Choices of the Heart (37 page)

If the mirror had belonged to her, she would have smashed it against the wall.

She put out the light so she couldn’t see herself and climbed into bed. Every bone and muscle in her body ached, her heart worst of all. She had known too little sleep over the past few weeks, and now sheer exhaustion overcame her will to keep listening to the music drifting through her window.

But sleep didn’t conquer the rumble of thunder echoing off the mountains and the roar of rain pounding on her roof, blowing in through the open window, and pouring through a leak in the roof over the schoolroom.

“The new chalks!” She sprang from bed and ran barefoot into the other room. The storm had found a weak point in a corner, well away from anything important save the floor. Esther set the washbasin beneath the leak, then ran back to her room to light the lantern and dress. She needed a bucket. The basin wouldn’t hold enough. The barn held buckets—maybe one rested outside the kitchen door too.

She tossed her cloak over her shoulders and drew up the hood. It didn’t help much. Rain soaked through the wool in moments. Her boots dragged in a yard suddenly turned to a sea of churning mud, and the lantern became a useless metal burden with the candle unable to stay lit.

Esther could barely stay upright in the buffeting wind. She slipped and slid and used intermittent flashes of lightning to find her way to the barn, where relative dryness met her with the scents of horses and cows, hay, and the not altogether unpleasant odor of manure mixed with the straw on the floor. Horses stamped and snorted in their stalls at each roll of thunder. A hoof struck the wooden partition. She should get out. If the beast broke loose, he could run amok in a closed barn and trample her as she tried to escape.

She snatched up a bucket from beside the door and turned to go. A lull had come. She might reach her room without further soaking herself. And the horses had calmed for the moment.

She lifted the latch and then heard it, a low, groaning mew.

“Kitten?” She cocked her head, listening for the sound again.

“Ma-row.” It sounded like it was in pain, injured. Perhaps by one of the horses? Cats were known to go into horse stalls in pursuit of mice trying to get at the grain. If so, she couldn’t leave it.

She set down the bucket and moved forward, her hands held out before her to find her way between the boxes. “Kitten?” she called again.

“Ow-row.” The sound dropped onto her ears.

It was in the hayloft.

Esther groped in the darkness until she located the ladder, then she climbed, her skirt tucked into her waist sash, her cloak neglected on the barn floor. “Where are you, little one?”

She heard a meow again, then a squeak. A mouse? Oh no, she wasn’t moving toward a cat with a cornered mouse. The idea sent a shudder through her. She paused, heard the squeak again, and laughed. No, not a mouse, a kitten.

Outside, rain gushed and poured off the eaves of the barn. Lightning flashed, and the thunder rumbled and roared again and again and again as it bounced from mountain to mountain.

Inside the hayloft, Esther sat cross-legged beside one of the feral cats she had befriended and marveled at the ease and calm with which she delivered four damp, hairless balls. How she licked each one clean and guided it to nourishment.

“‘I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well,’” she quoted from Psalm 139. “God’s hand even in these tiny creatures.”

If God cared about such tiny beings, how could He not care about the human beings He had created to have communion with Him?

Esther stroked the momma cat’s head. She purred and snuggled more deeply into the nest of hay she had made for herself and her new family.

“If women gave birth so easily, little one, there’d be no need for midwives.”

And the pain struck again, her lack of a place in the world. Midwives were growing out of fashion. In trying to help Bethann understand she wasn’t alone in suffering pain deep to the heart at the hands of someone else, Esther had ruined herself there on the mountain, as she had in Seabourne. She had some healing skill, but she wasn’t a doctor. As the mountain grew more civilized, one would come and resent her intrusion.

“So how can I believe You care, God?” Her cry rang from her heart, yet it was too quiet for anyone or anything other than the cat and her new offspring to hear. “You gave me so much—looks, intelligence, a loving and wonderful family. And now . . .”

A simultaneous thunder blast and lightning strike shook the barn. The horses’ whinnies sounded like screams, and the cows mooed with as much emotion as placid beasts could produce. Silent now, the momma cat curled herself around the kittens.

