Choices of the Heart (7 page)

“Mr. Jefferson,” Griff said, “is dead.”

“Well, so should Granny Duval be.” Hannah half smiled. “She’s as old as he would be if he was still alive—about a hundred.”

“You’ll be welcome,” Zach added.

Esther’s skin broke out in gooseflesh as though the temperature had suddenly dropped from early summer day to late autumn night. “I am here to teach, not doctor. I just thought . . . burns need tending immediately.”

And she couldn’t abandon Bethann if she could help her.

Esther stood and brushed a few pine needles and herbs off of her lap. “I shall return in a few minutes.” She turned and marched down the path. “Lord, don’t let—” She stopped. No sense to pray for the men to remain behind. God didn’t listen, let alone answer.

As though proving her point, boot heels crunched along the overgrown and leaf-strewn path. Zach or Griff? Long, easy strides eating up the ground. Griff. Zach walked faster with a shorter gait.

She stopped and turned. “Please, I’d like to talk to Bethann alone.”

“Not sure you should.” Griff smiled at her in that eye-crinkling way that made her insides feel like plucked strings on the church’s old harpsichord. “She’s taken a dislike to you.”

And she wasn’t going to like Esther any more in the next few minutes.

She hesitated. She need not go. Bethann wouldn’t welcome her. Esther’s aid hadn’t been requested.

But she had watched her mother rush off at all hours of the day or night to help someone in need. And as Esther paused at the end of the path, Bethann moaned at the edge of the stream.

Esther spun on her heel and bounded to the other woman’s side. Bethann stood bent over with her arms taut across her waist, her hands gripping her elbows as though she held her guts inside, which she just might feel she was doing.

“Bethann.” Esther reached out to rest a hand on the older woman’s shoulder but drew it back at the last moment. “I can help you. I have some gingerroot and peppermint oil in my—”

“Don’t need any of your fancy know-it-all doctoring.” Bethann turned her face away. “This’ll pass.”

“It should have passed already, and you’re far too thin. You’re not eat—”

Bethann turned on Esther with a sound like a snarl. She jumped back, glancing toward the end of the path to see if Griff remained in proximity. She might need his aid after all.

He stood there as still as the trees on either side of him, face tense, mouth grim.

“What would you know of this?” Bethann demanded. “Pretty little preacher’s daughter who has to seek trouble because you don’t know what it is?”

If only you knew.

Esther set her hands on her hips and glared at Bethann. “You don’t know anything about me, Miss Tolliver. I might be pretty, but that’s not my fault, and I’m scarcely little. As for trouble . . .” She took a deep breath. “No, I haven’t known the kind you’re in, but I’ve seen my share—”

“Where?” Bethann snorted. “At tea parties and the like?”

“When I’ve examined women.” Esther took a step forward to ensure only Bethann heard what she had to say. “I am a fully qualified midwife and have been for three years. I apprenticed with my mother for three before that.”

For a moment, Bethann’s eyes widened. Her jaw hung slack. Then she flung her head and shoulders back and her hands forward, palms slamming into Esther’s chest. “You lie. You don’t know anything. You can’t. It’s not true. Do you hear me? Not true.”

“Four months.” Esther managed the two words through chattering teeth and a haze of memories that wanted to intrude.

From the corner of her eye, she spotted Griff moving forward and waved him back.

“Maybe five,” she added.

“No.” Bethann shot her head forward like a chicken about to pick up a tasty bug. “I’ll deny any such thing, and you’ll be gone without an escort back to your momma.”

“Of course I’ll say nothing.” Esther tried the gentle smile she’d practiced in the mirror to resemble Momma’s. “It’s part of my training to keep secrets.”

“See that you do. This ain’t nobody’s business but mine.”

And the father’s. And God’s. And perhaps Bethann’s parents, despite her age, since she lived at home.

“You’re right.” Esther nodded. “It isn’t any of my business unless you ask for my assistance.” She held out her hand, palm up.

Bethann hesitated a moment, then touched her fingertips to Esther’s in a feathery acknowledgment of their agreement. Then she stumbled away, past Esther, and along the creek.

The brush of Griff’s heels on the ground cover joined Bethann’s retreating footfalls in the brush as he approached Esther. “What was that about?”

