Choices of the Heart (8 page)

“Yep, he should have. Or sent her away. She and Miss Esther aren’t going to get on at all. I just hope the youngsters—” Griff stopped himself.

No need to tell Zach about his uneasiness regarding the schoolma’am, whether or not she was good for the children. Surely she would keep her religious views to herself and simply teach them what the Bible said. Maybe in doing so, she would come to the truth herself, realize God was always faithful no matter what.

“They’ll like her right much,” he finished.

“How couldn’t they?” Zach stared at Miss Esther without even trying to disguise his expression—pure admiration, longing, need.

Griff’s gut twisted ever so slightly. Too much for him to deny it was a twinge of envy, since Zach had a three-week advantage over him with the lady. Too little for him to convince himself he cared all that much, not enough to start trouble between him and his cousin over her.

“Are you thinking of courting her?” Griff asked.

Miss Esther glanced their way and frowned. Surely she hadn’t heard them.

“May I have some more wood, please?” she asked.

Zach and Griff sprang to produce more dry sticks for her cook fire.

“I should do that,” Hannah said from her log seat. “Better’n sitting here doing nothing.”

“Let your hand rest.” Miss Esther’s face softened as she glanced at Hannah.

Griff removed himself to the far end of the meadow, where the horses grazed and dozed in the shadow of an oak. He untethered two of them and led them down to the creek. In the clearing behind him, Zach remained at the fire, alternating between feeding wood to the blaze and gazing up at Miss Esther Cherrett. He hadn’t answered Griff’s question, but the answer was obvious from the yearning expression on his face—yes, he wanted to court her.

“You may have your chance with her,” Griff murmured beneath the burble of the stream and the drinking horses. “I won’t cause more strife in this family than my sister has already.”

If he could just stop himself from looking at her, from listening to her voice.

He returned to the meadow for the next set of horses. The others were eating and waved him over to the fire, but he shook his head and proceeded to water all the mounts. By the time he finished with the two packhorses, the others had finished their meal. Zach was burying the fire, and Miss Esther was tending to Hannah’s hand like she truly did know what she was doing.

And she must. She carried herbs and the like with her. Though red with a few small white blisters along one side, Hannah’s hand didn’t look as bad as it might have.

Griff pulled up his sleeve to examine the scar just above his left wrist, where he had burned it half a dozen years earlier. Bethann had smeared it with lard, which hadn’t done it a bit of good. The skin had blistered and wept, then settled into a ridged, red pucker. It didn’t bother him now. It didn’t hurt the use of his arm, but that kind of scarring could keep a body from using his hand well.

“What happened?” Miss Esther’s voice glided across his ears, as soft and rich as that ribbon Pa had brought from the city for Momma and the girls before he got hurt.

He glanced up, caught a hint of a scent he didn’t recognize, and looked away. “Burned it.”

“That’s apparent.” Impatience rang in her tone. “How did you burn it?”

“Mule shed caught fire a few years back. I was in getting the stupid beasts out, and burning hay fell onto my sleeve.”

“That must have hurt.”

He shrugged as though it were nothing. In truth, he had been sick with the pain.

She hefted her satchel, passed it from hand to hand. “Did you save the mules?”

“Sure did.” He grinned at her.

She blinked and darted a glance toward the horses. “When will we get home—to your home, that is?”

“We’ll get there day after tomorrow if we ride late. The moon is bright.”

“What about Bethann? She didn’t take her mount.”

“We’ll leave it for her. She can make it on her own.”

“Is that safe? I mean—” She shifted the bag a couple more times. “A female alone and all. Females alone aren’t . . . safe.”

As if she knew anything about danger.

He took her bag from her twitching fingers and started for the horses. “Bethann likes to keep to the shadows. She’ll be right behind us.”

“If you think so.” Mouth tight, which made her lips look fuller instead of thinner like most people’s, she trudged beside him. Her gaze flicked around the clearing’s edges. Yes, somewhere out there Bethann likely lurked, waiting for them to head out. She would fetch her mount then and follow close enough that they could hear her scream if she encountered danger she couldn’t manage herself.

