Arms of Love (3 page)

She felt heat rise into her cheeks and looked up at him, but he was gazing at the afternoon sun, now dipping behind the endless rows of ancient trees.

“It grows late. I had best start for home.”

Lena felt a pang of disappointment, but she knew he had work to attend to. She slipped her hand into his as they walked toward Tim, his big dappled horse.

“I’ll come tomorrow, Lena . . . to make sure that all is secure.”

She nodded as he mounted. Then he stared down at her, his eyes intent. “Be safe, my love,” he said.

“Of course.” She smiled. But something cold and unfamiliar, like a splinter of ice, pierced through her as she watched him ride away, and she shivered despite herself.

Chapter 2

A
dam tossed restlessly against the coarse linens of his wide bed and flung his arm up to shield his face.

It was the same engulfing blackness as always, as if he were wombed in the dark, unable to breathe. And then the red haze came, like some eerie dawn breaking over shrouded and jagged edges, until he gasped with the burn of the bloodlike sun and its shadow. He tried to beat against it, through it, flailing his fists in useless movement that only seemed to elongate the shine of the hazy red. And then it was winter and all snow, but for the sun, which still burned, turning his hands and arms and neck crimson as he tried to swipe himself clean with strokes of his shaking hands. But his efforts were futile, and then he was falling into nothingness, his soul left somewhere behind with a child’s cry. His face stung; his fingers were numb; and then, strangely, he was in Lena’s arms, pressed secure against her shoulder, sobbing for want of something and nothing and everything . . .

Adam woke with a strangled cry and tried to gain control of his racing heart and raw breathing. He stared around the shadows of his room and shivered in a cold sweat. Then he lay back down, searching the recesses of his mind for the nameless fear. But nothing came save the familiar feeling that he had been ravaged, his spirit burdened with a load he could not name. And then, as he always did, he began to pray.

Lena pushed the spade into the damp earth and found the ground still frozen beneath its surface. She took a deep breath and piled her slight weight on the edge of the tool; her rough-soled shoe slipped and she fell. Facedown. For a long while, and despite the chill, she lay there breathing in the comforting smells of mud, melting snow, and the slightest promise of new grass. She only lifted her dirt-stained face when the feeble cry of an infant lingered in the early morning air, and she knew that she must rise.
I must rise. I promised
.

She placed her palms flat against the earth and was pushing up when the reverberation of hoofbeats shook the ground. She jumped up then, scraping at her face with the hem of her apron, the better to see. She abandoned the spade in an attempt to cross the slippery dirt to the house, but the horse and rider were upon her before she’d gone three steps. She stared up at Adam and worked to blink back tears.

He slid down and looped Tim’s reins over the wood post before gently catching her close in his arms.

“What are you about?” he asked softly as he lifted a hand to skim some of the mud from her cheek.

“
Ach
, Adam . . . I dig my
mamm’s
grave. She died this morning giving birth. There was so much blood . . . I didn’t know what to do.” Lena sobbed and moved toward him, expecting to find refuge in his arms, but he stared at the farmhouse, his body tense. “Adam? I am sorry . . . I know you loved her too.”

Adam bit back the words of comfort that came to his lips and brushed past Lena to retrieve the spade. He struck the ground with force.

“Adam . . . what . . . you don’t have to do that,” she said, scrambling to reach him.

“I know. Is it a boy or a girl?”

A lesser man might have felt disarmed by the pain that darkened her already shadowed eyes, but Adam steeled himself. He longed to hold her to him, to feel her delicate frame yield to his willing strength. But he had made a promise before Gott and Lena’s mother, and he had no choice but to keep it. His world felt as though it had slid from him, and he tried to concentrate on the dirt before him.

“It is a girl,” Lena said, breaking into his thoughts.

He looked at her, gripping the handle of the spade with all his strength to keep from taking her in his arms.

“Go and tend the babe, and send John to me.”

She swiped at her splattered face with a shaking hand. “I don’t think that a ten-year-old boy should dig his mother’s grave, Adam, do you?”

