Choices of the Heart (18 page)

Pleased with himself, Zach set out across the ridge to the Tolliver compound. He was tired from a day of working the ferry back and forth across the New River, but the prospect of seeing Esther after more than a week filled him with renewed vigor.

He reached the Tollivers’ a little before the sun slipped behind the western mountains and discovered Esther cross-legged in the rocky soil outside her cabin door, two cats on her lap. Her dress and face glowed in the twilight, and a final beam of sunlight touched a copper highlight in her hair.

She was just too pretty for him. He really wanted a wife who was plainer, not likely to cause trouble. But he couldn’t let Griff have her. She would bring more to the Tollivers, things they didn’t deserve, like connections to fine folk in the East.

But she was kind too, with the way she stroked and murmured to the animals on her skirt.

“They probably have fleas,” he greeted her.

She glanced up at him and laughed. “You sound like Griff.”

“Then I take it back. If they had fleas, you wouldn’t be petting them.”

“A clever man.” Her smile melted him, melted the moment of resentment toward his cousin for seeing her like this first.

He crouched down in front of her. “How did you get them to come to you?”

“I lured them with fish. The boys spent all afternoon catching it and cleaning it, and I fed it to these cats. But they appreciate the gift.” She rubbed one cat’s belly. It purred excessively, and Esther drew her brows together.

“Is something wrong?” Zach asked.

“No, but I think she’s—” She shifted her shoulders as though casting off a burden. “What brings you here so late in the day?”

“Tomorrow is Sunday and we don’t have a preacher this week.”

“Yes?” Her hand stilled, but her fingers must have tightened, for the cat meowed and scrambled away.

“Is something wrong about that?” Zach asked. “We’re back here in the hills and not too able of supporting a preacher. Uncle John here takes a notion to say a word, but mostly folk like to just rest.”

“Only the menfolk preach?” She slumped back against the cabin wall. “I was afraid you might ask me to do it because of my father, and . . . well, I’m not that much of a hypocrite.”

“How could you be a hypocrite?” Zach reached out his hand, so wanting to touch her fingers lightly curled on her lap where the cat had lain, but he couldn’t be that bold and not risk offending her.

She snorted. “Easily. But how may I help you?”

Ah, her lovely, precise speech.

Zach’s insides surely held as much strength as pine sap in the spring. “Will you teach the little ones about the—”

The atonal melody of a tuning instrument drifted from the far side of the big house.
Twang
,
twang
,
twang
.

Zach shot to his feet. Unfair of Griff to bring out his dulcimer on this warm, dark night. Surely it would lure her to him, away from Zach.

She didn’t move. She made no indication that she so much as heard the first soft cord drawn across the strings.

Zach moved to lean against the wall beside her and gazed down upon the top of her head, the coiled hair still shining in the last glimmer of twilight. “I’m thinking you could tell stories from the Bible to the children tomorrow.”

Slowly she shook her head. “I won’t do it without asking a preacher first.”

“Sure, I understand that.” Zach suppressed a sigh of disappointment.

Griff began to strum and pluck the dulcimer, and Esther’s head shot up. “What is that? It sounds a bit like a Spanish guitar, but maybe softer.”

“It’s a dulcimer.” Zach couldn’t suppress this sigh. “Griff plays. And he sings. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but I’m a fair dancer if—if you’ll consider going with me to the celebration, that is. Maybe the Independence Day service too, and I can introduce you to the preacher, though I suppose Mrs. Tolliver will . . . want . . .” He laid his head back against the logs and closed his eyes, wishing he knew when to shut his mouth.

With one graceful motion, she rose and glided to her door. “I already told Griff I wouldn’t go with anyone. I’m here to teach, regardless of what your mommas want me here for. I’ll take the children.” She lifted the latch and flashed him a smile. “But I like a good reel as much as the next person.” Then she slipped inside and closed the door behind her. A bolt shot home.

A reel was hardly compensation for her not arriving on his arm, yet better than nothing. But what stood out most in Zach’s mind was that she had already turned down Griff—Griff, who promised he would let Zach court her and had gone ahead and asked her to the Independence Day celebration.

He followed the lure of the music around the house and up the front steps of the porch. Griff perched on a low stool, his dulcimer flat across his lap. None of the other Tollivers ranged about him, though Zach suspected Bethann wasn’t far off. She loved music. She sang in a high, clear voice and often used to sing in church. Then Henry Gosnoll married Hannah, and Bethann sang no more in front of other folk, just her family.

Griff did sing, in smooth, resonant tones he kept to a low pitch in the settling quiet of the night. A ballad passed down from the Old Country: “Barbara Allen.” Sweet and sad and with a warning embedded in the lyrics, a warning to maids not to be heartless. Or perhaps to young men not to be foolish over a maid.

And from his grave grew a red, red rose,

From her grave a green briar.

They grew and grew to the steeple top

Till they could grow no higher.

And there they twined in a true love’s knot,

Red rose around green briar.

Zach stood with one foot propped on the top step and waited for the last note to die away before he spoke. “Why did you ask her?” he demanded in the ensuing stillness.

“Momma told me to.” Griff strummed the narrow, flat instrument. “She doesn’t abide me telling you you can court her. But she said no, as I knew she would.”

Zach’s heart lightened. “She did? When I saw you two at the pool . . . well, I thought you looked pretty friendly.”

“As when I left.” Griff laughed and set the dulcimer aside. “I had to ask to keep Momma happy, but I ensured she wouldn’t say yes.”

“How?”

“I told you. She’s running away, and I pushed to find out why. She’s right secretive about it, so she doesn’t want to be around me much. Happy now?”

