’s two horses and a mule in the stalls, munching happily on newly strewn hay as if nothing had happened. Thank heavens they were there! She at least would have the means to ride back into town.
Sizing up the two beasts, she decided to put a bridle on the old horse, who was small and knobby and appeared much more approachable than the youthful mule. She found a bridle in the tack room, then pulled the horse, Jonas, out of his stall. Slipping the bridle over his head, she prayed she would be able to get up on the horse…and stay up. That might be a problem, too.
Gingerly, she led the animal out of the barn and over to a stump where she might
be able to mount him more easily. Just as she was preparing to step up, however, a deep voice called to her out of the darkness.
“Where the hell have you been?”
It was Roy. When he came close enough for her to make out his face, he seemed almost angry.
Her heart pounded uneasily. “I was right here.”
“No you weren’t,” he said. “I looked for you here not ten minutes ago.”
“Ten minutes ago I wasn’t here. I was rounding up chickens out back.”
He let out a sigh. “I didn’t look there!”
“I thought everyone had gone.” And of all the people who’d remained behind, why did it have to be Roy? She felt so emotionally vulnerable now, she wasn’t certain she was prepared to handle his quicksilver moods. “Where were you?”
“I was in the orchard, looking for you.”
“What would I have been doing there?”
He didn’t answer.
His lack of response told the tale, however. He thought she was reliving the moments when they’d frolicked through the bare trees….
The discomfiting silence stretched into an interminable minute before Roy finally said, “There’s no sense in your riding Jonas home. I can take you in the wagon.”
“It’s no trouble for me to ride back on my own,” she said. “I can do it.”
His frown deepened. “I’m sure you can. But that would leave an extra horse in town for Ed to take care of.”
She hadn’t thought of that.
He strode forward to take the reins away from her, but she grabbed his arm.
He stiffened at her touch, and she saw a bone-deep weariness in his eyes that surprised her. She was used to thinking of Roy as tireless, yet the fire must have seemed interminable to him. “You don’t need to help me,” she assured him. “I can get by on my own.”
“Certainly. But for my own peace of mind, I’m going to take you home myself.”
“Why should you worry about me?” she asked, lifting her chin. “I’m the woman you’ve wanted to drive away remember?”
She’d meant to sound haughty and removed, but even to her own ears the hurt seeped through her tone. She felt vaguely ridiculous, and dropped his arm and stepped back to hide her discomfort.
Liz Ireland Page 23