Her question, protecting her brother from the duty of death, edged at something in his mind, but he couldn’t capture the thought. He rested his foot on the spade. “Yet you would do it yourself.” He paused, then spoke in a soothing tone, deciding he could at least comfort her with his voice. “I mean no harm to the boy; I thought to send him to the woods for firewood. It would be better if he were not about.”

Lena nodded and walked up the steps to the front door of the farmhouse. Her small back was straight, her kerchief still white in places over the fall of her shoulders, where the golden mass of her hair had worked loose from beneath her head covering and straw hat. Adam tore his gaze away and stared at the ground, feeling an eerie sense of being outside of himself before he snapped back to the moment. He would do better with a pickax.

He heard Lena’s melodic voice echo from within and then the sounds of the infant’s cries diminish. The door opened with a creak, and he looked up to see ten-year-old John, pale and thin, edging out onto the porch, his fingers pressed into a crevice of the limestone wall. The boy appeared to be of a sober and studious bent of mind, but there were times when Adam wondered what really went on behind those intense blue eyes.

“Take the horse,
sohn
, and go fetch some wood for the fire. Ride into the forest on this side of the river. Neither British nor Patriots camp there.”

“You would trust me with the horse?”

Adam smiled, trying to remember what it was to be ten and failing entirely. “
Ya
—you have tended him while I have visited, haven’t you? It’s a sad morning today. Some time alone in Gott’s woods would help you, I think.”

“They took our horse, Benjamin, when they came for
Fater
.”

Adam nodded. “I have heard. General Washington’s army must have need.”

“You still have your horse.” There was a slight irony in the boy’s statement.

“So I do.”

John wet his lips and looked with longing at the steed. “I would like to ride.”

“Then ride.”

The boy stared at Adam and straightened his back, so that for a second he seemed remarkably like his sister and older than his years. “I will walk.” Adam shrugged, tossing a spade full of dirt. “As you wish.”

John lifted a birch basket from a corner and unlooped a small hatchet from a peg in the stone wall. He walked off in the direction Adam had indicated without another word.

Adam smiled to himself. They were a strong family, the whole lot of them. Then the renewed cry of the infant reminded him that it was a parentless family for now, and that Lena would have a far greater load than she could possibly carry. Although he regretted her loss, he allowed himself to imagine the privilege of helping with her burdens. Then he shook his head. That was impossible now; he had given his word. And he turned his attention back to the ever-deepening grave.

Lena fancied she could hear the earth turning over from Adam’s digging outside, then realized it was only the beating of her heart. Abigail, her eight-year-old sister, was still in her nightgown, blond hair hanging to her waist in a tangled mass.
Mamm
would have seen to it by now . . .

Lena rubbed her fingers against her temple as she tried to think where to begin. Her spontaneous rocking from foot to foot would not soothe the new babe for long, but she had no idea where a wet nurse might be found. She could give the infant goat’s milk, of course, but her
mamm
had asked specifically for a wet nurse before she died, murmuring about too many infants not surviving without the touch of a woman.

And then there was the body to be washed, but no one to bless the burial. She could send for Deacon Wyse, Adam’s father, but what she knew about the man made her reluctant to ask. She suppressed a sob. This wasn’t the time to mourn. And
ach
, how to break the news to her father . . . His health hung in the balance as it was; to carry news to him in jail of the loss of his beloved wife might be more than he could bear. In truth she had not been to see him in the three weeks since he had been taken because her mother had seemed to weaken each day after he was gone, finally becoming bedridden with the pregnancy. Lena told herself that she should have known things would go badly for the delivery; she should have tried to send for a midwife. But she hadn’t been sure when the baby would come . . .

“Where is
Mamm
, Lena?”

Lena turned back to her sister and knew that she could not reveal that she felt near to madness under the burden that
Derr Herr
saw fit for her to carry. But of course, she and Adam could marry now perhaps, and he would lift some of the load.