Lynna Banning (16 page)

Before she could answer, he began again to rock his body with hers, and in a few moments Erika forgot everything but the flowering of her pleasure with his.

A
fraid she would break into a skip before she reached the kitchen, Erika forced her feet to a sedate pace as she descended the stairs. She could fly! She could sing! She could eat a dozen of Mrs. Benbow’s buckwheat pancakes and scrub three loads of laundry!

Never had a night passed so quickly. Or so pleasurably! She pressed her hands to her hot cheeks, then ran her tongue over her kiss-swollen lips. She had never known passion until last night. Love she had known—love of Mama and Papa. And love of Jonathan ever since that day in the garden.

But not like this. This love was sweet and urgent and freeing.

Passionate,
he had said she was. His voice had shaken when he had spoken the words.

She pushed through the Dutch doors into the
kitchen. Though the sun had barely risen, the interior of the room was already hot, and a delicious cinnamony smell hung in the air. Mrs. Benbow looked up from the stove where she was arranging a batch of freshly baked tarts on a serving platter.

“For tea,” the housekeeper said. “Ted—Mr. Zabersky comes for your lesson today.” She cast an assessing gaze on Erika and stifled a smile.

“Hungry, are ye? You look positively radiant, my girl, so I expect you’re near starvin’, as well. Always thought it odd that lovin’ and eatin’ went together, but.”

Her voice trailed off as Erika threw her arms around her and hugged her tight. “Thank you, Mrs. Benbow. I’ll just get my apron and wash up for you. Then I’ll feed the baby and practice my chords before the professor comes.”

“Baby’s fed already and napping in the parlor. You practice first, lass. Tithonia’s musicale is in two weeks.”

Erika froze with her hands on the apron ties.
Two weeks?
So soon? She wasn’t ready! She would never be ready!

Panic chased away her euphoria. “It’s to be held at Mrs. Brumbaugh’s? Oh, I can’t!”

The housekeeper eyed her. “Now, there’s a word I haven’t heard you use before-’can’t.’ Why ever can’t you?”

“Because it’s Tithonia,” Erika blurted. “And the Presbyterian ladies, the quilting circle ladies, will be there, watching me. Waiting for me to make a mistake in the English or.or proper behavior. I do not know enough.”

Mrs. Benbow paused, the pastry spatula in her uplifted hand. “Sure enough they’ll be there, along with everybody else in town. This is a big moneyraising event for Plum Creek public projects, and everyone who lives here in the valley will be there!”

Erika caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I want Jon—Dr. Callender to be proud of me. Be glad he married me.”

“He’s glad, lass,” the housekeeper replied with a chuckle in her voice. “Should’a seen him this morning. Sang all the way out to the barn to feed the mare, he did. ‘Beautiful Dreamer,’ it was. Seems to me
glad
is more important than
proud.
He’s already had
proud.
And I don’t mind sayin’ it wasn’t enough. There, now, I’ve gone and scorched the porridge!”

Erika watched the older woman duck her head and turn toward the stove.
“Glad” is better than “proud”?

But there was more to it than Jonathan’s approval of her. She wanted to prove her worth, wanted to be proud of herself,
for herself.

That, she admitted, was why she was frightened.
More frightened than she’d been since the day she stepped off the boat in New York’s busy harbor.

Theodore Zabersky showed up on the stroke of four, bent over Mrs. Benbow’s hand with a gallantry Erika hadn’t seen since she left the old country, and started her lesson ten minutes late because his conversational pleasantries kept the housekeeper talking.

Erika’s nerves were on edge. Halfway through her arpeggios, her hands shook so violently she had to stop.

“Never mind, my dear,” the professor offered, his manner unruffled. “I have brought my violin—we will try it again, together.” He unsnapped the black instrument case and lifted out his Eichheimer.

“Now we play it again, from the beginning.”

Erika gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate. C major, then G major, then A minor.

It went badly, and at the end of the hour Erika excused herself from tea and fled to her room, leaving Mrs. Benbow to serve the cinnamon tarts.

She must think! Must get her emotions under control. She thought it strange—laughable, even—that the specter of Tithonia’s disapproval loomed larger than Jonathan’s. After all, he was her husband! Worse, Erika’s own approval of herself mattered more than even Tithonia’s!

