Choices of the Heart (10 page)

“Zach wants her,” Griff added, bent over the wood to study the swirling grain of the pine board. From the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker in the window, the pale blur of a face. “She’s his.”

“He’s already fallen for that pretty face?” Momma clattered the lid to the water tank. “I don’t believe it. She’s gotta be too smart for that. He don’t know nothing about anything.”

“He’s kind, and maybe that pretty face is enough. Either way—” Griff turned. He had to tell Momma now, if that was Bethann outside the window. She’d come inside in a moment and say what had happened and make her accusations. If Momma believed her eldest daughter, if Pa believed Bethann, and if his own suspicions about his sister were right, the shots ringing over the mountain wouldn’t be coming from hunting rifles.

And someone in either family would no doubt be dead.

“He got three weeks’ acquaintance on me, you see,” Griff blurted out.

Momma spun to face him. “How? You set out together.”

“Yea, but I got stabbed along the way. Ambushed.”

The stove lid clattered to the floor. The back door burst open, and Bethann shot into the kitchen on a wave of warm air smelling of pungent farm animals and fragrant herbs.

“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 around 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.