Choices of the Heart (4 page)

Esther blinked. “Teach you what?”

“How to look so hoity-toity.” Hannah laughed again, a full-throated bellow of mirth. “I declare you could freeze butter in July with that look.”

“I had no idea.” Esther’s face heated.

“Leave off, Hannah.” Zach toed a fallen branch back into the fire and didn’t look at Esther. “You’re going to frighten her off.”

“As if you telling her about Griff being stabbed did.” Hannah snorted and began to dish up fried bread and bacon onto plates.

Esther leaped forward to snatch up the coffeepot, using some of her excess riding habit hem to lift the scalding pot, and poured the coffee into waiting mugs. The rich, dark aroma smelled heavenly. She inhaled the bitter scent she found so much more satisfying than tea, and a lump rose in her throat.

Papa never drank coffee. Momma never drank tea unless it was chamomile. The teakettle and coffeepot resided side by side atop the stove, as different as Momma and Papa and unimaginable not together.

Her body leaned toward the east, toward her home of four and twenty years, the church her father shepherded, the patients she and her mother tended, the people who had watched her grow up.

Yet they had called her a liar when she needed them to believe the truth the most.

She leaned back toward the west. “If you want me to continue with you,” she announced, “no one must mention that I am marriage fodder.”

“It’s just a crazy notion of my aunt’s.” Zach shrugged. “And we’re wasting time eating instead of traveling. I want to get as far as fast as we can and see if Griff’s all right.”

“He’s all right,” Hannah grumbled. “He’s too stubborn to let a little knife do him in.” Her mouth twisted and her nostrils pinched as though she smelled something unpleasant.

So Hannah didn’t like her cousin, but Zach did.

“Who stabbed him?” Esther pressed, watching Hannah.

Hannah took a huge bite of bread and bacon and chewed with evident pleasure, her eyes half closed.

“Ambushed,” Zach said. “Probably someone thinking to rob him.” He touched his side. “They weren’t very good with knife throwing, though. Anybody knows one should aim for the middle.”

“Of course.” Esther nodded. “One hits the bowel and the large artery there. If they don’t bleed out, they’ll die slowly of—” She gulped.

Hannah and Zach stared at her.

“You seen a man stabbed in the gut or something?” Hannah asked.

“No, I, um, learned a lot of medical things from my mother.” Esther bit into her own bread and bacon so she needn’t say more.

She didn’t want to tell them that her mother was a midwife, didn’t want to admit that she herself was a fully qualified midwife. She’d left healing behind when she ceased to heal.

“It’s all them books,” Zach muttered and rose to his feet in one sinuous motion.

Esther watched him stride away into the woods, carrying his plate. Hannah gazed after him too, her brows knit, her mouth pinched. “Momma owns three books. She tried to get Zach to read them, but he never would much. She said he’d regret it one day when Griff could read and he couldn’t.”

“We all regret disobeying our parents sooner or later.” Esther surged to her feet and began to gather up the coffeepot and spider for cleaning. “We should be on our way.”

She looked toward the east again. She had regretted her disobedience sooner rather than later. But here she was, going against their wishes yet again and wondering how long would pass before she once more regretted her actions, or if just maybe this time she was right.

Hannah
and Zach should be on their way back from the
coast by now.

Griff Tolliver came to full consciousness. Vaguely, through a haze of burning pain, he had been aware of the passage of days—sunlight, moonlight, and the in-between shades of gray and blackness—slipping past his fevered brain. Too many days for him to lie vulnerable in an abandoned cabin along the Old Wagon Road. A log cabin with no glass in the window and no lock on the door and his elder sister Bethann’s inexpert ability with a rifle were not enough protection from whoever had tried to kill him.

“Who?” He groaned as he struggled to sit up. Corn husks whispered from the pallet beneath him. His head no longer throbbed. The rough stitching in his right side pulled, a far cry from the earlier, constant, tearing certainty that death would find him a willing companion. “Who?” he repeated on a sigh.

“Who what?” Bethann dropped to her knees beside him and slipped one arm beneath his shoulders. “You sound like an owl.”

Griff focused on her face, pasty white save for a constellation of ruddy freckles across her slightly crooked nose. “Who did it? Who tried to kill me?”