Not that she was likely to encounter danger she couldn’t handle herself. Even if the fighting had begun again, no Gosnoll or Brooks would harm a female or child.

At least not intentionally.

Griff strapped Miss Esther’s satchel onto her horse, then waited for her to ask his assistance mounting. Ignoring him, she took the reins and led the mare over to the log by the fire, stepped onto it, and swung herself into the saddle. Not a bit of petticoat or ankle flashed from beneath the excessively long skirt of her gown.

So she mounted as well as she did everything else.

A lead weight seemed to settle around Griff’s heart, dragging him down, for Zach too watched her, his eyes an intense blue like the sky on a sunny autumn day. Griff knew Momma and Aunt Tamar Brooks hoped the schoolma’am would be a good wife for either him or Zach. The mothers wanted at least one of the sons to marry someone more refined than the local girls now that the lead mine promised the families a bit of prosperity. For the sake of peace, Griff would let Zach try. He didn’t know how much success his cousin would enjoy from a female who didn’t like to be touched.

For a moment, Griff’s blood raced with the potential challenge of simply taking Miss Esther Cherrett’s hand without her flinching away from his nearness. At once he dismissed it as improper, unworthy of the kind of man Momma wanted him to be, unworthy of the vow he had taken to preserve or restore peace at any cost between the families on the ridge.

Annoying things were vows. When a body made them, he didn’t know the cost they would demand.

7

If nighttime had not been so close, Esther pondered after two more days of riding and sleeping on the ground, she would have turned her horse east, north, south, anywhere but a continuing trek west. West and up. And up. She kept glancing back toward the east, where the land lay in darkness and the wind through the trees sounded like the sea.

She ached for the sea, the sharp tang of salt spray, the cleanness of the air. There in the mountain forests, she smelled nothing but leaf mold, damp earth, and the occasional whiff of pine. Not to mention her own reek of wood smoke, horses, and, horrifyingly, perspiration. She wanted a bath, a swim, a bar of her fragrant soap applied more lavishly than quick splashes while bent over a stream allowed. Clear, sweet-water streams, but cold and shallow streams nonetheless.

More than bathing, more than clean clothes, more than a day spent off a jouncing horse, she ached for her feather bed and lavender-scented sheets, a variety of food, and, most of all, peace.

“What have I done?” she asked the space between the mare’s pointed ears. “What have I done?”

She had asked the question a few times after learning of a conflict between the families. But now that she had met Bethann and Griff, had been told that she could be responsible for someone’s death if she said the wrong thing to the wrong person, all Esther wanted to do was run back to the shelter of Seabourne, home, Momma, and Papa. Except she wanted that home to be the one she’d enjoyed before she had gone to the Oglevies’ house when Papa had said to wait for Momma.

She longed for the impossible.

So she remained facing west, perhaps a little south, and always climbing through lush, green forests and past racing streams. Then they reached a river that shimmered and sparkled in the last rays of the sun as though the stars had come out early and drowned themselves in the racing current.

Esther stared at the current, blinked, stared again. “It’s flowing north. I thought rivers flowed south.”

“This is the New River.” Zach walked his horse back to Esther’s. “It flows north to the Kanawha River.”

“So does the Shenandoah,” Hannah added. “Not to the Ohio, but it goes north.”

“I didn’t realize.” Esther ran through all she had learned about geography. She could tell someone how to find Saint Petersburg in Russia but hadn’t known about a river in the commonwealth of Virginia.

A fine teacher she would make for children growing up in these mountains.

“Do you live by this river?” was all she could think to ask.

“Another five miles away or so.” Zach’s face shone as bright as his hair. “My family operates a ferry. Has for fifty years.”

“And the ridge is named for us.” Hannah’s voice rang with pride.

On his mount a dozen yards behind them, Griff said nothing and made no move to ride closer. A shadow on the path farther back suggested Bethann did indeed follow them and Griff remained in the rear to watch over her.

“Our father’s people were here first,” Zach explained.

