The Rose Legacy (30 page)

She jolted awake at the doctor’s voice outside the door. Climbing from the bath, she dried herself and dressed. She had only one blouse again, the one she had rescued from the mountain and sewn back together. The one she had fallen in was too badly torn to repair.

She pulled on her blue denim skirt and admitted Mae and the doctor, wincing when he examined her shoulder. She was less stoic when he treated the abrasion with carbolic acid and packed it with alum. She gasped at the terrible stinging burn.
Bruto!
He was too rough, not like Papa’s gentle hands.

“Quillan tended this?”

Teeth clenched, she nodded.

“Well, he got it connected again.” He snickered.

That was funny? She sent him a dark look.

He laughed a dry, cheeky laugh, as though it started in his mouth and stayed there. Then he rubbed his eyes, which looked puffy and dim, and blew out a slow breath. “We’ll sling it for a week to let the tendons heal. Don’t put any weight on the arm until the pain stops.” As he packed up his medicine bag, she wondered how long he’d been without sleep and how many injuries he’d treated already.

Again it made her think of Papa, coming home so tired sometimes that he walked in his sleep. And Mamma guiding him in and taking his coat and his bag and his hat while he stood like a small boy without raising a hand.

“Thank you,” she said, meaning it.

“On to the next one.” He gave her a brief smile, then walked out.

Carina lay back on her cot, more fatigued than hurt. “Are there still people missing?”

Mae shrugged, dipping a bucket into the bath and emptying it out the window. “I don’t know the latest count. If someone comes up missing, their name gets posted on the board. The trustees send searchers.” She dipped the bucket again. “When they’re found, they’re crossed off and announced alive or dead.”

Carina shuddered. “Was my name posted?”

Mae nodded. “And taken off this morning. Didn’t you hear the hurrahs?”

Carina lay back smiling. No, she hadn’t heard. But she could imagine.

T
WENTY-TWO

I am become most despised.

—Rose

J
OE TURNER ARRIVED
not an hour later with a posy of wild flowers he must have picked above the level of flood damage. “I’m so very glad you’re safe, Miss DiGratia. It gave us all a terrible scare.”

The Italians brought small food offerings, cheese and pastries baked by wives and mothers, offering encouragement in dialects she had to strain to understand. And miners, slouch hats pressed to their chests, with no offering but their good wishes. Carina was moved to tears.

How could they all care? What could it matter to them that one foolish girl was safe? And then Mr. Beck came. Carina lay now on the sofa in Mae’s parlor exactly as she had the other time she’d been nursed back to health. And again she heard Mae through the door. “She won’t be working until she’s healed, Berkley Beck.”

“Of course not, Mae. What do you take me for?”

“And she’s had far too many visitors trotting through already. She’s resting now, and in dire need of it.”

“Only just a moment.”

“Come back tomorrow.” Mae’s tone was unyielding.

“Tomorrow I have other duties.”

“So much the better. She’s plumb worn out.”

“Have a heart, Mae.”

Carina felt as though no time had passed. Had she just imagined these last two weeks? Had the flood really happened? Did she truly fall down a shaft and spend the night in the care of Quillan Shepard? The pain in her shoulder and nearly every other part of her body told her it was so.

She sank back into the cushions, thankful Mae was not permitting Mr. Beck. Things were too confused with Mr. Beck telling her to spy on Quillan and Quillan asking her to spy on Berkley Beck. How did she get into the middle, when all she wanted was her dear Flavio to come and take her home?

The thought jarred her. It was what she had told Quillan, but was it what she wanted? If he did come, would she go? Could she be again the innocent, trusting woman in love? She pictured the vine-covered slopes of Sonoma, the sunlight like melting gold, warm on her forehead.

No, it was Mae’s palm on her head, and she was in Crystal, Colorado, rescued from the mine shaft by a man as changeable as the mountain weather. Monster or man, he stirred her dangerously. If Flavio would come, it better be soon, before she forgot him altogether.

Carina walked among the men lying on makeshift beds in the hotel restaurant, the tables having been pushed aside and stacked to make room for the injured. The men lay on bedrolls on the floor, as the women and children housed at Mae’s were using all the extra cots that could be amassed. Some of the women and children were injured, but many had simply lost their homes.

