Bridget knew he was teasing, but she was mildly chagrined all the same. She arose quickly, pulled on her worn wrapper, and stepped into her shoes without fastening the buttons. The dirt floor was always cold until the sun got a good start, and she wasn’t one for going about barefoot, anyway. There were too many perils, from sharp stones to snake-bite, and a simple puncture wound from a nail or other rusted object might bring on lockjaw.
She shifted her thoughts to the bracing aroma of hot, fresh coffee scenting the crisp predawn air. She knew without looking that there was dew on the grass, for the sun was still mostly huddled behind the hills to the east, and the ground was surely hard and cold. She felt a pang of guilt for her lack of hospitality, necessary though it was.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked, taking a sip from the mug of coffee he’d poured for her.
Trace’s mouth tilted upward at one corner, but his eyes were solemn, in a gentle, uncomplaining sort of way. “I’ve slept in worse places than green mountain grass, Bridge,” he assured her.
She was filled with a swift, consuming desire to know all his experiences, large and small, and told herself it was because what Trace had endured, Mitch had, too. “Where?”
He drew a deep, slow breath and expelled it slowly. “In rocky fields. Inside the trunks of trees, under them on the ground, and up in the branches. Barns and burned-out houses and, once or twice, a chicken coop.”
Bridget had already wrinkled her nose and grimaced before she realized the expression could be construed as rude. “A chicken coop?”
Trace chuckled, a man-sound that Bridget had sorely missed after he and Mitch and Granddaddy had all gone. “It wasn’t so bad,” he reflected, and this time, there was real humor in his eyes. “Fact is, we counted ourselves lucky to bunk there, given that the sky was dumping icy rain and there wasn’t any other shelter for about ten miles in any direction.”
She felt a small crinkle form between her eyebrows. “‘We’? Was Mitch with you?” It was so important to know, though she couldn’t have explained why in a month of full moons.
He nodded. “Mitch and nine other men.” A distant look entered his eyes, threw shadows. “One of them was bleeding pretty bad. We tried to keep him alive, but he was gone by morning.”
Bridget touched his forearm. “I’m sorry, Trace.”
“It’s all right,” he answered. “It’s all right,” he said again. But then he turned his back and went to the door to watch the sunlight spill over the waters of the creek. Bridget knew that was what he was doing because it was a spectacular, sometimes even dazzling sight, and she’d done the same on many a morning herself.
She didn’t cross to him but busied herself with the assemblage of breakfast—cornmeal mush, molasses, one of the precious tins of pears Trace had bought in town the day before at Gus’s mercantile. “Thank you for the book,” she said, shy as a schoolgirl acknowledging a valentine. She wondered what it was about Trace that kept her off-balance, sometimes bold, sometimes reticent, and always confused. Why, if she hadn’t known better, she might have thought . . .
No.
He didn’t turn around, and the cool breeze felt good, filling the cabin with sweet freshness and a multitude of sounds—birds singing, the creek telling its old, old story, the horses greeting one another in snuffles and muted whinnies.
Bridget felt a swell of love for the place, rising up from the core of her being, and all of a sudden, she knew that however much she missed Virginia—and the memory of it would always be a tender bruise pressed deep into her heart—Primrose Creek was home now. She set the cast-iron kettle on top of the stove, hoisted up one of the buckets, and filled the pot with water. She was making no effort to be quiet now, for there was work to be done, and Skye’s help would be needed.
“I was glad to do it,” Trace said belatedly. “I’ll see to the stock while you and Skye are getting dressed.” With that, he was gone.
Skye grumbled something from the direction of the bedstead, and Bridget smiled to herself. Skye was not at her best in the mornings. Noah, on the other hand, was wide awake from the instant he opened his eyes, and he was already bouncing in the middle of the straw-filled mattress.
“I didn’t wet!” he crowed. “I didn’t wet!”
“Good thing for you,” Skye grumbled. More than once, they’d had to carry the mattress outside to air in the sunshine.
“I’m proud of you, Noah,” Bridget said.
