Fox River (31 page)

“You don’t believe in the devil, either.”

“My point exactly.”

“What will Christian say?” Julia stared in the direction of the barn. She could hear Callie’s high-pitched laughter.

“What do you think?”

“He didn’t just lose nine years of his own life. He lost all of Callie’s, too. And he’s going to blame me.”

Maisy put her hand on Julia’s shoulder. “Having children changes everything. It changes the way we look at life, the decisions we make, the choices we’re presented with. We do things for our children we would never think of doing for any other reason.”

Julia covered her hand. “It changed me. It will change him, too.”

“Here they come.”

Julia lowered her voice. “How do they look together?”

Maisy’s voice was sad. “Like matching pieces of a puzzle.”

A
fter Ian left I lay awake until dawn, planning how I would leave him. I was young, but not without common sense. I’d done nothing wrong, nothing I’d had the power to change, but Ian had beaten me anyway. All my struggles had been for nothing. I would never find a way to please him, not because I was foolish or inadequate, but simply because that task was impossible.

If he had hoped to convince me I was worthless, he hadn’t yet accomplished it. He had made me doubt myself and feel responsible for everything that went wrong in our lives. But Ian had stepped over a line when he raised his hand to me. I knew what he had done was wrong, far worse than misguided, perhaps even evil. I knew men sometimes beat their wives. I had even been taught that sometimes a wife deserved it. But now that I had joined that hateful sisterhood, I realized that what I’d been taught was wrong.

No man should raise a hand to a woman. Not for any reason.

When my fear faded, fury replaced it. When fury faded, sadness seeped in. I thought sadly of the Ian Sebastian I had first seen on a great black stallion, the Prince Charming who had scooped me from the ground and galloped away to his Virginia castle.

I rose at last, a plan half-formed in my mind. I would wait until Ian left Fox River, then I would go to Annie. I knew Ian would watch me carefully until he was convinced I meant to do as he’d ordered. By then Annie and Paul would be back from their wedding trip to Spain. I would stay with them until plans could be made to return to New York. My mother and brothers wouldn’t want me at home, but I couldn’t stay in Virginia, fearing I might find Ian around every corner. And if my family refused to take me in, then I would accompany Annie and Paul to Chicago and make a home for myself there.

I would miss Ian. This seemed strange to consider, but it was true. When he wasn’t angry, he was a charming companion, a wonderful lover, an interesting conversationalist. I admired his devotion to Fox River, to the hunt, to Virginia. I would always mourn the death of our mutual dreams.

But I would not allow myself to be beaten again.

I arose with that thought, determined to avoid Ian without arousing his suspicions. I was stiff and my body throbbed, more from my tumble into the bushes than from Ian’s fists. But when I straightened, pain sucked at my abdomen, a long, terrible spasm that left me gasping. I fell back to the bed and bent over double, resting my head against my knees.

For a moment I was terrified. What internal organs had been damaged when Crossfire threw me? The pain threatened to cut me in half. Even the pain I experienced during my monthly flow was nothing like it.

Although recently there had been no flow and no pain to which I could compare this.

Slowly I lifted myself into a sitting position again, staring at the door that separated my bedroom from Ian’s. I had been so busy that I had paid little attention to my body’s cycles. When I had thought about it, I had assumed that unaccustomed exercise had delayed my flow.

Until that moment I hadn’t considered I might be with child.

I moaned a little, and rocked back and forth at the thought of what might be happening. I might well be losing a child I hadn’t even known I carried, losing it because the child’s father had caused my horse to throw me. Perhaps even because the child’s father had beaten me afterward.

As terrible as it was, I could still see the irony. From the beginning Ian had claimed he wanted a son. Now, because of his own actions, his son might never be born.

I waited for another pain to strike, but after a few minutes, when nothing happened, I got to my feet once more and started toward the door. I had to relieve myself and check for bleeding. I almost reached it before another pain impaled me. I gasped again, surprised anew by the intensity. I crossed my arms over my belly, in some inborn and futile attempt to protect the child who might be growing inside me. And I moaned when the pain and dizziness continued.

