Elizabeth Grayson (20 page)

Ann’s steps faltered as she climbed the
Andromeda
’s gangway. A wave of childish grief rolled over her. Her mother had been reading to her the day before the doctors began to arrive with their black satchels and scowling faces. She remembered now how her mother’s screams had echoed through the house for most of the afternoon. Then toward evening James Rossiter had come into her room with tears on his face and told her that her mother and baby brother were dead.

Ann shivered with the memory as she trudged up the stairs toward her cabin.

If her mother and Spotted Fawn Woman had died giving birth, Ann knew she could die, too. She could die birthing a child that had begun in shame, a child she’d tried to deny she was even carrying. She could die screaming in agony, with no one to help but a boatload of rivermen.

Still, Ann had made this choice and she wasn’t sorry. She loved her life on the river. She loved that she’d found someone to watch over her the way Chase had last night, someone who cared about what she thought and how she felt.

Ann had changed since she’d barged aboard the
Andromeda,
then fought to stay. She’d made fast friends of people she might never even have noticed in her other life. She’d seen things and done things and learned things—and found a family. She didn’t regret a moment of her months on the river, no matter the cost.

But now that it was nearly time to deliver her baby, Ann couldn’t help being terrified. She crossed the cabin to the bedroom and climbed into her berth. Whispering a prayer for Spotted Fawn Woman and her child, she curled up tight and pulled the blanket over her.

ANNIE?”

Ann started awake, realizing between one heartbeat and the next that
he
was here with her. She could feel his energy squirm across her skin, hear the tempo of his breathing, and smell the high, sharp bite of camphor.

She could see him silhouetted in the lighted doorway, his shadow reaching out to her. Her heart throbbed in her throat and panic roared along her nerves. Her ears rang; her muscles froze.

“Annie, are you all right?”

Those weren’t the words or the voice she’d been expecting. This voice was soft and deep and filled with concern.

Ann’s fear evaporated. She pushed herself upright and sat at the edge of the bed, becoming aware all at once that her hair was straggling down her back and her dress was bunched in a wrinkled mass around her.

“I looked in on you before I went down to the salon,” Chase said coming toward her. “But you seemed to be sleeping.”

“I was tired,” she said. It was the easiest explanation.

Chase smiled a little. “My sister Suzanne spent the whole last month she was carrying Matt sitting on the back porch at my parents’ house, staring at the river.”

Ann grazed his sleeve with her palm to thank him for encouraging her.

“I brought you supper on a tray,” he coaxed her. “Frenchy gave you three desserts.”

A stroke of appreciation tickled through her. “I’ll eat it later.”

“Is your stomach upset?” Chase asked and lifted his hand to feel her head. “You’re not feverish, are you? That baby’s not coming, is it?”

“I’m fine.”

But Chase seemed to know she wasn’t fine. He stood looking down at her. “Rue said he saw you heading into town this morning. Where did you go?”

She averted her eyes and didn’t answer.

“Annie?” Even in the half-light she could see a score of worry slice between his brows. “Did something upset you?”

For a moment she tried to hold her peace, but it seemed useless to try to evade the truth. “I walked to the Blackfeet encampment to give Spotted Fawn Woman the blanket I made for her.”

She’d been so pleased with the piece, she’d showed it to him the night before.

“It was lovely,” he offered carefully. “Did she like it?”

“Red Dog was there alone,” Ann went on, thinking how silent and desolate their camp had seemed. “He’d hacked off his hair and was covered with ash.”

Chase made a sound low in his throat and cupped his hands around her forearms. “What happened?”

Ann’s throat worked to form the words as tears spilled down her cheeks. “Spotted Fawn Woman died,” she said. “The baby died, too.”

“Oh, Annie.” Chase pulled her to him, accommodating the full, ripe bulk of her in his arms. Ann leaned into him, pressed her face to the wash-softened cotton of his shirtfront.

“She was so young,” she whispered. “She seemed so happy to be carrying Red Dog’s child. How could she die?”

