Hannah Alexander (14 page)

“The bleeding’s stopped,” he said.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, surprised. What was this? An answer to prayer? “You’re sure?”

“Nothing more has come through the potato starch.”

Could she trust it? Of course, she wasn’t out of danger yet. None of them were. “What will happen to Deacon and Heidi if those men catch up with them?”

“You don’t know how long you’ve been out, do you?”

She blinked up into his dark eyes, made darker still by the shadow of his hat low over his forehead. “Couldn’t have been long.”

“Those loud-mouthed men know nothing about tracking and seem to be slow about their business of pillaging, raiding and burning those not of their political persuasion.”

Victoria heard the contempt in Joseph’s voice through the roaring in her ears. She glanced upward and silently apologized once again for her mistreatment of the Almighty. She needed to beg Him for mercy, not ostracize Him with her anger.

Joseph touched her hair and brushed it back from her face. “Are you feeling ill?”

She nodded. She also felt terrified, ashamed, overwhelmed. She needed distraction. “The men are gone?”

“They aren’t within hearing now. They’re tracking Deacon and Heidi. If they’re lost, though, they could come back this way. I’m waiting until I know for sure they’re gone.”

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”

“I dragged myself into it.”

“I didn’t mean for you to.” She swallowed and closed her eyes but she opened them again quickly, because the dizziness affected her stomach.

“I know.”

“I knew when Heidi showed up that you wouldn’t leave without her.”

“I wouldn’t have left without you.” He peered through the trees toward the creek. “How could I, Victoria? I love you.”

Her breath caught and held. “You seem able to say those words with ease.” She was beginning to believe, after all this time and all the doubts she’d experienced, that he truly meant what he said. Though if he didn’t, life would have been less complicated.

“I said the same words the day I left you in St. Louis. I meant them.” He turned to glance at her for a few seconds before returning to his study of the creek. “Maybe not as much as I mean them now.”

She tried to sit up, but her stomach churned. “We’ve danced around the subject for five weeks, and there’s never seemed to be time to talk.”

“I had the impression you didn’t want to talk.”

She took a deep breath through her nose and tried to calm her stomach. Must not make any sudden movements. “I’ve wanted answers for a decade, but when you showed up I wasn’t sure I still wanted them.”

“Do you now?”

“The way I feel right now, I’m not sure I would remember what we said.” She paused to breathe slowly. “When I heard about your engagement, I felt you simply loved me less than you loved your father’s ambitions for you. Or...that you truly loved the woman you were called upon to marry.” She said it lightly, but her heart seemed to beat through every word. He mattered far too much to her, and even though she knew her words were those of a desperate woman, and not something she would say if she were completely in control, she needed to say them. What if she didn’t survive this? He should know the truth, shouldn’t he? She felt ashamed to feel so in need of Joseph’s reassurance. Ashamed and vulnerable. It was an awful feeling.

“I can’t believe you have doubts now, after all this time,” he told her gently. “Why do you think I avoided seeing you and Matthew together?”

“What about those letters I never received? What...did you write to me?”

“I explained that no matter what you might hear, I was not going to marry Sara Jane, my lifelong neighbor and childhood friend.”

“You cared for her?”

“She was like a sister.”

“So you wouldn’t...you wouldn’t have married her even if she’d lived?” Her head pounded and she swallowed back the nausea again. Now was not the time for this conversation.

He turned to look at her, frowning. “Victoria?” He touched her forehead. “Your skin’s getting hotter.”

“I know. Tell me about Sara Jane. I need to be distracted right now.”

He moistened a cloth and placed it over her face. “It was always you.” His voice was tender, filled with compassion. “I never loved anyone else the way I love you. I would never have married Sara Jane. My father was ill. He made the announcement of our engagement without consulting either of us. He and Sara Jane’s father made the plans without us. The first I heard of it was when Sara Jane came riding like wildfire to the house to beg me to put a stop to it. That’s when she told me she was secretly engaged to a man in Atlanta.” Joseph studied the terrain past the trees again. “The announcement Matthew received about my engagement was from my father, not from me.”

