Home to Stavewood (Stavewood Saga Book 3) (14 page)

Chapter Forty-Four

    
 
R
ebecca regained her strength slowly, the warmth of Timothy beside her every night and his loving arms around her during the day.

      He had vowed in the beginning he would do anything to make her happy and he devoted himself to the task, showering her in gifts and attention, waiting on her when she was too tired to do anything on her own and taking her for brief carriage rides on sunny days.

      Emma and Roland took Ottland and Émigré home and began to think about the arrival of their own child.

      “Bernadette came into the mill today.” Roland sat at the dinner table, his son dropping bits of food to the dog at his side.

      “Bernadette?” Emma set a tureen of stew on the table and sat down herself, looking at the man seriously.

      “She saw the obituary for Sam in the Billington paper and she came looking for Mark. I explained what I could.”

      Emma sighed and ladled out the meal.

      “She’s thinking of putting her baby in the orphanage.”

      Emma looked up at Roland’s face with worry. “No!”

      “It sounds that way. Maybe she thought Mark might help her out. I don’t know.”

      Emma stirred Ottland’s supper in the porringer so that it would cool and watched his tiny face as he sat expectantly awaiting his food. She looked up to her husband and then back to the child, noticing how similar they were.

      “It seems so unfair,” Emma remarked. “Rebecca and Timothy’s hearts broken over losing a child they wanted and at the same time Bernadette Shofield is giving hers away.”

      “Her child is Jude’s as well,” Roland reminded.

      “I know,” Emma sighed. “Should that matter to a baby?”

      Roland recalled his own childhood without a father, remembering his mother’s struggles to raise him alone. Over the years he had imagined his father in a hundred different ways. Sometimes he saw him as a kind man who loved him, but life had somehow kept him away all those years. Other times he would envision a selfish man who didn’t care if he had a son who missed him. He shuddered to think of a father like Jude Thomas. “Any family who was to take that child would face the risk that Jude would come looking for him in time. Emma, I wouldn’t even want to imagine what would happen if he ever came back to find any of us had a child of his. Not just to us, but to the child as well.”

      “I know,” Emma had imagined the ramifications herself.

      “Roland,” she said softly and he looked up to her, still captivated by the way she said his name. “I love you.” Emma smiled at him warmly and then turned and kissed her son softly on the forehead.

      Ottland grinned and smiled. “Dada!” he babbled and Roland shook his head.

Chapter Forty-Five

   
 
T
he Muldoon house remained bitterly cold through the night, although Mark fed the stove every bit of wood he could find. He ventured out into the darkness and brought back several armfuls of firewood and then slipped out to the barns to do the milking before daylight.

      In the yawning darkness within the stalls he set down the battered lantern and shook his head at the shame of it all. The pitiful cows produced little milk, which did not surprise him, judging by their gaunt appearance. Their pelvic bones protruded from their hips pointedly, their pathetic faces scrawny and miserable. Although he was a stranger to them, they did not fuss over his milking. He expected that it was because they lacked the energy to put up a fight. When he finished he turned them out into the corral, but no grass remained there. He took what milk he did get back to the house. He knew that Colleen and her father would not be delivering this one day of the year, and he thought they’d drink what they could of the milk and find some way to carry as much as they could for food. Mark Elgerson was leaving Barite, with Colleen beside him as quickly as possible.

      He visited the tiny coop, where he gathered four eggs, the shells thin and light. He examined the chickens. They were not much better and they might not be very good eating, but he planned to slaughter them and ask Colleen to cook them up for their trip.

      When Mark returned to the house he boiled the eggs and woke Colleen gently.

      She rubbed her eyes in exhaustion and sat on the edge of the cot despondently, looking at the covered body of her father in the corner.

      “Come eat something.” Mark gestured to the chair.

      Colleen pulled the cot to the table, as she always did to sit, and peered at the eggs. “Are they all from today?”

      “Yes and the cows are milked. I wanted to do it before daylight.”

      “But you cooked them all? I like to save a few if I can.” Colleen frowned.

      “We are saving nothing. Eat up. You’re going to need your strength.”

      Colleen peered up at him through puffy eyes. “There are no deliveries today. It’s Christmas.”

      “I know. Merry Christmas, by the way. We’re going to spend the day getting ready. We are leaving in the morning.”