With her arm immobilized in a sling, Carina was no good for changing bandages or any of the other tasks that required two hands. Instead she carried messages, refilled water glasses, mopped brows, and kept spirits up. It humbled her to see the faces of the men brighten when she stopped beside their beds.

Some of them would touch her hand with gentle reverence when she felt for fever or checked a pulse. All of them thanked her, and she heard it whispered among them that they’d be sure to heal now, as though something in her touch could change their fate. Simple men, dreamers.

And the women. How had Carina misjudged them so? The Italian wives with their black dresses and shawls, their old-world ways and old-world speech. The other women making homes with their men with crude determination, making the most of their loss to keep the light in their children’s eyes. It was as though her own blindness had been healed in the darkness of the Rose Legacy mine shaft, and now she saw them for what they were: fellow seekers.

Carina tousled the head of a small boy come to visit his papa, whose legs had been broken in the flood. “What is that you have?”

“A coon.” He pulled his shirt open a little more to show her the baby raccoon nestled there. “It’s ma died in the flood. I’m showing my pa.”

“He’ll like that.”

“I’m feeding it canned milk.”

At thirty-nine cents a can, Carina wasn’t sure how much the boy’s papa would like that. With one finger Carina petted the scratchy fur of the coon’s head, softer to the eye than the touch. She smiled as the boy scurried off.

Crouching low, she felt the fevered brow of an Irishman whose name she didn’t know. He’d been found late Thursday morning and had yet to regain his senses.
Per piacere, Signore, heal this man
. She prayed the same for each of them, knowing little or nothing of who they were. Only that it didn’t matter.

Èmie came toward her with a tray of fresh bandages and ointments held perfectly level in her unwavering gait. “I’m off to Mae’s with Dr. Simms.”

Carina looked behind her to the young doctor who had come to Crystal to prospect but found himself needed now in his first profession. His overlarge ears and slightly bulbous nose did not enhance a stern bedside manner, but that wasn’t his way regardless.

He gave her an awkward smile. “Doc Felden said not to overdo it. You’ll need rest to heal that shoulder.”

Carina nodded. It was true her body needed rest. She felt every movement in a dozen places. But it could have been worse, far worse. And she felt obligated to repay the debt. God had saved her, and she had promised what? Anything.

Some of that time in the darkness of the shaft was a blur. But she recalled her desperate plea. She had begged and bargained with God. He had done His part. She reached up and touched the crucifix that hung at her throat on a new chain, given to her by Joe Turner. The cross reminded her of Quillan’s words. He had been leaving. God had turned him back, sent him inside to search for her. Yes, God had done His part. Now she must do hers.

“Carina.”

She looked up to Father Charboneau and flushed. He must know her burden. Was it not so with him as well? God had stretched out His hand in both their lives. The priest repaid it daily.

“Are you feeling all right? Èmie’s worried you’re pushing too hard with your own injuries not healed.” He smiled. “She sent me down to badger you into resting.”

“I’m fine, Father,” Carina stated, though she ached badly.

“You look as though you need some air. Will you walk with me?”

She stood slowly. The sunshine would feel good. She followed him out and blinked in the brightness. She wouldn’t take the sun for granted again, not after the black skies full of hail and rain. Though clouds built now in the west, they were fluffy and white with no menace in them, only playful frivolity.

They started toward the creek, where salvaging work was well under way—small piles of undamaged goods, larger piles of slightly damaged, and then parts and pieces, the largest piles of all. They passed a group of men hauling a freight wagon upright from the water, where it had been towed upstream.

She recognized Quillan among them and dropped her gaze before he saw her. Too many feelings were conjured when their eyes met. And she was nervous already knowing he was coming for supper. Why had she ever offered such a thing?

The priest saw Quillan also but made no greeting. Instead, he drew a long breath and released it as they passed, then turned to her. “You’ve been asking about Wolf.” The priest’s face grew stern, and she quailed inside.

“I did ask, but—”

“You’ve awakened suppositions that were better left forgotten. Especially on the heels of this week’s violence.”

