Nobody's Angel (6 page)

"Em, you great cow, be careful what you're about!" Mandy, clutching folds of her elegant skirt in both hands, whirled on Emily, who was grinning widely as she watched her sister's less than graceful descent. Even as she appeared ready to box her sister's ears, Mandy recollected her status as a young lady rather than a squabbling child. Her eyes left Emily to shoot self-consciously toward Craddock. A large component of Mandy's reach for self- control stemmed from the knowledge that a man—even so ineligible a one as Craddock—was witness to her behavior, Susannah knew. She stifled an inward sigh. Really, Mandy in the throes of man-fever was getting to be almost more than she felt equipped to handle. But of course she would handle it, because who else would if she did not?

Emily was sensitive about her weight, as Mandy of course knew very well, and was still young enough that she felt no compulsion to preserve her dignity. She flushed with anger in turn, "Don't you dare call me a cow, Amanda Sue Redmon! You're nothing but a—a preening peahen yourself! All you care about is your mirror! You're lazy, and vain and—and . . ."

"Emily! That's quite enough! You're far too old for such tricks as pushing your sister from the wagon, and for name-calling as well. And that last goes for you, too, Mandy. Words can be far more hurtful than deeds, remember." Susannah never raised her voice, but the authority that sprang from years of acting the mother to her sisters silenced both girls. They glowered at each other, but neither said anything more. With an inward prayer to the good Lord above to grant her patience, Susannah walked around to the back of the buckboard, beckoning her sisters to follow her. They did, although Mandy and Em both looked sulky and Sarah Jane was openly dubious. All four of them clustered around the end of the wagon, silent for a moment as they stared at the sprawled figure of the indentured man.

His legs, bare from just below the knee down, stuck out over the edge of the buckboard. They were hairy and dirty, and decidedly unprepossessing. The brogues he wore looked too small for him, and the bottom of one foot could be seen through a large hole worn in the sole. His breeches were tattered, permitting indecent glimpses of male flesh to anyone who cared to look, which Susannah emphatically did not. His shirt was little more than a gray rag, and only the gold waistcoat, which amazingly still retained a button that held it closed at his waist, kept his chest from being bare. Aware of her young and innocent sisters' eyes fixed on what was visible of the convict's very masculine, hair-covered chest, Susannah felt another stab of misgiving. Here was a complication to her compassion that she had not considered: what effect would the addition to the household of a virile and very likely completely amoral male have on the girls?

Sarah Jane was probably right, Susannah admitted to herself with a sinking feeling. She should never have allowed her annoyance at Hiram Greer and a certain sympathy for the convict's plight to move her to purchase him. Problems of all sorts were very likely to ensue, and more problems were something she certainly didn't need. But the deed was done and could not be undone. She must take care to keep Mandy and Em, whose youth rendered them most vulnerable, from close contact with the man.

And if he proved to be the kind of rogue who preyed on young girls? Susannah felt queasy at the very idea. Then, as she bethought herself of the stout iron fry-pan that hung from a hook in the kitchen, she felt marginally better. Should the need arise, she would clout the varmint soundly on the head, then sell him to Hiram Greer for his pains! Though perhaps, if she were lucky, it would not come to that.

"Craddock, you get up there behind his head and lift his shoulders. Mandy, you and Em take his left leg. Sarah Jane, help me with his right."

"Yes'm." Craddock crawled up in the wagon to do her bidding. Her sisters also moved to obey, though a tad reluctantly.

"Susannah, he stinks," Em said, wrinkling her nose as she made a discovery that had become known to Susannah an hour or so previously, when she had struggled to get out from under the man who had collapsed on her. Susannah was well-accustomed to nursing the infirm; it was one of the duties she had willingly assumed when she took over her mother's place as the female head of the minister's household. But even she had known an instant's hesitation before sliding her hands around the convict's hair-roughened and filthy leg. Her sisters, whom she had never allowed to be exposed to the very intimate tasks involved in nursing a man, could not be blamed for their obvious reluctance to touch him.

"Yes, he does," Mandy chimed in. Grimacing, she let go her grip on the man's ankle and stepped back.