“Zach, of course. Drink.” She held a cup to his lips and tilted it so he had to swallow the bitter but cold draft or choke.

He swallowed, fighting dizziness and weakness. “Not Zach. Zach wouldn’t.”

“He’s a Brooks and related to the Gosnolls, isn’t he?”

“Sure, but—” He leaned on his left hand to spare his right side.

Zach, his friend, his cousin, would never harm him, despite his family. Together they had knelt in the makeshift church and prayed for God to forgive them for their part in the family dispute. They had vowed before God that they would stop the fighting, the violence, before any more of the men of Brooks Ridge were maimed or killed, and then they persuaded their mothers to hire a schoolma’am for the younger children to be properly taught how to read and write and love their neighbors as themselves. Neighbors or family. Either counted. Miss Esther Cherrett sounded perfect—the daughter of a parson, educated by him with some fancy English education.

“Not Zach. He took a vow,” Griff murmured.

Bethann snorted. “Since when does a Gosnoll or Brooks stay by a vow?” She rose with one fluid motion and stalked to the open door of the cabin, plain in face and form but as graceful as a mountain lion.

And as bitter as one of her herbal concoctions.

Griff slid back against the rough wall to keep himself from succumbing to one of those herbal concoctions. His side murmured a token protest at the movement. “So why do you think it was Zach?”

“Rest. You need your rest.”

“I’m right rested, Bethann. I need to talk.” The effort not to yawn nearly dislocated his jaw.

Bethann laughed, the sound like a saw blade striking metal. “You need to rest so’s you don’t open up that wound.”

“It’s healed well enough.” He groped beneath the remnants of his shirt for the bandage wrapped around his middle.

No fresh blood soaked through the linen. His touch on the slice through the flesh right above his hip bone didn’t send him reeling into unconsciousness. A twinge. A simple twinge. He would be back on his horse in another day or two.

And continuing east to meet up with the party from Seabourne.

“Tell me why you claim Zach threw that knife at me,” Griff persisted.

In the doorway, Bethann shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Who else was around who can throw a knife but him and Hannah?”

“Hannah couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a knife if she was a yard away, let alone in the dark from fifty feet away.” Griff stifled another yawn. “But why would Zach ambush me and slice my guts open?”

“To be rid of you, Brother. You die and it’s all his—the woods, the mine, the farms.”

“Not with our fathers still alive, and we have younger brothers and cousins who expect a share.”

“Our fathers.” Bethann kicked her booted foot against the door frame.

Dust and splinters shimmered in the last rays of the sun. With a ripping sound, the frame cracked up the middle.

“They’ll kill each other off sooner than later,” she insisted.

“No. No, it’s over, I’m right certain of that.”

Bethann snorted.

“I can’t—” Griff shoved his hair out of his face, finding only a line where a lump and a gash had rendered him unconscious. “No, I won’t go around accusing Zach of trying to murder me without more proof than your guessing.”

“You ain’t up to believing proof.” Muttering something about fetching more water, she slipped out of the door and beyond his line of sight.

The water bucket remained in one corner of the cabin.

Griff remained in the far corner, drowsing, aching in body and heart.

Not Zach, not the cousin who was closer to him than his brothers, fourteen and sixteen years younger. He and Zach had been born a day apart. Until ten years ago, they had spent more time together than with the rest of their families.

And we took
that vow together.

Yet unfortunately, Bethann was right. Zach’s father and brother-in-law had broken every vow they had made.

Including their marriage vows.

Still, Griff didn’t want to tar Zach with the same brush and continue the feud. Too many had died already. They didn’t need to add to the numbers on the word of a bitter and resentful spinster, regardless of her reasons for her anger.

“Lord, get me out of here.” He fell asleep propped in the corner and praying for a speedy recovery from his wound.

He awoke to Bethann attempting to pour more of her draft down his throat. He pushed it away. “Food, not that swill. I need to get up.”

“You still need rest.” In the dim morning light, her face glowed as pale as moonlight, her seemingly lipless mouth a slash of red like a cut.

Gently Griff took her arm and tried to push it away so he could get to his feet. She resisted. His hand shook with the effort to move her. Weakness. Humiliating, dangerous weakness. He couldn’t lift a gun, throw a knife, or ride a mile if he couldn’t move aside his thin sister.

