The Colonel's Lady (35 page)

The next morning Olympia was promptly buried beside the men on the hill and then forgotten, or so it seemed. Going to headquarters, Roxanna could hardly keep up with the activity stirring all around her. Cass—every officer—seemed tightly wound, pulsating with a restless, reckless energy. Was this how men became before battle? His gaze seemed saber-sharp as he surveyed the maps on his desk, and his dictation was no less forceful.

“Every soldier, prior to the march, is to have said accoutrements: a bayonet fitted to his gun, scabbard and belt, a pouch and cartridge box holding twenty rounds of cartridges, one pound powder, fifty pounds of lead balls, and a hundred buckshot.”

Save the orderlies, they were alone, but he hardly looked at her. There were so many details to attend to, and his officers were trying their best to do exactly as he asked without risking his ire. To his credit, not once had he raised his voice to them all morning, though they seemed taut as fiddle strings. Strangely, the closer the hour drew for his departure, the more self-possessed he seemed to be.

Yet in the dim light of the blockhouse lamps, Roxanna began to notice a few alarming things. A telltale flush had begun to show beneath his deeply tanned face. And his astonishing eyes were far too bright. He seemed to be fighting some fierce internal battle, winning and losing by turns before her very eyes.

“And finally, every man should have a knapsack . . . a blanket . . . and canteen.”

His voice trailed off—a bit wearily, she thought. Out of the corner of her eye, she studied him, her quill still, as he straightened from bending over his maps. So tall he was, yet he seemed suddenly to list, bringing a heavy hand down atop his desk as if to ground himself. In that soundless second, their eyes locked and his subterfuge came crashing down.

Oh, Cass
. . .
you are so very sick.

She was on her feet, forgetting her bitterness, frightened he might fall.

Heavens, but a wool uniform in such weather is ludicrous—and with a fever
 . . .

Her fingers touched his blue sleeve, but he jerked away as if she was little more than a pesky insect. “Nay, Miss Rowan.”

The rebuff threw a black shadow over her. She’d merely meant to suggest he remove his coat. The warning in his tone returned her to her chair just as the scouts came in, fresh from their foray across the wide river. Their news set her heart to pounding. Liam McLinn and over a thousand British and Indians were poised to march south toward the settlements.

Never before had leftovers remained following supper. To a man, all seemed to have lost their appetite. Their commander hadn’t eaten at all. Only Abby, secure on her stool in the kitchen, relished her hominy and gravy and biscuits. Roxanna forced a smile for her sake, glad to see her eating so well after Olympia’s passing. The only sign she gave of missing her aunt was clinging to Roxanna and Bella a bit more closely and carrying Sukey everywhere she went, even the necessary.

Last night after Olympia died, an orderly had brought a trundle bed to Roxanna’s cabin, and she made it up as homey as she could, with a Star of Bethlehem quilt and a plump pillow. Listening to the soft, snuffling sounds Abby made in sleep, Roxanna felt her spirits sink like stone. She didn’t know the first thing about being a mother. And she didn’t know how she’d take care of herself in future, much less a child.

Across the room, Cass’s tooled leather chest lay undisturbed in its hiding place, offering little comfort. Blood money, she mused. A tidy sum to atone for her father’s death. She’d not touch it, no matter how desperate she was.

Thinking of it now turned her more melancholy. She looked up from a stack of just-scrubbed pewter plates, jarred by a resounding thud in the dining room. Bella was already at the serving door, Dovie and Mariah and Nancy right behind her. No shouting or cross words or warning were heard—just the splinter of shattered glass and the heavy thump of overturned furniture.

What on earth
 . . . 
?

Roxanna feared it was the Herkimer brothers and Micajah. She’d felt their growing animosity for days. Had it erupted all over again? Cass wasn’t present, she remembered. His meal untouched, he’d excused himself minutes before and headed up the hill.

Sucking in her breath, she froze as the serving door flew wide open, sending Mariah and Dovie reeling. Abby scampered off her stool as Micajah was knocked backward into the kitchen. Nose bloodied, he picked himself up and flashed them a rabid look before charging back into the dining room.

“Law! Send for McLinn!” Bella cried, wild-eyed.

Dovie disappeared in a flash of linen out the back door, and Roxanna moved closer to peer at the fracas, wiping her hands on her apron, fear rising. Cass couldn’t have his officers beat up before the campaign even began. Without thinking, she stepped into the candlelit room, right into the heart of the fray.

