Elizabeth Grayson (16 page)

“It’s the islands that cause the jams,” Rue replied from where he was squinting out at the water and the deck of dirty clouds hanging above it.

“And that the river’s dropping,” Chase added. “The channel’s even shallower up ahead, so we’ll have sandbars and rapids to contend with. I warned you the trip wasn’t going to be easy, didn’t I?”

Both of them knew the moment the
Andromeda
turned her bow upstream at Sioux City, that Ann was committed to the journey all the way to Fort Benton.

“I’m glad I’m here,” she assured him quietly. But now that the excitement was over, Ann drooped with exhaustion.

“I need to rest,” she murmured and climbed to her feet. Though she was feeling well enough, it seemed to take more effort to get through the nights of baking than it had a month before.

“Why don’t I see you back to your cabin?” Chase offered, rising, too. “There’s weather coming in, and I want to be sure you’re settled before it starts to rain.”

As they left the wheelhouse, Chase called his father’s admonition back to Rue. “Stay off the sandbars while I’m gone.”

Rue’s laughter followed them down the stairs.

Ann was climbing into her berth a few minutes later when she heard the first raindrops pecking at the windowpane. By the time she awoke at midafternoon that soft patter had become a drumming deluge.

She lay drifting for a time, listening to the rhythm of the rain and feeling the baby stir within her. She rubbed her palms over the taut, itchy skin of her abdomen and wished she’d had the gumption to ask Chase’s mother about her backaches, the shortness of breath, and her bouts of unexpected tears.

Since Lydia had given birth to six living children, she would have been able to advise Ann about such things. Perhaps she’d have been willing to tell her what it was going to be like when the baby came. How much would it hurt? Would Ann be able to bear the pain? Was she more likely to die in childbirth because her mother had?

Ann did her best to swallow down her anger at being forced to bear a baby she’d never wanted, to bring a child into the world who would constantly remind her of a night she ached to forget.

She wished she’d dared to ask the women homesteaders who’d been aboard about having babies, but ladies didn’t talk about such things to strangers. Now that the last of them had disembarked, Ann was marooned in a world of men. If she needed help, the only people she’d have to turn to were the steamer’s crew, her officers and chefs and roustabouts, the miners headed for the goldfields or the soldiers with orders to the forts out West.
And what would any of them know about bringing a baby into
the world?

With a sigh of resignation, Ann rolled to the edge of the berth and stretched her toes toward the floor. She could tell by the faint rise and fall beneath her that they’d tied up somewhere. Chase said a pilot couldn’t properly read the river if the surface was dappled by rain, so the safest course was to lay-by and wait out a storm.

In the filmy twilight of the rainy afternoon, Ann washed, dressed in one of the gowns the Hardesty women had given her, then coiled her hair. When she pushed open the pocket door into the sitting room, Chase was at his desk.

“There’s coffee in the pot,” he said without looking up from his ledgers.

Ann glanced toward the stove, then back at him. The light falling from the gimballed oil lamp above the desk cast a sheen of warmth across the broad, blunt bones of his face and set off tracings of red and gold in his curly hair. Tenderness fluttered at the base of her throat as she watched him.

Perhaps it had been the stop at Hardesty’s Landing and seeing her husband reflected in his family’s eyes, that made her so aware of him. Of how solid and competent he was, of how his men respected him, of the courtesies he paid her. They were simple things: coming to escort her down to supper, insisting that the men keep their voices down as they came and went to the officers’ quarters, asking if there was anything she needed when they pulled into a settlement.

Whatever the cause, Ann had begun to look forward to having her time with Chase in the mornings. He usually arrived gruff and rumpled with sleep, responding only in rumbles until he’d drunk his coffee. Still, she appreciated his warmth beside her when the mist rose cool across the water. She relished the things he taught her about the river. She liked that they could laugh together over Frenchy’s imperiousness or Beck Morgan pitching face first in the mud at their last landing or the way Cal consistently beat Rue at checkers.

The more time they spent together, the more curious Ann became about the man she married. While he was busy with his duties, Ann had read the logbook and snooped through his things. Though his spelling confirmed his lack of schooling, Chase wrote with insight about the complexities of running a steamer. She discovered he was good at arithmetic and that the clothes in his drawers were of good quality, but old and in need of repair.

