Choices of the Heart (30 page)

“Except it might lead to knowing what varmint stabbed my brother,” Hannah protested. “A left-handed thrower, seeing as how it’s his right side that’s been hit.”

“As with me,” Griff said.

“They were too inebriated to have come this far.” Esther turned her back on them and knelt again to fuss over Zach, drawing up the quilt and tucking it around his shoulders.

His bare shoulders. Whether or not Zach was injured, Esther should show more decency than being there with a half-naked man, tending him, touching him, her soft hands caring for Zach as they had cared for Griff’s face.

He raised his hand to the sticking plaster on his cheek, the blackened eye above it. “I can’t hardly see where I’m going. Took me nearly all day to find you.”

“I’m sorry.” Esther stilled with the back of her wrist to Zach’s brow, the sort of gesture a mother would perform on a sick child, or maybe a wife for her ailing husband. “I should have left a message.”

“You did,” Griff snapped. “Several of them.”

“What?” Esther surged to her feet, came down hard on her injured foot, and gasped.

“What did you do to her, you beast?” Hannah cried.

“Nothing,” Griff and Esther answered together.

“I stepped on a sharp stone last night, is all.” Esther gave Hannah a tight smile and hobbled forward. “Will you tend to Zach? He needs more cold water on his brow. He’s still burning up. But the willow bark tea seems to be helping with the pain. Will you give him some more in a few minutes?”

“You’re leaving?” Hannah’s eyes widened. “Esther, you can’t go now.”

“No, no, but Griff must. He’s not welcome here.”

Esther wouldn’t be either if Griff spoke one word about those notes beneath her bed. The temptation to ask her about them in front of Hannah ran hot through his veins. Aunt Tamar suffered from rheumatism and rarely left her house, but she was one of the most God-fearing woman Griff knew and wouldn’t tolerate a fallen woman in her house, teaching her children, or courting with her son.

He gazed at Esther—her gown specked with blood, her face drawn with fatigue, and her hair spilling over her shoulders in tangled waves—and the notion of her being a fallen woman uprooted itself from his brain. She must be innocent, or so good her past didn’t matter. She had spent all day tending an injured man after patching Griff up until late the previous night. She wasn’t complaining. She was thinking of him, of getting him away from his hostile kin.

He wanted to get her away from his hostile kin even if they weren’t hostile to her. He closed the distance between them and took her hands in his. “Do you need me to carry you?”

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea. But I’ll accept your arm.”

He offered her his arm. She leaned upon it heavily and half walked, half hopped out of the sparsely furnished parlor and onto the front porch. Coolness met them there from a breeze blowing down the mountain. It carried the scents of sun-warmed pines and roses from Aunt Tamar’s garden, the sort of place he wanted on his side of the ridge, the sort of place for a man to ask a girl for courting rights.

He couldn’t ask anything courting-like of Esther now, with the words of those messages burning his eyes.

Heart heavy, he released his arm from her hold, crossed both arms over his chest, and leaned against the side of the house. “I thought you ran away with one of my horses.”

“I couldn’t walk here.” She rested her hip against the porch railing and gripped the bar, her knuckles white. “I didn’t take the time to write anything, so what do you mean by me leaving you a message?”

“I went looking for you. They was spilling out from under your bed.”

“They were?”

“Yea, right,
were
spilling out.”

“I wasn’t correcting your grammar, Griff, I was expressing surprise. They were tucked up too tightly to fall out by accident.”

“They weren’t tight when I went hunting you. They wa—were spilling all over the place bright as pennies.”

“And you read them, as someone hoped you would.” Her face was so pale, her eyes and hair appeared black in contrast. “That person must know—you know—”

“That you weren’t welcome in Seabourne, yes, ma’am, that was clear from the start. What I don’t know is why.” He leaned forward, though a yard and a half still separated them. “Why do they hate you so much?”

