Choices of the Heart (3 page)

She began to count in unison with the little girl, while the others scattered around the house and grounds. A man with an accent Zach recognized as English, due to visitors to the mountains, called out to Miss Esther, and she stopped counting. Several people drew closer to the gate. Zach stepped back into the shadow of the garden wall, poised to run if someone opened the gate.

Miss Esther disappeared into the gloom of falling night.

Midnight. Four hours away. That meant her family did not want her to go, but she was coming anyway, coming despite him telling her what had delayed Griff.

Four hours to cool his heels in an unfamiliar town. It was a small town, he supposed, not like some they’d seen on their way east, but large enough no one had looked at him and Hannah oddly when they rode through. They could return to the public house on the square, have dinner, learn what they could of Miss Esther Cherrett. Maybe they could find out why a young lady living in a fine house, with people who wanted her around, would choose to answer Aunt Lizbeth’s advertisement in the Richmond newspaper and come teach mountain folk like them. Aunt Lizbeth said it was a calling of the Lord, most like. Hannah and cousin Bethann both said it was something else. Zach thought it could be good to have her in their midst.

Zach joined Hannah with the horses, and they walked into the square. The public house looked crowded, noisy, and smoky. No place he wanted to take a meal.

“I don’t mind it,” Hannah said. She and her husband had lived in a town for a while. “I’ll go in and get us supper.” She disappeared into the sea of people.

Zach waited in the dark.

“Maybe she won’t come,” Hannah said when she emerged.

But she did. At midnight by the striking of the church clock bell, Miss Esther Cherrett appeared at the gate carrying two bags. “Mrs. Gosnoll? Mr. Brooks?” she called. “There’s more. I’ll change my dress and bring them down.”

Zach moved the bags into the alleyway but remained by the gate waiting, watching the back of the house. She would come now. She wouldn’t leave her things at the gate with them and not come back . . . would she?

No, she wouldn’t. Past midnight, according to the church clock, she appeared as a shadow against the back of the house, more bags in her hands and a bundle over her arm.

She reached the gate, breathing a little heavily, and let her parcels fall to the ground with too loud a thud. “I’m ready to leave now.”

Not a hint of a quaver, no hesitation. Only determination.

Beauty, courage, determination. As usual, Aunt Lizbeth Tolliver was right when she said Miss Esther Cherrett possessed the right character for the position.

And for a wife for either her son or her nephew.

“Her nephew,” Zach mouthed, then stepped forward to lift the first bag. The oilskin sack proved heavier than its relatively small size implied. He hefted it onto his shoulder but gave Miss Esther a quizzical glance she couldn’t possibly see.

“And I thought we were the ones with the lead mine,” he muttered.

“Books,” she said.

“Right wise of you. We don’t have much in the way of books on the ridge.”

And he hadn’t read any of the ones in his mother’s collection, not more than the bits she had made him read and take to memory. Of course this lady would be bookish. It was why Aunt Lizbeth had picked her for the position. And she would want a man who could discuss those books with her.

So he’d be catching up on his learning. Might be good for him with the mines and all. Maybe she could start his book learning along the way, give him an advantage over Griff.

First he had to get her on her way with them.

When she turned to latch the gate behind her, Zach realized the bundle over her arm was her own skirt, or the extra fabric of the skirt. She wore a riding habit. He’d seen them on his few visits to a town. They did well for a lady riding sidesaddle.

Their horses weren’t broke to a sidesaddle.

Zach’s heart sank. She might refuse to go once he informed her she would have to ride astride for over three hundred miles. Might as well get it over with at once.

“Our horses ain’t broke to a sidesaddle, Miss Esther.”

She flashed him a smile. “Then it’s a good thing I have lots of fabric in my skirt.” She shook out the excess folds.

“You could make two dresses out o’ that material,” Hannah said. “Kind of a waste, isn’t it?”

“Not to preserve my modesty, it isn’t.” Miss Esther sounded just a bit uppity.

Zach laughed. Hannah needed that jab now that her husband ran the mine and made more money than his in-laws did as yet, for all the Brookses and Tollivers owned it. He liked Miss Esther’s spirit.

He liked her too much.

