Choices of the Heart (28 page)

It wasn’t the only place green grass grew like the most luxurious of eastern lawns. All the way around the house, it grew still green from spring rains. Closer in, a kitchen garden promised an abundance of fresh produce ripening, and fanning from that shone the bright colors of flowering plants.

Mrs. Brooks enjoyed a true garden meant for nothing greater than beauty.

“So pretty,” Esther said.

“It’s all right.” Mattie reined in. “Can we dismount here? They’ll recognize the horse, and I don’t want to get shot for a Tolliver.”

“They wouldn’t.”

They just might.

Esther dismounted, wincing as her right foot reached the ground. She should have brought her stout walking stick. She had to settle for taking Mattie’s wiry arm and gritting her teeth. It couldn’t be half the pain Zach must be feeling, if he were still in a place to feel pain. That would be a blessing, odd as it seemed. It meant he still lived.

She clutched at her satchel and began running through the remedies she might have on hand. She had no laudanum and only a minute amount of opium powder. White willow bark tea wasn’t strong enough to ease Zach’s kind of pain. Surely something else could serve. She and Momma had rarely dealt in matters requiring the reduction of pain. Opiates risked the stopping of labor, which could kill both mother and child. Whiskey? The mountain seemed to contain enough of that. It dulled the senses but was surely not good for an injured man. She needed a stronger thread for stitching up a knife wound than she had used on Griff’s face, but if the knife had struck an organ, all she could do was try to keep Zach comfortable to the end.

If she had any say in the matter, the end would not come.

As they approached the house and Hannah flung open the door and started toward them, Esther remembered that once she would have prayed before seeing a gravely ill or injured person. She didn’t know when she’d last prayed. She had given up on good things from God.

“We were praying you’d get here.” Hannah’s greeting seemed to be a taunt. “Didn’t know if they would let you.”

“I’m not a Tolliver prisoner,” Esther responded a bit too sharply.

“We didn’t wake anyone, as you told me not to,” Mattie added. “But we had to bring one of their horses. Miss Cherrett’s hurt her foot.”

“Then I’m twice as glad you’ve come.” Hannah grasped Esther’s arm and urged her forward. “We got him in the parlor. Didn’t think it’d be good to carry him up the steps.”

“Have you sent for a doctor?” Esther posed the question she always did when called to an injured person’s bedside. It was the one way she and Momma had kept the physicians on the eastern shore from saying the women overstepped the bounds of their training.

“Ain’t no doctor to call.” A tall, thin woman with the kind of bones that suggested she had once been beautiful emerged from a door to the side of the front entrance. Her hair, more silver now than gilt, was thinning and drawn tightly back from a deeply lined face, the grooved lines around her mouth signifying pain. Dark circles like bruises emphasized the sky-blue of her eyes.

“Mrs. Brooks?” Esther ventured.

“I’m Tamar.” She shook Esther’s hand. “Should have come introduce myself, but my sister and I don’t visit much no more. Mostly communicate through our boys.” Her voice cracked. “While we got ’em.”

“He won’t die, Momma,” Hannah said. “Esther has a healing gift. You saw my hand.”

Esther ground her toe into the floorboard. “A burn is far different from a stabbing, but I’ll do my best.”

“And the Lord will use you according to His will,” Mrs. Brooks said. “Come in.”

A number of lanterns added to the natural heat and stuffiness of a closed room in the summer. No curtains hung over the windows, but the shadow of the mountain and trees kept the room dark. In an hour or two, the light would be good. She didn’t have an hour or two, more than likely.

“Please open the windows,” Esther said. “Fresh air is more healthful.”

The two women stared at her.

“No, ma’am,” Mrs. Brooks said. “The night ain’t healthy.”

“It isn’t unhealthy. I’ve been out in it many times and am always well.” Esther marched over to the closest window and threw up the sash.

Cooler, sweeter air streamed in, and she marched to the second and third until sweet, fragrant air from the garden swirled around them, dispelling the greasy odor of the tallow dips.

Once she could breathe, she braced herself, schooled her expression to blandness no matter what she discovered on the mattress someone had carried into the room, and dropped to her knees beside Zach.

