Stephanie Mittman (34 page)

Seth wrapped the creamy woolen shawl around her and led her down the aisle toward the back of the hall, wishing he could change their direction, change fate.

“We’ll stop at my office and get Bartlett moving,” he said, knowing that they didn’t have the luxury of time for a reunion. Or for recriminations. “It’ll help if he comes with us to Boston.”

She stepped outside of the grange hall with him and stood on the top step. “Seth, there won’t be any Boston,” she said, and allowed him to help her down the steps—the girl who had bristled when he’d held a door for her, who had dashed from pillar to post. “I can’t go.”

“Of course you can. You and me, and Bartlett and Anna Lisa and Armand, too. As soon as I get Bartlett started on the details, we’ll come back here and have your father marry us and—”

Slowly, cautiously, she came down the steps beside him. When she reached the bottom and could let go of the railing, she gently touched his face, a feather against his cheek, a wish against his soul. “Don’t do this,” she said softly. “Get on your train and go before I lose my … resolve.”

“And let you die some noble death? Is that your plan? Well, there’s nothing noble in dying, Abby, nothing at all. But in fighting tooth and nail? Well, that I could admire for—”

She sighed as if he didn’t understand what it was costing her to be so brave. How could she not know how gladly he would pay the price for her, give his own life, if only he could.

“Can you give in to me just this once?” he asked.

She smiled at him, the radiance still there, and laughed. “And you’ll never ask me for anything again?” she asked, arching one eyebrow at him.

“That’s my girl,” he said, taking off toward his office as if he had a bottle of miracles waiting there. She lagged behind, not dawdling, he realized, and he slowed his pace so that she could keep up with him, she who had always danced ahead.

The light was on in the bedroom upstairs, his bedroom, and Seth opened the office door for Abby, followed her in, helped her to a seat, and then called up the stairs at the top of his lungs. “Ephraim? Get down here before I come up and get you and break all your old bones!”

He glanced at Abby, saw her smile, and continued his tirade purely for her amusement. Hell, he’d stand on his head to make her smile. And he’d give his life to see her well.

Bartlett came down the stairs, buttoning his vest as he came, assessing the situation with just a glance. “Didn’t I tell you he’d be madder at me?” he asked Abby, confirming what Seth had supposed when he’d put all the puzzle pieces together on the train from St. Louis.

“You bet your old ass I am,” Seth said. “Now get your sorry self over to Walker’s Mercantile and have him get Mrs. Waitte so she can put you through to
Mass General on the telephone. Tell them we’re bringing Abby on the next train and—”

Bartlett sat down in the chair behind Seth’s desk, reached into the bottom drawer, and pulled out a bottle of scotch that hadn’t been there when the desk had belonged to Seth. “They won’t operate,” he said, taking two shot glasses out and splashing the liquor into them. “How’s the pain, honey?” he asked Abby, affection clear in his voice and his eyes.

“The new medicine lets me sleep,” she said, shrugging off her shawl as if they had all the time in the world to sit around and discuss the weather or something equally unimportant.

“They
will
operate,” Seth said. “You’ve got connections there. Pull some strings—”

“Sit down,” Bartlett said. It was an order, not an invitation. “And drink this. Do you think no one thought of taking her to Mass. General until you showed up? Do you think Ansel didn’t storm in here demanding just what you are? Do you think that Reverend Merganser—”

“My father came to see you?” Abby asked, her hand shaking in her lap.

“Honey, there is no one in all of Eden’s Grove who hasn’t come to demand I do something for you. I feel as if I should follow up Seth’s column in
The Weekly Herald
with one of my own.” He shrugged and looked at Seth as if the whole thing was his fault, as if the article on brain tumors had caused Abby’s.

“So why didn’t you take her to Boston?” Seth demanded. “Why did you let a minute pass?”

“Because too many minutes had passed already.”

Seth lifted the glass of scotch and downed it in one gulp. He had failed her, pure and simple. He hadn’t seen the signs and now …

“My fault,” Seth said, rubbing Abby’s hand and feeling the tremors in it.

