A Heartbeat Away: Quilts of Love Series (21 page)

Beth felt bruised by the kiss. She had allowed him a liberty she should not have, while enjoying the unexpected attention
much more than she should. The two points warred within her. She should slap him, but her response had been a chokehold. Her mind told her it was too soon for love. Once he saw her on a daily basis, her limp, whatever affection he held for her would fade.

They stared at each other for a languorous minute, breathless with the shock of the moment, or the depth of the response the contact stirred. She was his nurse. He had been her support of sorts. A friend.

Nothing more.

The milling of people outside the window penetrated the silence of the moment. She still could not look away from his penetrating gaze. No rebuke formed on her lips and she wondered if this would be the first and only chance she would ever have of being kissed. She took a bold step forward. He met her with a hand to her waist, swayed slightly toward her as she rose on tiptoe to taste of his lips again. Maybe he would love her . . .

His hand circled to the middle of her back though he held her away from him, eyes searching hers. “I’ve got to leave.”

She didn’t want to hear it. Not while her heart was soaring on the gossamer wings of a new hope.

He lowered his face to hers, his arm urging her closer. Salt added to the taste of the moment and she didn’t know whether the tears were hers or his or both. She lifted her hand to his face and touched wetness. She pulled back as a sob swelled and choked. Her throat clutched for air and she swiped hard at the tears on her cheeks as his words chanted through her mind. She would soon be alone again.

He swallowed hard, bereft of her warmth, dizzy. He gripped the banister and sank to the bed, watching Beth. Everything in him wanted to drown out the crazy world and the infernal war and continue this moment forever. But it wasn’t right and they would both regret giving in to whatever was drawing them together.

Leaving would mean finding answers about Ben. Locating his body and taking it back down South to rest next to his mother and father. He could at least do that. He could rejoin his regiment in some capacity that didn’t require shooting a gun or marching for long distances. Supply wagons needed drivers. But rejoining the fray meant pitting himself against Beth’s North. Somehow claiming sides seemed trivial in the face of what they shared. Though he was not foolish enough to think all would share his view.

“I’ll write to you.”

She hugged herself, nodding, not meeting his gaze.

Her silence was killing him. “Beth, say something.”

“There is nothing to say. You must do what you think is best.”

He closed his eyes and massaged his head. Even now he still would not have the strength to travel far. They might still have a few weeks before the fever stopped draining the little strength he did have.

Her shoulders squared and her chin came up.

“We have time, Beth.” He didn’t know if he said it for himself or for her, only that he hated the awkwardness of what he had set into motion. “Maybe weeks.”

“There are men out there who need our help. My help. You expect me to be here by your side as they suffer?”

“Then maybe I should leave now.” He flung the words at her.

Her gaze stabbed at him. “If that’s what you want.”

Beth’s mother waited for her at the bottom of the steps. Flour smeared along the backs of her hands and a smudge marred her soft cheek. “Is all well, daughter?”

What could she answer?

Anya’s worry ran deeper, Beth knew, but her mother was and always had been a woman of few words. “Jim has offered to take him across the Potomac so he will avoid being taken prisoner.”

She shuddered at the thought of Joe hauled off to a Union prison.

Her mother wiped her hands down her apron, face angled back toward the kitchen and the women who came and went in and out of the house. “Make sure he is fed well and he’ll gain his strength quickly.”

“If the fever would just go away.”

Her attention returned to Beth. “It will. Give it time. Give
him
time.”

She glanced hard at her mother, wondering at the emphasis of the statement, but Anya was heading back toward the kitchen, out of earshot.

By nightfall, the wagons were packed and ready. The men would drive them into Sharpsburg in the morning. She had volunteered to return, but her moment of bravery melted as the grandfather clock ticked toward midnight. Every horror she’d witnessed beat at her. Too easily, she could recall the unreality of going about a normal routine while surrounded by the groans of men mauled by an enemy to whom they could not put a name. She felt, again, the stretch of nerves they labored under for those three days leading up to Wednesday. Again and again she recalled those moments in the cellar when all three of them had huddled with Joe as the dying soldiers’ breaths became more and more labored, more ragged. The shells raining down with no thought for the damage they had already incurred or the men who twitched or screamed at the familiar sounds that had already claimed legs or arms or sanity.

She sighed and swept back the light blanket knowing sleep would not come while her mind spun. Sitting up, she let her feet touch the floor, swung them back and forth, returning, for an instant, to the childlike innocence of measuring the distance of her feet to the floor. She sprang up as the image dissolved and shrugged into her dressing gown.

Her hand had just clasped the doorknob when a board outside her door released a groan. Someone was moving down the hall. Panic gripped her.
Joe
. It had to be him packing up in preparation of leaving. He had seemed so determined. She had sent Jim to care for him after their kiss, unable to face him or the result of the cross words she’d spoken.

When she stepped into the hallway, she saw that the broad back at the head of the steps was too wide to be Joe’s.

“Jim.”

The black man glanced over his shoulder at her, but kept moving. She followed, determined to know whether Joe had made plans. If his fever still raged. If Jim judged Joe strong enough to cross the Potomac on his own . . .

At the landing, she stepped into the circle of light that encompassed Jim and was surprised to see her mother and father.

“It is late, daughter,” her father admonished.

“Shouldn’t you be to bed as well?”

“Your mother was worried.”

“You said yourself you couldn’t sleep either,” Anya protested.

Her father’s soft chuckle was his admission. “Sit and join us, Bethie”

She turned to Jim. “How is Joe?”

The black man sagged onto a bench. “When I took him food, he picked at it. I told him he should eat and he tried . . .”