“She was going to be married.” For some reason, tears burned Victoria’s eyes. “She was in love?”

“With a good man, but not with me.”

“And then she died.” Victoria never cried over sad stories like this. But the tears dripped down her face. She dabbed at them, sniffed. She had never felt so awful in her life.

Joseph held her hair away from her face, lifting it from her shoulders. “You’re overwrought because of your fever. We need to cool you down.”

“I wondered why you wrote to Matthew and not to me,” she said.

“I know. I sent you letters as well, many more than I sent to Matthew. At the time, I believed you never wrote back because you no longer cared. All I received from you was silence.”

“If I’d only known.”

Chapter Thirteen

F
rustration slammed through Joseph like the kick of a mule. He had suspected for many years that Matthew had somehow intercepted the letters to Victoria so she would believe she’d been abandoned by the man she loved. But even as he’d suspected, he’d known Matthew too well to truly believe it.

“I picked up the clinic mail most days,” Victoria said, her words a little slurred by the effects of fever. And the tears. “What else did you tell me in the letters?”

Memories combined like burrs under a saddle for a long moment. “Everything.”

She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. “Oh,” she said on a sigh.

“I asked you to wait. I told you all about Sara Jane and our childhood friendship and the trick our fathers pulled on us. I told you when she died and how I grieved her death.”

“You loved her as a sister.”

“I was devastated when she died, but never because I wanted to marry her. I wanted her to marry her beau and pull out from under her overbearing father’s fat, greedy thumb. Her death was only one incident that helped me decide to leave the family plantation for good. I told my father I was going to marry you.”

“Did you tell Matthew about any of this?”

“No. I knew how he felt and I didn’t want to rub salt in his wounds. He knew you and I were in love.”

“How could the letters have been lost? It isn’t as if you sent them all at the same time.” She looked up at him. “Where
did
you send them from?”

Joseph held her feverish gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes. Now that he knew the truth—that Matthew had not intercepted the letters and Victoria had never received them—he realized who had sabotaged their delivery. “Cleophas Rickard.”

“Your father?”

“He was a man accustomed to getting his way.”

“You posted your letters with him?”

“I didn’t think about it at the time, but yes. Or rather, I might just as well have.” Joseph fought back frustrated resentment as the reality of his loss settled into him.

“I suppose he had servants...slaves...do that.”

“My father had a young houseboy, Robert, who was at his beck and call all hours of the day and night. He slept at the foot of my father’s bed. I often left to post my own mail and poor Robert would be told to race to catch up with me and do the mailing for me. I would have preferred to send him away to play at the creek with friends, but I knew he might receive punishment for that, so I allowed him to stay busy.”

“You think your father had your letters destroyed.”

Joseph had been brought up not to speak ill of the dead, especially not his father. But anger held him captive. “I was wrong not to suspect something was up when you didn’t at least return greetings to me when I wrote to you, but I thought you were angry.”

“If I had received those letters...” She shook her head. The tears had stopped falling. “I’d have thought you and Matthew would communicate better.”

“I didn’t write to Matthew about you, and he seldom mentioned you in his letters. His posts were all about some new medical technique he had learned or a new medicine he’d begun to use on patients.”

“We both thought you had settled in Georgia for good.”

Joseph knew it must have been very difficult for Matthew to resist Victoria, especially when she wasn’t receiving word from the man she loved. “I regret to say that I held much resentment against Matthew for so many years.”

But the end result was that his love for her had been preserved, and right now he didn’t care why. God worked in amazing ways, and who was to say that God’s work, this time, had been as successful as always to bring about His will in the lives of His people.

“I knew of your frustration with family expectations,” Victoria said. Her voice was hoarse and her face had grown crimson.

Joseph picked up the wet cloth and remoistened it with whiskey. “I think you’re dehydrated. You need to drink.”

She took the cloth from him and used it to moisten her neck. “I don’t think I could hold any water in my stomach. When can we leave? The men haven’t come back this way.”

He desperately wanted to leave. He wanted to pick Victoria up and carry her to the creek and douse her to lower her temperature. “Not yet. I want to get you out of here as soon as possible, but we can’t take the chance yet.”