“Let’s get goin’.” He spoke sharply and turned his back on the women, expecting them to follow.

They did—down the alleyway and around the graveyard to a copse of trees where four horses stood. Three served for riding and the fourth for supplies. They weren’t about to waste money on inns in this fine weather. For this night, they needed to ride fast and far in case Miss Esther’s parents came after them.

She had chosen to come. She said she was old enough to make the decision on her own, and if she wanted to stay, Zach wasn’t about to stop her. But he longed for her to come with them, to save them all from destroying one another.

They mounted and headed through the quiet village. None of them spoke. Apparently Miss Esther could ride astride without too much complaint. Zach would find out how that came to be, there on the coast where ladies rode sidesaddle or not at all. Her back was straight, her head high, her ridiculous skirt draped over every inch of her legs right to the tops of her feet. In contrast, Hannah’s legs showed from mid-calf down. Boots covered her. The practice seemed normal to Zach. Compared to Esther Cherrett now, it seemed vulgar.

If Miss Esther was appalled by them, she showed no sign of it. She remained silent, riding at an easy canter. All the way to Norfolk and beyond, to where the fine plantations began to march along the James River.

At dawn, they stopped in woods around one of those plantations.

“We’ll have some breakfast here and rest the horses,” Zach said. “I’ll get a fire going while you and Hannah fetch water.”

Miss Esther didn’t follow Hannah to the creek. She stood beside her horse with her hands on her hips. “Tell me about this cousin who was stabbed.”

Zach paused in the act of loosening the saddle cinch on his horse. Hannah halted halfway to the creek.

“Griff.” Zach looked away, though she likely couldn’t read his expression in the poor light. “He was ambushed on our way here. We stopped like this and went for firewood and . . .” He shrugged. “I best be getting that firewood or we’ll be taking too much time.”

She started to ask another question, but he entered the trees with a crunch of last year’s pine needle carpet and scattered cones, drowning her out. Maybe by the time he returned, he could talk about the attack on his cousin long enough to satisfy Miss Esther’s questions. They surely wouldn’t be too many. She had come with them, after all.

Zach paused in the act of gathering branches from a lightning-struck, dead tree.

Aunt Lizbeth had said she hadn’t told Miss Esther about the fighting for fear she wouldn’t come at all. “Can’t have her finding out and turning back halfway here.”

He shouldn’t have mentioned Griff’s attack, as the bruise on his ankle from Hannah’s kick indicated. Esther Cherrett had come anyway, strutting out of her parents’ house in her fancy city clothes like she ran off every night.

But maybe she did, and that was why she needed to start again where no one knew how to find her. A fine female to take into the Tolliver household and teach the young’uns the right way to go on in the world.

Zach smiled and ripped several branches from the downed tree. They snapped off. Good. Not rotten to the core and likely to burn too fast. A fairly recent lightning strike then. Easy wood for the small fire he wanted, just good enough to fry up some bacon and boil some coffee.

He took too long gathering more wood. Sunlight was beginning to stream through the foliage as he returned to the clearing where Hannah had already begun a small fire and set water to boil. Miss Esther perched on a log to one side, her head bowed over her hands as though she were praying. She looked up at his approach. A beam of sunlight shot between two branches and concentrated on her face.

Zach dropped the pile of branches in his arms. It crashed to the ground with a clatter, snap, and crunch of breaking, colliding wood. Hannah cried out a protest. He ignored her and stared.

Miss Esther Cherrett’s beauty took his breath away. Her hair wasn’t just dark brown. It was like fine wood polished and set with bands of copper and gold. Her skin was as fine and smooth as one of Aunt Lizbeth’s china bowls that she prized like her children, and wide, dark eyes gazed at him from beneath ridiculously long lashes.

“You’re staring,” Hannah muttered out of the side of her mouth.

“Sorry.” Zach glanced away, then back.

For less than a heartbeat, his eyes met Miss Esther Cherrett’s. Then her eyelashes swept down to shield those gold-flecked orbs, and her cheeks paled.

“Will you stop acting like a loon and feed the fire?” Hannah commanded.

“Yea, sure.” Zach crouched to feed more wood to the fire. When he heard footfalls heading toward the creek, he made himself concentrate on the burning branches and not on watching Miss Esther walk away.

