Beyond the Valley, page 7
“Are you sure? I can wait.”
“I am sure. I just need to rest a moment. Just listen to the way the breeze is sighing through the trees. It’s so soothing.”
“Soothing? It’s cold, that’s what it is.”
“Maybe. But here, I am just Sarah. I am not a servant or a slave. I am God’s child in God’s garden.”
Celia curled her lips and gave Sarah a sidelong glance. “You are an odd one, Sarah Carr.” Then with her basket balanced on her hip she walked off.
The wind strengthened and crows cackled in the trees. The clean scent of snow descended, and she knew it would fall soon, and she needed to get home to gather the eggs in the chicken coop in case it would come deep.
After a moment’s pause, she stood and then strode down the road that led back to the Woodhouses. But as she rounded a bend, she met a man on horseback. His horse blew out a fog from its nostrils and shook its shaggy mane. She stepped to the edge of the road and did not look at the gentleman. She would have walked on, if it were not for the fact he spoke to her.
“Miss,” he said, bringing his horse to a halt. “Can you tell me which way I am to turn? I am going to Benjamin Hutton’s house. I have been there once before, years ago, but cannot recall which direction I took. There was another person walking down this road ahead of you and she could not answer me. I think I frightened her.”
Briefly Sarah met his eyes, and thought him chatty—and handsome. “Well, you are a stranger, sir, and you ride a large horse. He looks frightful.”
The man patted his mount’s neck. “Charger? No, he is as gentle as a foal.”
His dark blond hair had been cut at his shoulders, and he wore no queue. But oh, how beautiful were his eyes—the deepest brown she had ever seen, unlike Jamie’s, which were icy blue.
Realizing she had been staring, she felt a flush rise in her cheeks. “I do not know the place, sir. You might ask Mr. Pippins at the trading post just down the road.”
“Thank you.” He inclined his head and looked at her curiously. “I will take your advice. Thank you.”
He wore no regimental uniform of either an American or British soldier, but instead a black coat, bronze waistcoat, and black breeches. His riding boots were worn, without sheen, black as the mane of his horse. He gave the appearance of wealth. But that meant nothing. Anyone could buy a good suit of clothes and fine boots if they had something to barter.
He paused a moment, dragging the reins through his gloved hand. His gaze made her feel uncomfortable.
“Is there anything else, sir?”
He shook his head slightly. “No. Forgive me. I was just thinking I had forgotten how beautiful this part of Virginia is, especially the Potomac at the mouth of the bay. Do you agree?”
“I have no great opinion of it.” Annoyed at the way he looked at her, she raised her chin. “I am from Cornwall where the sea . . .”
“Cornwall? My parents were born there.”
This time, she looked away, trying to be unimpressed. “Are you always this friendly with strangers, sir? I should not be talking to you.”
She went to leave, but he said, “What brought you to Virginia?” and it made her turn around, hands on hips.
“If you really want to know, I was brought here against my will.”
A look of surprise shone on his face. “Kidnapped?”
“Yes. I was put on a rat-infested ship, and auctioned off like a piece of merchandise.” She pointed back in the direction of the river. “Right across the Potomac they do that kind of business. I must pay off my passage in servitude for many years before I can return home . . . if I want to return home.”
He frowned. “Well, don’t you?”
“It depends.”
“On what, may I ask?”
“Well, I do not know. Circumstances, I suppose.”
“I am sorry for your situation.”
“You have no reason to be.”
“I apologize for asking. Perhaps after we win this war, our new government will end all that.”
She narrowed her eyes directly at him. “Hmm. King Solomon said we should not put our trust in princes. He was a king and wrote that. I trust no one—not anymore.” And with a swish of her skirts she turned her back on him and walked on. She could feel him watching her, most likely appalled by her impediment.
“Does that hurt you?” he called to her. He stepped his horse toward her and walked him alongside her. “Your leg. Does it hurt?”
“You are bold to ask, sir.”
“It is not unusual for a physician. I am only concerned. I would like to help you if I can.”
