Choices of the Heart (14 page)

Maybe God thought he didn’t need a wife.

Feeling as though someone had filled his boots with lead soles, he motioned to his brothers to come with him and headed up the mountain without a word of farewell to Zach or Esther.

12

Too late, Esther realized Griff and the boys were leaving. She pulled her hands free from Zach’s, marveling how she’d forgotten he still curled his fingers around hers, and turned.

The others were already too high up to hear her call to them, even if she would raise her voice in a shout. And she wouldn’t do that. She’d been too well-trained to raise her voice for any reason. The one time she had since she was a child had brought down wrath and a disaster, but not her parents’ wrath. They said she had done the right thing.

It wasn’t enough to counteract the wrong she had committed.

So she remained silent and still until the Tolliver males vanished into the trees at the top of the cliff, then she turned back to Zach. “I should go back too. Surely it’s getting on to dinnertime. I should help.”

“No one hired you to be a servant, Miss Esther.”

“Helping is not servitude, Mr. Brooks.” She sounded priggish and stiff.

“And sending you unkind messages is not a welcome. Why didn’t you tell me about it?” He took her arm.

She experienced nothing above the now-familiar distaste for the pressure and warmth of human closeness, not the lightning jolt and residual tingle that raced from Griff’s hand.

She shuddered at the memory, the flash of thought that something was wrong with her for feeling thus, for not exactly disliking Griff’s touch despite what she claimed. Surely something was wrong with her.

She stepped away from Zach, far enough he couldn’t take her arm again.

“I’d like to know who sent you an unkind message,” Zach continued.

“It wasn’t sent. Someone nailed it to the door of the schoolroom.” Esther ground the toe of her boot into the gravelly earth beside the pool. “All it said was that I should keep running.”

“Keep running?” Zach sounded bewildered or perhaps disbelieving. Difficult to tell with the rainfall gurgle of the waterfall. “What does that mean?”

Esther shrugged. “Someone thinks I’m running from something.”

Someone knew she was running from something.

“Are you?” Of course he had to ask.

Esther started walking, watching where she placed her feet on the uneven ground with its rocks strewn about like the stones from an ancient and tumbling cathedral. “I needed to leave Seabourne.” She chose her words with care, telling enough of the truth. “No one asked me to. That is, my family didn’t want me to leave, as I told you. But I didn’t feel I was doing any good there.”

Zach kept pace beside her, his long, strong legs making the rough track seem as smooth as a city pavement. “Surely you had a dozen men courting you?” His smile teased her.

She couldn’t help but smile back, even as she shook her head. “Not one.”

“What’s wrong with the men out there?”

“Not easy to court the pastor’s daughter, you know, and my mother is the local midwife. She . . . well, she knows more about everyone in town than makes them comfortable.”

And so did Esther.

“So,” she continued, “I was running away a bit. But there’s no need for me to keep running.” She paused atop a boulder step. “I’d like to stay.”

She stood above him, their faces level. He locked his gaze with hers, and the blue that could be so icy in his cousin’s gaze looked like a warm pool in Zach’s.

“I know we all think you’ll do right well here,” he said. “You proved yourself on the journey here, you know.”

“Was that a test?” She laughed and resumed climbing, still feeling nothing other than a comfortable warmth from being in Zach’s company. “Was it the fire building, the coffee, or burning the pan bread?”

Zach laughed and strode ahead of her to give her a hand over the last terrace of rocks to the relatively level ground and trees. “Burning the bread for sure. Showed us all you’re human and not an angel.”

Esther made a face. “I’m no angel, Mr. Brooks. Never think it.”

“I can’t help it. You’re—”

“You don’t know me yet. Not like you think. I—I’m—”

She wanted to say bad-tempered, possessed of a vicious tongue, unfriendly. None of it was true. Yet she couldn’t explain why she was no female to court, that she feared everything marriage entailed, for she was beginning to think that with him, she needn’t fear. He was such a gentle soul, kind of innocent of the world despite his age.

“You’re pretty and kind and not like any girl I’ve met,” Zach said.

“I don’t have the relationship with the Lord I know I should.”

That might do it, stop these compliments.

“None of us has the relationship with the Lord we should. I . . . well, I—” He looked away, and the tips of his ears reddened. “I don’t read well enough to study my Bible. I’d like to, but Momma doesn’t have the time, and I . . . You’re going to be busy enough with the children, so never you mind what I said.”

“No, Zach, don’t say that.” Her heart melting over his simple confession, a confession that must have cost him a year’s worth of pride to admit, Esther reached out to him. “I can’t imagine not being able to read well and not having anyone to teach me. I can’t remember when I didn’t have a book in my hands. I’d love to teach you to read well.”

“You would? You could?” Joy lit his face even beneath the dark green canopy of tree leaves.

Esther wanted to hug him, odd for her when she hadn’t reached out to anyone for months. Zach’s pleasure in her promise gave her a jolt of joy, something she hadn’t experienced for too long to count.

No, not quite true. The sight of the waterfall had filled her with warmth. No, heat of a burning excitement to see such beauty. An unexpected gift.

God, are You looking out
for me after all? Will my spirit heal?

She made herself tuck her hand into Zach’s arm as they retraced their steps down the mountainside. Though their gait was steady, her heart skipped ahead. A beacon of light seemed to shine for her, guiding her forward and out of the slough of despond that had gripped her since January.

If he could have carried a tune, Zach would have sung or whistled all the way from the schoolroom door, where he left Esther, to the barn, where he came across Griff mucking out a stall. Without a word, he picked up another pitchfork and joined in the messy, smelly business. They didn’t speak. Often since the time they were big enough to wield the heavy clods of manure and straw, they had worked side by side, enjoying the companionship.