I don’t know if my moaning awoke Ian, or if he had lain awake that night, too, swamped with guilt over what he had done or, worse, angry that he hadn’t thrown another punch. The door opened, and he strode in. I reacted by straightening, despite pain, and holding out my hands to ward him off.

He looked as if
I
had struck
him.

“Louisa…” His face was contorted. “Are you ill?”

“No. Go away. Please…”

“You are. Something’s wrong. What is it?”

His voice was so gentle that, for a moment, I couldn’t understand what he’d said. I was tricked by the voice, beguiled by what looked like guilt in his eyes. “I woke up…” I gasped again as another wave of pain threaded through my body.

“Where does it hurt?”

I touched my belly.

Before I could speak he scooped me up and carried me back to bed. “Don’t get up again. You must lie still.”

“I don’t know…It might be—”

“Are you going to have a child?”

“I hadn’t thought so. Not until this. But I might…”

He seemed to take stock of the situation. “I’m going to phone Dr. Carnes. He’ll come immediately.”

Unexpected venom rose inside me. “What will you tell him when he sees my face?”

He laid me carefully in place and dropped down beside me. “Can you forgive me for that?”

I saw something in his eyes I had never expected. Tears. For a moment I couldn’t speak. He did, instead.

“I don’t know what came over me yesterday,” he said in a choked voice. “The devil possessed me. I tried to get you to hold up, and when you didn’t—”

“Couldn’t!” I looked away.

“When you couldn’t, I thought you were deliberately trying to show me I’d been wrong about Crossfire all along and you had been right. I wasn’t thinking straight, Louisa. I admit it. Then, afterward, when I was the butt of jokes about you and your unsuitable horse, something rose up inside me. It was like the devil was urging me on.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t looked at him just at the moment I would have been safe. I wouldn’t have felt pity for him, or a rush of some sweeter emotion. But I did turn, and I did look at him, and I saw tears on his cheeks.

“Oh God, I love you,” he said haltingly. “I married you because I do, Louisa. If you can just forgive me this one terrible lapse. If you can just…”

His hand settled over mine. All I had to do was turn my hand palm up and let him take it.

And I did, for I had never really been loved before. Not this way, not so terribly, so wrenchingly loved. To be loved this way, by this man, was worth whatever I had already suffered.

And I would suffer no more. I was sure of it. Most probably I was carrying Ian’s child, and if I didn’t lose it now, then soon we would be a family. I would give Ian something he had desired, and that would surely make all the difference.

“Tell me you forgive me,” he murmured.

I reached up and wiped the tears from his cheeks. And I told Ian Sebastian what he wanted to hear.

I did not spend the next months improving my riding skills, as the furious Ian had demanded. I spent them in bed, feet propped high and Fox River life revolving around my every whim. I was indeed to have a child, and even Ian’s prize broodmares received less attention than I did.

I was convinced the child I carried was a girl. I hadn’t yet shared that belief with Ian, who always talked as if it were a boy. I dreaded an argument about something neither of us could influence. He had been so kind and considerate since Thanksgiving night that, could I have chosen, I would have chosen a boy, simply from gratitude. But secretly—and since I had no control over the outcome—I yearned for a daughter.

When two months had passed without further cramping, Dr. Carnes declared me fit to rise from my bed. By then the child was visible to anyone who cared to investigate. My walk was less spritely, my clothes were chosen for what they hid instead of what they revealed, I bobbed my hair so something about me would be simple and streamlined. We entertained again, and if my unfortunate behavior at the Thanksgiving hunt had humiliated Ian, my pregnancy soothed the gossips. Every man in the club knew how impossible it was to reason with a woman in my condition.

We gave Annie and Paul a small dinner party before they left for Chicago, and six weeks later followed it with another for the Joneses. I was saddened by their departures, but encouraged by Ian’s attentiveness. Perhaps I wouldn’t need a local refuge. And when my new offspring was old enough to travel, we could visit Annie.