Zach wanted to say yes. Instead, he felt like punching his cousin in anger for the first time in his life.

Esther leaned out her window, but only the faintest strains of the music drifted through the night. Each soft note plucked at a cord in her heart, drawing her as though she were attached by a rope and being pulled out of the door, across the yard, and around the house.

She didn’t come from a musical family. Papa sang well enough, Momma and the boys not much at all. But Esther had learned to lift her voice in songs of praise from the time she was a small child and figured out she remembered Bible verses better if she sang them.

Now, gripping the sill to keep herself anchored in her safe little chamber, she made up her own melody to go with the arpeggiated chords crowding through the window and battering her ears.

Can anything be
more lovely than music in the night . . .

She gritted her teeth to stop herself from singing aloud. She possessed such a loud voice that if she sang, someone in the house might hear her.

If only the musician were one of the girls or even Mrs. or Mr. Tolliver. She could slip out and listen closer. But Zach said it was Griff with complete certainty, as if he knew no one else would play the gentle stringed instrument. That Griff could draw such tender notes from strings with those broad, calloused fingers seemed impossible. She thought musicians had long, slender hands, white and smooth hands.

No one on the mountain possessed smooth hands except for her. She rubbed lotion into them every morning and night to keep them soft and smooth. Habit. Only habit. Never again would she need to worry about scratching a patient or marring a newborn’s skin with a sharp nail or rough callous. She had ripped that part from her life, from her heart.

She would fill it with the mountain children. They needed a teacher, education, even the basics of reading. Enough reading so they could pick up their Bible and study what it said.

And now she had promised to ask about teaching a Sunday school.

“What was I thinking?” She pressed her hands to her temples. “Me teach Sunday school. Papa would laugh hard enough to fall off his chair.”

And be pleased.

You’ll do well, my dear.
His voice came through so loud and clear her heart squeezed.

“Oh, Papa. Momma.” She rested her head on her folded arms and shuddered with dry sobs. She should be home in her room readying herself for Sunday, a busy day in the Cherrett household. She shouldn’t be standing at a window in a cabin all on her own, listening to soft strains of music and wanting to join the musician.

But she was there, and she would keep her word. She would fill up the emptiness inside her with work and the presence of children. She would go over her lessons for Monday on Sunday. Without church, the previous Sunday had been quiet at the Tolliver compound. She expected the same of the morrow.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. After morning chores and breakfast the next day, Mr. Tolliver gathered the family in the parlor. For at least half an hour, they sang hymns—old ones Esther knew, ones that might have slipped up the mountains from the work Francis Asbury did in America the previous century. Even Bethann, still too thin and pale but up and about, sang in a surprisingly pretty soprano. The family broke into harmonies, even the children, and their faces glowed with the joy of the music.

Esther’s heart glowed with the joy of listening to the music from Griff’s and Mr. Tolliver’s smooth baritone, to the piping notes of the boys, to Mrs. Tolliver’s alto.

“If you know the words,” Mrs. Tolliver said between songs, “join in.”

“If you can carry a tune,” Brenna muttered.

Griff smiled at Esther. “I’ll be surprised if she can’t.”

Esther’s mouth dried. She swallowed. She licked her lips. She shook her head. “I’d rather just listen this first time.”

No one forced her to sing. They continued, and then from atop a chest Mr. Tolliver pulled down a Bible that looked old enough to have come from Europe a century earlier. It was the size of a gravestone—or not much smaller—and his hands shook as he set it on a table before opening the leather-covered boards. He flipped through the fragile pages and began to read. “‘Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.’”

As Mr. Tolliver read the words in the halting manner of someone not used to reading aloud, Esther laced her fingers together and pressed them hard onto her lap to stop herself from jumping up in protest at the glee in his voice. She didn’t recognize the passage. Early Old Testament, judging from the pages on either side of the spine. Yet she doubted it meant what she guessed he thought it meant—that the Lord stood on the side of the Tollivers.

Peace.
Don’t you want peace?
she wanted to cry.

How could he—crippled up from his injuries, having lost a son and a grandchild and a handful of cousins—want the fighting to continue, to renew after a long hiatus?

Breakfast roiled in her middle. Scenes flashed before her eyes. Oglevie’s face. His reflection in the window. His hands reaching . . .

A hand landed on her shoulder, and she emitted a gasping squeak of surprise.

Mr. Tolliver stopped reading and stared at her. Everyone stared at her.

Griff, close at hand, stared the hardest. “You’ve gone pale, Miss Esther. Do you need some air?”

“It is hot in here,” Mrs. Tolliver said. “The reading’s about done. Take her outside and get her some cool water.”

“No, truly, I’m all right.”

Esther’s protest fell on deaf ears. Griff’s hand beneath her elbow practically lifted her from her chair. At least it placed enough pressure on her to rise that not doing so would have created a scene. So she rose, murmured an apology to Mr. Tolliver, who nodded a response, and stumbled from the room on the heels of shoes wholly inappropriate for the mountains. They exited the front door, descended the porch steps, and rounded the house to where a pump had been installed close to the back door.

Griff drew a cupful of water. He handed it to her without letting their fingers touch, but his gaze caught and held hers, ice-blue enough to cool the May day.

“So,” he said, “tell me what upset you about my father’s reading from Deuteronomy.”

16

Esther’s eyes shifted to the right, then dropped. “I’m not comfortable with vengeance,” she murmured. “It’s wrong. It hurts no one but the person getting the revenge. It’s up to God—” She broke off from a speech that sounded much like someone assigned to recite—no emotions, no conviction in her words, more like a child repeating something her parents told her to know.