“She’s right pretty,” Hannah said. “And in a heap of trouble, I expect.”

“Yea, she came with us for some reason, sounds like. Even with me telling her about Griff.” Zach raised his head to watch Miss Esther kneel beside the creek.

She splashed water onto her face. She then took a comb from her pocket and raised her hands to her hair to twist and tuck and pat every strand into place.

Yes, she was indeed a lady, to care so much about being neat on the trail.

He glanced up at Hannah. “She’s got courage.”

“Either that,” Hannah said as she set the spider over the fire, “or her trouble’s bad enough she’s willing to risk being in the middle of our troubles.”

“Should we bring her along after all?” Zach watched Miss Esther rise in one fluid motion, then stand staring down at the water, her hands clasped behind her back as though she contemplated deep thoughts, prayed, or perhaps simply admired the ripple of light on the water.

Hannah glanced over her shoulder. “I’m thinking she’s wondering if she should come along.”

“She’ll come.”

Zach didn’t take his eyes off of her as she straightened her shoulders, turned, and marched back to the fire with a long-legged stride of self-confidence. Her rounded chin was set firm beneath a half smile, though she looked past rather than at him.

“What may I do to assist you?” she asked.

Hannah smirked. “Can you make coffee?”

“Of course.” Miss Esther set about pouring water into the battered tin coffeepot, spooned in grounds from a bag, and set the pot on the edge of the fire without a second’s hesitation.

Zach glanced at Hannah, who stared at Miss Esther wide-eyed.

She looked up from her preparations and smiled. “Why are you so surprised I can make coffee on a fire? I told Mrs. Tolliver of my skills, which she said were why she wants me for the position. She said something about primitive conditions in the mountains. I can assure you, some of the conditions at fishermen’s huts . . . where my mother and I . . .” She faltered for the first time. “Why—why are you staring at me?”

Zach didn’t have words to express the sense of a dozen butterflies beating their wings around the inside of his ribs.

But Hannah laughed. “You’ll do, Miss Esther Cherrett. You’ll do right well.”

“For a position as a teacher, yes, I am well-educated thanks to my parents—”

“No.” Hannah sliced her hand through the air between them. “As a wife for Zach or Griff.”

3

She should not have brought her sketchbook along after all. If Zach Brooks or Hannah Gosnoll found it, Esther would simply have to run farther west, off to the barely civilized plains, and take her risks with the Indians. Or maybe down the Mississippi to New Orleans or on a ship to the West Indies or Europe, anywhere to hide her shame.

Too many of her sketches—images conjured from dreams she had abandoned long ago—could pass as portraits of Zachary Brooks, right down to the wheat-gold hair and sky-blue eyes. If he saw those drawings, the colors shaded with chalks, he might, just might, think she agreed with his aunt that she would make him a fine wife. He already looked at her like she was one of her mother’s candied violets.

She shuddered, and the temptation to head back east to Seabourne left her shaken and hollow inside. The two desires of her life ripped her in two—go home to parents who loved her and would now be worrying about her, or go on and worry herself over pushing away suitors while trying to civilize the younger children of the families, now that they had discovered lead on their land and needed an education to ensure no one swindled them. Now that the families had ambitions, apparently.

“Not me,” Esther said between clenched teeth. She realized her error and added, “Not I. I have no intentions of marrying.”

“Pretty girls always do,” Hannah said.

She was a more than passably pretty girl herself with the same pale gold hair and blue eyes her brother possessed. But her skin needed protecting from the sun, as it had darkened to a honey brown, and lines at the corners of her eyes made her look all of her thirty or so years.

Esther rubbed a finger along her as-yet unmarred complexion and looked first Hannah and then Zach in the face. “I mean what I say. I am not coming to the mountains or going anywhere else to find a husband. The idea of marriage—”

She stopped before she said it sickened her. They either wouldn’t understand or would understand too much.

“Does not appeal to me,” she concluded.

Hannah and Zach exchanged glances, then burst out laughing.

“Can you teach me to do that?” Hannah asked. “I can use it on cousin Bethann when she gets on her high horse.”