“Yours? Listen, son, there would have been only the smallest chance even months ago. Even if she’d been diagnosed early, even if she’d been in Boston. We only operated on sure bets. And even then our success rate was minimal. Mostly we got our patients from insane asylums, where they wouldn’t be any worse off if I—”

“
I? We?”
Seth stared at Ephraim Bartlett. “
You
are a brain surgeon?”

“I
was
a surgeon,” Bartlett admitted reluctantly. “And yes, my specialty was the head.”

“Fine. Then you’ll operate,” Seth said, as if that settled it. “Abby and I are going to get married tonight and then tomorrow—”

Abby was looking at Bartlett, and Seth followed her line of vision straight to Ephraim’s hands, which he held out. Tremors shook his hands so that the man would have been hard-pressed to hold a pen, never mind a scalpel.

“I’m going to take Abby home to get ready to marry me. Her family ought to be there by now. You and I can work out what we do next when I come back.”

Abby pulled her shawl up around her shoulders. “No,” she said more firmly than he’d have liked.

“No what?” he asked.

“No, I don’t want to marry you. I won’t marry you. Are you in a rush to become a widower?”

Could he say aloud the words that crashed in his
head? That he wanted her headstone to say that she was his beloved wife, and belonged to him in that way forever?

“It wasn’t a very moving proposal,” Ephraim agreed. “None of that flowery stuff or words of love.”

“Of course I love her,” Seth said. “Why else would I want to marry her, attach myself to that crazy family of hers, and spend my days here in Eden’s Grove with her?”

“You don’t need to marry me, Seth. Not now.”

“Do you think I’m marrying you because I think you’re going to die? That I’m doing it for you?” he asked. She should know better, surely she should.

“Well, you didn’t want to marry me before I was dying, did you? I mean, you left, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. You tricked me into leaving. You know I wanted to marry you. Even after that ridiculous story about Armand Whitiny—which I will tan your bottom over just as soon as we are alone, by the way—I still wanted you.”

Her look said that she didn’t believe him.

“What about the ring?” he asked. Didn’t that prove it?

Ephraim Bartlett leaned forward with great interest, as if he had any right to be privy to their conversation. “There was that,” he reminded Abby. “And remember that you were the one who sent him away, girl.”

“You can have it back,” she said, pulling it from her finger where it belonged.

“I’ll take it for now,” he said, holding out his hand and letting her place the ring in it, curling his fingers around her hand as she did. “But I’ll be putting it back
on that finger later, with God—and God help me—your father, watching.”

“Does it matter what I want for you?” she asked, unshed tears glistening in her eyes.

“This is for me, Abby, believe me,” he said. “It’s always been about what I want, and I’m ashamed and embarrassed to say that it still is. Do this one last thing for me, Abby. Be mine.”

And then he opened his arms and she nestled against him, fitting her soft body against his, letting her sobs be muffled by his rumpled suit. “I’ve always been yours,” she said, her words muffled by tweed and closeness and his own sigh.

“That’s my girl,” he said, pulling a hankie from his back pocket and holding it to her nose. “Now blow.”

She did as she was told, and then lifted the biggest, loveliest hazel eyes to him. “I can’t give you much,” she said, “and I would have spared you the end, but I want every moment I can have with you.”

“I’ll work on it,” he said, and nodding at Ephraim, he took her arm so that he could see her home.

Seth saw her to her door and stood there beneath the porch light, all flesh and blood and real, and despite the pain in her head and the worries in her heart, she reveled in the sight of him.

“I’d like to kiss you,” he said, asking permission for what he’d stolen long before.

“I won’t break,” she assured him, and was swept up into his arms and pressed so tightly against his chest that she began to doubt her own words.

He kissed her, tenderly at first, gently, as if he didn’t quite believe that he wouldn’t hurt her, and then the kiss deepened, sharpened, turned to something possessive and defiant, as if his very lips, his breath, his love, could keep her alive.

And God help her, she believed him. She kissed him back as if nothing would ever part them, and she pressed herself against him, molding her body to his.

“We’d best get you inside,” he murmured against her neck. “I think it may be cold out here.”

“Is it?” she asked, feeling only warmth, his warmth, spreading through her, warming places that had been cold since the day she’d told him that she couldn’t marry him.

“I can’t believe I fell for that Armand business,” he said, his hand drifting down her back and cupping her bottom so that she could feel his hardness against her belly despite her layers of skirts.