His face was as white as the homespun pillowslip beneath his head. Once shining golden hair lay limp and dull around his head, and his eyes were nearly colorless.

But those eyes were open and gazing right into hers. “You . . . came.”

“As soon as I could. Where does it hurt?”

“Right side. Above . . . bone.” His voice was breathy. His pulse was thready and too fast, his skin clammy and colorless.

She glanced up at his mother and sister standing across from her, their hands clasped at their waists, the mother’s tiny, the daughter’s far more sturdy.

Esther narrowed her eyes for a moment, but she shoved the thought aside and asked, “What have you done for him? Is he still bleeding?”

“I stitched the skin together,” Mrs. Brooks said. “It ain’t bleeding much now, but it don’t look right. But I told him it ain’t right for an unmarried girl to look at him there.”

“She’s . . . healer,” Zach whispered. His hand reached out, fingers groping.

Esther covered them with hers, wishing they weren’t so cold, so clammy. He’d lost too much blood. He needed restorative broths, but she couldn’t recommend that until she saw where the knife had gone in. If the stomach had been compromised, food would only kill him faster.

Which meant she didn’t dare administer a pain reliever yet.

“I can’t help him if I can’t look, Mrs. Brooks.” She made her voice as authoritative as she could. “It won’t be the first time I’ve seen a male torso. I have four brothers and I extracted a bullet once.”

Their eyes widened. Their jaws dropped.

“My mother and her mother and her mother were all healers as well as midwives, and I have learned.” As she explained, Esther pulled back the quilt that covered Zach.

She glanced over his bare chest, smooth and muscular, only long enough to note if any other injuries had occurred. All seemed well other than how he seemed oddly vulnerable without his shirt.

Unlike his cousin—

She clamped down a lid on that memory and focused on Zach’s belly. The bandage was dark with old blood. She touched it with her fingertips. Nothing fresh. Nothing else oozing. A good sign.

“Hot water,” she directed. “Fresh bandages. Zach, I’m going to hurt you as little as possible, but this has to come off.”

“It’ll start the bleeding again,” Mrs. Brooks protested.

“It may. We have to take that risk.” Esther began to search through her bag for a heavier needle and stronger thread than she’d used on Griff.

She located a tiny vile of clove oil and closed her fingers around it as though she had found a diamond the size of her palm. Clove oil would numb the wound area if she did need to rework the stitches. She should have remembered it and used it on Griff. That she hadn’t pricked her conscience. Yet surely she wasn’t so lost to propriety that part of her had enjoyed the stitch that made him flinch. If so, she needed to beg his pardon.

And repent of such a wicked thought.

Hannah brought in a kettle of hot water and set it beside Esther. She shook her head, sending her hair tossing back behind her shoulders, and set to work.

Although Mrs. Brooks’s stitching had stopped most of the bleeding, she had only sewn the skin together, and blood had pooled beneath the surface. This might mean something vital had been struck and his bleeding would never stop until he slipped away. She must find out.

She snipped away the stitches. Fresh blood poured out onto the quilt beneath him and like as not through to the mattress.

And behind her, Hannah fainted.

“Get her out of here,” Esther said without looking around. “I don’t have time for someone who faints at the sight of blood.”

Zach had fainted too. Good. Easier to work on him.

With smooth efficiency, Esther mopped up what she could and pulled the wound apart. She smelled nothing bad. Perhaps a good sign. She didn’t have enough experience with knife wounds to know for sure, but logic and her knowledge of anatomy said she might smell foulness if the knife had glanced off the hip bone and cut into the belly cavity. And blood didn’t continue to flow. Indeed, the knife hadn’t gone all the way through. The wound was serious but, if no infection set in, wouldn’t be fatal.

Thrown from a long distance? Deflected off his hip bone? She couldn’t ask Zach until he woke, but the latter seemed likely. He was still alive, weak, too weak, but had been alive for hours after the wound.

“God, I need direction . . .” The prayer slipped out unbidden.

“Amen,” Mrs. Brooks said. She knelt beside Esther. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Shouldn’t you see to Hannah?”

“She’ll come around soon enough.”

Most likely. Few people stayed in a faint for long.