      “Leaving?” Colleen sat up in confusion.

      “I have a plan. I need to know if there is any money. Not just your savings, but all of it, even money you might have used for change for customers. Does anyone owe you anything? We will need it all.”

      Colleen looked hungrily at the eggs and walked over to a dark corner in the tiny house. She pulled away a board set into the dirt floor and extracted a rusty tin can.

      “Here.” She handed it to him. “I’ll make more without him I guess anyway.” She slumped onto the cot and ate one egg.

            Mark pried open the can and poured the contents out on the table. There was not much there, but it would do, he figured. They would need to bring any food they could, there would not be enough to buy anything along the route, but if they could get tickets to get at least close to home they might make it.

      “Colleen, look at me.” He sat in the chair across from her and ate quickly. “You need to listen to me now. Go wash your face and wake up and then we need to talk.”

      The young woman stood up and stumbled out the door, quickly returning with her face bright from the icy washing and sat before him dully.

      “We are leaving and you are going with me,” he began.

      “But, you don’t need to take…” she interrupted.

      “Just listen. You cannot stay here and I will not leave you. You are coming home to Stavewood with me and if I have my way about it you’re going to stay there with me and become my wife.”

      “Wife?” she sat up. “You want to marry me?”

      “Absolutely.”

      “But your family, they might not like you just bringing home some milkmaid and marrying her!” she gasped.

      “They will love you. Now, are you going to hear me out?”

      “Alright,” she surrendered, her mind racing with the possibilities.

      “Are you listening?” He looked into her eyes.

      “Uh hum,” she mumbled in shock.

      “I need you to help me fit into your father’s milkman uniform and we’ll have to fill it out so I look like him.”

      “Like my father?” Colleen was pulled away from her imaginings of Mark’s family, their faces in shock over her arriving with their son.

      “Just like him. I figure if I can wear his clothes and the scarf to cover my face, we can ride out in the morning as if we are making the deliveries.”

      Mark stood up and began to pace the room. “You need to go over your usual route with me and we need to look as normal as possible. That might mean making a few deliveries as well. Anyone who pays you tomorrow would help as well.”

      He ran his hands through his hair and turned to her. “We’ll ride up to the next closest train station. I think that’s in Ulla. From there we’ll get the train home.

      “We can pack what we need into the milk cans and park it somewhere within walking distance of the station. Any food we bring will help as well. I’ll kill the chickens later and you can cook them up.”

      Colleen began to realize that he was completely serious about his plan. It would mean that she was leaving nearly everything behind. She looked around the room, seeing it in a light she never had before. Colleen suddenly realized that there was nothing to leave behind. Her father lay dead now and if they ate the chickens there would be only the cows. Other than that she owned the clothes on her back and her books, three worn volumes of poetry.

      The girl looked up at him, her chest heaving. She stared at his face and tried to grasp everything he was telling her.

      “Okay?” he asked and squatted down to face her.

      “You’re serious. You want to take me to Stavewood and marry me?”

      “Oh Colleen.” He took her hand and got down on one knee. “I suppose that this is all such a terrible mess. I have done everything wrong. Let me start again.

      “Colleen Muldoon, will you become my wife and accompany me to my home in Minnesota? I promise to love you all my life and I guarantee my family will be thrilled. Please.” He looked down at the floor.

      Colleen began to sob slowly and a gasp caught in her throat. She put her fingertips to her face and took a ragged breath.

      Mark looked up at her expectantly. “Well?”

      “Well?” she parroted.

      “I think this is where you say
yes.
”

     “Oh, I…” she swallowed. “Oh, um, yes. I guess.”

      “You guess?” Mark looked at her sternly.

      “I’m afraid,” she admitted.

      “Of marrying me?”

      “No. Okay, yes!” Colleen grabbed him around the neck and kissed him enthusiastically.

Chapter Forty-six

   
 
T
he Minnesota snow fell in deep layers throughout the night, blanketing the landscape in a silent covering of pure glistening white. No creature stirred as the sun rose, spreading its light across the lawns at Stavewood.

      Timothy Elgerson poured himself a steaming cup of coffee in the big kitchen and opened the door, stepping out onto the back porch as he did nearly every morning. He inhaled deeply, opened his hand and extended out his big palm. He felt the icy flakes land on his skin and wondered what the weather was like in Missouri today. It would be cold, he thought, and a hard dry cold. There would not be beautiful snow.