By midmorning, Bridget and Skye were toiling in the vegetable garden, and Trace’s ax echoed rhythmically through the woods. Noah was sitting on the ground, spinning his top on the surface of a flat rock, and the sun was high and hot.
“Mama?” Noah said in a tone of gleeful wonder, and in the odd stillness that followed, in the space of a single heartbeat, Bridget heard it. A brief, ominous, hissing rattle. She raced toward her son, stumbling over furrows and flailing through waist-high stalks of corn, and it seemed as though she traveled a great distance in that flicker of time.
A small rattlesnake was coiled on the ground, just to Noah’s left. Bridget didn’t reason, she didn’t scream; she simply acted on instinct. She snatched up the snake in her right hand, feeling a fiery sting midway between her wrist and elbow as soon as she did so, and hurled the creature away, into the pile of rocks to one side of the garden. The bite on her forearm burned like a splash of acid; a sickening heat surged through her body, brought out a clammy sweat. Nausea roiled in her stomach, and the ground tilted at wild angles.
“Take him inside,” she gasped to Skye, swaying a little but keeping her feet. “Take Noah inside. Now!”
Skye obeyed—she was a sobbing blur to Bridget by then—and ran stumbling across the clearing, battling through brambles and high grass, shrieking Trace’s name.
Bridget pulled off her sunbonnet and tried to make a tourniquet of sorts with the ties. Then she leaned over and threw up in the dirt.
Trace appeared in the throbbing, thundering void, lifted her into his arms, carried her inside to the bed.
“Lie still,” she heard him say. His voice seemed to come from the far end of a long chimney pipe or the depths of a well. “Just lie still.”
Bridget closed her eyes, felt herself slipping toward the darkness, and opened them again. She could not, would not die. Noah needed her. Skye needed her. Devil take it, she needed herself.
Trace was not part of the equation—or was he?
“It hurts,” she said.
“I don’t doubt that,” Trace said. “And I’m about to do something that’s going to hurt more. Shut your eyes, and do your best to relax.”
She tried but got no further than the shutting-her-eyes part; before she could follow through and relax, something hot and sharp sliced into the swelling wound where the snake had bitten her. She swooned, for the first time in her life, and found sanctuary in the cool gloom of some strange inner landscape.
Trace loosened the tourniquet on Bridget’s upper arm; he’d replaced her bonnet strings with his leather belt. He’d drawn as much of the poison as he could, and now came the hardest part. The waiting.
“Will she die?” Skye whispered. She didn’t worry that Noah would overhear, for the boy had curled up on the bed beside Bridget, close as he could get, and fallen asleep. It was as though the child thought he could save his mother by holding on tight.
“No,” Trace said, and it was a vow before God. “No. Bridget isn’t going to die.”
“It happened so fast,” Skye murmured, gazing at her sister with fear-glazed eyes. “I don’t know why she didn’t use the hoe. She’s killed a lot of snakes since we took to the trail.”
“I don’t reckon she took time to consider her choices, honey. She was thinking about Noah.” He sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, took one of Bridget’s still, pale hands in his. The sight and feel of the calluses on her palms and fingers jabbed at his awareness, made an ache behind his eyes. She’d been reared to be a lady, the well-bred and educated wife of some prospero
us Virginian, with servants at her beck and call, linen sheets on her bed, fine china and silver gracing her table. Instead, she’d wound up in a broken-down cabin, all but alone in the middle of Indian country, with a lifetime of hardship and struggle ahead of her. “Is there any whiskey around here?”
Skye glared at him and set her hands—which were probably just as work-worn as Bridget’s—on her hips. “No,” she said, peevish. “And this is no time to be drinking anyhow, Trace Qualtrough. I don’t know what you could be thinking of.”
He would have laughed if he hadn’t been so afraid Bridget would never open her eyes. “It’s good for cleaning wounds,” he told her gently. “How about carbolic acid? Or quinine?”
She shook her head. “No,” she fretted, “and there’s no doctor in Primrose Creek, either. Gus might have some medicine at the mercantile, though.”