“I told them a truth they didn’t want to hear. They wanted to believe anything but that the man with the goose that laid the golden eggs was guilty—” She pressed a hand to her lips. “I can’t talk about it. It hurts.” She pressed her other hand to her middle. “Because you won’t believe me either.”

“I need to know. I have brothers and sisters to protect.”

“From what? A female with loose morals, when your own sister has had one child without benefit of a husband and appears to be—” She shut her mouth.

Griff sighed and rested his head back against the log wall of the house. “I shouldn’t have read your letters. I thought you’d run off. I wanted to know why.”

“You know why, Griff.” She dropped her voice to a murmur so low he had to move closer to hear. “If I had run away, you would have known why.”

“Because I kissed you?”

“Because I kissed you back. Because I used your attraction to me to persuade you to do what I wanted. Because you thought me a wanton for it.”

“I didn’t.”

“Your anger said as much.”

“That’s because I—”

He gazed down at her, so pretty and so tired, her shoulders slumped as though carrying the Tolliver clan on her shoulders, and knew he had compounded her burden with his accusation. He also knew he didn’t care about whatever had driven people to write the vicious words in those letters and sent her running to the mountains. He loved her. He had known he loved her since he’d thought she was gone.

He opened his mouth to tell her so, but then he recalled how she had touched Zach’s brow, had smoothed the quilt over his bare shoulders with loving tenderness, and he couldn’t humiliate himself that way. She had run to Zach’s side without so much as thinking he, Griff, might worry about her.

She had kissed him, but maybe that was just the moment, gratitude for his rescuing her, the night woods. She’d wanted away from his hold soon enough after that.

“You lowered yourself to teasing me to get away from me,” he said at last. “That made me angry with you.”

“Why? Because I used my wiles on you or because I wanted away from you?”

He smiled and stroked his thumb down her cheek. “Because you didn’t want me holding you.”

“You read the notes. Maybe now you know why.” She turned her face, and he held his breath, thinking she might kiss his palm. Then she tilted her head away from him. “I wish they were wholly untrue.” She slid sideways along the rail and placed distance between them. “There now, you may not want me to come back, but for now I’m the best chance Zach has of surviving this attack, and I’m staying until he’s well.”

“Then you’ll return to us?” he asked.

She gazed at him from beneath her lashes for a long moment, then inclined her head. “If you still want me . . . to teach your siblings, that is.”

Oh, he wanted her to teach his siblings, to grace his table, to sit beside him and sing in the evenings. He simply wanted her.

“Come back to us,” he said. “And don’t let Zach win your heart while you’re here.”

“My heart isn’t a prize to be won. It’s a cold, unfeeling lump of beating muscle inside my rib cage, and I intend to keep it that way.” She said it so seriously Griff laughed.

“Ah, Miss Esther Cherrett, you don’t lay out a challenge like that to a man from these mountains and not expect him to rise to the occasion.”

For Griff Tolliver, winning her heart was no challenge. If she dared, she would give it to him in a moment. But he knew about the letters. Added to her behavior the night before, he would believe them the more he thought about them.

Esther expected a message to arrive at the Brookses’ at any time telling her not to return to the Tollivers’, that despite Bethann’s behavior, they wouldn’t tolerate a schoolma’am with a questionable past. But the message never came, and the days turned into weeks.

Zach did so well the first two days, Esther thought he would heal quickly. But when she changed the bandage on the third day, her heart dropped to her middle, feeling like the cold lump she had told Griff it was.

“I need to make a poultice for this.” She spoke calmly, not wanting to distress Mrs. Brooks. “It’s not healing as I’d like.”

It wasn’t healing at all. It bore all the signs of sepsis.

“What do you need?” Mrs. Brooks asked. “Onions? I got lots of onions from last year still.”

“Let’s try something gentler first. Milk and stale bread. Maybe a bit of cinnamon.”

