Susan Johnson (9 page)

All eyes riveted on the fey young girl; shock, disbelief, and chrysalislike traces of hope illuminated in varying degrees on the faces assembled before her. She saw the heartbreaking look of yearning pass between mother and father and saw Hazard’s brief nod.

Blaze spoke first, “He’s our only child. If you can do anything—” Her voice broke, and fresh tears spilled over. Beseechingly she looked at Hazard, who folded her in his arms. Then his eyes came up and held Empress’s in a dark, direct gaze.

“Whatever I have,” he said quietly, “is yours, if you save him.”

She was in there now, desperately working over Trey.

The doctor didn’t expect him to live through the night.

“I
need my saddlebags,” Empress had said quietly in response to Hazard, and a servant had taken off at a run down the hall.

All the rest she required—the boiling water; clean bandages; crockery to mix her medicines and poultices; the bizarre request for a dozen eggs beaten into a froth with cream and vanilla—had appeared in Trey’s room within minutes. Stripping off her damp jacket and pulling off her wet boots, she’d said as politely as possible to the crowd of family, friends, and servants assembled in the room, “I prefer working alone.”

All the faces registered differing combinations of shock and wariness, but Hazard and Blaze, standing at their dying son’s bedside, never questioned her motives. Trey’s breathing was no longer apparent. Only by carefully watching his chest could the faintest motion be detected. And at terrifyingly long intervals. As if his brain, still marginally functional, would occasionally remind the lungs that they needed air. And when the message slowly arrived through shattered and damaged
routes, the lacerated remains of Trey’s body would attempt to follow the instructions.

Hazard squeezed Blaze’s hand.

She looked up at him, her faced wet with tears, and it took every ounce of strength he possessed to keep his voice steady. He had always been her rock; he couldn’t let her down now, although his heart was breaking. “She’s going to take care of Trey now,” he said, and tugged gently on her hand.

“He can’t die, Jon. Tell me he won’t die.” Her plea was a desperate cry for assurance.

Hazard looked at their last surviving child. Their firstborn, who represented so many memories of their love—the baby who could have been killed by the Lakota but wasn’t; the strong, plucky child who had survived all the feared childhood diseases that had taken their other four children. Their only child they hadn’t had to wrap in white velvet and lay in a small coffin with their favorite dolls or toys or warm, soft blanket.

Hazard’s eyes turned back to Blaze, and he answered in the only way that wouldn’t break her spirit. “He won’t die,” he said, thinking that if Trey did, he’d feel like dying himself. He wondered if it was a penance for having too much—the deaths of all their young children. An austerity bred in him by his Absarokee upbringing at times questioned the necessity for all this material wealth.

They had had too much, he sometimes thought. Life was too rich. Their love too grand. Five beautiful children, and power and land and wealth. Then, one by one, the children had been taken from them. One son dead of diphtheria. Another two years later with the same strangling illness, although they’d fought it with every remedy, every prayer, doctors brought in from Chicago. Then, five years later, when Chloe and Eva had died within hours of each other, after they had survived the pneumonia and were seemingly on the mend, he’d feared for Blaze’s sanity. He’d held her for two days, afraid he’d lost her, too, terrified at the blankness in her eyes. He’d talked and soothed and cajoled, promising the world to her, not letting her know their two daughters had been buried, desperate with his own fear.

It was Trey who’d finally broken through the barriers. He’d been away at school and had been sent for when Chloe and
Eva became ill. When he’d come into the room, Blaze looked up, and tears ran down her cheeks. They’d been the first sign of emotion Hazard had seen in two days.

“I’m home, Mama,” Trey had said, and held out his arms.

So, if there was a balance in the natural order of things, if gains required loss, he and Blaze had paid dearly for their wealth. And if Trey died this stark winter night because of the enemies out for his blood, he felt a terrible gut-wrenching need for vengeance. Jake Poltrain wouldn’t live out the day.