She sighed. “I trust your judgment. Tell me, then, when your father deeded the plantation to your brother.”

He recalled his father’s fury with him, and then his death. After all that, to learn that Matthew and Victoria had married...it was like a stake in his heart. After all he’d gone through, his greatest wish was denied him, but if not for the past ten years of struggle, would he be the man he was now?

“He changed the deed when I told him I was going to marry an abolitionist.”

“I did write to you, Joseph. I take it you never received the letters.”

“Of course not. After my father died I was angry to the bone and sick of life. I took a wagon train West to get away from the world I’d always known.”

“Why didn’t you ask me about the letters long ago?”

“When you were already married? A man doesn’t get that personal with the wife of another man. The only conclusion I could draw was that you had chosen security over love. How could I blame you? I didn’t realize how much I’d hurt you when I left.”

“You mean you didn’t know how much I loved you?” she asked.

“I thought that if you loved me enough, you would have gone with me.”

“But I didn’t—”

He touched her lips with his fingers. “I know better now. You are a woman of strong principles. You were wise enough to know you couldn’t have withstood watching slavery in action in every part of your life. I blamed myself for forcing you to choose a loveless marriage because of my need to obey my father’s dying wish.”

“My marriage wasn’t loveless.”

Her words stung, and yet he was glad, for her sake, that she’d not been lonely. “Can you tell me it was anything like the love we would have shared?”

Victoria looked up and held his gaze for a long moment, her eyes bright, face still flushed from the fever, and he felt like a brute. Why was he doing this now?

She shook her head, then leaned back against Boaz. “I think I’m the kind of woman who can only truly have a deep connection to one person my whole life. That spot was already taken. Matthew knew that.” The words fell softly, almost as if she felt guilty for speaking them.

Joseph held Victoria’s clear gaze. It was the same gaze that had always had the power to scramble his thoughts to the point that he was unable to hold an intelligent conversation. He felt her studying him.

“Now we know,” he said, feeling weak with regret, thinking about what might have been. “I’ve wanted to ask you about what happened for the past five weeks, but—”

“But you’re a gentleman, and we had to get to know one another again.” She could read his mind. She knew him so well.

“I wasn’t able to tell you before,” he said. “But all those nights on the trail, you were the one I dreamed about, and the guilt of dreaming of another man’s wife came close to driving me crazy. I was guilty of the sin of coveting my friend’s wife, and I fought it by keeping busy, by joining the cause you and Matthew started me on in the first place.”

“I’m so sorry you endured those years.” Victoria’s voice weakened. “I never lacked for gentle company or interesting work. But you built a town in Kansas. God blessed your attempts to flee from your temptation.”

“I think it was necessary for us to go our separate ways for a season,” he said. “Your skills will be vital in Kansas Territory, and I would never have gained knowledge of the wilderness and been able to lead other wagon trains to the Territory had I not been forced from your side. Do you remember the day your brother found me lying in the street?”

He got the response he wanted when she smiled. “I remember,” she said. “Albert carried you to the clinic where I had taken a job working for Matthew, an old family friend.”

“You chose to work in a dangerous part of town.”

“And you chose to interfere when you saw a man beating his wife.” Her smile widened. “You always were the interfering sort. Albert and Matthew took to you immediately.”

“And you?”

“What woman wouldn’t take to a man like you?”

He liked that. He recalled looking up from the cot where broad-shouldered, red-haired Albert had placed him and seeing Victoria at the far end of the room folding bandages. The vision of her had burned into his heart that very first time. Only in the weeks and months later had her depth and character burned into his soul.

She took a breath and let it out slowly, as if trying to settle the pain in her thigh. “I believe Matthew intended to ask me to make a marriage/business partnership with him before you came along. He’d already begun to teach me minor skills.”

That was something Joseph hadn’t known. “Matthew was the one who suggested I propose to you. He was like a fond uncle expressing his approval. He even seemed angry when I told him I was returning to Georgia.”

“Of course. He doted on me. He always wanted me to be happy.”