After taking a moment to think whether or not she should answer, she decided there would be no harm in it. “Sometimes, when I have walked a great deal my muscles ache. But that is all. I was born this way, and have accepted it as my lot in life.”
“I see. What is your name?”
“Sarah Carr, sir.”
“And where do you live, Sarah Carr?”
“At the Woodhouse farm. It is just down this road to the left.”
“I know I am forward for asking. But are you wedded?”
“I am a widow.”
His brow creased. “You are so young to be.”
She looked past him, down the road. “You bring no wife with you, sir?”
“I have yet to find my life’s partner, Miss Carr,” he replied. “I will pay the Woodhouses a visit as soon as I can.” He then tipped the corner of his tricorn hat to her. “I am Dr. Alex Hutton. I bid you good day.”
He turned Charger, jabbed the horses ribs with his boot heels, and galloped off. Dry leaves whirled beneath the horse’s hooves. Sarah stood in the middle of the road watching him fade into the distance. A wonderful sensation bubbled up inside her, similar to the first time she saw Jamie leaning on the fence rail watching her. It made her heart race. Only this time the man had intrigued her. A physician. A healer. What was his life like, ministering to the sick and wounded?
She headed back down a narrow path that led to the farmhouse and thought of his eyes. They were noble, with life sparkling warmly within them. But she was a poor, crippled servant, pitied by her owners, in submission to laws that promised harsh punishment if she tried to flee. He’d never look on her as anything but lowly.
He had a handsome face, too, and for a moment, she compared it to Jamie’s plain looks. Then she shook her head, dismayed she would judge him against her deceased husband. Ashamed, she tried to forget Dr. Alex Hutton and his large, frightful horse.
The fields lay barren where corn had once been. It made her think of those days when she helped with the wheat harvest, when she first met Jamie. Tears swelled in her eye and she dashed them away. It would do no good to cry now.
She followed a brickbat walk that led to the garden Temperance kept. A grapevine arbor served as an entrance. Trim boxwood hedges enclosed the sanctuary, a place of solitude and escape. She went to a spot in the north corner and sat at the base of a pear tree. She lifted her hair over her shoulder, and then raised her skirts to the middle of her calves with her legs stretched straight out in front of her. She placed her feet together, ankle to ankle, and studied them. Such a slight difference—but it was enough to mark her.
If it were in the Almighty’s plan to make her whole, then she would rejoice. But if not, she willingly accepted her burden, and tried to comfort her aching heart. It proved hard, and she shoved her gown down as far as it would go, and put her face within her hands and wept.
8
Alex had been reluctant to leave his group of ragtag patriots fighting in the backwoods when he received a letter from his sister-in-law. It had been dated three months earlier, for getting a letter deep in the wilderness took extra time. He bid them farewell when cold mountain mists ribboned down from the Blue Ridge into the valleys and plains, and the rivers and streams caked over with ice.
From atop his horse, he saw farms and plantations spread out across a vast plateau. His brother practiced law for the wealthy estate owners, and he wondered if it had been taken over. With so many men away fighting, he doubted it. He would have gone on, but a farmer, leading a bull by a lengthy rope attached to a ring through its nose, came toward him.
“Is that you, Dr. Hutton?” The farmer paused and set his hand on his bull’s neck. The beast stood several hands taller than his horse.
“Do I know you, sir?”
“I’m Flenderson. I’ve got a farm next to your brother’s place.”
“Yes, I do remember. It has been a long time—years in fact.”
“You have been out fighting the British?”
“I have been caring for the sick and wounded.”
“A noble thing. Taking some leave are you?”
“For a time.”
“I heard about Benjamin.”
Knowing how his brother must have suffered caused a dull pain within him. If only he could have been there with him. “Typhoid, while camped near a swampy area in eastern Maryland. Those places are a breeding ground for disease.”
Flenderson shook his head. “I’m sorry for it, sir, especially for Emma and her girls. I brought them a basket of apples at Christmastime. Haven’t seen them since.”