She knew it was true. Even with the flood, William Evans was not far from the miners’ minds, and the tale of Wolf had become interwoven in their mutterings. She dropped her gaze.

“You’re meddling in things you don’t understand.”

Carina shook her head. “I’m not asking anymore. I don’t want to know.”

“It’s too late for that.” Taking her arm, he led her to the shade of a bench beside a partially erected building. Yesterday it hadn’t been there. Thanks to man’s industry, today its wall kept the sun from burning down on them. Father Charboneau seated her, then motioned to the bench at her side. “May I?”

“Of course.” She nodded, though she wished he would walk away and leave her.

“What you heard was not the whole story. I’m going to tell you another, and you can judge between them. Wolf’s story. He gave it to me one night on the mountain in the dark. I say gave, because it took so much for him to share it. To my knowledge he told no one but me.”

The priest’s eyes found hers a moment, held them captive, then released her. “I recall him sitting under the stars, the firelight playing on his face as he spoke of a small boy traveling with his parents and baby sister. Two other wagons were in the train, none of them experienced, but all determined to better themselves in Oregon, the great land of plenty.”

Carina pictured the two men sitting by the fire on the mountain under the night sky, Wolf with his mane of golden hair, Father Charboneau unremarkable except for his vigor.

“For a boy of five years, such a journey is a magical adventure, something new every mile. But it’s also grueling and long, especially for the women and the young. One night as they camped along the river, the baby began to cry. Perhaps it was colic, perhaps something else. She wouldn’t be soothed.”

Carina swallowed the tightness in her throat, hearing again the old prospector’s voice.
“That baby started in to cry. And then Wolf, see, he started a-howlin’, the fiercest, loneliest howlin’ ever heard.”

“Wolf, though that wasn’t his name at the time, had crept some distance from the wagon to find a bush and take care of nature. But he heard his father scolding in a low, harsh voice. ‘Quiet that baby, Judith, before she brings God’s wrath upon us.’ ”

Carina shivered, though the sun was hot. Without knowing why, she dreaded the next words the priest would speak.

“Wolf never returned to the wagon. A Pawnee raiding party swooped in upon them in the darkness, and, though I won’t give you the details, which he described with agonizing recall, the deeds done that night were something no child should behold. The horror of it would turn a strong man’s mind.”

Father Charboneau groaned. “Think, Carina, what such a scene would do to the innocence of a child. As Wolf watched, his family was destroyed. Not a life was spared, not even the baby, whose cries had betrayed their position.”

Looking down, Father Charboneau raised his brows and sighed. “When a party of Sioux found Wolf two days later, he was sitting on the ground beside the burned out wagons, howling in fear and hunger. They named him Cries Like a Wolf.”

Father Charboneau stood, linked his fingers together, and hung his hands. “Wolf showed me the scars he bore for being a white slave among the people. I’ll keep the memory of them always, though I don’t doubt the scars in his mind were more brutal.”

Here the priest fixed her with his blue eyes. “But he was a gentle man, a deep and compassionate man. He wanted no part in violence, only to live in peace.” He eyed her a long moment, then spoke very low. “I don’t believe Wolf killed that miner. He was no animal. He was the most humane man I’ve ever met. It wasn’t in him to kill.”

Hearing the priest, Carina believed it. Wolf was not the monster the miner had described. He couldn’t be. Nor was he the savage Quillan thought him, or Rose would not have loved him. And somehow, Carina was certain she had. Father Charboneau stood a long moment, and Carina thought he would say more. But then he turned and walked away.

Carina closed her eyes, picturing the child Cries Like a Wolf. A child who became a man but carried in him the fear and heartbreak that howled when his own son cried. And that son was Quillan. She knew now what Mae and Father Charboneau had meant. Leave it alone.

“Carina. Thank goodness you’re well.”

Startled, she opened her eyes to Berkley Beck. She hadn’t spoken with him since before the flood. He had not come back after Mae sent him away Wednesday evening. He was too busy restoring Crystal. A man of importance and duty. And what else?

He reached a hand to her. “I looked for you at Mae’s, but she said you were helping with the injured. At the hotel they told me you’d gone out with the priest.”