He seemed to know her fears, hear the things she hadn’t said. “Don’t be afraid, Annie. You’ll be all right.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” he said and wrapped her up tight in his arms. “I know, because I’m going to get the finest doctor in St. Louis to take care of you. I know you and that baby are to be fine.”

Ann nodded and nestled close, wanting so much to believe him.

chapter nine

THE PAINS BEGAN ABOUT THREE O’CLOCK. ANN WAS kneading the night’s last batch of bread dough when a sharp catch near the base of her spine made her straighten. The tightness rippled low along the sides of her abdomen and bunched at the base of her belly. She rubbed at the spot with one floury hand.

She’d been having pulls and twinges for weeks, and at first she’d marveled at the changes taking place in her body. But now that the spasms were a daily occurrence, they seemed a dark portent of what lay ahead.

Ann bent gingerly sideways to relieve the strain and heaved a gusty sigh. What the devil was she doing here, anyway? She hadn’t come down to bake since they left Fort Benton two weeks before. She was tired and hot from the blast of the ovens, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember why she found dumping flour into yeast so fascinating. Yet here she was with one last batch of dough to knead and form into loaves.

She stretched, then bent back to her work.

The next pain caught Ann hard enough to make her gasp. It began with another constriction low in her back, then wrapped around her belly like two grasping hands. She gripped the edge of the counter in surprise and panted until the pain was over.

She swiped the sweat off her forehead, then glared across at Frenchy. He was singing as he slid one pale loaf after another into the roaring ovens.

She ought to tell the man to finish his own damn bread. She ought to throw off her apron and stomp ...

Another sharp roil of discomfort grabbed her and squeezed her hard enough to send a hot trickle of liquid running down between her legs. Ann pressed her thighs together to stanch the flow, but the trickle became a stream, and that stream a gush that soaked right through her underdrawers and pooled around her shoes.

Ann froze, utterly mortified. She hadn’t wet herself since she was three years old.

Frenchy must have noticed something was wrong, because he hurried toward her. “Ann? Are you all right?”

A fiery blush scorched up into her hair.

“Merde!”
he cried when he rounded the counter where she’d been working and saw the floor. “You’re going to have that baby, aren’t you?”

“Now?” Ann asked him, horrified.

He grabbed a chair and made her sit, then tore out of the galley. He returned with Chase not three minutes later.

Chase’s hair was ruffled with sleep. His open shirt flapped around his hips and his feet were bare. He looked at the puddle on the floor and then at her.

“Are you having labor pains?” he asked her.

Is that what they were?

“How bad are they?”

She didn’t have any idea how bad “bad” was. She didn’t see how Chase could know that, either.

All Ann knew was that the ordeal was beginning, the ordeal that had taken her mother away, the ordeal that cost Spotted Fawn Woman her life. The ordeal that set the very marrow of her bones to trembling.

Her belly bunched again, and she started to squirm.

Chase must have realized what was happening, because he bent and swooped her up in his arms. “Don’t you worry, Annie,” he assured her. “You and this baby are going to be fine.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and hid her face against his throat.

Chase gave Frenchy directions in a low, terse voice. “Go rouse Cal. Have him stoke up the boilers. Get Rue up, too. Tell him to get us to Hardesty’s Landing as fast as he can.”

Frenchy, whose position usually precluded such mundane work, went without a word of complaint.

As Chase turned to leave the galley, Ann saw smoke curling around the edges of the oven door. “Wait!” she cried. “The bread is burning!”

“To hell with the bread,” Chase snapped, then took the stairs to the captain’s cabin two at a time.

Fifteen minutes later Ann was snugged up tight in the captain’s berth. “How—how far is it to Hardesty’s Landing?” she fretted as another of the pains tightened its grip on her.

Chase hesitated, and she thought for a moment he was going to lie to her. “Forty miles, more or less,” he finally answered.

“A full day’s run,” she whispered, horrified.

“It’s downstream, Annie.” He took her hand. “We’ll get you to Ma before the baby comes, so don’t you worry.”