“Was my sister-in-law well, and my nieces, when you visited them?”
“Emma was thin as a reed. Her mourning made her that way, I suppose. She told me her serving girl ran off.”
Alex’s worry for Emma and his nieces rose. “She has been alone all this time without any help?”
“That’s right. I’ve done all I could, but I’ve a family to look after too. Emma told me she didn’t need help and that I should not come back ’cause there is no man there and it wasn’t proper I should show up.”
Indeed, he knew grief would take its toll, yet Alex hoped it wasn’t something more. And the fact that her servant abandoned her and the children gave him reason to believe life had been made much harder for Emma. The last time he saw her, she seemed incapable of hard work. He recalled a conversation at his brother’s table on fetching eggs beneath the hens and how mortified Emma acted. She explained she would not know what to do, and feared being pecked. Perhaps all that had changed and she had learned to do the chores in order to survive.
“Well, I hope to help in any way I can,” Alex said. “I owe it to my brother. He paid for my medical training in Philadelphia at the university there.”
“Aye, Benjamin was a good man.”
“But it is not only for that reason. Emma and the girls are my family. I’ll not turn my back on them for anything in the world.”
“I wish you well, Dr. Hutton.” Flenderson tipped his hat and proceeded to leave. He looked up at Alex as he was passing by and smiled. “Lily and Rose are a pair of sprites if you do not mind me saying.”
“No, I do not mind. I am anxious to see them.”
He clicked his tongue and urged Charger forward, worried what he might find when stepping through his brother’s door. He knew from what Flenderson told him that he’d find a grief-stricken woman. But would he find hungry children, too? The thought of his five-year-old nieces suffering cut him to the quick and caused him to urge Charger into a canter.
Moving on, he thought of the girl he met on the road. Sarah was it? She had kind eyes, and spirit. If he needed help, would the Woodhouses allow it until his aunt’s arrival? He had sent a letter to his aunt, asking her to come, but he expected she might decline, it being winter and she being at such an age that the cold and a long coach ride would cause her a great deal of discomfort.
The road forked and he turned to the right and traveled a quarter-mile until he saw the house his brother had built, situated in a small vale surrounded with trees. Stone hedges enclosed the yard. Frost glazed the windows of the colonial saltbox. No smoke blew from the center chimney. They had to be cold without a fire, hungry without a hot meal. He headed down the lane and dismounted near the door. Before he reached for the latch, snow had begun to fall in enormous flakes.
“Emma.” She did not answer, and so he removed his hat and stepped inside.
A gloomy light pervaded the house. The floorboards creaked under his footsteps as he stepped into the room on the left and saw Emma and the two children huddled together under a mound of quilts on a settee. The room smelled of hearth fires and unwashed bodies. The girls looked over at him with wide, frightened eyes.
He touched his sister-in-law’s cheek, then her forehead. She moaned. Fever. “Emma, can you hear me? It is Alex. I have come to help.” She looked up at him with glassy eyes and a blank stare.
He spoke softly to the girls, drew venison jerky from his pocket. They were so hungry. “Do not be afraid, Lily, Rose. I am your Uncle Alex.”
Above the fireplace hung a musket and powder horn, and on the flagstones next to it a cart of wood and a basket of twigs. He grabbed the iron poker and stirred the ashes. A few red cinders appeared. He threw sticks across them and they caught fire. Then he stacked a few logs over them. Soon the room simmered with heat.
“Come here, girls.” He gestured to them with his hands. “Sit here by the fire where it is warm.”
They crawled out of the quilts and hurried to him without speaking. He saw they had no shoes or stockings on. When they sat down, he took turns chafing each child’s feet. He’d find wool leggings, hopefully, in an upstairs bedroom.
Rose held out her arms to him, and he drew her in. She cried, and his heart broke. “You are hungry, aren’t you?” She drew back, nodded, and put her finger in her mouth.
“Do not worry,” he said, brushing back her curly hair. “I will find something more than jerky for you and your sister to eat. But I must help your mama before I do.”
