The Randolph Legacy (55 page)

Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy

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She took her lover’s hand and pressed it to her lips as if she’d been doing it for a lifetime. Ethan stepped back, suddenly startled and bereft. “I—I’ll never be far from her again, Jordan Foster. You’ll treasure my mother always or you’ll reckon with me!”

His young father cocked a brow. “Now who’s the Boston preacher?” he accused.

Epilogue

Ethan raised the spyglass to his eye, here, on the edge of Virginia
. The red sun was hanging low in the west. Astonishing! The Allegheny Mountains looked like the rolling waves of the Atlantic. He thought suddenly of Fayette’s vision of long ago, just before he fell from the mizzenmast. He smiled. “Lafayette, I am here,” he whispered.

—Not yet, precious bane. Find her.

Ethan closed down the glass, turned toward the camp, where the women were starting the fires for their evening meal, swaying in the late-summer breeze. He was still amazed by the numbers of their traveling companions. Though a few of the former Windover slaves had chosen other states or territory to settle, most were on their way, via Barton Gibson’s accurate maps, to the rich bottomland Jordan Foster had cleared for his first family.

He must write to his sister tonight, Ethan reminded himself. Description of these hills. He’d leave the urges to join them to her already westward-drawn husband and the tiny revolutionaries he’d planted in her midst.

The scent of Martha’s open-fire hearth mixed with the rich pine of the mountains around. He tried to steal a slice of corn pone, but got burned and slapped at the same time for his effort.

“Ethan Blair, don’t you know nothin’ about protecting them healing hands of yours?” Martha scolded.

He grinned. “I’ll bring some food to Judith. Where is she?”

“Off to higher ground, when your mama say lay herself down. Wouldn’t listen to that good sense. She lit off over the trail instead is what.” She indicated the place with her chin. “Go on. Fetch her back, child. Got water?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She offered two of the corn cakes wrapped in the linen towel she’d grabbed off her shoulder. “I am sore uneasy about all Miss Judith’s restlessness this day.”

“She’s been restless?”

Martha eyed him suspiciously. “And you have a care with her in your spooning. Please her all gentle, if’n it’s the same kind of restlessness got you sparked now. And don’t you be gone long without a lantern. Don’t fancy hauling you’s both out of a tree prowled by wildcats!”

“Anything further,
madame?”

“No need to Frenchify me, young one—you just get her to eat all her share of them cakes—her appetite been poorly today.”

“She says she can’t find her stomach.”

“Well, you the doctor! Find it for her, and make her give it a little nourishments.”

Ethan began climbing the small, winding trail. It had been a fine day’s travel. Nearly twenty miles, a good distance at this altitude. Why were the women so testy that not even his French could win a smile from one? All seemed restless, worried.

—
Hurry,
Fayette said at his ear.

He turned. His friend formed out of the evening midst. He was not the ghost from other visits—joking, confident, knowing everything. This was Fayette falling, suspended between Heaven and Earth. Confused. Terrified.

His Washington went cold with fear at the sight. Judith. He must find Judith. She would know what to do.

He stumbled, climbing higher. There, ahead, her beautiful hair shining through the loose weave of her sea green shawl, almost blending in with the pine trees. From behind, she was the Judith of the night they met, without the enormous burden the child inside her had become. She stumbled, fell to her knees.

He ran to her side, helping her support her pregnancy as if it were a bundle of wheat from the fields of Windover. She leaned back in his arms. She looked at the sky, drawing in a long breath. A cry burst forth from her then, a wild, ecstatic sound, that ended in laughter. “You see, Fayette? He’s come,” she called out. “Go on to your reward, and bother us not about the aspects of Heaven that do not suit your taste!”

Ethan raised his head. She saw him too, then. The falling Fayette turned into the confident, all-knowing one. He held up his hand to them before disappearing into the mist.

“He’s well now?” Ethan asked his powerful wife.

“Yes, love. I think our Fayette is going on at last.”

“And you?”

“I?” She erupted in girlish laughter. “I am far too grounded to fly away with him. My husband has seen to that.”

He bowed his head, kissed their clasped hands. “You have all the women worried by—”

She squeezed his hand until the pressure made him gasp.

“Judith, have your pains begun?”

“No. Not pains. Only … Ethan, I can hardly bear to keep my eyes open, the world is so beautiful to me.”

“The world?”

“Yes. At first I thought it was the sky’s hues, the hills about, rolling like the ocean. So I tried to concentrate on smaller things—my ring, the wildflowers, the pine needles at my feet. Then the gold, purples, the softness became richer, deeper than I can bear. Then Fayette going on at last, and now … now, you!”

“Me?”

“Ethan, look at you!”

“Mais, ma chère femme, je ne connais pas—”

She rose to her knees and pulled him close, laughing. “No, no, speak English, sweet boy!”

He blinked. She laughed harder. He didn’t care that she was laughing at him, just so she laughed. She was well if she laughed, wasn’t she? She pressed his shoulders. Hard. Harder.

“Those eyelashes your mother and sister envy, will our child have them, you think?”

“Comment?
… Pardon?” he amended quickly.

More laughter. “Oh, Ethan, if you kiss me as the first stars come out, I think I will die with the joy of it!”

“Non,”
he breathed. “Don’t die, Judith.”

She took his face between her hands. “Your kisses bring life. Don’t be afraid for me.”