“I’m a very good actress,” she said, leaning her head back to let him kiss her throat, and gasping as his lips went lower still.

“Are you acting now?” His words drifted up to her. Of course she was acting. She was playing the part of a newlywed with her whole life in front of her.

“Seth?” It was Anna Lisa’s voice, and suddenly Abby and Seth were bathed in light from the open front door. “Are you certain she can do that?”

“She
can
very well,” he said, releasing her and guiding her into the living room where all of the Mergansers stood gawking at him. “But I suppose she shouldn’t.”

“Sir. Mrs. Merganser,” he said with a nod to her
father and mother. “Jed, how goes the flying machine?”

Jed’s face lit up, and he said, “It’ll fly. I know it will. Of course, some people around here don’t believe in miracles, so …”

“God’s miracles and man’s … well, man doesn’t make miracles,” her father said.

“Well, sir, I’d like to see if maybe someone can,” Seth said.

It would take a miracle, Abby knew, and she only hoped that Seth could make it happen.

“For Abidance?” her father asked.

“Don’t you have something you want to ask my father?” Abby asked, looking at him as innocently as she could manage considering that she could think of little but the way he had kissed her and pressed himself against her, and how, if they really were to marry tonight they could—

Seth cleared his throat. “Seeing how Armand Whitiny has jilted Abidance here,” he said with a knowing look that made Armand Whiting cough behind his hand, “I’d like to offer for her hand.”

“Don’t you want the rest of her?” Jed asked, and Abby loved the low chuckle that came from Seth’s chest.

“You want to marry Abidance?” her father asked. “I guess with all that kissing on the porch she didn’t have time to tell you—”

“He knows, Papa.”

“And you still want to—”

“Tonight. As soon as she’s ready,” Seth said, taking
her hand in his and kissing her knuckles before guiding her to the sofa.

“I don’t need to—” she started.

“Save your strength,” he said solicitously, whispering in her ear as he helped her sit, “for later.”

“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” her mother said. “Abby isn’t really up to—”

“Best damn idea I’ve heard in a month of Sundays,” her father said, daring anyone to contradict him or call him on his choice of words. “Jed, you go tell Ansel and Emily to meet us at the church. Mother, you see if there’s something sweet you can whip up in a hurry. Patience, you go tell Mrs. Stella we’ll need her at the organ, and tell them over at the Grand that they’ll need a room. Prudence, you get your sister ready, and I’ll just stick close to the groom here and make sure he doesn’t leave town … again!”

“It was
your
daughter …” Seth was saying as they left the house and he sent her a plaintive backward glance while her father railed on.

“Can’t,” Bartlett said. “Don’t you think I wish I could?”

“And if there is no operation?” Reverend Merganser asked as the three men sat around Seth’s desk and Ephraim asked them to share what was left of the scotch.

“She’ll die,” Bartlett said matter-of-factly. “In all likelihood she’d die from the operation anyway.”

“So you’re saying that there’s really no difference,”
the reverend said, eyeing the scotch as if he could taste it across the table.

“Oh, there’s a difference, all right,” Bartlett said. His speech was slightly slurred, but his facts were textbook perfect. “If she dies on the table she leaves the way we all knew her—brave, full of life, whole. She’ll have more time if we let the tumor grow, but she’ll lose more of herself every day—the forgetfulness we’ve all noticed will extend to you,” he said, pointing at the reverend. “And you,” he added, pointing at Seth.

“She’ll forget the most basic of things, lose control over her bowels and bladder and—”

“You have to do it,” Seth said. “Now when there’s still a chance.”

“She doesn’t have a chance with me,” Ephraim said. “I couldn’t even kill her right with these hands.”

“Then
you
have to do it,” the reverend said, looking right at Seth as if he were the Messiah himself. “You’re a doctor. You love her. You can save her.”

It was the stupidest, most ridiculous, horrifying thing he’d heard since Anna Lisa had told him that Abby was dying. “I’m not a brain surgeon. I’ve never taken out more than an appendix, done more than a caesarean section, or lanced a boil. I don’t have the training, the skill, the knowledge….”

“He could tell you,” the reverend said gesturing toward Ephraim with his head. “You could be his hands.”