The anger mitigated the vast, empty helplessness. He’d known when the doctor took too long to answer his questions. Hazard had seen enough men die in his life to recognize the color of death. He’d known then how slim the chances were. How infinitesimal the hope for their son.

He led Blaze to the door, willing to do whatever was required to save his only child. “We’ll be right outside if you need anything,” he said.

“I don’t want to leave,” Blaze exclaimed abruptly, rebelling against stoic acceptance. Turning, her glance briefly touched on Empress and then went to Trey’s still form. “I can help.” Her voice was suddenly firm, her eyes shiny with tears but determined. “You can’t do it all alone.”

Empress debated momentarily. The beautiful flame-haired woman, dressed in the height of fashion, looked at first sight as frivolous as a butterfly. Large sapphires sparkled at her throat and ears. Her cut velvet dress was recognizably a Worth, blue as a summer sky, sumptuous as a queen’s ransom. Had they been entertaining, or did she dress so for dinner every night out here on the frontier? It seemed another age ago when her own mother had a wardrobe from Paris’s best couturier. But she knew her mother had possessed a strong spirit beneath the genteel facade, and perhaps this woman did too. “It may be fearsome to watch,” she warned cautiously.

“I’ve watched four of my children die,” Blaze said quietly. “Nothing is more fearful than that. Tell me what I can do to help,” she said, finishing with a resolute lift of her chin. “What
we
can do,” she amended, looking up at Hazard.

Hazard’s fingers tightened on his wife’s small hand, and with an apologetic smile at Empress, he said, very softly, “He’s all we have.”

“If I’m doing something for Trey,” Blaze explained, “it’s
like … somehow—” Her eyes filled with tears, and she finished in a trembling whisper, “He’ll know we’re here, and he won’t die.”

Empress understood. Medicine could cure on its own merit, but everything she’d learned from her mother and grandmother, who knew the old herbals by heart, verified that people lived who hadn’t the barest hope of survival, and others died who shouldn’t have. And the difference was their will to live, or caring human contact, or whatever one wished to call that small spark of inextinguishable energy that passed between human spirits.

“Then first,” Empress said, “we have to make him comfortable, take away the pain so his body can begin to heal. You can help. Have some ice brought up to keep the eggnog cold. We’ll feed that to him all night.”

Empress dissolved the sleeproot and pipsissewa powders in a small portion of the eggnog mixture. And then they took turns in the laborious process of dripping it into a small funnel attached to a hollow reed, placed far back in Trey’s mouth. His swallowing reflex took care of the rest.

An hour later, one cup of the eggnog had been administered.

“We have to get a poultice on the wounds,” Empress explained, “now that he’s sedated.” The doctor had extracted the shotgun pellets—at least as many as he could find—and although therapeutic, it was weakening to the patient. Trey had lost considerably more blood.

Empress took dried yarrow from her saddlebags and added enough boiled water to make a thick paste. Hazard helped turn Trey so the wounds on his back could be treated. It was a gruesome mass of bloodied flesh, which Empress gently dressed with the poultice, then wrapped with bandages.

“Now some yarrow tea for him,” she said, and Blaze helped brew a small amount with the boiling water. Hazard, Blaze, and Empress took turns, again bending low over the comatose man, dripping small spoonfuls of the yarrow tea through the funnel-reed apparatus. It had to be accomplished very slowly, so Trey wouldn’t choke or accidentally draw some into his lungs.

Through the night their ministrations continued: fresh rosehip tea to bring him strength; a monkshood brew in a minute
carefully modulated amount (it was poisonous) to reduce the chance of fever; another portion of sleeproot in the rich, chilled eggnog.

“Don’t ask me how it works,” Empress told them once, “but my mother saved a man once who was ravaged by gangrene with her eggnog. It makes new tissue, she says, and heals the old.” Then, a half hour later, another serving of yarrow tea, which slowed the flow of blood, sedated the nerves, and served also as an anesthetic.