“I gave her some advice.” Esther smiled. “She didn’t want it.”

“Didn’t look like it.” Griff gazed past Esther. “Will she be all right? I mean, she ain’t a-dyin’ or anything, is she?”

Esther hesitated before responding. Women did die from the sickness that accompanied childbearing. They suffered so badly they couldn’t eat and faded away. Sometimes they suffered a seizure and just collapsed, never to awaken again. Bethann attempted to appear vigorous though.

“I don’t think so, if she eats more,” Esther said.

Griff rubbed the back of his neck. “And she’ll be better in a week or two?”

“Should be.”

So he suspected what was amiss with this sister.

How it must distress him to have a sister, who must be eight or nine years his senior and unmarried, in a condition too many women in the East referred to as
delicate
. Despite her thinness, nothing about Bethann, from her forceful voice to her wiry arms, was delicate.

He dropped his hand and clasped the other one behind his back. “Miss Esther, my pa ain’t—isn’t well, and my older brother got himself killed with the feuding ten years ago. That leaves me the head of the family, and there are reasons why I gotta know the truth about Bethann.”

“I promised her I’d keep her secret. You’ll have to ask her.”

Lightning flashed across his eyes. “Even if it means this could start the fighting again?”

“I keep my promises,” Esther said. “And my secrets.”

“Even if it could get people killed?”

“How could it get people killed?”

“That’s family business.”

“And this is my business.”

Even if she had vowed to leave it behind, it apparently wouldn’t leave her behind.

Their eyes locked, held, neither so much as blinking for a full minute.

Then Griff ripped his gaze away and turned back toward the clearing. “I suggest you be praying no one’s going to die over your honor, especially not you.”

6

Not a polite thing to say to her. Griff knew it without his mother standing over his shoulder reminding him that just because he’d grown up in the mountains didn’t mean he was raised without knowing how to treat a female right. Suggesting Esther Cherrett might be responsible for someone’s death was certainly not treating her right.

Even if it was the truth.

He’d have to be ignorant of all around him to not suspect what was wrong with Bethann. And if she was breeding, the same man as before was all too likely responsible—Henry Gosnoll, Hannah Gosnoll’s husband, Zach’s brother-in-law.

The incident that had started a ten-year-long feud.

“Oh, Bethann, how could you be such a fool again?” He groaned the words aloud and paused on the path to lean against a tree and rub his face, his gritty eyes.

His side ached. His heart ached more. The instant Pa learned the truth, he would take his shotgun to Gosnoll and the fighting would begin again.

If it hadn’t already.

Griff pressed his hand to his side and considered the possibility that someone in the Gosnoll family knew about Bethann and wanted vengeance against the Tolliver family for her interference.

Someone like Zach.

“Not Zach.” It was a prayer, a plea, a cry for help. “God, this can’t go on.”

“God can do anything He wants.” Miss Esther’s voice purred through the afternoon stillness in the forest. “He has His reasons, and I’m not convinced they are all good for us.”

Griff jerked around and stared at her. “Miss Esther, that’s blasphemy.”

“Perhaps.” She shrugged. “Will you send me home for saying it, for not being the perfect lady of faith everyone expects the preacher’s daughter to be?”

Her lips smiled. Her eyes did not. The canopy of leaves shadowed them, dimming the golden lights and turning them into bottomless pools. Cold pools like the one beneath the waterfall where he experienced peace and solace.

He wouldn’t find peace and solace with this female, that was for sure. A quiet and biddable female she was not. She hadn’t in the least backed down from Bethann’s belligerence and, according to Zach and Hannah, hadn’t complained or expected them to wait on her for the entire journey. Yet she was not—as Momma believed from mention of Miss Esther’s father being a minister—a spiritual female. Unless he’d just been mistaken about the meaning behind her words.

“You don’t believe God has our good in all He does?” he asked.

“I believe He has a purpose in all He does, but it may not be for our good.” She bit her lip, then brushed her fingertips across her lower lids. “No, that’s not right or fair. I’m worn to a thread, is all. I meant to say that I don’t think it is always good for us . . . or something of the like. I can’t think straight.” Tears swam in her eyes, bringing back the gold lights.

