“Dr. Foster, my husband, and I are most grateful for your eggs, Mrs. Atwater.”
“Shall I visit, start a supper for you, poor dear, with no servants of your own by way of those two shiftless men?”
“No!” Ethan pleaded, taking hold of her ankle.
“I’m quite well, Mrs. Atwater,” Judith tried, “and must be about my household duties.”
“True,” Ethan agreed, his voice suddenly low and amorous, his hands removing her slippers with exquisite deliberateness.
“You are so good, after those two behaved so badly yesterday. Common knowledge now, please do not attempt to defend them! How is Dr. Foster faring?”
“He improves.” Judith felt her stockings gliding down her leg under Ethan’s fingers.
“And your husband?”
Judith couldn’t banish the breathless tremor from her voice as the ties of her first petticoat were urged free. “Husband?”
“Yes, your husband! I’ve been calling after him since you left. To chastise him soundly, and speak again on hiring a live-out girl to help you.” Another petticoat gone. “No one answers!”
Ethan growled. His teeth bared against her thigh.
“Where is he?” Mrs. Atwater demanded. “Making his rounds?”
His tongue’s caresses turned circular.
“Rounds, yes,” Judith could barely breathe out.
“Well, I’m glad he feels well enough to be about.”
“Oh, he feels very well.”
Ethan stifled laughter, there, below her breasts. Unlaced. He’d unlaced her completely. She pushed down his head, now in danger of rising above the windowsill. Her daygown slipped off her shoulder, threatening scandal. But his clever hand reached up, caught the back seams, held them.
“I must go, Mrs. Atwater. My duties, you see—”
“No,” Ethan growled low beneath her, “she does not see.” Judith reached, even as the captain’s mother finally granted her leave and pulled in the shutters harder than she’d intended.
Then Judith whirled about. The action left her wearing nothing but her shift and sent her husband sprawling. “Ethan Blair,” she summoned in a whisper laced with fury, “you’ve made a wanton, deceitful woman of me!”
He rested back on his elbows, among her discarded gown and petticoats. “I heard no lies, Judith.”
“Distracting truths, then!”
His finger traced the arch of her foot. “Distracting, yes. Artful truths.”
Judith stepped out of his reach. Did he know anything about her activities the day before? No. He was teasing her. Her shift slipped off one shoulder.
Ethan’s eyes lingered on the breast his wife’s sudden movement exposed. Different. It looked different to him today, he realized. Darker.
“Stop that!” she demanded.
“What? Stop what?”
“Stop looking at me like a … a doctor!”
“But Judith, that life station is …”
She flung herself onto the discarded undergarments.
“ … my fondest …” He attempted to complete his thought, but she stopped any further words with her mouth over his. He felt her anger mount with her ardor until she tore her mouth from his.
“You did not think to work
these
buttons free, while you were removing me from my clothes?” she demanded, yanking his waistcoat closures so hard that two of them tore loose.
He grinned. “And miss this?”
E
than was vaguely aware of the day’s light growing dimmer.
Don’t leave her there, on the floorbocards,
he admonished himself. He was used to sleeping anywhere. Not she, not his gentle Judith. Gentle, even when she’d strafed his chest with her strong, accurate, seamstress fingers. At the height of her rushes, he’d felt their calluses, but never nails. He loved his wife’s wildness.
But he must take better care of her. Wasn’t it bad enough they hadn’t reached the bed, again?
Now, her languid smile told him she didn’t mind, for all her mock protest over the time and place of his seduction. He kissed her temple. She burrowed her back deeper against his shirt. Was she sleeping already? This was different. Her falling asleep before he did. Different, like her nipples, like the softer feel of her belly. Different, like … He nuzzled against her temple and breathed deeply. Yes, even her scent was softer, sweeter, more … what? Female? Could he ask Jordan about these things, or would the physician laugh at him?
Then, suddenly, she was crying, their nest of petticoats not enough to silence her tears, to hide shaking shoulders.
He turned her gently to him.
“Judith,” he entreated. “Have I done something wrong?”
She smiled. “You’ve done something very right. We have.” Her cheeks dimpled.
“Have we?”
“Yes. There is a child within me, Ethan,” she announced.
“A child?”