The store had been well stocked, Trace reflected. He was pretty sure he’d gotten most of the venom out of Bridget’s snakebite, but he didn’t like to leave her. Her forehead was hot as an oven brick, and it wasn’t a good sign, her not waking yet. Nonetheless, he shook his head and replied, “I’ll go. You stay right here next to Bridget. Talk to her, so she knows she isn’t alone.” So she won’t slip away.
Skye cast a glance toward the open door. “No,” she said. “No, I’ll go—I’ll take Sis and be back in no time at all.”
“Skye—” Trace began. He wasn’t inclined to argue. Skye was a vulnerable young woman, and Primrose Creek was a dangerous place.
She’d backed all the way to the threshold. “You can’t stop me,” she said. And then she bolted.
He should have chased her, brought her back, he knew, but he was bound to Bridget somehow, as surely as if there had been a short but strong cord stretched taut between them. “Be careful,” he muttered, and set his jaw when he heard Skye and the little mare crossing the creek with a lot of splashing, yelling, and whinnying.
Then he laid the back of his right hand to Bridget’s forehead and thought, couldn’t help thinking, what it would mean to lose her. In the hard years since he and Mitch had ridden away to war, he’d sustained himself with the simple knowledge of Bridget’s existence, recalling the sound of her laughter, the fire of her temper, the deep blue of her eyes. To him, she’d symbolized everything good about home. Whatever the distance between them, real and figurative, he’d carried her with him every step of the way, a secret saint hidden away in his heart.
“Don’t go,” he whispered.
Her lashes fluttered, and she murmured something, but she hadn’t heard him. She was wandering through the red mists of a fever, he knew, perhaps lost, seeking a way out. She would live if she could, no doubt of that. Bridget McQuarry might have been a little thing, small-boned and fragile-looking as a canary bird, but she had the spirit of a Roman warhorse.
He brushed his lips across the backs of her knuckles and settled in to keep his vigil.
She dreamed she was back in Virginia. It was twilight, and the cicadas and fireflies were out. A jagged shard of moon hung in the sky, transparent as a thin layer of mica, and the collapse of the Union was still far off, a troublesome possibility, a topic men discussed after supper, while they smoked their cigars and drank their brandy.
Bridget sat in the swinging bench on the veranda; she heard the familiar creak of the supporting chains as she rocked and dreamed. It was getting chilly, but she didn’t want to go inside, not yet. She wrapped her arms around her middle and went on savoring it all: the scent of the lush flower garden her late grandmother had started as a bride, the distant lowing of the cows, and the nickering of horses. The house, a three-story structure of whitewashed wood, with green shutters at each of its many windows, brimmed with light and noise and family behind her—she heard her cousin Christy pounding doggedly at the ancient organ in the parlor, heard Skye and Megan chasing each other through the downstairs rooms, squealing with delight.
And Mitch was beside her on the swing, hidden in shadow, holding her hand. She was completely happy in those moments, though even then she knew that the sturdiest of blessings could be snatched away in the blink of an eye.
She had only to think of her grandmother’s passing to be reminded that life was a fleeting and oft-times frail gift. Rebecca had gone riding one perfect summer morning, and when Bridget saw her again, Granddaddy was carrying her across the meadow toward the house, tears shining on his face. Something had spooked Rebecca McQuarry’s prize gelding; she’d been thrown and struck her head on a stone. She was already gone when Granddaddy and Uncle Eli found her.
“Bridget?”
She started a little; she’d thought Mitch was beside her, there in the swing, but the voice belonged to Trace Qualtrough. She fidgeted with the soft organza of her dress. Where was Mitch?
He took her hand, Trace did. “Don’t go,” he said.
Her heart flailed, like a wounded bird trying to take wing. She picked up the ivory-handled fan lying in her lap and stirred the air in front of her face, for it felt uncommonly warm all of the sudden. “Go? Don’t be silly, Trace. Where would I go?”
His hold tightened on her hand, a firm grip but not a painful one. “There’s nobody I care about more than you, Bridget,” he said. “God help me, it’s always been that way.”
She frowned, but something caught up her spirit and carried it skyward in a dizzying rush. Her heart pounded, and the fan picked up speed. She started to speak, had to clear her throat and start again. “You don’t mean it.”
