The Vow (10 page)
Hannah laughed. “I’d love to, but I have my chores.”
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“Forget them. You’ve been working too hard. And if Reiver can leave the mill to go into Hartford today, then you can go for a short carriage ride.”
She cast a longing glance out the window. “It is a beautiful day for it.”
He crooked his arm and extended it to her. “Turn your churn over to Mrs.
Hardy, grab a shawl, and let’s go.”
Minutes later Hannah was seated next to Samuel in the carriage, on the road leading south from Coldwater. Wrapping her gray wool shawl more closely about her, she found the cool autumn air invigorating.
“You seem especially happy today,” she said.
“I am. Not only have I sold five engravings, I’ve been commissioned by a wealthy farmer named Broome to paint a portrait of his daughter, Patience.” He glanced at her with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “I’ve heard the young lady is quite comely, so I’m sure it won’t be much of a chore.”
“How fortunate for you.” Just at that moment Hannah realized that she had never ever heard Samuel mention another woman romantically. Surely a man so handsome, charming, and attractive to women had a lady love somewhere. The thought made her decidedly uncomfortable and she couldn’t understand why.
“Where did you meet this Miss Broome of yours?”
Suddenly Samuel’s lighthearted mood vanished. “She’s not my Miss Broome. In fact I’ve never even met her. Her father contacted me about the portrait.”
“I see.” Hannah plucked at the edge of her shawl. “With winter coming, I’m sure Reiver will appreciate your contribution to the family coffers.”
“He always does. At least he’ll be able to buy raw silk from China.”
They drove in silence up the dusty dirt road, passing few other carriages on their way up to the hills. Samuel didn’t stop until they arrived at a spot at the crest of a hill where they could pull over the carriage and enjoy the panorama.
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A breeze tugged at the long, wide ribbons of Hannah’s bonnet, brushing them against Samuel’s chin. He looked down at her and smiled. “Is it too chilly for you up here?”
“Not at all.” In fact she felt quite warm, perhaps because her arm touched Samuel’s and she could feel his heat through the sleeve of his coat.
She took a deep breath to savor the autumn air and felt a pain so sharp that she gasped and doubled over in agony.
“Hannah, what’s wrong?”
She wrapped her arms around her abdomen and looked at him helplessly.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Are you in pain?”
She swallowed hard and nodded as another pain knifed through her.
He slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Is it the baby?”
“Oh, dear God, Samuel! I’m going to lose my baby!” Hannah screamed her denial and clutched at the lapels of his coat, feeling as though her insides were being ripped out. “Please! Get me home.”
“Hang on!” Samuel untied the reins and brought them down on the horse’s rump with a sharp smack, causing the animal to throw back its head in alarm, but it managed to turn the carriage and start down the road at a brisk trot.
Samuel drove like a madman, keeping one eye on Hannah, curled into a tight ball on the seat as if she could physically retain the baby in her womb.
Where the road was straight and relatively smooth, he urged the horse into a canter to make better time, and slowed the animal down to negotiate any ruts and rocks.
The moment they pulled up in front of the homestead, Samuel was out of the carriage before it had come to a full stop. He grabbed the bridle to stop the horse 82
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from trampling him before racing around to the other side and extending his arms up to Hannah, who rose, swayed, and collapsed.
Hannah opened her eyes to find herself in her own bedchamber, in her own bed, the curtains drawn to keep the room as dark as her thoughts.
Impressions exploded on her consciousness…excruciating pain, urgent voices, soothing hands. But most of all, her body that had been changing to nurture and protect the helpless child growing within her now felt empty with an aching hollowness.
A gentle hand came out of nowhere to brush damp strands of hair away from her face. “Hannah?”
She turned her head. There was Samuel where she knew he’d be, sitting at her bedside as he had just after Benjamin was born, his pale eyes bright and sad, his handsome face grave yet radiating strength.
“I lost the baby, didn’t I?” she said, her voice breaking.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I suppose it was God’s will.”