The bookshelves above the desk confirmed that he read. He had carefully annotated copies on science, philosophy, and history. She’d found a compact volume of Shakespeare’s plays, one of poetry borrowed from the Mercantile Library in St. Louis—and several big, expensive atlases.

But why would a man whose life was constrained by the mudbanks of Missouri have three world atlases?

Chase must have looked up from his work and realized she hadn’t moved. “Would you like
me
to get you coffee?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him, then asked outright about the atlases.

Coppery color ran up into his cheeks. “I always figured,” he admitted hesitantly, “that once Quinn finished medical school, I’d do some traveling.”

Ann poured coffee for both of them. “Where would you go?”

Chase shrugged and glanced away. “A good pilot can get a job pretty much anywhere there’s a river,” he began, “and I hear tell there are castles along the Rhine that are well worth seeing. I’ve always had a hankering to cruise the Nile and visit the pyramids. And what do you imagine it’d be like to ply the rivers in China?”

Ann had never imagined Chase harbored such big dreams or that he’d entertain such far-flung possibilities.

“I know world travel isn’t something a man like me usually aspires to,” he went on uncomfortably, “but I’ve always had this hankering ...”

He flushed again.

“I think your plans sound wonderful,” she encouraged him, “but why are you waiting until Quinn gets out of school?”

“Well, you make really good money piloting on the Missouri.”

“You’re paying for Quinn’s education, aren’t you?”

Chase toyed with his pen. “When Quinn was little he was always nursing a rabbit that had gotten separated from its mother or a crow with a broken wing. It was Will coming home from the war without his arm that made Quinn decide he ought to be helping people instead.” Chase looked at Ann directly. “We’re so damn proud Quinn wants to be a doctor.”

“But why did
you
take responsibility for putting him through medical school?”

“Well, Pa can’t,” he said. “And Quinn’s family.”

It was as simple as that. One of the rules Chase lived by: that family was sacred, something to be treasured and protected and sacrificed for.

Just the way he was making sacrifices for her and her baby.
The realization stunned her. For weeks all Ann had been able to see was how much Chase had gained by marrying her. Not once had she considered how much he’d given up.

“You won’t be able to go off once Quinn’s through school, will you?” she asked him. “Not now that you’ve married me.”

“I might have had a few regrets about the choice when I made it,” he conceded in the moment before his bright blue gaze rose to capture hers. “But now I’m not a bit sorry.”

The intensity in his eyes sent a frisson dancing along Ann’s nerves. A month ago, when they stood up to make their vows, she was convinced Chase Hardesty was a liar and an opportunist, someone who’d betrayed her for the promise of gain. But since that day, her perceptions of him had shifted and shifted again, forming and reforming like the patterns in a kaleidoscope.

They’d shifted again today and somehow struck a balance between them: between his ambition and her needs, between her expectations and his dreams. And in that delicate meshing lay a world of possibilities.

Ann skimmed a hand along his shoulder as she passed on her way to the settee. He hesitated, watching her get settled before he turned back to his work.

Outside the cabin the rain beat noisily against the decks and promenades. Inside, Chase and Ann shared a married couple’s comfortable silence.

CAPTAIN! CAPTAIN HARDESTY!”

At the sound of Goose Steinwehr’s voice, Chase straightened from where he’d been cutting up one of the trees they’d felled for fuel. He watched as the big, peg-legged Dutchman half-stepped down the cedar-lined ravine.

“Is something the matter, Mr. Steinwehr?”

“No, sir,” Goose answered him, then took a moment to catch his breath. “We found ourselves a honey tree.”

Chase leaned the axe against his thigh and swiped sweat from his face with the back of his arm. “How’d we do that?”

“One of the sentries found it,” Goose reported.

“Did he find any sign of Indians?”

They’d put in to wood up not quite ten miles north of New Fort Berthold, deep in the Dakota Territory. They’d been seeing redskins ever since they left Sioux City a little more than a month before. The
Andromeda
’s sightings had been peaceful enough: squaws washing clothes along the bank, half-grown boys in bull boats, and a crowd of old men milling around the trading post at Fort Sully. Not every boat had been so lucky.