“But, why?” she muttered. “Why should that be
true?” She folded her arms on the windowsill and rested her head against them.
Why?

Because,
a voice inside her said,
you want to belong. To be accepted.
Jonathan already accepted her, and he’d shown that last night. Besides, his acceptance was based on things between husband and wife. Between a man and a woman.

How odd it was that she felt more confident today as a woman than as a member of Plum Creek society. As an American. It seemed illogical, but it was true. More than anything else, she wanted to belong, to count in Plum Creek. She wanted it because she believed in the things America stood for—equality and justice. Freedom for everyone.

Yet what did Tithonia Brumbaugh’s charity musicale have to do with these things?

Nothing, she reasoned. And everything. It was the residents of Plum Creek—women—who arranged nursing shifts at Jonathan’s infirmary, supported the school, hemmed blankets for the poor, organized social relief projects. It was women who made a difference in how the town grew. At this very moment they were raising money for Jonathan’s hospital and for his new water system. She wanted to be part of it. She wanted her life to
count.

“Oh, God forgive me,” she moaned. “I do also want to please Jonathan.”

And so you shall,
spoke the voice.
But you must
be yourself. In order to please him, you must please yourself.

“Why could it not be easier?” she asked aloud. “Other women pretend. They all the time put on false fronts. Why not me?”

Because you are not other women. You are you.

“Very well,” she said at last. “I am me, plain Erika Scharffenberger, from little village in Schleswig.”

She lifted her head. “I try my best.”

Three more residents of Plum Creek died from the ravages of cholera before Jonathan sensed the epidemic had peaked. In all, twenty-one people had succumbed over the past two weeks. Erika wept each time he brought home news of another loss.

Now everyone in town and on the surrounding farms boiled their water and moved their privies away from the creek. If only they’d listened to him sooner! If they had paid attention, the two Devitt children and Timmy Ellis would be alive to start school again next month. And Gwen Shaunessey and young Susan Ransom, who served as volunteer nurses, wouldn’t look gaunt and tired. Gwen in particular. Already too thin, the widow looked as if she would blow away in a stiff breeze, and two spots of high color marked her slack cheeks. Twice Jonathan had ordered her home to rest, but she had reappeared
the following morning, donned her starched nurse’s apron and followed him down the row of cots, notepad in hand, as she did now.

He often wondered at Gwen’s devotion to duty, then remembered he had once courted her, before he had married Tess. The widow would not have made him a good wife; she was too set in her preferences. Besides, he discovered he hadn’t a spark of affection for her other than as a friend.

But she made a superb nurse. Slowly he made his evening rounds to check on the hospital patients, Gwen at his elbow. After a day on horseback calling on families in the valley, his back muscles were stiff and his head ached.

The Ransom girl, too, worked long hours on little sleep, taking for granted her apparently limitless energy and recuperative power. Jonathan groaned inwardly. Youth was indeed wasted on the young.

His thoughts strayed to Erika. She was his wife now in body as well as name. She, too, appeared to have an abundance of vitality, undiminished by successive nights of lovemaking. He stumbled over a china chamber pot thinking of it, regained his balance by grabbing the curtain of sheeting separating the infirmary beds.

Plotinus Brumbaugh had helped erect the privacy barriers. Tithonia had disapproved of the ward arrangement and had stitched up the drapes with the
help of Jane Munrow and the Presbyterian ladies’ aid society. Odd, how people reacted in a crisis.

Tithonia had been furious at him all summer for harassing her husband and the rest of the town council about the existing unsanitary water system. But when her niece, Ardith, fell ill and almost died from the bacillus he’d warned them about, Tithonia had proposed the charity musicale to raise money to finance the water project.

The town would have a real hospital! Brumbaugh Memorial it would be called if, as Jonathan suspected, Plotinus and his wife contributed a goodly share of the costs from their own pocket. He thought the matter over as he dictated instructions to Gwen.

“More salted water tonight for the Ottesen boy. And sponge down Mrs. Linderholm about every hour. I believe her fever will break by morning.”