Esther clambered to her feet. She had forgotten about the leak in the schoolroom roof. The place would be flooded.

She headed for the ladder but stopped, nostrils flaring. Yes, she smelled smoke. Most definitely smelled smoke.

She tumbled down the ladder, snatched up her cloak, and charged from the barn, then ran back to grab up a bucket and departed again. The smoke burned stronger; the rain fell lighter.

Not now. Not now. If something was burning, they needed the rain, the wet.

She glanced around, seeking flames—the barn, the house, the chicken coop.

Her cabin. Against a patch of clear, starry sky, a plume of smoke bloomed as though someone had lit a fire on the hearth. Probably a lightning strike on the roof.

“Nooo!” She raced across the yard, slipping and sliding in the mud.

Everything she owned lay in that cabin—her pictures, her books, the curl of embroidered ribbon Griff had given her.

She flung open the door. No flames she could see, just heavy, oily smoke like burning pitch. Of course. Pine logs. A pine-shake roof saturated with the oil of the sap and smoky before bursting into flames. She might have minutes; she might have seconds.

She dropped to all fours and began to crawl. Her dress caught on the rough floor and ripped. Another gown ruined. They’d all be ruined if she didn’t reach her room.

She pushed open that door. Less smoke. Cool, sweet air flowing through the window—

And a flash of heat behind her.

She whirled, caught the flame curling across the floor, and threw her cloak atop it. The wet wool smothered it, but another flame near the window burned more insistently, sparkling off broken glass.

A lightning strike that broke a window?

No time to think of that. She slammed the door and began snatching her things from tables and pegs. Books, clothes, and satchel ended up in a jumble atop the coverlet. She wrapped it together and tossed it out of the window.

A line of red-gold ran beneath the door.
No more time.

She scrambled to her feet, coughing from the smoke, and stumbled to the window. Her skirt was still tucked inside her sash. She raised her leg to climb over the sill. A bit too high for that. And the opening was too small. Surely too small for her to go through. She beat on the frame with her fists. The nails groaned but held fast. She needed something stronger than she was. Someone stronger than she was. But the family slept, exhausted from the ordeal with Bethann, the noise hidden by the storm.

She heard the flames now with only the door and fireplace between her and fire. In the darkness, she peered around for a ram, something with which to batter at the window frame.

She grabbed the washstand. The pitcher slid to the floor and shattered like the glass in the other room.

Don’t think. Don’t
think. Don’t think.

She hefted the stand and slammed it against the window frame. More glass broke. Arms aching, she slammed it again. Nails shrieked. Heart pounding out of her chest, she heaved the stand again.

The window frame and remaining shards of glass fell atop her bundle. She tumbled after them, catching her diaphragm against the edge of the opening. Winded, she hung there for a moment, arms, legs, body shaking, flames eating through the door behind her.

Somehow she must find the strength to crawl through the opening, get away, get her things away. Her breath whooped and wheezed through her lungs. She couldn’t drag herself to safety. She was trapped with the building burning around her.

Then she heard it, the sound of Griff calling her name, louder, louder, coming toward her.

She raised her head. “Here! I’m—” Her voice broke on a spasm of coughing.

But he was there, grasping her beneath her arms and hauling her through the open window. He held her tightly against him, murmuring something against her hair, then set her down. “Can you walk?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m all right.” She sank to her knees. “My things. Must get my things.”

“Here.” Griff scooped up the bundle and strode away from the cabin.

Esther grabbed up a shoe, a mud-splattered book, and her satchel, which had fallen out of the bundle, then followed. Behind her, the fire burst through the door and into her room.

Griff deposited her things inside the kitchen, then snatched up the two buckets by the back door and left. The rest of the family save for Bethann streamed into the kitchen and fanned out the door, calling directions, asking questions, working as a team that had either practiced or had experience with fire. They pumped water. They filled pails and carried them to the fire. Even Mr. Tolliver participated.

After a moment’s hesitation, Esther joined them. The building couldn’t be saved. They could only ensure that between the soaking rain and the water they poured over the fire, they could keep it from spreading to the wooden stockade fence or one of the other buildings, now that the rising wind was blowing the storm across the ridge.