He touched his own lips. Then he brought her close against his
heart, so she wouldn’t see it. The fear that rode on the heels of his joy. For the child of Judith Mercer’s lineage. For the child’s mother. Because of her father’s long-ago service to the Revolution, because of the one Loyalist who had gotten away that night of their stand. The one who had come back and killed Eli Mercer. He would return, looking. For Judith, no longer celibate and without heirs. For their child. Neither would be safe from the one who’d killed her father.
E
than waited quietly beside the tree in the park where he met Sally and the children every midweek afternoon. It was a tall poplar, its leaves turned red and gold on this shining autumn day. Poplars grew quickly. He wondered who had planted it, in the generation before his. Had his mother’s brother, the uncle he was named for, ever seen it, ever stood in its shade?
His sister and her chicks entered the park’s grounds. He slipped behind the tree as she found their meeting bench. She sat, and neatly divided the shortbread among her children. Even tiny Charlotte took a piece and quickly slipped off her mother’s lap to join her sisters skating through the downed leaves. How fast children grow, too, like poplars, Ethan thought, watching, feeling suddenly shy, awkward.
They found him, and pulled him to their mother. Sally looked up. Knowing already, he thought. She must know. For he did not always stand mutely before her, grinning like an idiot, did he?
“What is it?” she asked. “Ethan, what has happened?”
He hadn’t thought about how to tell her this thing, this marvelous thing she already knew. “Ethan?” she prompted again. “Is Judith well?”
“More than well. Come summer, your children might be safe from our pirate clutches,
madame.”
Sally sprang to her feet and let out a small squeal that reminded Ethan of the sound she used to make when he’d trod on her slippers during dance lessons.
He swung her high in his arms, drawing the looks of two passersby. His nieces giggled. That slowed the steps of an older couple, who gave them all a disapproving glance.
Sally kissed his cheek, then straightened his neckerchief. “You must not be so … so demonstrative in public places. Not without Judith beside you.”
“Why not?” She sat on the bench. He took his place beside her. “Why not, Sally?” he persisted.
“Sweet brother,” she began finally, “I am a matron whose husband’s profession keeps him away from home for weeks and months at a time.
I must be careful of my friendship with Dr. Foster’s handsome assistant.”
“But we are both married! You allow the girls to call me Uncle. Does that not make it clear that we are not lovers?”
His sister’s hand reached for his face, then resettled in her lap. “It makes it more likely in the eyes of some,” she explained quietly.
Ethan got that same sickening feeling that had marred the news of Judith’s pregnancy—that the one who’d killed Eli would come to destroy her. But this foolishness, these rumors would help, wouldn’t they? He removed his hat with a flourish, knelt before her, and kissed his sister’s hand.
“Let them talk!” he proposed.
“But, Ethan—”
“Don’t you see, Sally? If they think me your lover, they will never attach the name Randolph to mine, yes?”
She stood. Her black-and-white-striped skirts swooped around him. “And what about my name, brother dear? What about my good name?”
“Oh yes, of course.” His head bowed. “I am odious, Sally. I don’t know why you tolerate me at all.”
His sister shooed her children away farther, then took a place on the bench beside him. “You are nothing of the sort. I should not be so sensitive to the opinions of persons who don’t matter a whit. Barton is the only one who matters in this.”
“And Judith. She would have to brave slander.” Ethan shook his head. “I don’t think these things through well at all. Actions to consequences.”
“Oh, darling, Judith will laugh at any whispers, more heartily even than Barton. Especially now that she has a much more important duty to attend to.” She touched the side of his face. His women were so brave, Ethan thought with pride.
“What did Jordan say about Judith’s interesting condition?” Sally asked, her eyes beaming.
“We haven’t yet told him.”
“What? Ethan you must!”
“Before you? Before Mama?”
“Ethan Blair, the man is your dearest friend, is he not?”
“He is ashamed of me, I sometimes think.”
“What nonsense!”
“He chides me for—what does he call them?—my flights of fancy. And my problems with remembering to collect the money for our services. What will he think, Sally? Will he rejoice in the prospect of another mouth to feed in his household?”
“You are misjudging him,” she maintained. “Badly.”
“Am I? Did Mama tell you how he got in his cups last night?”
“She did.”
“And I’m misjudging him?”
“Yes. I’m sorry for your wounded heart, but yes, you are. Listen well to me, little brother. We must both concentrate on healing the rift between Jordan and Mother.”
“Rift?”