      Looking out across the yard he began to speak. It had become his morning prayer.

      “Where are you, son? As soon as I can I’m coming to look for you. Where are you?”

      Roland Vancouver gazed out across the meadow, the thick, falling snow obscuring his view of the beautiful countryside. He thought about how he had picked up the deed to the Weintraub ranch just the day before. Now, with the paperwork completed and filed, the ranch belonged to him and Emma. He had many plans for that piece of land. He could see that filly, Strawberry, running the track there, Mark bent over her back as they raced. He didn’t want to imagine years of not knowing what had become of the boy.

      Roland sighed.

Chapter Forty-Seven
      

    
 
C
olleen cut the threadbare woolen blanket into small sections in the lamplight early the next morning and placed them against Mark’s back, then tried fitting him into her father’s jacket again. She stuffed his hair into the hat and wrapped the scarf around him, covering most of his face. Her hands shook as she stepped back.

      “Well?” Mark asked. His voice was muffled inside of the wool.

      “If you don’t say a word, no one will know. You just have to grunt, kind of, and nod. No one really speaks to us anyway.”

      Mark nodded and pulled back the scarf.

      “The restaurant is the only place we stop for any length of time, and I do the collection there. They never pay me the full amount but they always give me something.”

      Colleen brought two of the milk cans into the house. They put the food in one and in the other they hid the gun and Colleen’s small books.

      She picked up the letter they had written the night before, which they would deposit in the mail box at the sheriff’s station. It stated that Mr. Muldoon had died on Christmas Eve and was at the house. Colleen had written carefully that she was leaving to live with family in New Orleans and asked the sheriff to sell off the cows and the property and to bury her father. She wrote that she was unable to do it herself. Colleen had no trouble in the wording of the letter, she felt as if she could not bury the man alone. She put the yellowed deed to the farm in an envelope with the letter and slipped it into the pocket of her apron.

      “I wish I could do more for him,” Colleen sobbed hard. She would have liked to have been there to see him put to rest, but she had to accept that she needed to go where there was some hope for a future, a family, a better life. He would have wanted that for her. The more she thought about her situation, the more she realized that without Mark there was no future. Her father had suffered from the pains in his chest for a few years now, and the one visit he did make to the local doctor was not encouraging. The cows were old and the money was never there. It seemed that no matter how hard they worked, the situation never got any better. When his condition worsened Colleen had cut back the deliveries, keeping only the best customers and those closest to home. Recently the situation only deteriorated when they lost two cows and nearly a dozen chickens. Without Mark, Colleen began to think she might not have survived at all.

      Mark held her to him and fought back a sob of his own. He had never met the man in life and he had wanted to badly. He wanted him to know how much he loved Colleen, how hard he would try to make her happy and give her a better life. They had wrapped him carefully, with deep respect and both had said their goodbyes.

      Mark looked around the room. “I think we’re ready. We have to try to follow your routine as closely as possible until we ride out of town. That will be the only time we might look suspicious. We’ll take that back road you told me about and, if you’re right, we should see almost no one.”

      Colleen nodded nervously. The plan that Mark had laid out did not frighten her. They had spent all day and a good part of the night making up the plan and she had drawn several maps into the dirt floor. Mark looked so much like her father in the getup she was sure no one would be the wiser. The trip did not frighten her, but Stavewood certainly did.

      “Tell me again this is what you really want,” Colleen said, looking up into Mark’s eyes. Seeing him in her father’s suit made her feel somewhat more comfortable, but she was worried and on edge.

      “This
is
what I want. And my family will be fine too, Colleen. They are working people, just like you and your father. They just got rich cutting wood. They will love you, please stop worrying. If we don’t pull this off now we’ll never get home to Stavewood. You’ll be starving and visiting me in jail. You have to pay attention and stop worrying.”

      She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

      “Let’s go,” she announced.

      Colleen hitched up the wagon and loaded the traveling milk tins and then went to fetch Mark from the house.

      “Walk slower, and more bent over,” she whispered close to his ear as they crossed the yard. “And let me help you into the wagon.”

      She helped Mark into the wagon and told him to shake out the reins gently.

      Lem McHerlong watched the wagon pull out from behind the barn. He’d find the gun this time and be waiting when Colleen and her father returned home.