He touched his lips to hers, remembering Martha’s injunction. But their chaste kiss turned into waves of tasting each other’s mouths, of breathing each other’s breaths. They kissed long and deep and closer than he’d thought possible. Then profoundly sensuous trills. Which one of them was causing that? A wave bursting from Judith’s secret sea suddenly soaked the ground beneath them.

She smiled, looking thoroughly wanton, besotted. “Ah. That’s better. Thank you.”

“Better? Judith, if your time has come, we need to get you down to—”

“The ground.”

“Ground, love?”

“Yes, down, on the ground.”

“Is the baby coming? Now?”

“Yes.”

He yanked off his coat, spread it out beneath her. “It doesn’t happen
like this, Judith. You must have pains first, coming, going, for hours, to drive me to distraction!”

She smiled. “Perhaps I’ve driven you enough?” She took his sleeve. “So soft,” she mused, rocking back slightly on her heels. “And how I love the scent of you, husband, even in your fear.”

She grabbed his shoulders again, squeezed hard. “Oh, Ethan,” she breathed. “Help me.”

“I will, Judith,” he said, kissing her temple, whispering at her ear. “This is a good place to be born—soft ground, gentle breeze, a perfect place.” He eased her out of one petticoat, stuffing it with the forest floor’s abundant pine needles, placed her back against it and the trunk of the sheltering tree.

“Good?” he asked shyly.

“Yes.”

“Thirsty?”

She nodded and he offered her the spring water from his bag, then poured a stream of it over his hands.

“Judith, may I—?”

“Of course.”

He folded her skirts back over her knees, then pulled his shirt’s cuffs to his elbows. She closed her eyes, but still did not appear to be in pain, even as he eased her legs farther apart.

“Close?” she asked.

“Feel,” he whispered, leading her fingers to the slippery mat of dark hair.

“Oh!” she marveled. “Girl or boy?”

“I can’t tell from the head, love.”

She laughed. “No? What kind of a doctor are—” But her r’s continued, grinding into his soul, becoming long, deep grunts of effort. The baby’s head eased out into Ethan’s hands. Steady hands. They didn’t seem to belong to him, these patient hands, stroking tiny cheeks that turned from blue to pink as the mouth opened, gasping, caught between water and land worlds. One shoulder, the other, then all the rest. Small, perfect. Child. More water, splashing out, soaking his shirt. A child, their child, Judith’s and his. Moving, breathing, reaching for his face, then turning to a mother’s beautiful voice, calling.

A
fter he’d cut the cord and examined the afterbirth, Judith helped her resourceful husband remove three more petticoats, swaddling the baby in one and herself in the other two. He attended them as he had the
birth, quietly, moving around their pine-needle carpet like a crab in the hold of the
Standard.

The swaddling, the hand-fed feast of spring water and the most delicious corn pone Judith had ever tasted had combined to finally defeat her efforts to stay awake, to not miss a moment of this vibrant new life she’d sung and suckled to contentment. So it was through half-closed lids she saw Jordan and the lanterns, the women.

“Lord, Miss Judith, that be you?”

“Yes. Ethan said you’d find us soon. It’s wonderful up here, isn’t it?”

Martha came closer. “Wonderful foolish of that man of yours!” she complained.

“Foolish?”

“I done warned him about having his way with you in the cool of the evening, on the top of a mountain, with you so close to term! You look worn-out.”

“But Martha—”

“Where is that scoundrel?”

She smiled, watching Jordan’s eyes change, grow as wide those of his new wife’s. “He’s close,” Judith assured them all. “He’s brought the baby to see the constellations,” she told them all.

“He didn’t take him no children when—”

Martha stopped suddenly as she saw the bloodstains. Jordan knelt beside the earthen bowl Ethan had dug for the gleaming afterbirth. Anne Randolph rushed forward.

Judith gasped against the feel of the women’s hands kneading at her abdomen.

“Good,” Anne whispered.

“And hard,” Martha pronounced.

They were like sisters, these women, Judith realized, in the way Ethan and Aaron were still brothers, even without a kinship link. Jordan Foster grasped her wrist, feeling for a pulse.

“Good Lord, Judith.”

“Steady, yes?”

“Yes, but it hasn’t been an hour since Ethan left us. How could you have—?”

“It didn’t have a great deal to do with me. There was no time to come down, even to call,” she explained. “So fast. Almost no pain at all. In moments the three of us were very busy.”

“Three. Do you hear that, Annie?”

Tears. There in Ethan’s young father’s eyes as he grasped for his wife’s hand.

“There now, love,” she whispered.

Oh, Ethan must not miss this,
Judith thought, just as he stepped into the small fire’s light. He looked different, this man who had shed his skin yet again. This man with too many names was now a father, by the grace of God and the love they shared, her heart whispered to her own sweet father. And to the other, the gruff one, who’d praised her hips and called her Ethan’s good choice.

Ethan raised his eyes to the steady, silent stream of fellow homesteaders. Judith found his scent mingling sweetly with the night air, the lifeblood, the downy newness of his burden. He responded to the children’s tugs at his waistcoat and knelt.

Judith took a measureless pride in her husband as she watched him open the layers to their child’s first circle of hushed company.

“Her name is Memory,” he announced.

Forge Books by Eileen Charbonneau

Waltzing in Ragtime

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE RANDOLPH LEGACY

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

Forge
^®is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

eISBN 9781466813700

First eBook Edition : February 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Charbonneau, Eileen.