Pressed palm to palm, she soaked in the calm that was so much a part of him, savored the comfort in his promises. No matter how their marriage had begun or what she thought of him four months ago, she knew Chase Hardesty would stand by her. She knew she could count on his strength and his concern.

“Is there anything I can get you?” he asked gently. “Do you want someone to come and sit with you?”

Ann didn’t want anyone but him, but she’d probably need him far more later than she did now. “You go on up to the pilothouse,” she told him. “I’m going to rest for a little while.”

Ann hadn’t expected to sleep, but when she awoke at midday, Frenchy was settled in a chair beside the bed.

“Did the bread burn?” she asked him.

He gave his head a contemptuous shake. “Those rousters! They’ll eat anything. But for you, I made some good beef consommé. Women need strength to push their babies out.”

Ann managed to eat a little.

“And now we walk,” Frenchy instructed when she was done. “It will bring the baby sooner.”

Knowing better than to argue with him, Ann wriggled to the edge of the bunk. She’d barely gotten to her feet when one of the pains swelled over her.

“Breathe!” Frenchy ordered. Then taking liberties only a Frenchman would take, he pressed his fist against her spine and massaged, none too gently. The pressure eased her constricted muscles and gave her something to press against.

“How did you know to do this?” she panted.

“I have”—he flushed as he answered—“wives. I have children. Frenchy Bertin, he knows about such things.”

When Chase came by a good while later, the cabin had grown warm and close with the heat of the afternoon.

“How far to Hardesty’s Landing?” Ann asked fitfully. The pains were coming harder and more regularly.

“We’ll be there soon, Annie,” he promised, wiping her face and throat with a cool cloth. “Soon.”

In the steamy dimness of late afternoon, Ann’s thoughts ran in fragments, focusing and then fading into the hot, yellow air. Visions of her mother and Spotted Fawn Woman rose up before her. Had they died panting and writhing in pain? Had they succumbed sobbing with weakness and despair? Would she die that way, too?

Terror climbed her chest, ripped hot through her throat and belly. Was she going to be punished for not wanting this child? And if she managed to deliver it alive, would Chase take one look at the baby and realize what she’d done?

She wrapped her arms around her belly and drenched her pillow in hopeless tears.

When Chase came next, it was almost dark.

“Where
are
we?” she pleaded. “How far is it to Hardesty’s Landing?”

Before he could answer, one of the contractions roared in on her like a rogue wave. She clutched his hand as the constriction tightened inside her. She squeezed harder as the pain rose and poised and crested. She moaned as it crashed over her. When it finally ebbed away, she was sobbing for breath.

“Are they all like that?” Chase asked. His hand was steady around hers, but she could hear his voice shaking.

Ann didn’t answer; tears slid from the corners of her eyes.

“Hang on just a little while longer, Annie, please,” he whispered. “I’ll get you home. I swear I’ll get you home.”

Home, she thought hazily, to a place where she’d been accepted without question. Home to a woman with kind eyes and knowing hands, to a family who brought their babies into the world safe and whole.

Home.
It sounded like heaven.

“Hurry,” she whispered. “Hurry!”

CHASE RAISED ONE SHAKING HAND FROM THE
Andromeda
’s wheel and wiped the sweat from his eyes. The sky had long since faded from dusty blue to midnight-black, leaving not so much as a star or a sliver of moon to light their way. The Missouri lay ahead like an undulating ribbon of crepe, dead of all reflections, all movement.

They were just a few miles upstream of Hardesty’s Landing, picking their way through the dark, running for home as fast as they dared.

Chase strained his ears for some sound from the cabin below, where Goose had gone to sit with Ann. All he could hear was the roar of the furnaces, the low-pitched
huff
of the engines, and the paddle wheel’s ceaseless churning. Those sounds, the circumstances, and the heat tugged at the raveling edge of Chase’s patience.

