“It was a blasphemy, wasn’t it?” Anne Randolph demanded.
“The mildest cant, Mother,” Ethan said, before snatching the bourbon bottle from her hand.
Judith’s sharp eyes warned him of the neighbors’ lights. They pulled Anne Randolph inside the doorway, then caught her in their embrace. “You two are as bad as your sister and her subterfuge. I waited until dark as she instructed.”
Ethan caught sight of another figure on the street. Aaron returned from paying the coachman and arrived at the doorstep with his long-gaited stride. Ethan pulled the bondsman inside. His eyes drank in the sight of his mother and Aaron as if they’d disappear. “The table is set, supper warm, see?” he proclaimed. “Judith must have known you were coming, there’s so much food tonight, yes, Judith?”
The groan. Reminding him of their circumstances.
His mother started. “Ethan, you have a patient here?”
He looked down at the bottle, honey pot, and spoon in his hand. “Yes.”
“Jordan trusts you already to care for this unfortunate, son?”
“Uh, yes.”
His mother’s eyes lit with purpose. “Perhaps we might help?”
“No, no! It’s not a difficult treatment, but requires some patience and duration. Like Martha’s rice pudding, yes, Aaron?”
“If’n you say so, sir.”
Judith tugged at her shawl’s fringe. Nervous, too, he thought as he backed his way toward the bedroom. “Please sit,” he implored. “I’ll be out directly.” He felt badly, leaving them to Judith, but he needed time to think. Quiet time.
Jordan Foster was neither cooperative nor a quiet patient. Soon Ethan had smeared them both with honey. Before Jordan fell back on the bed with the proper dosage inside him, he’d thrown Ethan to the floorboards. Ethan had barely scrambled to his feet before his mother
appeared in the thrown-open doorway. Anne Randolph walked to the bed, where the doctor breathed out a snore.
“Good God,” she whispered. “His throat!”
Ethan frowned at the physician’s opened collar. “That’s an old wound. I didn’t do him any lasting harm, he always snores that loud.”
“You cut him, Ethan?”
“No. I closed the wound. He bade me do it!”
“When?”
“Mama—”
“When?” she demanded.
“Last spring,” he said softly, “on the way to Pennsylvania. When you sent him to follow me. Stop looking at me like that; it’s you who foresaw it,
madame
! The thieves are long gone. He’s healed.”
She nodded, though the color had not returned to her face. “And now? What ails him now?”
Ethan gave up all title to subterfuge. “He’s drunk.”
His mother considered the sprawled body. Ethan raked his hand through his hair, which solidified its unruliness in honey.
“When is the next dosage?” she asked.
“In twenty minutes.”
“I’ll render that,” she resolved.
“But—”
She looked at his smeared vest pointedly. “Could I do worse?”
“Mother, listen—”
“No, you listen to me, young man! I helped one hundred and twenty-eight souls through the epidemic of seventeen hundred and ninety-two. Surely I can perform a procedure as simple as making rice pudding. Aaron?” she summoned the man standing beside Judith in the doorway.
“You did, Miss Anne, you sure enough did!” he confirmed, smiling.
Ethan sighed. “Six teaspoons of the honey,” he instructed. “In twenty minutes’ time. The same again twenty minutes after that. Let him sleep, keeping the bottle of that damned corn whiskey in sight, and giving him a drink from it if he wakes asking for it. After three hours, another cycle: three doses of six teaspoons of honey, repeated at intervals of twenty minutes. In the morning, more honey, and a soft-boiled egg at breakfast and midday.”
Anne Randolph smiled. “I’ll be gone back to your sister’s house by first light. Barton must bring me home by noon, as he’s off on another of his expeditions soon. You’ll have to feed our patient the eggs yourself. Judith and I will sit with Dr. Foster now. Go. Attend to your own
needs. Leave us to visit together as we see to your unpleasant predicament.”
“
My
predicament!”