From what Chase and Jake Skirlin heard from the sutler at the fort, war parties were ranging up and down the river, trying to draw the steamers in to shore so they could board them. When the boats steamed by, the Indians fired on them and had succeeded in killing one of the pilots. Which was nothing, the sutler told them, compared to what the Indians were doing out West. The Sioux and Cheyenne had the Bozeman Trail from Wyoming to Montana virtually under siege.

Since Fort Sully, Chase had been posting sentries whenever they tied up for the night or had men ashore hunting or cutting wood. He’d keep right on posting them until they reached Fort Benton, three weeks from now.

“While your sentry was finding that honey tree, did he see any sign of Indians?” Chase asked again.

“No redskins, sir,” Goose answered, then grinned like he was ten years old. “So—do you want see the bee tree?”

With a nod, Chase relented. “Where is it?”

“Let me show you.”

Chase set aside his axe and followed Goose up the ravine.

Finding a bee tree out here in the wilds was a rare stroke of good fortune. If a hive of honeybees was large and well-established, if the Indians or bears hadn’t found it first, a man could harvest gallons of honey from a single tree.

Two hundred yards west and south of the ravine, Chase and Goose reached a hazy, sun-drenched clearing. The air beneath the canopy of the encircling trees was warm and fecund and abuzz with bees. They converged from all directions on a hollow log at the clearing’s heart.

Seeing its size, Chase caught a bit of Goose’s enthusiasm. The bole had to be an arm’s length across and he could see no sign it had been disturbed.

“We’ll come back once it’s dark,” he told Goose in an undertone. “Find four good men who are willing to risk getting stung for a share of the profits. We’ll meet on the gangway at dusk. I’ll talk to Frenchy about bottling the honey for us.”

Goose spoke quietly as if he didn’t want the bees to hear. “This honey will be valuable when we get to Fort Benton,
ja
?”

“Worth its weight in gold,” Chase said. But instead of contemplating this windfall, he was thinking of Ann. Thinking about Ann’s sweet tooth—and the treat he was going to have for her when this foray was over.

CHASE WAS STILL THINKING ABOUT ANN AS HE LED HIS little band of volunteers up the cedar-lined ravine toward the bee tree. Though the sky above shimmered with bright banners of cerise and gold, the clearing, when they reached it, was shrouded in shadow.

The men held at the edge of the trees, while Chase skulked toward the big hollow log. As he approached, he could hear the faint, almost melodious drone of the nest, and see the last of the worker bees straggling home for the night.

He gestured Rue and Goose forward. They were carrying heavy metal fireman’s pails, half-filled with glowing coals.

“Ease the buckets up close to the log,” Chase instructed. Then, as Rue and Goose scuttled back, Chase dusted each of the pails with sulphur powder. Thick yellow smoke billowed out of the buckets, blanketing the clearing in a foul-smelling fog.

The bees poured out of the hive, circling and buzzing.

Drawing bandannas up over their faces and narrowing their eyes against the smoke, Chase and Beck Morgan climbed onto the fallen tree and set to work with axes. The wood was dry and powdery with rot, and they’d have made short work of the log, if it hadn’t been for the bees.

They hovered in a dark, angry cloud, humming in their ears, buzzing under the brims of their hats, finding ways inside their turned-up collars and tightly buttoned sleeves. Each sting was a sharp, exquisite sear, a spark landing on tender flesh.

In spite of the bees, Chase kept chopping. Beck Morgan stayed with it, too, working with the same tight determination. Finally the log groaned and shifted beneath them. Both of them jumped free as the bole fell apart.

By the light of a single lantern, Chase could see an eight-foot-long cavity inside the broken log filled with shattered comb and oozing honey. With a whoop of victory, he dumped the rest of the sulphur onto the coals and backed away.

The men who’d been waiting in the relative safety of the trees grabbed up their spades and set to work. They scooped shovelfuls of glistening honey from the bee tree into big copper boilers. Some of the gooey harvest was new and translucent, the color of sunshine. Some was old and amber dark, bleeding from a brittle, rust-colored comb.