“Miz Rox—” Bella’s cry alerted her, and she ducked as a stool sailed past her head.

Like angry bulls, nostrils flaring, Micajah and the Herkimers rampaged, oblivious to the main door opening and Cass coming in. Never had she seen him so angry. His face, touched by fever at supper, was now white and tight with fury. He grabbed Micajah by his collar and flung him out the door onto the dust of the parade ground, then turned and punched Joram in the stomach. Joram doubled over in pain, leaving Jehu to mutter some excuse for their behavior till Cass cut him off.

“Two against one is not a fair fight, no matter who started it.” With that, he cuffed Jehu in the jaw and sent him toppling backward onto an overturned table. “When the three of you come to your senses, you can clean up this mess—and apologize to the women.”

With that, he went out.

Roxanna stood agape.

“Law, if he’s thisaway with the ague, that brother o’ his better get on back to Ireland,” Bella breathed.

The Redstone women had fled, so Roxanna and Bella finished cleaning the kitchen in silence. Distracted, Bella began looking out the door every few minutes, displaying a rare restlessness. “Hank should’ve been back from Smitty’s Fort by now. He always rolls in right before the officers have their supper.”

Her words raised the fine hair on the back of Roxanna’s neck, and her hands stilled on the kettle she was filling.
Oh, Lord, please not Hank.
Everything seemed to be disintegrating all around them—the keelboat disaster, the enemy marching south, Olympia’s death, the officers in disarray, Hank missing. Taken one at a time was daunting enough, but all together, ’twas too much.

“Perhaps he had trouble with that wagon wheel like last time,” Roxanna murmured, giving her a reassuring half smile. Abby twirled on her stool, lost in her own childish world, untouched, Roxanna hoped, by the trouble swirling around them.

Shoulders slumped, Bella said nothing and dried a last dish. Pushing down her rising uneasiness, Roxanna hung a kettle from the crane, praying Hank would materialize at the back door.
Lord, please
 . . .

Bella eyed her wearily. “Abby and I’ll stay put till those three roosters right the dining room and settle their feathers and apologize. You’d best go on back to your cabin. You look a mite peaked to me.”

Did she? She certainly felt it. Untying her apron, Roxanna left the kitchen and came round the springhouse to the startling sight of Cass talking to Graham Greer near the smithy. Before she’d taken two steps in their direction, Cass disappeared into the commissary and Graham approached her. She greeted him, conscious of the warm stickiness of the early summer twilight, struck by how still the parade ground was, empty of all but the lookout on the surrounding banquette above. They moved unhindered toward the bench beneath the great elm in the fort’s far corner.

“Thought I’d speak my mind before we take our leave,” he said matter-of-factly despite his high color. “Somehow a campaign always makes you want to settle matters beforehand.”

She simply nodded, wondering about his and Cass’s conversation—if it had to do with her. She tried to keep her gaze from straying uphill to the stone house, as was her habit.

He ran a hand over the cleft in his chin, eyes alight. “When I come back from this next foray . . .”

When.
His hopeful wording jarred sourly with Cass’s fatalistic “I’m not coming back.”

“I don’t know what your plans are now that we can’t go upriver to Philadelphia, but seeing as how Olympia has passed and Abby needs a home, I was thinking the three of us might return to Virginia . . . together.”

She swallowed, struck by the simplicity of his proposal, so unlike Cass’s passion-filled plea. Yet this might well be the last offer of marriage she’d ever have. Uncertainty made a bubbling stew of her insides. Shouldn’t she give him some consideration, at least?

Her voice was soft, rife with reservations. “Will you be leaving for Virginia right after this campaign . . . if . . .”

He took a seat on the bench beneath the elm, inviting her to do the same. “If I return, aye. Have you been praying—pondering my offer?”

She hesitated, knotting her hands in her lap, groping for an answer. With her mind in such turmoil over Cass, she hadn’t given it much thought, truly. Graham might not survive the middle ground. But if he did . . . was this the Lord’s will for her, then?

Fixing her eye on the firefly lighting on her indigo skirt, she simply said, “When you come back, I’ll give you my answer.”

At this, he placed his hat on the bench and took her hand. Despite herself, she stiffened, unfair comparisons sluicing through her mind at his touch. Graham was so small. So simple. She could never imagine them well matched in anything—not a game of cribbage, or verbal sparring, or a kiss. He could never bring out the heights and depths in her that Cass did. Yet he seemed a good man, a God-fearing man. Life with him, if dull, would be safe . . . sound. Abby would have a father, a home. Perhaps brothers and sisters. The decision wasn’t hers alone. She had Abby to consider too.