It took until dawn and then some to subdue the blaze down to nothing more than smoldering ruins, partial walls, and a collapsed stone chimney. Esther’s hands and arms ached from the strain of carrying the heavy buckets by their wire bails. She plodded rather than walked. She couldn’t run like Jack and Ned, tireless as always, shouting, exclaiming over every shower of sparks shooting into the sky like fireworks for a celebration. Liza and Brenna pumped, filled, and carried with the same energy as their younger brothers, at least twice as much as Esther managed. Slow. She was so slow. The mud splashed up to her knees, and she had to wade through it to move a step. Her head pounded and she kept coughing. Then she picked up a bucket and her hands gave way. Her fingers simply refused to curl around the twisted wire handle.

She dropped to her knees and held her hands to the crimson light fingering its way through the haze topping the mountains. From the centers of her palms to the tips of her fingers, blisters covered her hands, blisters that had formed, broken, and reformed. For the first time in her life, she didn’t think about protecting her precious midwife’s hands.

33

The schoolroom and Esther’s chamber collapsed in on themselves with a final shower of sparks barely visible against the rising sun. The yard around it was a churned-up sea of mud. The air and everyone nearby reeked of smoke. And Esther discovered that besides her blistered hands, somewhere along the way her hair had gotten singed.

She sat on a chair outside the kitchen door while Mrs. Tolliver took a pair of shears to the frizzed and uneven ends. What felt like ten pounds fell from Esther’s head and onto the ground. The waves turned to curling tendrils that bounced and coiled around her shoulders. She tried to pin it up, but it refused to stay in the pins as though it had a life of its own. After a lifetime of always being the neatest person in any room she graced, she looked like her brothers did when they returned from one of their merchant sailing excursions—unkempt and a bit wild.

“You need a ribbon,” Liza said. “I have some.”

“I have one.” Esther retrieved the embroidered satin ribbon from her salvaged belongings. “It’s so pretty.”

“Too pretty to put on your hair until you can wash it. It’s a bit sooty.”

Brushing had helped some, but they all looked grimy without the time or energy to draw water for eight individual baths.

“Use this.” Liza produced a faded bit of calico sewn into a long, thin strip.

Esther tied her hair back, her fingers stiff from the blisters. The lack of piles of hair atop her head gave her a sense of freedom. Dressed in one of Liza’s gowns, a good enough fit except for being too short, she looked young, more Liza’s age than her own, especially with a smudge of soot still running along her hairline.

“I look like a ragamuffin,” she exclaimed.

Not the beauty of Seabourne, Virginia. Not a beauty at all. And not a midwife with her hands so sore and blistered. She should feel free.

She felt adrift, a part of nothing and very, very dirty. First she washed her clothes, a torture to her hands as she scrubbed her few remaining garments, then hung them up to dry in the brilliant sunlight. Somehow she must obtain fabric and sew more. She couldn’t possibly go about with only two dresses, and neither of them a good one. In the dark, she hadn’t known what she snatched, and she hadn’t taken her riding habit or her best dress. Her gray one with the faint bloodstain and a plain blue linen were all that had survived. Even her cloak was gone.

But she had her fine shoes. Silly creature that she was, she had managed to save all her shoes, from her riding boots to a pair of plain leather slippers to blue satin dancing slippers that had matched the one truly fine gown she’d brought along. And she had her books. Those were harder to replace than dresses.

“We’ll manage more for you.” Liza helped Esther hang up her petticoats. “Uncle Elias’s wife makes the finest cloth on the ridge. And I sew a fine seam.”

“You do. Your needlework is exquisite. How did you learn?”

Liza shrugged. “Momma taught me. I . . . well, I wasn’t going to show you this yet . . .” Liza ran into the house and emerged a few minutes later to show Esther a length of fabric about six inches wide and covered with tiny blue flowers. “To sew on your gray dress to cover up that stain and make it pretty.”

“Liza . . .” Esther’s throat closed. She blinked hard to clear tears from her eyes.