I was well into the pregnancy before Ian took me to task for knitting a yellow sweater for our baby-to-be. It was late in the evening, well before my usual bedtime, and until that moment we’d sat companionably, enjoying the fragrance of honeysuckle from an open window.

“Louisa, you do know that no son of mine will wear such a frivolous garment?”

His voice was light and teasing, and my instincts, dulled by months of coddling, weren’t aroused. “Perhaps I’d better knit something in Fox River Hunt colors? Dark green and the scarlet of his father’s coat?”

“Better than yellow.”

“You know, the baby could be a girl. And if she has my coloring, she’ll look pretty in this.”

He was silent, and I drifted back to my own thoughts until he spoke again.

“It had better not be a girl, Louisa.”

I looked up. “You’re not serious?”

“I told you, I want a son.”

“Of course you do,” I soothed. “But this won’t be your only chance to get one, you know.”

“I have no interest in a daughter. Perhaps later, when I have enough sons to content me.”

“Darling, what we’ve made, we’ve made together. And I promise if it is a girl, we’ll make her a rider and someone you can be proud of.” If I heard myself giving away my daughter’s dreams, it was the last thing I worried about.

“A daughter is never cause for pride. Women, in general, are silly creatures. My own mother was the silliest of them all.”

I was torn between wanting a new glimpse into his past and feeling outraged for my own sex. “You’ve never said much about your parents, Ian. What were they like?”

“My father was a man who knew how to get everything he wanted. He built Fox River Farm into what it is today, turned it around by the sweat of his brow and an unconquerable will.”

“And your mother?”

“Weak. If she’d found herself standing on a track with a train bearing down, she wouldn’t have had the strength or sense to step off.”

“I see you weren’t close.”

“I had my father. He was enough.”

“Not all women are silly. If we raise our daughter to be brave and intelligent—”

He scoffed. “No more of this talk. You’ll have a boy. I’m convinced.”

I was unhappy enough to excuse myself a few minutes later, claiming I was particularly tired that night. In bed, however, I couldn’t sleep. Ian’s picture of his family both intrigued and upset me. His disdain for his mother seemed almost to border on bitterness. And what of his father? The man with the unconquerable will? Had he conquered his son’s will, too?

I began to be afraid for my child, girl or boy.

A month before the baby was to make its arrival I was in the kitchen with Lettie, requesting a cool supper for a particularly hot evening. I asked for cold chicken and green salad, but my real reason for being there was to question her.

“Lettie, can you tell me anything about Mr. Ian’s parents? I know so little.”

Despite two large windows that were shaded by oaks and a small fan revolving on its axis, the kitchen was almost beyond tolerance. I fanned her to encourage storytelling.

“Miss Claudia, she was a good woman, but a little thing, too little to stand up to Mr. Andrew. He was a big man, bigger than Mr. Ian, and when he shouted?” She shook her head and grimaced. “That’s a sound I don’t want to hear again.”

“She was afraid of him?”

“We was all afraid of him, you want the truth. Me, I’d have gone somewheres else, if I hadn’t been raised here. But this is my home, and he didn’t yell at me, anyways. He knew I’d be gone if he did.”

“But you were still afraid of him?”

“A man like that? Takes one little thing and he could snap you like a twig in those big old hands. Stayed out of his way. And I danced a little the day he passed.”

I lowered my voice. “Was he cruel to Ian?”

“Only takes a time or two and you learn, if you’re allowed. He beat the boy, but not nearly as much as he beat Miss Claudia. There wasn’t nothing she could learn that could stop him.”

The room was sweltering, but I went suddenly cold. “He beat her?”

Lettie looked up. There was understanding in her eyes. “My man hit me once and I sent him down the road.”

“Seth?”

“No, I took up with Seth afterwards. He don’t hit women.”

“Claudia…Mrs. Sebastian died before her husband?”

“She did. You ask me, she didn’t have no reason for living.”

I tried to imagine my husband as a small boy, locked into this terrible family drama. What had he learned? Worse, what couldn’t he forget?

“You want that chicken whole or chopped up in little pieces?” Lettie asked.