Mending Horses (13 page)

Jonathan laid a hand on her shoulder. “You'd do it better, Soph. Hell, you near about brung me up.”

“Brought,” Sophie said, shrugging off his hand.

“Brought,” Jonathan repeated. Feeling his throat go tight, he bent to pick up the basket so he could avoid Sophie's eyes. It was unexpectedly heavy. “What you got in here? Bricks?”

“Books.”

“Well, that's mighty thoughtful of you.” He reached under the clothes and pulled a couple volumes out: grammar, geography, history, arithmetic. . . .

“Those boys need proper lessons.”

“I ain't no schoolmaster, cousin.” Jonathan emphasized the
ain't
. “I can't even talk—”

“Not
can't. Don't
. I know perfectly well what you can and cannot do. You've been a dancing master, a singing master, an actor.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So?”

“So, act like a schoolmaster.” She folded her arms under her
bosom. “Give them proper lessons and set them an example. None of your
ain't
s or
brung
s.”

“Maybe I ought'a leave Billy behind after all. The two of you are sure matched for stubbornness.”

“Will you be back for Thanksgiving?” she asked.

Jonathan leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. “Cousin, the devil himself couldn't keep me away from one of your Thanksgiving dinners. I can already feel my mouth watering.” He stood back, pleased that he'd coaxed a sparkle into her eyes. “Come November, being on the road'll lose its charm,” he said. “Once Billy sees a little snow flying, he'll want to settle.”

She reached out and straightened his collar. “You never did.”

“They're all of 'em dead, Hugh?” Eamon asked.

Hugh started with the weight of his cousin's hand on his shoulder. He nodded, turned mute by a burning feeling in his chest, his ribs like a cage of hot iron bars squeezing ever tighter around his lungs and heart. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't close his eyes without seeing Liam's gaunt and wasted face, Death standing at his side as near as Hugh stood to Eamon just now. He blinked, surprised to see Eamon's ruddy, weathered features instead of Liam's, to hear the murmur of the men in the tavern instead of Liam's labored breath. “Christ, me lads,” he moaned, scrubbing at his face with clammy palms.

“Here, man, a wee bit of something to settle you, eh?” Eamon pressed a tumbler into Hugh's trembling hand.

The rum went down sharp, a sting at the back of his throat. “Thanks, Eamon. You're a good man,” he said, his voice raspy from the weeping he'd done on the long trek from Cabotville. With the second glass, the burning around his heart subsided into a dull ache.

He drew in the good healthy odors of wood smoke and cooking and tobacco, the sweat of working men and the animal smells that lingered on their shoes and clothes. He filled his pipe with trembling hands, hoping the sweet tobacco smoke would purge the stench of vomit and feces, disease and decay from his nostrils.

“ 'Tis a hard life, that it is,” Eamon commiserated, “and naught but suffering for our lot. You shouldn't'a had to bury 'em all on your own.”

Hugh's face flushed with shame. No need to tell the man that he'd had no heart to stay for the burying—no heart to stay and see Liam's corpse added to the two lads under the blanket. What good would it have done to watch Liam's life slip away like water through his fingers, just as Margaret's and Jimmy's and Mick's had? His heart was never meant to take such sorrow. So he'd turned his back and put one foot in front of the other, hoping that the farther away he got, the lighter his burden would grow. Only it hadn't worked that way, and he'd found himself at Eamon's door with his insides turned leaden and an invisible chain shackling him to the memory of the room reeking of sickness.

“Another, cousin?” Eamon asked.

“Aye,” Hugh said, though he feared there'd not be drink enough in the world to wash his soul clean.

How had he managed to stay alive? Liam wondered. Or, rather, who had helped him? Whose hands had laid cool damp cloths across his forehead when he burned and piled blankets on him when he froze and trickled water onto his parched lips? The puzzle wove through his fever-blistered dreams. Sometimes he fancied it was Da, come back to salvage his first and last child. Sometimes it was Nuala. And sometimes it was Mam, and himself but a child and everything the way it had been before it had all gone irretrievably wrong.

He kept his eyes closed, not wanting to let go the feeling that Mam was with him somehow. But eventually the clatter of fireplace tools and pots became too real to shut out. A savory aroma set his stomach yearning. For the first time in he didn't know how many days, he was hungry.

He opened one eye a wee bit. He lay on the floor in the corner of a shanty cobbled together of building scraps, much like his own. But it wasn't his own; from the wooden floor to the whitewashed walls, the battered table and cupboard to the dishes on the shelves, it was all wrong. And there was something very
wrong about the woman in the blue dress and brown-checked apron bending over a kettle on the hearth.

It took him a hard minute of thinking to place her, though she lived in the shanty across from his. He'd always turned aside when their paths crossed, avoided meeting her eyes, for who'd be wanting anything to do with such a woman? She lived on her own, earning her livelihood taking in laundry and sewing, though most said she took in more than that. One of the neighbor ladies said she'd go out in the evenings, coming back to her shanty with a different man each time.

She had a weary sort of prettiness about her, grayish smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes, making their color seem brighter and her lashes longer and darker. Most brown-eyed lasses, you'd not notice the color of their eyes from across a room, but this one's were a clear amber, like a pair of ear bobs Mam had once admired in a store. Her brown hair was pulled back in a careless knot, a stray tendril curling limply against her cheek. Some might call that wanton. To him, she just looked careworn, too short of time or money to bother with braids and sidecombs and caps.