“Virginia has always been home to me,” she said at last.

33

Come morning, Hank was still missing. The night before, a search party had been sent out by Cass but hadn’t returned. A haggard Bella stood in the kitchen after breakfast, near tears and almost shaking.
Why
,
she truly loves him
, Roxanna realized,
and she’ll be devastated if he doesn’t come back.
With Bella stripped of Hank’s secure presence, Roxanna began to see her in a new, vulnerable light. What would Bella do without Hank? Yet speculating about the future seemed foolish. As it was, none of them could think beyond the fear and dust of Fort Endeavor. The coming confrontation with the British and Indians loomed like a boulder, barring anyone’s hopes or plans or dreams.

“Miz Roxanna, would you pray for Hank?” Bella pleaded in the shadows.

“Why, Bella, I’ve been doing little else,” Roxanna said softly, thinking of their near sleepless night.

“I mean out loud—here and now.”

Reaching out, Roxanna took one of Bella’s dark, work-worn hands in her own and squeezed tight, the words as hard to come by as hen’s teeth. “Father, You know what we have need of before we ask, and we need Hank back safe and sound.” She hardly heard what else she prayed, her mind was so riddled with other petitions. “And Bella . . . please ease her heartache. And Abby . . . help her speak. And then there’s Micajah’s broken arm . . . and a whole army coming against us.” She swallowed, fear locking her voice in her throat. She couldn’t pray for Cass, though she’d promised to do that very thing.

Tomorrow Fort Endeavor’s army would move across the mile-wide river to meet the enemy in the middle ground. To that end, just beyond her door, the fort pulsated with activity. Supply wagons and horses were being readied by every available man within fort walls. She could hear Cass’s voice above the din and marveled that he managed to stay atop his fever. Did anyone but she and Bella suspect how sick he truly was? He was now minus one officer in the field—Micajah would stay behind with a remnant of men and nurse his broken arm. The rest of the severely undermanned, ill-equipped army would cross the Ohio and move north before the British and Indians could set foot on Kentucke soil.

Now ’twas noon and she and Bella were in Roxanna’s cabin, watching Abby tend to Sukey. One of the regulars had made a little cradle out of mountain ash, and she rocked it with one hand. Roxanna caught the cradle’s sweet wood scent as she stood at the door and looked reluctantly at the preparations for battle.

Cass was atop his stallion beneath the flagpole. Though she didn’t want to, she lingered on him for what might be a final time. Seeing him thus brought back a string of memories. He looked just as he had when she first caught sight of him on his return from the winter campaign. Though she tried to shut away the thought, one bittersweet recollection led to another. His gift of the teacup and letter. Their first dance. That maddening cribbage game and breathless, unending kiss.

How was it that even now, despite everything, she had to lean into the door frame for fear she would give way? Butterflies flitted from the pit of her stomach to her chest in a woozy dance, and she lay a hand across her bodice as if to still them. Then a layer of anger and regret overrode everything, tainting it all.

Despite the press of preparations—the fact that a dozen or more men needed his attention in the melee all around him—Cass’s attention was fixed on Roxanna as she stood in the doorway of her cabin. If he did nothing else this day, he must return her father’s locket. The slight weight of it now seemed heavy in his waistcoat pocket, a reminder that he had erred greatly by withholding his confession and needed to relinquish this too, before another minute passed.

Though dust and distance separated them, he had a clear view of her atop his horse and read unmistakable weariness in the slant of her shoulders and unkempt hair. Black tendrils wafted about her solemn face, freed of a few carelessly placed pins. Lately she’d left off wearing her hat, and her fair skin was slightly freckled, her nose sunburned. But her eyes were a brilliant, unforgiving blue—and she was looking straight at him.

Her expression held a hint of the resolve he’d seen in her the moment he’d first met her, when she’d held up that trembling hand as he’d started to tell her about her father, her face so full of pathos it wrenched him even now. No doubt she’d think he’d deceived her doubly by withholding the locket.

With a terse word to a regular to mind his horse, he dismounted to go to her. But as he reached into his waistcoat pocket, it seemed a cold hand clutched his heart. The locket, kept close for long months, now seemed almost a part of him. He hated the thought of releasing it. If he kept it as he longed to do, if only for solace in the difficult days ahead, ’twould soon return to her.