“I find it difficult to believe that any god would want you to suffer so much.”
Without thinking, Hannah sought his hand with her own, lacing her fingers between his and holding on tightly. “Was it a boy or a girl?”
He hesitated as if debating whether to tell her. “A boy.”
She laughed, a bitter, hysterical sound, and tightened her hold. “Another son for the Shaw silk empire.”
He pulled her into his arms and held her head against his shoulder so she could cry.
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Later that day, when Reiver returned from Hartford and was told that his wife had lost their baby, he went to her room. Even as he held her hand, telling her of the other children they would have one day, Hannah couldn’t help thinking that he hadn’t been at her side when she needed him most.
By the time autumn eased into winter and the first snow fell, Hannah had recovered. She couldn’t indulge in mourning her lost child for too long, for her own feelings of loss had to be subordinated to Benjamin’s welfare and to family responsibilities.
One raw, bleak November day, Hannah went upstairs to Samuel’s studio to bring him luncheon on a tray and found him studying his preliminary sketches of Patience Broome.
“She’s very beautiful,” Hannah said. Why did that admission diminish her own feelings of attractiveness?
Samuel flung down the sketches. “That’s all I’ve captured, her beauty, nothing else.” He rubbed his jaw. “Or perhaps that’s all there is to her.”
When Hannah thought of the engraving he had made of her and how it revealed more than she wanted to see, she realized it was not his lack of skill that was at fault.
He looked at her. “Enough of Patience Broome. How are you?”
Hannah shrugged. “There are times when I wonder what he would have been like, whether he would have had light brown hair or dark, blue eyes or brown, and a laugh like Benjamin’s.” Her eyes glazed as she looked inward. “But then I count my blessings and it passes.”
“I can’t pretend to know what it feels like to lose a child, but I do know that time does heal all wounds.”
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“When my parents died, I thought I’d never stop grieving for them. But I did. Eventually.” Hannah fell silent for a moment, her gaze sliding down to the sketches of Patience Broome scattered on Samuel’s sketching table. This time she felt strong dislike.
Her expression must have reflected her emotions, for Samuel said, “Are my sketches really that bad?”
She snapped out of her reverie. “I beg your pardon?”
“The way you were staring at my sketches just now makes me want to tear them up and throw them away.”
Hannah’s cheeks grew hot with embarrassment. “They’re wonderful, Samuel. I was merely thinking of some particularly distasteful chores I have to do this afternoon, that’s all.”
He looked relieved.
She smiled. “I really have to get back to the kitchen. Reiver and James will be home for their midday meal any minute now.”
After she left the studio, she didn’t return to the kitchen right away. She went to her bedchamber, closed the door, and leaned against it, trying to understand why she had such strong feelings of animosity toward a pretty young woman she had never met.
Then the answer dawned on her. She was jealous.
Her hand flew to her mouth. For her to be jealous of Patience Broome, she had to have deep feelings for Samuel.
Hannah shook her head. That was impossible. Samuel was her husband’s brother. She couldn’t be in love with him. She couldn’t.
She put such thoughts out of her mind and returned to the kitchen.
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Reiver stood at the base of Mulberry Hill and watched part of his dream die.
All winter he had looked forward to the spring of 1843, when the new mulberry trees would send up their shoots, but now that April had arrived and the trees weren’t thriving, he was filled with a feeling of dread.
James pulled up a plant and examined the roots. “It’s the blight,” he said.
“The trees are rotting in the ground.”
Reiver whipped off his hat, threw it on the ground, and let out a string of profanities that shocked even James. “So much for trying to raise our own silk,”
he muttered bitterly.
“We can still manufacture it,” James said. “We’ll just have to import more raw silk from the Orient like everyone else.”
“I had my heart set on raising my own.”
James brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Everyone told us we couldn’t raise silk in this country. I guess they were right.”
Reiver pulled up a plant, swore at it, and flung it down. “Plow them up and burn the lot of them.”