He realized that she was saying something. He turned so his good ear was toward her. It hurt to move even that much. Everything ached, like waking up after a thrashing from Da, only the ache went deeper and fiercer than any he'd felt before.

She knelt on the floor next to him. She was younger than he'd expected, perhaps not much over twenty. “Are you awake for real this time?” she asked.

“I—I hardly know,” he mumbled. He flinched from her hand on his forehead. “What am I doing here?”

“Not dying, apparently,” she said.

“But—but why?” Gingerly, he dragged himself into a sitting position. She helped him shift the bolster and pillow behind his back so he could lean against the wall. He closed his eyes to rest from the exertion.

“Because I'm such a good doctor, I suppose.”

He opened one eye. Was she smiling? “Please, miss. Me head's
too sore for riddling. Can you just tell me plain what happened? How did I get here?”

“You were lying in my doorway. Can't have young men dying in the street. It's bad for business.” She went back to her kettles, poured out a mug of some sort of tea, tasted it, and made a sour face. She chiseled a lump from a sugar loaf and dropped it in the mug. “I tried to have someone carry you home, but when I looked inside—”

“Jesus, me house.” He tried to shove the blankets aside and get up, but they tangled like snakes around his legs, and his effort to wrestle them off only made him dizzy. The woman came back and held him still with hardly any effort.

“It's all right, Liam. They're . . . taken care of. They were all you talked of while you were feverish. So I had them made decent, and your shanty cleaned.”

“But you don't even know me.”

“I've been here three years. I certainly know my neighbors by now.” She got up and went back to her tea. “Even though they wouldn't care to know me.”

He looked away and picked at an unraveling thread on the coarse woolen blanket. The only thing he knew about her, besides how she made her living, was that her speech marked her for a Yankee. What other sort of Yankee woman would be reduced to living in the Patch among the Paddies?

She returned to his side, offering him a mug of tea. “For the headache,” she said.

It was some sort of concoction of herbs that would have tasted foul even with a gill of sugar dumped into it. He tried to swallow it without grimacing.

“I know,” she said. “It tastes horrid. Drink it anyway.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “All you done, and I don't even know you.” He took another sip of the bitter liquid to show he appreciated her efforts.

He nearly choked on the tea when she replied, “I'm a whore, just as you thought.”

“It's not me who ought to be judging folk,” he said. “With me da a drunk and me—” A what?
Nothing
was the only word that came into his head. “But even a—someone like yourself has got a name.”

“Augusta,” she said.

“Augusta?” he repeated. “It sounds a bit—” He swallowed back what he'd meant to say, which was that it sounded a bit grand for a whore. Instead he said, “It sounds too harsh to suit you.” Neither did she look like a whore—not that he'd be knowing. She looked just a bit on the nicer side of ordinary.

“Augusta,” he said, “What if you took sick yourself?”

She shrugged. “It's not as if anyone would miss me. Besides, I thought your father might come back for you.” She got up and turned back to the fireplace. “I should have known better.”

“What do you mean?”

She took a pair of bowls down from a shelf and began ladling some sort of soup into them. She was careful to put mostly broth into one bowl. “It's hard not to hear your neighbors fighting when the houses are practically on top of each other. It's hard to miss when someone's cursing or quarreling. Or being beaten. At least now you're finally grown enough to fight back.”

Finally?
Warmth crept up his neck. It rankled him that she'd consider him no more than a boy.

Augusta gave him the bowl of broth and sat on the floor next to him to eat her own soup. He let the first spoonful linger on his tongue before it slid down his throat like a caress. “My God, that's good,” he said.

Augusta's mouth pursed as though she were trying not to laugh. “It's only broth.”

“Aye, well, you've not had me cooking, have you?” he said. “Thank you. For everything.” He nodded toward the door. “And for whatever you done over there.”

She looked away uneasily. “It wasn't exactly my doing. I hired somebody.”

His own stomach turned at the thought of clearing out the foul mess that illness and death had left behind. “Wouldn't folk be afraid of the fever and all?”

“There's always someone who's willing to do what you won't for the right price.”

“I'll pay you back. Whatever it cost you.”

She fidgeted with her spoon. “Well, actually, you already have paid.”

“With what?” He'd a little money hidden away, but surely not enough.

“For someone with nothing, a pot or a chair is as good as money. Your rooms are clean, but you'll find them emptier than you left them.” She got up and set her bowl on the table, then busied herself with tending to the fire. “And they had to burn the bedding.”

“I—I hardly know what to say.”

“I suppose you're angry.”

Maybe he should be. She'd sold his things as if they were her own, and how was he to know whether she hadn't made a tidy profit? But it wasn't her selling his goods that felt odd. It was knowing that she'd seen all the refuse of his life. It was as if she'd stripped all the secret parts of him away while he'd slept, and now she knew everything about him and all he knew of her was her name. “It's not as if I could'a been doing any of it meself,” he said slowly. “I'd only'a made a mess of it, just like I done with everything else.”

“Why wasn't your father tending to you and your brothers?”

“Da can't manage. After me mam died, it tore him apart. Things're difficult for him.”

“Difficult.” Her voice was sharp as a chisel. “How long ago did your mother die?”

“It'll be six years now.”

“Most folks would think six years more than enough time to get over your wife's death, especially when you have children to feed.” Her voice grew fiercer as she talked. “If your father can't manage, then who's been doing it all this time?”

“Who else but me? Me and Nuala, I mean. Until she—” Liam shivered. “She's gone, too. They're all gone now.”