“Mother left for home furious with him!”
“About last night?”
“Last night, your worn-down bootheel, your adventure with thieves that neither of us knew a thing about—”
“Nor did you have to!
Zut alors,
if our mother was not so dedicated to looking at men in their underwear, she’d remain blissfully ignorant of what does not concern her!”
Sally threw her head back and erupted in laughter. But her mood changed dramatically. “Ignorant? So that’s how you’d like us better? Is this reward for our devotion? All men would be tyrants if they could. Even you!”
He patted her hand, as a few more couples slowed their walks. “Now, Sally,” he whispered, “it appears as if we’ve had our first lover’s quarrel.”
She could not hide her smile behind her hand. “I should have drowned you while you were still smaller than I, pest!” she hissed.
“Impossible. I was born in the sack, remember? Not destined for drowning. You must devise another way to be rid of me, sister dear.”
Sally’s face softened with—What was it? A flight of fancy? It was a family trait, Ethan decided then, this tendency toward imagination. “A baby. I look forward to sharing motherhood with your sweet bride, Ethan,” she whispered.
He smiled. “We have dreamed on this day forever, it seems. But neither of us dared hope for it.”
“Why not?”
“Reasons you would find ridiculous, I think. But, behind them, I believe it is because of the ways our lives have gone thus far.”
His sister’s hand covered his, pressed. “True, neither of you has led a charmed existence, despite your remaining undrowned. But it is behind you, sweet boy. All behind you.”
“No. No, it is not. Sally, the one who killed Eli—”
“The Loyalist.”
“Yes, the Loyalist, when he discovers that Judith is carrying Eli’s grandchild …” He put his head in his hand, fighting the dark pain behind his scar.
“Oh, Ethan, good God.”
He lifted his head. “I must find him first, Sally. I think I must kill him.”
The smell of the runaway carriage’s horses that permeated his
clothes since Ethan had grabbed their reins was quickly overcome by the scent of dying. Jordan Foster called for him. He gave up the reins and joined the doctor and their new patient, fallen there, on the cobblestones.
Ethan had witnessed dying before. Why did he feel a kind of madness coming over him—here among the scent, the weeping, the crowd of hushed, shocked faces?
Perhaps it was because this stranger was a woman. One who had been-moments before—alive, walking the streets of Richmond, part of his new life, where he did not believe Death could follow. Walking the streets of Richmond, with her package under her arm. They were still here: arm, package tucked under it, muddy, rain-drenched. He knelt beside the woman with the bright red hair—hair, arm, package, green gown—but he could not put the parts of her together.
Fayette had never allowed him to see anyone this bad on board the
Standard
. Sprinkle of freckles across the nose. But he’d held Eli Mercer in his death throes, hadn’t he? And Harry Burnett. He could do this:
Put her together, be of comfort
, he told his freezing brain.
Jordan Foster knelt at the woman’s feet, removing his coat. “Ethan!” the physician barked. “Give me your knife.”
He pulled his weapon from its sheathed place in his boot smoothly, mechanically, grateful for Jordan’s familiar, disgruntled tone. There, the knife into his master’s hands, barely disturbing the woman’s head on his lap. Head, nearly severed from its pale white neck. It didn’t matter, the care he was taking. She could feel no pain.
—Ruined. Cream cakes I baked for my sister.
Ethan heard the woman’s wistful voice, though it was impossible for her to speak. He heard her inside his head, where Clarisse, and the
chained slaves, and Fayette sometimes spoke with him. Together. At last. She came together.
“We’ll deliver,” he assured her quietly.
The knife in Jordan’s hand stilled at the ready.
—Good. Deliver. Thank you.
“She’s dead, Ethan,” the doctor barked. “Assist me.”
The Richmond ladies who’d flocked out of their houses at the sound of the screaming horses brought forth their sheets. Ethan eased the woman into their care. He joined Jordan, trying to understand his clipped explanation of what he was about to do.
With a quick sweep of the knife, Jordan laid open the abdomen and uterus. His hands went inside. Ethan’s mind didn’t sharpen fully until he thrust the wriggling baby and placenta into his arms.
“Too small,” the surgeon pronounced. “He’ll die. Let me—”
“She,”
Ethan corrected him. “It’s a girl.”
“What does it matter? Ethan, what are you doing?”
“She’s cold.” He held his burden closer, unbuttoning his vest.