But he managed to spill the contents of the tankard over his pallet.

Bethann grumbled and sighed and backed away. “Don’t come crying to me when your side rips open and you bleed your veins out.” She stomped from the cabin, her heels thudding dully on the dirt floor.

Griff used notches in the walls as handholds to pull himself to his feet. He staggered and swayed and moved with as much confidence as a baby taking its first steps, but he moved. The sun had risen by the time he reached the door. He longed for the strength to leave the cabin and walk far enough to stand in the bright rays, feel the warmth. A stream gurgled at hand, and the notion of diving into the icy water spread through him like hunger.

He was hungry. He wanted meat. Bethann brought him porridge. Even though they would not find the wherewithal to stay in inns along the route, more from habit than necessity, they had packed provisions of oatmeal and flour, dried meat and bacon. Bethann preferred sleeping in the open and cooking over a fire to crowding herself amongst people. Griff wanted a real bed and fresh food.

Bethann located some wild berries growing in a meadow. Lush and red, they satisfied Griff more than had the thick porridge. One more day passed by, then two, then three. Each one brought more strength.

They also brought the schoolma’am closer, gave her more time in Zach’s company without Griff so much as knowing what she looked like.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” he announced to Bethann over a bowl of cornmeal mush flavored with jerky. “No arguments. Either you come with me or I go alone.”

She didn’t argue. She didn’t speak at all until, with some difficulty, Griff was mounted on his roan gelding and Bethann on her gray mare. Instead of heading her mount east toward the road that would take them to the pass over the Blue Ridge, she headed back the way they had come, back toward the New River and home.

He drew up. “Where are you going?”

“To give you your proof of Zach’s treachery.”

Sickness clenched his gut. “I’m not interested.”

“In what? The truth? Griff.” Bethann drew her brows together over her long, slim nose. “Knowing will save your life next time.”

Griff remained stiff in his saddle, though the rigidity pained his side. “There won’t be a next time.”

“Why not? A Brooks hurt Pa and killed our other kin.”

And paid for it with his life.

“The fighting has stopped,” Griff insisted. “I won’t be a party to it starting up again.”

“You won’t be a party to nothing if you don’t pay attention to the signs.” Bethann dismounted and lifted a sheaf of cut pine boughs. “I laid these here where I found you so you can see for yourself. Look.”

Griff didn’t want to look. He wanted to ride east and find Zach and Hannah and the lady.

But he dismounted and looked. Not enough rain had fallen in the past three weeks to have reached through the canopy of branches overhead or the pine boughs of Bethann’s making to hide the signs of where Griff had fallen as he attempted to dismount from his horse with a knife blade sticking out of his side. Leaves and pine needles lay crushed into a hollow. A brief outcropping of rock bore a splash of darkness. Blood. Nothing else showed signs of the ambush.

He scowled at Bethann. “I don’t see any signs. In fact—” His hand pressed to his side. “What happened to the knife?”

“Good question, that.” Bethann’s upper lip curled. “Took it with him so’s we didn’t recognize it. But he left this behind when he pulled the blade out, I expect.”

She lifted aside the bough of a cedar tree. Beyond it, the brambles of a wild rose wrapped around the outcropping of rock and struggled to reach the light. And from those briars dangled several strands of pale yellow hair. The butter-yellow of Zach’s hair. Hannah’s too. Hundreds of people’s hair.

But hundreds of people hadn’t been up the trail in the past three weeks. A few dozen, perhaps. Several possessed that gleaming pale gold. But few would have reason to duck into the depression beneath the tree.

Griff’s gut ached from his belly to the mostly healed stab wound. “Not enough proof.”

“Stubborn mule.” Bethann bent and plucked something from a lower thorn on the wild rose. “What about this too?”

She held up a strip of buckskin perhaps a finger long and half as wide as a pinkie. Fringe from a hunting shirt. Plain, brown, well-worn. Nothing distinguished it from the shirt Griff wore now, as the homespun one he’d donned for the journey had been ruined.

Then Bethann laid it across his palm, and he saw the difference. Stamped into the underside of the leather were two letters—ZB. Their mothers had started stamping their clothes when they were small to help know whose was whose when they left bits behind at the swimming hole or a field or any number of places.