Esther sprinkled a few drops of the clove oil on a clean cloth and dabbed it onto the wound. The pungent aroma of the spice filled the room, blotting out other less pleasant smells. Her nostrils flared, stung. But her eyes focused on the task, and her hands were steady.

“Hold him in the event he wakes,” she directed Mrs. Brooks.

Momma, you’d be proud of me.

“You have such a healing touch, Esther,” Momma had said often. “I wish you could be a physician.”

But she hadn’t been good enough to save Mrs. Oglevie, only the baby, that dear, sweet baby boy so alive, as his mother was not.

If I can save Zach, I’ll have
paid for some of my wrongs, my failures.

She stitched. She mopped. She murmured soothing nonsense to him when he woke and groaned with pain. She drew the last stitch tight and wound a bandage around his body with Mrs. Brooks’s help.

“Now it’s up to the Lord,” she pronounced, smoothing damp hair from Zach’s face.

He caught hold of her hand. “You won’t run away?” he pleaded in a murmur.

“No, I’ll stay,” she promised.

And as she spoke the words of reassurance, she accepted that she didn’t want to run for the first time in months.

24

Griff found the empty stall first. His favorite horse had disappeared in the night. His heart a lead weight in his belly, he sprinted from the barn and across the yard to the cabin.

The empty cabin.

The door stood ajar, her night things strewn across the unmade bed. Clothes still hung on their pegs, books laid on the table, one open with a sketchpad beneath. All that was missing was her precious satchel.

“Oh, Esther, you didn’t need to run.” He raised his hands to shove his fingers through his hair, wincing as he brushed the cut and bruise on his face. His left eye was swollen shut and suddenly began to burn along with the right. “I’d’ve gone away from you if you’d only stayed.”

“Griff,” Liza called from the schoolroom, “you shouldn’t be in here with—” She stopped in the bedroom doorway. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know, and Sunset’s gone too.”

Liza gasped. “Did someone steal her along with your horse?”

“I don’t think so. She took her doctoring bag.”

“Then maybe someone was sick and fetched her.” Liza tiptoed to the desk table as though Esther were sleeping across the room. “She draws pretty pictures.” She drew the sketchpad from beneath the book. “Look, it’s the waterfall.”

“Liza, put that down.” Griff snatched the pad from his sister.

The pages fanned open, and he caught a glimpse of himself on the page beneath the waterfall. He was wielding an ax to chop wood, and he looked like a wild man or some warrior going into battle, before guns were used for fighting.

Was that how she saw him, all wild hair and fierce expression, not a bit of softness in him? No wonder she ran, after the night before. He’d kissed her, then accused her of being a wanton because she kissed him back and used her female wiles on him.

His ribs squeezed around his heart, and he set the drawings on the table. “I gotta go find her. She can’t go out on the mountain alone. Even on a horse, it ain’t safe.”

“Isn’t,” Liza said.

He stared at her. “What?”

“Isn’t.” She set her hands on her nonexistent hips. “Miss Esther always says
isn’t
, not
ain’t
. If you don’t want to sound like an ignorant mountain man to her, you gotta—have to say
isn’t
.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He tugged the single braid she wore down her back.

She touched his face. “What happened?”

“Zach didn’t like something I said.”

“Did you hit him back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I deserved it.”

“Huh.” She glanced around the room, then back at him. “Did you kiss her? Is that why she ran away? She’s in love with you and don’t—doesn’t want to be?”

“I think part of that’s the truth. Now run back to the house and tell Momma I gotta go looking for Miss Esther. If she’s alone, she’ll never find her way into anything but trouble.”

“And if she’s not?” Liza tossed over her shoulder.

“He’d better start running before I catch him.”

Griff glanced around the room. Odd she would leave it in such a mess. Every time he saw her, she was as neat as the kitchen after being washed up, except the night before. Her ruined dress lay in a crumpled heap, half kicked under the bed. He bent to look at it. Maybe Momma or the girls could use some of the fabric for quilting. It sure was pretty with all those blue flowers on it, and in it Esther had looked like some princess from another land, so graceful in her dancing she seemed to float over the ground. He’d watched from afar and hadn’t dared ask her to dance. She seemed quite content with Zach as her partner most of the time. Too content and happy for Griff’s liking.