"So would you if you had not bathed for months," Susannah said. Before she could expand on this theme, Mandy, an expression of relief easing her frown as she looked beyond Susannah's shoulder, interrupted.

"Here's Ben, thank goodness!" she said.

Susannah's hands dropped from the convict's leg as she turned to watch the approach of their second hired man.

"I'm real sorry about this mornin', Miss Susannah," Ben said, hanging his head guiltily as he hurried toward them. Tall and bone thin, with a shock of auburn hair and a spattering of freckles to go with them, Ben was not an unattractive boy. Susannah liked him, and as a rule he was as biddable a youth as one could wish to encounter. But his recent devotion to Maria O'Brien, oldest daughter of a dirt farmer who, with his large family, barely managed to eke out a living some four miles distant, had rendered him all but useless. She gritted her teeth to hold back the scolding she knew would be better rendered in private and indicated the bound man.

"We'll talk about this morning later. Right now, you can help Craddock carry this man inside."

Sarah Jane, Mandy, and Emily stepped back from the wagon with varying degrees of relief. Ben's eyes widened as they found the unconscious figure thus displayed.

"Who's he?" Ben asked.

"Our new bound man," Emily said. She and Ben were much of an age, and Susannah suspected that Em found Ben rather attractive. But Ben seemed totally unaware of Emily as anything other than a daughter of the family, so Susannah hoped she had not much to worry about from that direction. Certainly she was not about to borrow trouble by planting a warning to stay away from the other in either Em's or Ben's ear and thus sow seed on what might prove all too fertile ground.

"Bound man?" Ben let out a whistle of surprise, his eyes shooting to Susannah. The look on her face must have been daunting, because he clamped his lips together and positioned himself between the convict's ankles without another word.

"Lift, then, when I say." Craddock took charge as he saw that his helper was to be the boy whom Susannah well knew he bullied when he thought he could get away with it. Craddock gave the word, and between them he and Ben managed to lift the man from the wagon.

"Dad-blum, he's heavy!" Having been sternly weaned from profanity in the year he had been with them, Ben had substituted a variety of colorful expressions for the swear words he had grown up with but was no longer permitted to utter.

"He don't look like hardly more than a skeleton, neither," Craddock marveled as he, backing, struggled to negotiate the two smooth gray rocks that served as porch steps without dropping his burden. The convict's head rested against Craddock's thin chest. His bristly black beard and the unkempt, overlong tangle of his hair were largely responsible for the ferocious look of him, Susannah judged with a slight feeling of reassurance as she followed them onto the porch. A slanting ray of light from the late afternoon sun touched a lock of filthy hair as it straggled down over the bound man's forehead. Susannah saw that it was not just dark but jet black beneath the grime that caked it. She had no chance to notice anything more about him as she hurried around the trio to open the door.

"Where do you want im, Miss Susannah?"

"In the parlor." She led the way, untying her bonnet as she went. A row of pegs had been set into the wall at the base of the stairs. As she passed them, she hung the hat there, then ran both hands over her head in a gesture as automatic to her as breathing.

There was a company bed in the parlor, pushed against the wall opposite the fireplace over which hung Grandma and Grandpa Durham's pictures. The portraits were huge and dark and would have been grim had not Susannah remembered her grandparents so warmly. They had died not long before Susannah's mother, their daughter, who had hung their pictures in the place of honor in the little used room reserved for important visitors. Two rocking chairs on either side of the fireplace, a wooden settee, and a pair of fine walnut bookcases filled to overflowing with books completed the room's furnishings. Susannah hurried to the iron bedstead and whisked back the intricately patterned quilt that she had spent many a winter night piecing some two years before. The linen, having been put on fresh after the bed was last used by a visiting minister six months previously, was clean. At her direction, Craddock and Ben lowered the convict to the bed.

He looked filthier than ever against the snowy sheets.

"He'll need to be bathed and put into some clean clothes," she decided. "Ben, you can help me. Craddock, you can carry in the shopping, and you girls can put it up and start supper. Pa should be home before long."