Griff stared at her, quite certain she had made those tears appear and wasn’t in the least sincere.

A chill ran up his arms, raising the hairs against his shirtsleeves like a cat’s fur being rubbed the wrong way—enough to make him want to hiss out something sharp and probably unkind. Or send her packing back to her seaside village and preacher father to set the fear of God back into her soul.

Then she lowered her hands, and the shadows around her eyes were genuine, like bruises beneath her skin. She held her lips tightly together, but a muscle in her jaw twitched. Surely no one could make that happen to oneself.

He raised his hand to touch her cheek, reassure her that soon enough they would reach the ridge and comfortable accommodations, at least in comparison with the road, and she could get her rest, write to her family, forget about unpleasant encounters with Bethann.

Well, maybe not that, with Bethann still at home.

And too soon, Bethann’s condition would create chaos on the ridge, and her state wouldn’t be the only condition around that was delicate.

Miss Esther flinched away from his hand the instant before it touched her cheek. “I apologize for saying anything untoward. Your sister’s . . . situation has distressed me into saying foolish things.” Casting him a half smile, she started up the path.

“I can guess what it is.” Griff tucked his hands behind his back. “It isn’t the first time.”

Miss Esther stumbled over a protruding root and grabbed an overhead limb for balance as she swung around and stared at him. “What are you saying?”

“Bethann has never been married. She has, however, been easily . . . persuaded to—” Heat suddenly crept up his neck. “I’m right sorry I said anything. This ain’t—I mean isn’t the way I was taught to talk to a lady.”

“I’m used to such talk. You haven’t offended me.” She gave him a smile that drew the sunshine beneath the trees.

Griff’s toes curled inside his boots, and he glanced away, focused on an empty bird’s nest above her head. He must not be swayed by a pretty face. A more than pretty face. Look how it had gotten Bethann into trouble and about destroyed two families when she got herself persuaded by a well set-up man. Griff would not fall into the same danger, the same trap. He wanted his wife to love the Lord unconditionally, believe that all the Lord willed was good and right.

“We should get back,” he said with an abruptness that verged on rudeness. “We haven’t eaten and daylight’s wasting.”

“Of course.” Her quick, light footfalls headed up the path.

After several moments, when she must have disappeared beyond the trunks and underbrush, Griff followed. By the time he reached the clearing at the pace of a tortoise, Miss Esther Cherrett was positioning the spider back over the fire and asking Hannah about her hand.

“It’s much better, thank you. Scarcely a blister.”

“Good. I’ll put more herbs on it before we leave. Can you ride with only one hand?”

“Yes, ma’am, I can.”

Hannah calling Miss Esther Cherrett ma’am? Hannah had at least five years on the newcomer. But Miss Esther possessed an authority, a sense of command. She directed. The rest of them obeyed. Good for the children, if she didn’t preach her blasphemy.

Griff looked at the shadows beneath her eyes and shook his head. Maybe not blasphemy, but honest doubt. He understood honest doubt after too many years of watching friends and kinfolk die for no good reason. But what sort of misfortune could she have endured in her comfortable village?

Her hands steady, her face smooth, Miss Esther appeared free of cares as she set about preparing dinner. Griff fed more sticks onto the fire and watched her efficient movements with knife and spoon, coffeepot and skillet. Her hands were small with long, slender fingers. They appeared delicate. With just one hand, she lifted the heavy iron spider and moved it as though it weighed less than the curl slipping from its pins to caress the nape of her neck.

“What’s going on, Cousin?”

Intent upon watching Miss Esther, Griff jumped at Zach’s question. “With what?” He made himself look at his cousin.

Zach arched one brow. “With Miss Esther and your sister.”

“Oh, that.” Griff shrugged. “Bethann being herself.” Griff watched Miss Esther from the corner of his eye. Graceful and comfortable with what she was doing, as though she had cooked over a fire many times. “We should help her.”

“We’re keeping the fire going. That’s more help than either of us trying to cook. Why is Bethann in a snit?”

“She didn’t like someone else doing the doctoring, I expect.”

The truth as far as that went.

“You know how she is—unhappy, so she works to make us all unhappy.”

“Your pa should have married her off a long time ago.” Zach’s eyes drifted to the right. “Would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”