He moved on, touching hands, chests, foreheads, talking over his shoulder. All the while, like a cool river flowing at the back of his mind, thoughts of Erika rose to fill him.

He remembered the day he’d yanked open the front door and found her on the veranda with her dark blue eyes widening in wonder, her lips twisting over the English words. He recalled how she had stood up to him, fisting her small, capable hands on her hips, when he’d discovered the goat.

And he thought of their first time together just a
couple of weeks ago. She was his now. His wife. His property, in effect. Always and forever.

Or was she? Unbidden, other images rose. Erika closeted in the front parlor for her harp lesson with Ted Zabersky. Erika in a new blue sateen afternoon dress, bustling out the front door to attend the ladies’ aid meeting, or help at the Methodist pie social, or.a hundred things.

“No food for Mr. Lander until tomorrow. Ice chips only.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

He moved to the next bed, felt for the thin wrist of eleven-year-old Sally Sinclair, who gazed up at him with adoring brown eyes.

“I’m going to get well, aren’t I, Dr. Callender? I just know it! I have a new pony, and a new dress with puffed sleeves! I’m hungry, and I want something new to read!”

Jonathan smoothed her wiry red hair and suddenly thought of his baby daughter. In a few short years she, like Sally, would be eager for ruffled dresses and leather-bound books.

He straightened, but instead of moving on to the last bed, he stood rooted, remembering that day two weeks ago when Erika had thrust his baby daughter into his arms. He’d handled hundreds of infants, had delivered them, sponged them off, held them while their mothers were bathed and their gowns and bedding
changed. Yet when his own child, Marian Elizabeth-named after his mother, he now recalled—had been plopped against his chest, his heart had all but stopped beating with pure, unvarnished fear. He could not fathom why.

A glimmer of insight made him catch his breath. He felt like a stranger in his own household. An outsider. The land, the structure he’d built on it belonged to him. He’d known Mrs. Benbow since he was a youth, had paid her salary to keep house for him for the past seventeen years. He’d married Erika, made her his in physical fact, and yet.

And yet when he tramped home from the hospital each night, entered the serene, ordered world that Erika had managed to create in the few months since she’d come, he felt left out in some way, as if he didn’t belong there. He had created the family unit—father, mother, child—but
he
seemed to be missing.

He was alienated, he realized suddenly. From his child. From himself. Only with Erika beside him at night did he know himself, understand what he believed in.

But who are you, inside? What manner of man?

He had never asked such questions of himself when Tess was alive. Why had he stumbled into the abyss now, when his heart was full at last, his life blessed?

“Dr. Callender? Are you all right?”

“What?” He gave the nurse a quick nod. “Oh. Of course.”

But he was not, he reflected as he adjusted his stethoscope and bent over the last patient. He was missing something. Something important

The heartbeat underneath the metal chest piece echoed in his ears with satisfying regularity. “You’re as healthy now as the day you were born, Rutherford. But when you go home tomorrow, I want you to drink lots of water—boiled, naturally. And stay away from spirits.”

“Sure, Doc. Thanks.”

“And not one drop of that elixir!”

The medicine hawker nodded. “Maybe I’ll hafta change the recipe a bit.”

Jonathan clapped his shoulder. He’d saved the man’s life, and the lives of scores of others, as well. He was successful at the profession he loved—medicine. He was respected. He’d made a good life in Plum Creek. What could possibly be missing?

Once more he recalled his feelings when Erika had placed his daughter in his arms. Along with pure, heart-stopping fear, he’d felt off balance. Afraid he would fail. Afraid he would lose something precious to him.

Had he separated himself from his own flesh and blood to protect himself? Was he allowing himself to be estranged from his daughter because he himself
had purposely stepped away from her? If that were true, it was only a matter of time before he would distance himself from Erika, as well.

He didn’t want to. But human beings were what they were, and as a physician he knew that in his anxiety he would bring about the very thing he feared. Loss.

For the past month he’d watched children die of cholera, ached at their agony, wept with their parents at gravesites. And all the while he believed such a tragedy would not touch him because.

Because he had not allowed himself to love his child.

Erika had seen it all along. That day she handed Marian Elizabeth over to him, a crack had appeared in the wall.