"He was leaving with John Naisbitt when I got here," Ben said. "He tole me to tell you that Miz Cooper done died."

"Oh, dear." Susannah, having spent a large part of the previous night at Mrs. Cooper's bedside, had suspected that the old woman would not long survive, but she had not expected her to pass from this life quite so soon as this. She would have to hurry over there and help the woman's daughters lay her out, then stay to comfort the grieving family. There was the funeral to think about— she played the church clavichord that had been shipped from England at great expense—and her father's best suit, which he would need to officiate at the service, to sponge and press.

But first the bound man's needs must be seen to.

"Start undressing him, Ben," she said, shooing her wide-eyed sisters out before her as she left the room. "Sarah Jane, you might get together some bread and molasses for me to take with me when I go over to the Coopers' tonight. The family will doubtless be too upset to want to think about cooking. Mandy, you and Em get supper started. There's a chicken plucked and ready to go in the pot, and you can fix dumplings and greens to go with it. I'll take some of that with me, too. Oh, and be sure and save the water the chicken's cooked in to make broth. We'll need it for him."

Her head jerked in the direction of the parlor and left her sisters in no doubt of whom she referred to.

"I thought the whole idea of getting a bound man was so that we'd have to do less work, not more," Mandy muttered as the girls disappeared into the kitchen. Craddock, his arms full of the day's purchases, shouldered his way through the front door. Susannah, prudently ignoring Mandy, who had a point, went up the narrow staircase that led from the sitting room—a large, less formal parlor where the family spent most of their time—to the second floor. There were four bedchambers abovestairs. The Reverend Redmon had the largest one, directly over the front parlor, while Amanda and Emily shared the next largest, located over the sitting room. Susannah and Sarah Jane each had a small room at the back of the house to herself. Susannah's room was above the rear porch and overlooked the family cemetery where her mother and grandparents lay, along with her four baby brothers who had not survived infancy. Susannah said her nightly prayers on her knees before the single long, narrow window that opened onto her room, instead of beside her bed as she had been taught. Sometimes her mother's and grandparents' faces got mixed up with her conception of God's and she quite forgot who she was talking to, but it was comforting, nonetheless.

Her father's room was, as usual, untidy. Papers and books were strewn about, along with the clothing he had discarded when he had changed to go to the Coopers'. If she hadn't done the straightening up herself, she would never have believed that the chamber had been spotless just that morning. Her fingers itched to restore at least a modicum of order to the room as she crossed to the tall bureau that stood against one wall, but she resisted. There were too many chores awaiting her that were more urgent.

Remembering Mandy's words, Susannah stifled a sigh. The bound man's collapse had made him just one more task to be dealt with, another problem rather than the solution she had bought him for. Last night she had not seen her bed until the wee hours of the morning. Tonight she would be lucky to lay her head down at all.

She was tired, bone tired, but there was nothing to be done about that. If she just kept plugging away, putting one foot in front of the other and doing each task as it arose, eventually she would get everything that was needful done. She always did.

The Lord never sent anyone more of a burden than he could bear. That bit of Scripture was the talisman that had kept her going for years. She repeated it aloud to ward off the exhaustion that, as she glanced toward the bed, momentarily threatened to overwhelm her.

It worked. Almost at once she felt better. Extracting a linen nightshirt from the bureau, Susannah turned and hurried back down the stairs. The appetizing aroma of supper cooking wafted into her nostrils. From the kitchen, she could hear her sisters bickering good-naturedly about everything from the amount of greens to boil with the chicken to the eye color of the man Mandy had flirted with in town. Susannah rolled her own eyes heavenward as she made a quick foray through the battle zone to collect a pitcher of warm water, a bowl, a sliver of soap, and a towel. There was a trick to not allowing herself to be drawn into any of the sundry discussions that flew about the room, and that trick was selective deafness. Firmly rejecting Mandy's offer to help—she knew full well her sister considered caring for the bound man both more interesting and easier than her kitchen duties—Susannah finally made it to the parlor with her booty.

Ben looked up as she entered. "Lookit this, Miss Susannah."