Joseph thought he heard something. He stiffened and held his hand up for her to be quiet, but when he peered through the screen of trees, he saw a doe drinking at the creek. He shook his head and tried to relax.

“I once told Sara Jane that she shouldn’t be traded off like some prized pig,” he said.

Victoria found the energy to chuckle at him. “Prized pig?”

“She was a lovely young lady and deserved to marry for something besides money, which could be eaten by moths, destroyed by war or famine or theft.”

An expression of wonder entered Victoria’s blue eyes. Her shapely lips parted with a chuckle. “Spoken like a true gentleman...except for the prized pig part.”

“The two of you could have been friends.”

“For a while, I hated the woman I thought you’d left me for, but how could I blame her for loving you?”

Joseph frowned at the increased color that had begun to stain Victoria’s face and neck. He touched her face. “Your fever is rising.”

She nodded. “My eyes are burning. I can always tell.”

He moved closer to her. “We need to get you out of here as soon as it’s safe.”

She stared up at him with eyes that had haunted him ever since he’d left, especially after receiving word of Matthew’s death. Those eyes had lingered in his dreams for his whole adult life.

Joseph took her hand. It was cold. He took both of her hands in his and tried to instill some warmth in them. “You have permission to sock me in the mouth for all my poor behavior as soon as you’re well enough.”

She gave a weak chuckle. “You could serve as my target stand when I practice my shooting.”

“I’m all yours.” He halfway meant it. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t behaved more like Buster Johnston than he could admit to himself.

She laid her head against Boaz’s side. “Do you really think those men are coming back?”

“I wish I knew, but we can’t take a chance yet.”

“If they’re coming, I wish they would hurry.” Her eyes slowly closed.

He knew she was feeling worse and he prayed silently for something he could do to help her, distract her. “You know those arguments we had about slavery when we were falling in love? Your words only underscored what I’d come to believe. When I returned to Georgia, I felt as if I was returning to undertake a battle. I had even decided, at one time, to free all the slaves in the plantation.”

Her lids fluttered open. “You did?”

“It wasn’t until I arrived there that I realized I couldn’t do that. Not only would it endanger my family, but it would have endangered the slaves who had served my family for so many years. My younger brother, Edwin, shared many of my convictions, and together we made plans for greatly increased care for the slaves, increasingly better food and sanitation, better homes, shorter working hours. Since my father had already improved their living conditions a great deal after his father died, other plantations in the area improved the standards of living.”

“It was a start,” she said as her eyes closed again. “I never knew.”

“No. I wrote to you about it.”

“I don’t care what your family says. You were a good son. Now,” she said, pressing her fingers to her forehead, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

He rushed to help her lean forward and held her hair back as she retched into the weeds, her whole body trembling. When she finished, he drew her back and dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, helped her wash and gave her a sip of water.

“Mint leaves?” he asked. “Did you pack any?”

She shook her head.

“Even if we dared try to return to town, you can’t ride in your condition,” he said.

She moaned. Then her eyes widened as she went still and silent, nodding toward the creek.

He heard what she had. More movement. Were the men coming back, or were more deer joining the doe at the water?

Victoria breathed quietly while Joseph picked up her Colt and stepped with easy stealth through the thick growth of briars and trees. Good thing it was later spring and the brush covered them completely. He would prefer a cave, but their little hiding place would serve.

He caught sight of one of what sounded like four riders along the creek. They were talking more softly this time, all wearing hats except one. That one...something familiar about him. And then he spoke, and for a moment Joseph could not breathe.

Buster Johnston. He was riding with Silver Tail—Broderick Thames—who had apparently sobered up since Joseph had seen him a few hours ago.

“You say you thought they were following this creek?” Thames asked Buster.

“They sure were. Don’t know how many came this way, but if you ask me, they’ve got a lot of shooting skills.”

Victoria’s trembling hand found its way to Joseph’s arm and she squeezed tightly. Her hand was as hot as her face appeared. He nodded and patted her hand with reassurance. What was the kid up to now?

“You say they were men from the wagon train?” Thames asked.

“Sure. Slave traders going to Kansas Territory. Bet I could get them to join your army, every one of them.”