He already had said so along the way. His mother and Griff’s mother were sisters whose families had resided in the mountains since the Revolution. The Tollivers were relative newcomers, having only been in Virginia’s mountains for the past forty years or so. “They’ve been in America forever, though,” Hannah had admitted reluctantly. “Maybe lived around your people once.”

“I don’t know the name.” Esther would have remembered any family related to Griff Tolliver if they at all resembled him.

For all Zach’s golden good looks, Griff’s dark attractiveness in contrast to his pale blue eyes left her restless and afraid of what she didn’t know—him. It was quite enough to fear. Men who got themselves stabbed without knowing why made poor companions, surely. He made a poor one now, silent and too distant on his roan gelding. The horse blended into the surroundings as mist rose from the river and the sun sank behind the mountains on the other side of the water.

Esther pictured another man sneaking up behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders, grinning at her pallid reflection in the kitchen window.

She jumped and swung toward Zach fast enough to draw her horse into a sidle. “May we go? I want to get home. That is, to your house.”

“You’ll be stopping at the Tollivers’.” Zach’s lips turned down a bit at his words. “I wish you were coming to our house, but they’re further along with their building than we are.”

“They have the school building,” Hannah said. “And most of the mine, though my husband manages it.”

“He must be very intelligent,” Esther responded, as she had the other two times Hannah told her this.

Hannah snorted. “Most of the time. About mines anyway.” She wheeled her horse away from the riverbank and trotted up the path.

“I’m sorry about that.” Zach rode alongside Esther on this wide track along the water. “He’s not the best husband at times, you may as well know. You’ll hear soon enough.”

“I’m sorry.” What else could she say?

She wanted to know nothing of these people’s lives beyond what she needed to know. She should not have interfered with Bethann, but a lifetime of observing her mother and her own training over the past six years had taken over her good sense, and she had to give her advice when it wasn’t sought. She knew better than to do that. But she’d felt so comfortable with Zach and Hannah by then, she thought—

No, she hadn’t thought.

“Lord, how can I ever—” She broke off the silent prayer before it was formed. Praying was before. God had failed to save her when she begged and pleaded. She wouldn’t ask for His help anymore. Mistakes or not, she would manage her future on her own.

She plodded on beside and then behind the Brooks siblings. Darkness settled over them with stars seeming to hang upon the trees, guiding their way, until the moon rose in a brilliant shine to light the way to a fence created of upright saplings stripped of their bark so they gleamed white in the colorless light, and a gate also created out of whole tree trunks.

“A stockade?” Despite the warm summer night, Esther’s skin rose in gooseflesh. “Surely it’s not . . . dangerous here.”

“Not now,” Zach said with dauntless cheer. “But it used to be. The gate’s never locked.”

He dismounted and opened the massive portal. It swung outward without a sound, but suddenly chickens and children and the tallest woman Esther had ever seen swarmed into the yard beyond. Lanterns blazed, and Griff appeared in their midst with an embrace and a word for each person.

“Let me help you down.” Zach reached Esther’s side and held up his hand.

She took it and slid to the ground. The hard-packed earth tilted and swayed beneath her wobbling legs, but Zach’s hand remained beneath hers, strong, hard from labor, not in the least something to flinch away from or fear touching.

She smiled up at him. “Thank you so much for coming to get me. I’m certain we will see one another again.”

“Soon. Very soon. I’ll bring my brothers to the school when it opens. Now come meet Aunt Lizbeth.” He led Esther forward to the tall woman presiding over what seemed like a dozen children swirling around Griff.

The number of children proved to be only two girls and two boys between ten and fifteen years of age. The woman was almost as tall as her eldest son, with his pale blue eyes and remnants of dark hair, and a smile shining with warmth even in the flickering lantern light.

She held out a hand to Esther. “Welcome to Brooks Ridge, Miss Cherrett. So glad you decided to come and civilize these louts of mine.”

“Thank you.”

They were all too good-looking for Esther to consider them louts, though their thick accents as they greeted her—a drawling speech with a hint of a twang—and their homespun clothes and bare feet might give others pause when meeting them on a street. Lead mines or not, they didn’t look prosperous.

“Hannah, Zach,” Mrs. Tolliver called out, “you all want to bide here overnight?”