“‘Your,’ in the good Quaker plural, my love. I do not absolve Jordan in this folly, of course. Do not clench your teeth at me, Ethan Blair! There, that’s better. Now, if you can kiss your lady and me without soiling us, you may do so, and be gone.”
Ethan knew better than to argue with her further. He approached, standing between his mother and his wife. Most of his anger dissolved. How he’d missed this woman in all her iron delicacy. He reached down, kissed Anne Randolph’s cheek. “Welcome to our home, Mother,” he said.
“An interesting welcome.” Her caustic tone, her frown, were belied by eyes bright with life. Jordan Foster was inches away, with his mother’s vibrant presence lost on him. Ethan took pleasure in that.
He immediately faced the disapproval of that pleasure from Judith’s fathoms-cold stare. He could hide nothing from his wife, he thought again, as the flush of shame sped up his neck. Judith’s eyes warmed with pardon, and something else. Passion. He reached down, blocking his mother’s view, and kissed his wife full on the mouth. The blush coursed from his face to hers as he tracked his fingers over a terrain starting from her cheek and ending where her chemise was still unlaced between her breasts. He broke away, leaving her breathless. Leaving himself worse. Would his mother see?
“Ethan,” she declaimed, too concerned with his wife’s appearance to notice him at all, “get out! You’ve left poor Judith quite besmeared.”
“Poor Judith,” he muttered, as he pulled an ever-present handkerchief from his waistcoat and threw it at the lady in question.
Aaron shook his head when Ethan limped into the hearth room. “As I thought. You ain’t been taking good enough care of that new leg.”
Ethan growled. “It’s letting me know that.”
“Take the warning, young one,” his kinsman advised, pouring heated water into a basin. Aaron laid an absorbent cloth over his arm before he brought the steaming basin to the sofa. He’d found everything needed. Ethan took the cloth, dipped it in the water. He washed the sticky honey off his hands, face, and clothes.
When Ethan finished, Aaron bent to retrieve the bowl. “Leave it, sit. Please, Aaron, you are our guest. Visit.” He motioned to a straight-backed chair, but Aaron quickly took the three-legged stool that Judith used when she warmed herself by the oven on baking day. Ethan sighed, but accepted his choice. “How is Martha?” he asked, sitting on the sofa. “How are your children? My father? The harvest?”
The big man’s hands reached out. “Would you give me that boot, sir? Long as you’re going to badger me, I may as well keep busy.”
“You’re tired, Aaron? My badgering can wait. Sleep. Take the sofa. No, our bed upstairs. I’ll show you—” He’d risen halfway before Aaron had him back in the sofa’s depths.
“Is it city life or your doctorin’ or you been drinkin’ that brew you’s doused in that’s made you take leave of your senses?”
“I am in full possession of what little senses I have,” he insisted. “We are not at Windover. This is my house. Well, Jordan’s. He’s from Boston. Do you think he would approve of you sitting like a faithful dog at my feet?”
“I ain’t—”
“No, he would not! You are my elder brother, Aaron, my guest here. I was a sailor. I can sleep anywhere.”
“So can I, sir.”
Bested again. “All right,” Ethan conceded, remembering him crouched in the fireplace at Windover. “So can you.” The big man’s hand rested at his shoulder.
“I brought me some leather, so I’ll get to work.” Aaron pointed to the arm of the sofa with his chin. “You, sir, keep that leg high, an’ be a dutiful son to Miss Anne.”
Ethan propped his foot where Aaron indicated. He heard the murmured voices of the women talking. Though their words were indistinct, he recognized Judith’s powerful, musical tones contrasting with his mother’s rounded speech. Aaron examined his right boot carefully. Ethan watched, content in the silence between them.
“You patchin’ up folks real fine here, your sister and the little ones say, Ethan.”
There. At last, “master” and “sir” gave way to his name. Aaron had given him permission to go to their secret place, to regard him as his brother. Was putting something useful to do into those big hands the key? Ethan smiled.