“Jim came to get me,” her mother inserted. “His fever is back. I checked the wound and replaced the bandage but I fear there is something deep inside him that is causing the redness. Doctor Bradley is a risk.”

She knew it to be true. The Mercersville doctor had no use for anyone with secesher sympathies.

“What about . . .”

“They’ve all headed south to aid our army. I’ve done what I could. Pearl helped me open the wound and clean it out. All we can do now is pray.”

“But he was so much better this afternoon.”

“The conditions under which you and Gerta worked were less than ideal and her eyes were old. You can’t blame yourself, daughter.”

She wondered, then, if Pearl had told her mother of her encounter with Joe.

“He seems bent on leaving to find his brother.”

“Ben is dead,” she said, her voice flat.

“Oh.”

She didn’t miss the anxious glance her mother sent her father, no doubt sharing her distress over the thought of Jedidiah dying. “Have you . . . heard word from Jed?”

“He is well. He hopes to slip away to see us but they are busy burying those that fell and he doubts he will be able to come.”

Her heart rose with the news. Jedidiah. In Sharpsburg. Walking, talking,
alive
.

“His message confirms that it is the nightmare you expressed.”

She shuddered and pulled the edges of her wrapper tighter. Jim rose and slipped out the back door leaving them alone as a family. Her father and mother shared a look she could not interpret.

“If Jed returns, it could be a problem, Bethie.”

Her father let the statement dangle. Her knees went weak as the meaning dawned and she slipped onto the last empty chair in the room. “Joe.”

“Jim seems to think he means something to you. He says Gerta saw it, too.”

“Saw what?”

Her father fidgeted. “A bond. Something more than that of a woman caring for a sick man.”

She wanted to laugh. To dismiss the statement as absurd. Her, a cripple, loving a man? She’d loved Riley and he had turned his back on her. Beth’s attempt at dismissing her mother’s words sounded more like a strangled groan than a laugh. Was this the reason Gerta and Jim had brought Joe along? Despite him being the enemy. The kiss had changed everything.
Unexpected though it was, she couldn’t deny the emotion it had stirred. All the feelings she thought herself incapable of, dead to, had surged to the forefront. For a moment, too, she had hoped for something more than the menial existence the injury had left her. And then Joe had talked of his need to leave . . .

When she focused on her mother and father, they were sharing a long look. She would have to let Joe go. She had no choice.

“You must stay here with him,” her father stated. “I don’t want you back in Sharpsburg, or Boonsboro. Not now. Stay here. See Joe back to health.”

“He’s leaving.”

Anya frowned. “Not in the condition he’s in now.”

It was her turn to frown. He would grow restless again. She’d seen it before in his unconsciousness and it would be there again. While she could understand his need to discover what had happened to his brother, she didn’t understand why he had to leave to do that. He could stay and make a vow. But he would have to have a reason to do so, and Joe had never expressed love for her.

“If he must go, it is for the best,” her father said. The words hit her hard. On one hand, they acknowledged she might have feelings for him, on the other they agreed that he should return to the South.

“I need to do my duty to the others.”

Her mother rose and came toward her. Anya’s face showed love and concern, enough to twist Beth’s heart. Her mother’s hands framed her face and her earnest eyes demanded her full attention. “You have done your duty. Rest, daughter. Your father is right. Stay here. Protect Joe. Heal whatever it is that troubles you.”

There it was again, the assertion that she was troubled.

“Follow the path of the quilt. God will lead you.”

She couldn’t grasp what her mother was telling her. It was as if her mother had forgotten their earlier conversation. “I am following God, Mama.”

“Then let Him heal.”

H
eal
. Such a bitter word for her. To heal meant to forget. To forgive. Yet the wound of her youth would never go away. She would always be scarred by the accident and the rejection.

For the second time in the night, she sat up. She stretched her leg, flexed her foot to work the kinks out of the muscles before she stood. The sun would stretch over the horizon at any moment and she wanted to check on Joe. If her parents thought it best for her to stay, she would do so, but heal?

She worked the buttons of her pristine blouse, thankful for clothes that weren’t stained by the blood and gore of dying soldiers. She shuddered at the memory.

Joe slept soundly, Pearl at his side sponging the heat from his skin. Shame washed over her at leaving Joe because of an unexpected kiss and at their exchange of barbs. She touched her lips and nodded at Pearl that she would take over his care.

“He’s not taken anything, Miss.”

What little weight he had gained would continue to melt away if fever refused to relinquish its grip. At least he didn’t thrash about, but when she touched his forehead, heat rose from it like a sunburn.

She continued to sponge his skin, his arms, but every stroke against his hot skin evaporated the water. “Pearl?” She turned to see if the woman had left yet.

“Ma’am?”

“Would you send Jim up when you see him?” She took note of Pearl’s wan expression. “And you sleep. I’ll help Mama as much as possible today.”

“Thank you.”

She finished working on the wound, sponging away fresh blood from the latest surgery then rewrapping the site. Leaning back, she rolled her head to release tightness and picked up the folded quilt blocks and slipped out the needle. There would certainly be plenty of time for her to add another block. She smoothed the material and joined together the seams trying to block out the play of colors. The draw of the bright central square. God. She’d given God her heart. What more could He want? Let Him heal . . . Heal what?

Her needle dipped into the seam and she began, the rhythm soothing. She leaned toward the basin of cool water. Dabs of the cloth against his skin seemed to do so little. What if he died? Infection was setting in. The thought stabbed fear, yet it was the only reason for the fever to rage so high. She trusted her mother’s care, just as she trusted Gerta’s.