Today, for the first time, Zach grew conscious of his sweat, the reek of the muck, the way his hair plastered to his head and the back of his neck. If Esther saw him now, she would find him revolting. All along the road to Brooks Ridge, she always looked as neat and clean as the local women did when a preacher came through and held Sunday services. He had washed up more than ever before on the trail. Now he hoped he could get to a stream before seeing her again. If he encountered her looking like he did, with straw and worse sticking to his arms and trousers, he would never help Griff again.

“You should hire someone to do this,” he told his cousin as they hung up their forks and leaned against the shady side of the barn with cold cups of water. “You got the money to do it now.”

“Why pay someone to do a job I can do myself? I like the work.” Griff swiped his sleeve across his forehead. “It reminds me that I have mules and horses needing cleaned up after.”

Zach inclined his head in acknowledgment of the rightness of Griff’s words.

Silence fell between them again. In the distance, a hen let out a loud cluck signaling she had laid an egg, and the boys’ shrill voices pierced through the heated air. Short silences between the men were common. This one stretched beyond the usual.

Zach straightened and hooked his cup beside the bucket of fresh-drawn water. “Guess I oughta be on my way. Momma’ll expect me for dinner.”

He waited for Griff to extend an invitation for him to stay. He could clean up enough to be fit for the table, borrow something from his cousin. But the invitation didn’t come.

“Expect I should get cleaned up” was all Griff said.

Neither of them moved.

Zach fisted his hands on his hips and demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me someone sent her that note?”

“Didn’t have a chance. Why didn’t she tell you?”

“I don’t know. She don’t trust me yet, I expect.”

“She doesn’t trust anybody, and maybe with good reason.”

“What do you mean?”

Griff straightened. “Why would someone tell her to keep running if they didn’t think she had cause to run in the first place?”

“Oh, right.” Zach felt like a fool for not thinking of that. “I can’t believe she’s done anything wrong.”

“Because she looks like no other female you ever saw? Handsome is as handsome does, Momma would say.” Griff’s mouth set in a grim line.

Zach stiffened. “Are you saying you think she is running away from something?”

“She wanted to leave in the middle of the night, didn’t she? No one to know and all that? She didn’t scare off when you told her I’d been stabbed. What’s that about? Most females would have gone screaming back to their mommas.”

“She keeps her word?” Zach didn’t say it with the confidence he wanted to.

Griff snorted. “She owes us nothing. She didn’t need to come out here, but she wanted to. Since when do girls who look like her come to these mountains?”

Zach wanted to say since God prompted them to do so, but Esther Cherrett hadn’t talked about God leading her anywhere. Still, sometimes God led one unexpectedly, took one’s misdeeds and turned them into good.

“You don’t trust her?” Zach asked.

“Depends on what you mean by trust. Do I think she’ll murder us in our beds or steal from us? No. I think she’ll make a right fine teacher. She’s smart. She’s kind. She knows a lot about a lot of things. But she has something behind her that ain’t right.”

“I don’t believe it.” Zach’s fists tightened.

Griff flexed his shoulders. “Then you explain that note.”

“It don’t matter. She—”

He started to admit she had offered to teach him to read his Bible, but not to Griff. Griff knew how to read good. He could talk and charm and get every girl at a celebration to dance or sing with him, especially when he pulled out his dulcimer and sang. They flocked around him like hens after grain.

But Esther had remained with Zach at the waterfall pool.

Taking comfort in that, he demanded, “So what do you think’s wrong with her?”

“You don’t want to hear me thinking bad things about her, and I gotta get cleaned up.” Griff started toward the house, apparently not minding if Esther saw him all mucked up.

“Wait.” Zach fell into step beside him, caring who saw him but needing to follow. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“It’s not kind.” Griff paused, half turned back.

Behind him and across the compound, Aunt Lizbeth called from the kitchen doorway, and the younger boys began to race toward the house.

Griff glanced over his shoulder, then looked at Zach. “I think the word is
indiscretion
. It’s why unmarried girls go away from here, ain’t—isn’t it? They commit an indiscretion.”

“But that’s when”—Zach’s ears warmed—“they’re in a certain kind of trouble. You don’t think—” The notion made him feel sick.

“No, not that, but I think maybe she’s running away from an indiscretion.”

Zach gave his head a violent shake. “Not her. She’s too good, too kind. Besides, that don’t explain the note. How would anybody know?”

“I don’t know.” Griff sighed. “I wish I did. But however or whyever news got here, there’s something wrong with our new schoolma’am, and I’m going to find out.”

“Don’t.” Zach’s hand lashed out and gripped Griff’s shoulder. “Don’t do it.”

Griff glowered, and Zach braced himself for a justifiable blow. It never came. Of course it didn’t. Griff would never strike out at him any more than he would strike out at Griff.

He released his hold. “Don’t,” he said more gently. “I don’t care, and if she’s done something wrong, God can forgive her. And I intend to make an honest woman of her.”

13

Esther woke sweating and shivering from a dream. From
the
dream. She swallowed hard to keep the bile down. Her eyes burned, but no tears came. They lay stopped up in her chest as though she had tried to swallow a rock or, more likely, a chunk of broken glass.

“God, I thought You cared about me, that You’d make this go away.” She cried out the words to the empty room, the silent cabin.

Beyond her window, open for a breath of wind in the warm night, leaves on the trees rustled, yet no air reached the chamber.

Gasping, afraid she was about to be sick, Esther stumbled to the window and leaned out over the frame. A shadow darted through the moonlight, too small to be a person, too small for anything truly dangerous, but too large to be a rodent. Probably a cat. Every farm owned a cat. They slept in the cool shade of a barn by day and hunted in the darkness of the night. No wonder some people thought them evil.