She applied the bread and cinnamon poultice, and his fever climbed. She used an onion poultice, and he thrashed about in pain so much he broke open his stitches. The ensuing gush of fluid made even Esther’s gorge rise, and she had experienced all sorts of human frailties. Hannah had been helping her but fled from the room, her hand to her mouth, tears flowing down her face.

Esther didn’t know what else to use. She was a midwife, not a physician, but her pleas for them to send for a doctor met with resistance. Doctors didn’t come to the mountains. Not worth their time and trouble. Doctors took too long to get there. Doctors cost too much money.

Esther knew of a doctor who would come and not cost them a penny. But by the time anyone sent for Rafe Docherty, Zach would likely be dead. Still, she must try somehow to get a message to him.

The consequences to herself didn’t matter. Dr. Docherty would, of course, tell her parents where to find her. She wouldn’t then be surprised to find them on the Brookses’ doorstep telling her to come home. It didn’t matter. Saving Zach did.

“Can you get a letter up to Christiansburg?” she asked Mrs. Brooks.

It was at least seventy-five miles away through rough mountain terrain. That could take as long as three or four days to get there. More than a week there and back. Zach didn’t have a week. He grew thinner and weaker every day. She would have given her hiding place away for nothing.

But she would have tried.

“There’s a physician there, a kind and godly man,” she explained.

At the least, Dr. Docherty and his wife Phoebe could pray. No doubt they were already praying for her.

“How do you know a doctor in Christiansburg?” Mrs. Brooks asked.

Esther smiled. “His wife is a midwife and brought me into the world. She and my mother have been friends for over thirty years.”

“Ah, then they are trustworthy people.” Mrs. Brooks retrieved pen, ink, and paper from somewhere and brought them to Esther. “I’ll send Mattie.”

Esther stared at her. “He’s only fourteen. He can’t travel all that way on his own.”

“He’s a man grown. He’ll do right well. His pa went clear to Roanoke on his own when he was younger than that.”

“I think,” Esther said, “I have been too protected.”

“Of course you have. You’re a female.”

Esther wrote the letter with a hand that shook from fatigue and anxiety over the consequences. She kept it brief.

I am living on Brooks Ridge along the New River and have a patient with a septic stab wound. What do I do? I’m afraid he’ll be dead by the time you get this, but I have to try. Although you will ignore this request, I ask that you please not tell Momma and Papa where I am. I can’t go home.

Esther Cherrett

If Zach died, she couldn’t stay. The Brookses wouldn’t keep her to teach one child, as only Sam would need schooling since Mattie would be needed on the ferry. And Griff wouldn’t want her back, whatever he claimed. She would have to move on, maybe southeast to Charleston, lose herself in a city, with one more death on her conscience.

She walked outside for a breath of fresh air. In mid-July, it was warm and sticky, emphasizing the onion stench of her hair and clothes. The Brookses had provided her with a bath whenever she liked, but a swim in the waterfall pool lured her. A good thing she didn’t know how to find it from the Brooks compound. Otherwise, the temptation to go might prove too great to resist. She couldn’t leave Zach for that long.

With a sigh that didn’t even lift her shoulders, she returned to his sickroom to find him barely breathing.

If something didn’t change by morning, Mattie wouldn’t need to fetch Dr. Docherty.

26

Griff finally tracked his cousins down at the abandoned one-room house of a Neff uncle who had died years before at the hand of a Gosnoll. They appeared to have been doing nothing but drinking for the past week. The house stank of liquor and unwashed bodies.

And worse. They didn’t even rouse themselves when he knocked and walked in, but started up cursing when he flung the door open wide to the sunshine.

“Why aren’t you all working?” he demanded.

They groaned and covered their heads. He hoped they hurt.

“You aren’t getting a thing from the mine if you don’t give a thing to the mine.” He scanned the room, picked up three empty jugs before he found a fourth still mostly full. “If you aren’t at the mine tomorrow morning, don’t any of you go back, and don’t expect a penny.”