“I do mean it. Right or wrong, it’s so.”
Didn’t he know she was going to marry Mitch? That had always been understood. Mitch needed her; he’d said so himself, a thousand times. She was his strength, she was his soul. She was his honor, and all his courage came from her. He could not imagine a life without her at his side.
“Mitch,” she said, a little desperately. “I’ve got to marry Mitch. I promised.”
“You don’t love him. You know you don’t.”
It was true, Trace was everything to her that she was to Mitch, but she could not allow that to be so. She’d long since decided that. “No,” she whispered. “Please—no.”
If he’d kissed her then, she would have been lost, but he didn’t. He touched her hand to the side of his face, held it there lightly for a mere moment and for the length of eternity, and then he stood up, said good night, and walked away without looking back.
And there would be another time when he didn’t come back. A time when she needed him more than she ever had or ever would. A time when he’d failed her.
“Bridget?” She didn’t open her eyes, though he sensed that she was beginning to awaken. Skye had gone to town and returned with both whiskey and carbolic acid, bought from Gus on credit, and Trace had treated Bridget’s wound with the latter several times, in the hope of staving off infection. Her skin had blazed with heat all day, but now, with evening creeping across the land, shadow by shadow, a deep chill had seeped into her, and that scared Trace more than the fever had.
“She’s not getting better,” Skye breathed, “is she?” She looked stricken, and little wonder. Bridget was surely one of the cornerstones of her life: sister, mother, friend. “She’s—she’s shivering.”
Trace nodded. Then, on an impulse, he wrapped Bridget in bed quilts, gathered her up in his arms, and carried her over to the stove. There he sat, rocking her back and forth, staring down into her face with fierce concentration. Willing her to hold on.
Skye made supper, fed Noah, put him to bed, and lay down beside the child in her clothes.
Trace did not relinquish his hold on Bridget but held her through the night.
It was almost dawn when, at last, she opened her eyes, blinked, and stared at him with something resembling amazement. “The snake—?” Terror seized her; she struggled to sit up. “Noah!”
He held her firmly. “Noah is fine,” he said. “You’re the one who was bitten.”
She gnawed at her lower lip, and he could see
that she was debating with herself: believe, don’t believe. “My son—where—?”
“He’s sound asleep. He and Skye.”
She let her head rest against his shoulder, and even though he knew it was weakness, not affection, that made her snuggle in close like that, he treasured the sensation. He’d come so near to losing her.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. He might have had sandpaper in his throat, the way he sounded.
She shook her head. Then, very softly, “You saved me, didn’t you?”
He grinned; couldn’t help it. She was alive. “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. There’s still some swelling, and I reckon you’re sore as all get-out, whether you’ll admit as much or not. You’re going to have to rest for a few days.”
She blinked, stiffened in protest. “A few days?” she echoed. He might have said she’d never walk again, if you went by her tone. “That’s impossible! There’s the gardening to do, and the cooking—”
He laid a fingertip to her lips to silence her. “We won’t starve, Bridget.”
“But winter is coming, and—”
“And I’m here. So is Skye. You could still get in trouble with that bite if you don’t take care of yourself. Where would Noah and Skye be then?”
That gave her pause, though it was obvious that she wasn’t one bit pleased at the prospect of giving in.
As a lady of leisure, in fact, Bridget was hopeless. She let Trace put her in bed and cover her up, let Skye bring her tea and Noah tell her stories, but her eyes were big and frightened, and in between long slides into healing sleep, she fussed and fretted.
Trace worked all day, cutting wood for the roof, but he came in often to check on Bridget. Skye looked after Noah, and the two of them weeded the garden and carried water and kept Bridget company whenever she was awake.
Trace took a bath in the creek at sundown, put on clean clothes, and went into the cabin. Skye had made a simple but flavorful hash for supper, and he managed to pester Bridget into taking a couple of bites. There were big dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was bluish-pale, like thin milk. He knew she was in pain, knew also that he would never hear her say so. The bite was still angry, but the swelling was going down, and there was no sign of infection.
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