Emma twisted beneath the quilt she gripped. Alex ran his fingers through his hair and thought what to do. Take her upstairs and put her in bed, bank a fire . . . water, food, Peruvian bark.
He had to isolate her from the children, and prayed the fever raging through her body had not infected them and that she would recover. He lifted Emma in his arms and carried her up the staircase where cobwebs quivered between the slats. She felt like no more than a child in his arms. Pushing a door in with his shoulder, he brought her into the room that she had shared with his brother and laid her in bed. He drew off the sweat-soaked clothes she wore. They were filthy and foul-smelling. He tossed them aside. Her skin had turned a ghastly shade of yellow along her arms and throat.
“It is as I thought, Emma. You have yellow fever.”
He tucked her beneath the bedding and spoke softly to her, hoping not to alarm her delicate spirit. But it could not be helped, for she opened her eyes and looked up at him afraid.
“So hot. I thirst.”
With no water in the bedroom pitcher, he opened the window and scooped up snow from the sill and brought it to her lips.
“Am I going to die?”
“I will do all I can to help you, but you must fight, Emma.”
“Lily? Rose?”
“I am going to take care of the girls and will be back when I am finished. I pray God you have food in your larder. They look half-starved.”
As he was going through the door, she held out her hand. “Take care . . . of my dear girls . . .”
He looked back at her. “I will, Emma. But I must keep them from you until you recover. Rest now.”
Downstairs, the girls were waiting in the doorway of the sitting room and followed him out to the kitchen. On the oak table sat a basket of apple cores. Water in the bucket had frozen solid. The only things in the larder were a bit of cornmeal, sugar, a bit of salt, and dried beef. What he could do with such meager provisions he did not know, but he would make something edible.
He broke the ice with a mallet from the drawer, and set it in a black kettle. Then he built a fire and the ice slowly began to melt. He threw in the beef and salt, and made a mush out of the cornmeal. That night Lily and Rose ate their fill and slept side by side, covered in the down quilts their mother had made, warmed by the hearth fire that crackled in their room.
And while they slept, Alex washed Emma and spooned broth into her mouth. So little she took, until she slipped into a deep stupor. As the wind seeped through the walls of the house, Alex lit the logs in the bedroom fireplace and burned Emma’s clothes. By midnight, the snowfall had ended, and a bright full moon shone through the windows.
At least his nieces were safe. But he feared for Emma.
9
Dawn came, and snow sparkled over the fields. Soon a clear blue sky greeted the world, misty and soft like the down of a dove’s wing. Sarah, warm in her heavy wool cloak, headed toward the well over grass that crackled beneath the soles of her shoes. She looked down into the yawning dark cavern and could not tell if the water had frozen during the night. Hopeful, she lowered her bucket, felt it sink, and hauled it back up.
Having done most of her chores before the sun peeked over the horizon, she trudged back to the house and filled her mistress’s pitcher and emptied the rest into the cask near the door. Temperance washed each morning at the strike of nine, and told Sarah it was next to godliness to be clean. But Sarah already knew that, being of that habit herself.
She glanced at the miniature clock on the mantle, and seeing she had a quarter hour before Temperance would call for her, she heated water in the kettle until it warmed. Then she poured it over her hair and rubbed it dry with her apron in front of the fire.
“You have pretty hair, Sarah,” said Celia. “But Mistress Temperance says you wash it too much.”
“I know. Back home I was ridiculed for washing it so often, instead of keeping it hidden beneath a mobcap. I never cared what the mockers would say. I cannot be convinced of letting my hair go for weeks, even months, like other women.”
“I have heard ladies have found mice nesting in their hair.”
“Well, I do not know about that. But it would be awful.”
Celia tied her apron string into a bow. “It sure would be.”
Sarah remembered how much Jamie loved the silky feeling of her locks and the way they smelled. For a second, she wondered if Dr. Hutton would like the way her hair felt—if he were to touch it.