He’d chosen to gamble with all their lives to see that Ann got the help she needed. He mopped his face on his sleeve and squinted at the small, flat-bottomed yawl bobbing a hundred yards ahead of them. Across a skim of ink-black water the lantern in the bow illuminated a desperate scheme unfolding in pantomime.

As two deckhands, Bill Whalen and Kit Harvester, eased the boat forward, Rue stood in the bow and felt out the bottom of the channel with a sounding pole. Once he was satisfied with the measurement, Rue gestured to Beck Morgan who sat in the stern.

As Chase watched, Morgan took one of the contraptions they’d knocked together an hour ago—a six-inch-square block of wood with a candle affixed to one side and a weighted line dangling from the other—and lit the candle’s wick.

Old-timers referred to what they were doing, following the channel one candle at a time, as “eating up the lights,” but Chase had never done it. He’d never seen it done, and he couldn’t be entirely sure if it wasn’t a story the seasoned pilots had made up to bamboozle unsuspecting cubs. Still, after seeing the kind of pain Ann was in, he was desperate enough to try anything.

In the skiff, Morgan sheathed the lighted candle with a collar of stiff paper to protect the flame and set it gingerly on the surface of the water.

The rowers moved the yawl ahead. Rue probed; Morgan launched another of the little glowing rafts. They moved again.

When half a dozen lights were laid out like a path of fallen stars, Chase rang the engineering bells. Cal responded to the orders, the deck shimmied, and they crept ahead by inches.

Chase followed the pinpricks of light until he thought he’d go blind. Then the high gray bluff just north of Hardesty’s Landing loomed out of the dark. The rider they’d landed two hours ago and sent galloping ahead must have reached the house, because his mother was standing at the foot of the steps, waiting for them.

Though his nerves clamored for a quick French landing, Chase brought the boat round and nuzzled her up to the bank with his usual care. When he reached the Texas deck a few minutes later, Goose Steinwehr stood braced against the wall beside the door to the captain’s cabin.

“Your mother’s with her,” the mate informed him.

Chase nodded his head. “How’s Ann faring?”

“She makes me glad it’s
women
who have babies,” the big German said with a laugh. Chase could see by the slump of his shoulders and the way Goose’s hands shook as he lit his cigar that sitting with Ann had taken its toll on him.

“Thank you for staying with her.”

Steinwehr nodded and pushed away from the wall. “When this is over,” he said, thumping down the stairs toward the salon, “we will drink to the health of your new son.”

Chase could have used a swallow of whiskey right then, but instead of following Steinwehr, he gathered his gumption and went into the cabin.

The air was so hot and thick he could feel it against his skin. It had breadth, volume, and a smell—sweat and blood and a faint lingering drift of Ann’s perfume. He kicked past a pile of damp, pink-tinged sheets on the sitting room floor, stepped into the bedroom—and stopped dead in his tracks.

Annie lay so white and still she might have been carved from alabaster. Her hair straggled against her shoulders, corded and dark with sweat. Her nightdress was plastered to her skin as if she were glazed with icing.

I didn’t get her to Ma soon enough,
he found himself thinking. I should have pushed harder, done more....

“ ’Bout time you put in an appearance,” Lydia said.

Chase instantly recognized his mother’s tone. He was in trouble, and he didn’t even know what he’d done wrong.

“I—I had to get us here,” he stammered, still not able to take his eyes off his Annie’s face.

“Couldn’t Rue have done it?”

Chase opened his mouth and closed it again. Once Ma set her mind on something, arguing was pointless.

“You should have been down here with your wife,” she went on, “instead of asking that
Dutchman
to sit with her!”

Ann spoke without opening her eyes. “I
asked
for Goose.”

“It’s all right, Annie.” Chase didn’t want her spending her strength defending either Steinwehr or him.

“There’s absolutely no excuse,” his mother began, “for a husband passing off his responsibil—”

Ann made a little warning trill deep in her throat as a spasm took hold of her. Chase had seen her through one of the pains before, and it left him quaking. This one was worse,
a hundred times worse.