Just as he’d searched Richard Rowan’s still body before burial, one or more of his men would do the same to him, stripping him of all personal possessions and finding this, a testament of his love for her. Though she didn’t believe he loved her in life, perhaps she would in death.

Thinking it, he hesitated, weighing the wisdom of what he was about to do. The grit of dust in his mouth, the sun making him squint in the golden glare, he made a last move toward her.

Bella moved to stand beside Roxanna, eyes on the gates as if willing Hank to appear. The sun was hot, bearing down with devilish intensity, turning Roxanna’s thoughts to watering her garden. But Cass would no longer let her outside fort walls, sending a regular to tend it for her. Too much Indian sign, he said. Yet she craved its greenness and order and peace. Heat shimmers danced with the dust kicked up by the horses and wagons on the teeming parade ground. Even the sky seemed like a square of faded linen from the heat, no longer blue but a stark, bone white.

“Law, but he’s down!”

Bella’s breathless words pulled her back to the present.
What?

In a swirl of linen skirts, Bella bolted out the door, and Roxanna went running after her. Was Cass on the ground? There was such a press of soldiers gathering that she couldn’t see clearly. Bella pushed past all those broad, sweat-stained backs with a hard hand as the Herkimer brothers called for a stretcher. At the edge of the crowd stood Graham Greer. Roxanna had the uncanny feeling he was more concerned with her reaction than his commanding officer’s well-being.

Micajah took charge as second in command, his voice a bit shrill and unsteady, Roxanna thought. “Take him to the stone house, not the infirmary. And make haste for Dr. Clary.” With that, he moved to talk to Bella, who, from the look of her, wasn’t obliging. She spun away from him and cut through the throng to Roxanna.

Chin jutting stubbornly, she approached Roxanna with renewed purpose. “With Hank away, there ain’t nobody to tend McLinn.”

“But Major Hale asked you—”

“I ain’t goin’ to be holed up in that house when Hank comes in.” Her shining eyes, deep wells of pain, brooked no argument. “Besides, the colonel’s your man, not mine.”

Though whispered, Roxanna wondered how many others had heard. Heat inched up her neck in uncomfortable prickles. She didn’t dare refute the bold statement. “But I have Abby to tend to—”

“Abby ain’t no trouble. You’d best go on up with the Herkimers and the guard lest they have to make another trip.”

Folding her arms across her chest, Roxanna tried another tack. “I know nothing about the ague, Bella.”

“Well, you is about to.”

“And I don’t know enough about the stone house—”

“You is a fast learner. Once you is up there, you ain’t likely goin’ to want to come out. Take some of your belongin’s. Sick as he is, this ain’t goin’ to be a quick trip.”

As if this were all part of some grand, prearranged plan, Roxanna saw the guard waiting for her by the sally port through which the stretcher was just exiting. Heart pumping with a wild resistance, she returned to her cabin on leaden feet and stuffed some of her belongings in a knapsack, stooped to kiss Abby, then followed the funereal procession up the hill.

While Cass was taken upstairs, Roxanna dropped her belongings by the door and wondered where the kitchen was. Without Hank’s amiable presence, she felt at sea. The foyer was even grander flooded with morning light than it had been touched by candlelight. To her right was the study, the door ajar. Avoiding it, she walked past the dining room and touched the cool knob of a slightly less ornate door she suspected was the kitchen. It opened invitingly and she stood slightly openmouthed on the threshold.

The large room was painted a bright brick red. Milk-white cupboards with black butterfly hinges abounded, and a huge stone fireplace took up the entire west wall. Tucked just behind this was a narrow stair that ran up to Cass’s room, she guessed, and also descended to a cellar.

Crossing to the nearest cupboard, she peered inside. Coffee. Tea. Cocoa nuts. Loaf sugar and spices. Almonds and raisins and olives. A veritable treasure trove.

Next she took in a stone sink with spring-fed water. Bella had told her the house had been built atop a spring, but she’d hardly believed it. Her heart squeezed tight.

Why did everything have to be so perfect?

She could hear the Herkimer brothers talking in low tones upstairs, awaiting Dr. Clary. Reaching into her apron pocket, she withdrew a small tin of cinchona Dr. Clary had supplied after the poisoning and then kindled the hearth’s ashes, surprised to find her hands unsteady.