“At least we tried, Reiver,” James called after him.
“Trying doesn’t count,” Reiver retorted over his shoulder. “Success is all that matters.”
He strode to the homestead, his anger and bitterness rising like bile in his throat and leaving the sour taste of defeat on his tongue. Wait until the good citizens of Coldwater learned that Rummy Shaw’s son had failed in his attempt to provide his own raw silk for the mill. He’d be a laughingstock again.
When he entered the parlor, he found Hannah seated in the wing chair by the cold fireplace. Although she had suffered another miscarriage just two weeks ago in her second month of pregnancy, she had recovered as quickly as if it had never happened.
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She stood up the moment she saw his face. “Reiver, what’s wrong?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “A blight has killed all our mulberry trees.”
Hannah’s blue eyes widened until they became enormous in her thin face.
“Oh, no! Does that mean…?”
“This crop of worms will all die without mulberry leaves to feed on.” Reiver braced his arms against the mantel and leaned heavily against it, trying to control his rage.
Hannah placed a hesitant hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry, Reiver. I know how much it meant to you to raise your own silk.”
He stared into the fireplace. “Ruined. Everything’s ruined.”
Her hand fell away. “You can still import raw silk, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“And you’ll still be able to manufacture thread.”
“Yes, I can still do that.”
“Then you’ve experienced a temporary setback, not ruination.”
Reiver moved away from the fireplace. “You’ll have to excuse me, Hannah.
I’ve got to go help James dig up what’s left of those trees and burn them.”
And he had to find a way to see Cecelia. He needed her more than ever to comfort him and soothe his shattered dreams.
Hannah watched him leave, then returned to her chair. While she knew the loss of the mulberry trees was a catastrophe, she had more pressing matters on her mind.
She could deny it no longer. She was falling in love with Samuel.
How else could she explain the warm flush of pleasure she experienced whenever he spoke to her, the way she caught herself listening for his quick footsteps or his resonant voice? How else could she explain why Samuel
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occupied her thoughts, never her own husband, and her guilt at imagining him making love to her whenever Reiver did?
After her second miscarriage, Samuel shared her deep sorrow as he had that first time last fall, helping her to regain her strength and easing her bleak despair so she could look forward to the future again. He willingly provided the comfort that Reiver never could.
Hannah closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the heel of her hand to ease her torment. She could never reveal her true feelings to him. That would only result in disaster.
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Chapter Five
The outstretched arms of the ancient oak tree in the backyard provided the only respite from the hot July sun, so Hannah and Samuel placed their chairs deep within the cool cave of shade. She sewed while he sketched Hannah’s second son, David, treasured all the more after her two heartbreaking miscarriages.
Hannah set down her sewing and scanned Mulberry Hill’s long slope, now barren of the mulberry trees that had once been Reiver’s hope and pride.
“It’s so sad,” she said, glancing down at Davey, sleeping soundly on a blanket at her feet. “Reiver was so confident that silk could be produced in this country. And now…” She shrugged.
“After five years of marriage, you should know that my brother’s not the kind of man to let a mere act of God or nature stand in his way,” Samuel replied, his intent gaze darting from the sleeping child’s cherubic face to his sketch pad.
Hannah smiled. “Indeed I do.”
With the price of mulberry trees plummeting so low that desperate nurserymen were selling them for firewood and last year’s blight delivering a devastating coup de grace to the few remaining trees, Reiver had abandoned his dream of producing silk and was now concentrating on manufacturing thread from imported Chinese raw silk. If there was one thing Hannah had learned about her husband since their marriage, it was that Reiver Shaw was a practical man and undaunted in his obsessions.
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So much had changed. The rearing shed where Reiver tended his worms with such single-minded intensity had been torn down after standing empty for so long. Last year, in 1844, Hannah managed to carry another son to full term, though she remained haunted by her previous miscarriages. While she tried to keep her feelings for Samuel a secret, she feared he was falling in love with her.