“That’s not necessary. It’s not a mercy. Hand it to me and I’ll—”
“Not ‘it,’
she.”
Ethan stopped listening to any but the mother’s voice, as it returned to his head, asking him to keep his promise of delivery. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers, then tucked the tiny child, her cord and pulsing afterbirth, against his skin. He secured them in soft cotton folds and waistcoat. Then he rose unsteadily to his feet.
A large woman took his arm.
“Her sister?” he whispered.
“This way, sir,” she led him.
T
he darkened room was full of women. It smelled of blood, as he did. A different kind, though—lifeblood. The sight of him brought tears to the woman lying on the bed. Her red hair matched her fallen sister’s. He’d brought something besides confirmation of Death’s visit. How could he convince her of that? He walked closer.
One of her attendants rose. “Get out!” she stormed.
He stood his ground, focused on the new mother. “This little one, she’s cold,
madame,”
he whispered. “And hungry. And so small. She needs you.” The child responded to his voice, curling herself closer into the space beneath his heart.
The sister’s hand flew to her mouth.
Another woman approached so quickly he saw only flashes of her white apron. She peered inside his waistcoat, gently unbuttoning. She
called for her bag, for her stout linen thread. She tied off the baby’s cord, cut it, then lifted her from Ethan’s bloody pouch. Second birth, Ethan thought as he sat, exhausted and bereft, in a chair in the room’s corner, feeling the placenta’s weight cold against his gut. Watching the bustling skirts. Listening to the hushed tones, the sister’s high-pitched welcome. Then, contented suckling. Outside the circle of welcome, Ethan waited. Because Fayette said it was always wise to be patient among women.
Finally, one approached. He saw the red-embroidered design on her apron clearly now. Rich, swirling, interconnected designs. She carried a crockery bowl under her arm. A handsome, blue-and-white-painted bowl. Color—so much color. It hurt his eyes. She reached inside his shirt, lifted out the afterbirth, his last anchor to the tiny child. Her voice was kind.
“Tree of life, see?”
He stared between her hands, at the blue-veined, red-jelly mass, saw the pattern she described growing out of the whitened cord. Yes, the sheltering branches of a tree. He nodded. The wonder of it brought tears to his eyes. She placed the afterbirth into her beautiful bowl. Frowning—thinking him stupid, most likely. It didn’t matter. Many people over his lifetime had thought him without much sense. Perhaps they were right. What had he done to Judith? Would her feet slip underneath a carriage wheel, too? The woman set the bowl aside, and wiped her hands on her apron.
“Come with me.”
She was the midwife, Ethan finally realized, Mother Ballard, who was afraid he and Jordan wanted to steal her patients. “No,” he protested softly. “Take care of the baby.”
“She’s snug. Between auntmother and cousinbrother, born three days apart.” She cocked her head. “Do you understand me, Frenchman?”
Ethan nodded.
“Small, but she has a chance, I’m thinking.”
He bowed his head.
“Come,” the woman urged again, taking his hand as if he were a child. She led him from the room.
“I should leave now, yes?”
She clucked her disapproval. “Abandon your tiny patient so soon? And when your lady wife comes with that tea of hers, do you wish her to see you looking like—”
“Motherwort.”
“What do you say?”
“Judith’s tea is motherwort.”
“Ah, you know a little more than your knives and surgery, do you? You listen to the botanist’s daughter?”
“I am not a fool,
madame.”
“And did I once say you were, touchy Frenchman?”
“No.”
The red on her bodice blurred. Or was there something in his eyes? The whitewashed corridor became suddenly too close. He must not fall. What would she think of him if he were to fall while on duty, at a patient’s house? He felt a surge of strength from the midwife’s hand.
She pulled him into the large hearth kitchen, where her strong hands began stripping off his mud- and blood-caked clothes.
“Come now, do you think there’s anything you have that I’ve not seen—God in Heaven!” She fell away from his back. But she approached it again, even tracing the ridges with her fingertips.
“White scars. And in a smaller place than the breadth of you now,” she observed. “This happened half your lifetime ago. A child bore these lashes.”
“I was twelve. Small for my age.”
“Interesting. Sit.”
When he did, she scrubbed his face with a wet, lavender-scented cloth.