“My sister, my nieces told you of our success?”
“They done that, yes.”
“Did you expect anything different from them?”
“No. Didn’t expect you to be no one but the man I knows, neither.” He frowned at the boot’s worn-down heel. “Sure wish I had my bench. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Ethan turned toward the bedroom doorway. “They won’t be able to control him. We have to be ready to help soon, Aaron.”
“Oh, child. There be a few things you don’t know ’bout your mama.”
“And my father? How is it he allowed you both to travel upriver?”
“Miss Anne got other business.”
“Business?”
“Trading.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Early frosts killin’ off the tobacco, wheat, the seed corn. Your brothers, in past times, they would send their people to help out at the old place in times like these. But they irated at your mama.”
“Since she helped Jordan and me to trick them in Pennsylvania?”
“That be the truth of it. Well, now, your mama needs to raise some cash, as everything going ragged, clothes to tempers.”
“My father’s temper?”
“Oh, old master only peeved you ain’t come back.”
“Does he know why?”
“Well, he got a scrambled notion of events up in Pennsylvania, I think. On account your brothers keep painting themselves the great heroes, pulling you from the North. You be the bad one, slippin’ out of their grasp, not comin’ home, disappearin’ with your lady in tow. Now, old master, he like that part, you towing Miss Judith, mind. Your brothers, they sure your sister knows where in the wide world you off to now. That’s why she send for Mr. Barton to bring us in the dead of the night for visits. I gots to fetch Miss Anne back by dawn, like in a fairy tale.”
“What is she selling, to raise the cash?”
“Bride gifts.”
“Bride gifts?”
“Yes. Nothing you would even know, she’s had them packed up so long already.”
“I wish I could help.”
“You and Mr. Jordan and Miss Judith, you got your own city row to hoe, sir. Your mama, she keeping us all from want’s door, like she always done, don’t fret yourself.”
Ethan looked at the closed bedroom door. “Aaron. It’s past time. They’re not calling us.”
“Maybe them ladies don’t need us, young one. You’d best get yourself used to thinking in that direction.”
“A
treatment for overindulgence at the drink, this honey remedy,” Anne Randolph observed.
Judith nodded, wondering if she would ever feel comfortable in the presence of Ethan’s beautiful mother.
“He learned that medical knowledge while at sea, I’ll wager.”
“Yes,” Judith whispered.
“Drunkenness! Has he subjected you to it often?”
“Oh, no!”
“A recent madness.”
“Yes, a madness. Dr. Foster’s. But not Ethan’s!”
“Just because he’s the one left standing does not excuse my son’s erratic stance, his deception, his behaving like a Randolph man!”
Judith set her mouth in a firm line. “He carried Dr. Foster home from the tavern, straining his leg, hence his stance. My husband does not indulge in spirits to excess. You misjudge him, Mrs. Randolph.”
Anne Randolph blinked, then regained her composure quickly. Her soft tone astonished Judith. “‘Mrs. Randolph’ will not do. What did you call your mother?” she asked.
“Mam,” Judith breathed out. “‘They call thee Mam, thy little lambs,’ my father used to tell her.”
“And now my Ethan has that woman’s stalwart lamb coming to his defense. Judith, would you consider calling me Mother? Or Mama, as Ethan does when he’s not angry with me?”
Judith stared at her lap. She nodded.
“Good. Now, in return, I promise to open my mind to possibilities besides the obvious ones of my hasty judgment. Tell me what happened.”
When she did, Judith noticed Anne Randolph’s eyes change with each sentence. Ethan had spoken eloquently of his mother’s veils. Judith realized she was watching a full spectrum.
When she had finished, Anne Randolph sat back in her chair and closed the lids over those enigmatic eyes. As she opened them, a new woman emerged. She took the elegant silver watch tucked into her waistband and stared at its numerals. “It’s past time. If you’ll pour, my new daughter, I’ll shove the honey down this recalcitrant’s throat.”