Afterward the poultice on Trey’s back was exchanged for an application of monarda oil, an antiseptic.

Then a brew of araica to reduce swelling and the chance of infection.

And so it went.

They spelled each other routinely, hardly speaking, weary with fatigue, but bound by their determination to keep Trey from slipping away.

Hazard often talked to his son in a low murmur, altering occasionally into a quiet, melodic chanting that twice caused a faint eye movement beneath Trey’s closed lids.

They all noticed the almost imperceptible reaction, for each in their own way were watching Trey with vigilance. Hazard looked up at Blaze both times. “It was always his favorite,” he said the first time with a sad smile, and when it occurred again very near morning, he murmured, “The People are watching over him. I can feel it.” Hazard went off by himself shortly afterward to a darkened corner of the large room, sat on the floor, closed his eyes, and remained motionless, as if in a trance.

“He’s praying to his spirits,” Blaze explained. “He sees them and hears them. I wish I had his faith; it gives him infinite strength. He talks to them with reverence, and they to him. It is the mind that leads a man to power, he always says, not strength of body.”

When Hazard returned to Trey’s bedside, he took a thin gold chain with a small bit of rough stone wrapped in fine gold wire from around his neck and carefully placed it around Trey’s. It was the most important spirit medicine in his life, his talisman, which had always kept him safe. And now, in his son’s greatest extremity, he gave it up to save him. “
Ahbadt-dadt-deah
,
he is in Your hands,” the Absarokee name meaning “The one who made all things.”

Empress and Blaze were near exhaustion, and at Hazard’s insistence they lay down on cots set up near Trey’s bed. Hazard didn’t sleep but sat in a chair close to Trey and watched the faint rise and fall of his son’s irregular breathing. He had already made all the promises and offerings to the spirits, and now he sat silently and willed his son to live.

Empress woke first, her sleep fitful and light, her subconscious brain racing over the remedies and potions, racking her memory for anything that would help Trey survive. He must live! her mind insisted, an emotional response so powerful that she sat bolt-upright on her narrow cot and opened her eyes to find herself already half out of bed. She owed him her life, she thought, still dimly enveloped in sleep although both her feet were on the floor, sensitive to the softness of the carpet. She would repay him by saving his life. Her eyes finally focused on the electric light over the bureau mirror. Electric lights! She hadn’t noticed in the frenzy of the past hours. Hadn’t expected them on the isolated prairie. But why not? the logical part of her brain reminded her. Helena prided itself on its technological progress; their first streetlights went into operation in ’82, and the mines had used generators before that. The Braddock-Blacks had everything else, why shouldn’t they have electricity, and the lights were dismissed although the phenomenon was startling so far up-mountain. Single-minded, Empress’s only concern was that Trey must live, and that purpose overwhelmed even minor miracles of technology.

Trey’s silvery eyes continued to haunt her even though she’d not caught the slightest glimpse of them locked tightly away behind his shuttered lids. She could still see their luminous beauty, the humor and heated passion that had shone lambently from their depths. Complex emotions surrounded her practical, debt-ridden fight to save his life, Byzantine reasons that also dwelt on a man’s tenderness, the quirked curve of his mouth when he smiled, the arrogant assurance that he would find her flowers in January snowed-in mountain country.

Hazard had risen when Empress woke and gone to the windows facing east. He lifted the dark drapery aside. The first gray light of dawn was rimming the snowy mountain landscape,
coloring the darkness of the sky with a fringed, pale border. “It’s morning,” he said quietly, throwing back the heavy material.

His voice woke Blaze and, silently walking to his side, she leaned her head into the solidness of his shoulder.

Empress echoed the softly spoken words in her own mind with a rush of hope.

Each of them, in their own way, saw victory in the light.

Trey Braddock-Black had not died during the night.

It was a triumph.

Very early, Blue and Fox came in to help while Empress, Hazard, and Blaze left briefly to wash and change.