“What do you find interesting, Mother Ballard?” he asked, hoping to distract her enough to ease her touch, which was as forceful as Martha’s when he’d come in from playing in the salt marsh. Surely she was not so hard on her babies.
“That the abuse did not turn you cruel. There. Most of it’s off.”
“Along with a layer of skin,” he groused. “That I had no use for, I’m sure,” he hastened to add when her scrubbing hand threatened again.
She snorted. “The leg, now.”
“Madame?”
“I’m wanting a look at your bad leg, Doctor.”
“My master’s the doctor.”
Amusement in her eyes. “And what are you, his slave?”
“Assistant.”
She shook her head. “Learn to accept what the people call you. I am Mother Ballard since my sixteenth year, imagine that. You must not correct unimportant things. Now, off with those choice boots.”
“I can’t walk without them.”
“No need to walk. Off. And the muddy britches as well—what’s under them is not foreign to me either.”
He did as she’d bade him, which won him a fine-woven blanket before she pushed him into a Windsor chair. She sat on a stool opposite and drew his right leg across her knees. It commanded her attention for full minutes of observation, poking, and prodding.
“He has skill, this surgeon. He did well by you,” she finally pronounced.
“Yes.”
“Your lady says you engage yourself in pursuits of the mind, Mr. Blair. Besides your doctoring and horsemanship. What are they?”
“I read. Make ship miniatures. Observe the stars.”
“Do not let those delights go fallow. This leg will not hold you forever, even after the Boston surgeon’s work. That’s if you manage to dance around trouble long enough to reach your elder years, of course.”
Ethan grinned. “It’s fortunate that the stars shine for good and troublesome alike then, is it not,
madame?”
Her frown deepened. Ethan despaired of ever being able to cause her to smile. “They say you whistled sharp, then calmed the carriage horses, before seeing Leah Prichard out of her life, catching her child, and not allowing Dr. Foster to stifle her life away.”
Leah Prichard. The woman’s name brought the image of the harrowing accident into his mind. Muted him again.
“I smell those horses, under the blood on your clothes,” she continued. “A wild-with-fear smell.”
“Perhaps my own.”
“I think not. You don’t have the sense to be afraid when you see need. Only now do your hands shake. See? I know the secret of rescuers.”
“You come by this knowledge through experience, Mother Ballard?”
She smiled at last, allowing him a look at her full, shining beauty. “Yes, they say
that
, too, about you,” she said, standing, turning on her heel.
“Wait,” he called, taking a few uneven, stumbling steps before he gathered the blanket around his nakedness. “Who is it says what?”
But she’d disappeared around the corner. The feelings their conversation had distracted him from hit hard in her ringing, silent absence. The shaking in his hands intensified, spread. Were the fits coming over him, here in this stranger’s house? Ethan leaned against the wall, commanding his racing heart to still, his uneven legs to hold him. Neither effort produced results. With a soft blasphemy, he sank to the cold stone floor.
Mother Ballard returned, clean shirt over her arm. She knelt beside
him. As he tried to look away, she grabbed his jaw, poked wide his eyelids. They rebelled his will, too, finally spilling tears.
“Tell me, I am out of patience with you. Tell me now,” she commanded.
“My wife’s with child.”
“I know that. Who do you think told her?”
“Don’t let her die, Mother Ballard,” he whispered his fear. “Don’t let my Judith die.”
Her insistent grip turned into a gentle hold on the curve of his face. “Fetch the young doctor a whiskey, Emma,” she urged the shadow behind them.
A man’s voice answered. “He doesn’t drink spirits.”
The midwife turned. “What does he do when life catches up with him, surgeon?”
Ethan scrambled to stand. Only their joint grip at his shoulder kept him down.
“Jordan,” he called, forgetting formalities, “this lady—”
“What have you done to him?” Dr. Foster demanded.
Her hands fisted at her waist. “I? I, is it? Who nicked the cord of that infant with your knife, butcher?”
“I did my best! That’s a seven-month child with no hope. But I had a healthy assistant before he stepped into this house you preside over, witch!”
“Jordan!” Ethan summoned, “I’ll not have you—”
“Quiet!” his master barked, without redirecting his attention from the midwife. “Now, suppose you tell me what’s wrong with him?”
“It’s a simple case of new-father nerves, not that you’d know a simple malady if it visited you on angel wings.”
“Can’t even keep your gossip straight! He is not a father.”