Ever His Bride (24 page)

“H
unter!” Felicity
had kept her wits because her husband had kept calling her name,
the light of hope in the terrible darkness.

“Thank God, you’re alive, Felicity!” He
kissed her cheek and ran his hands quickly down her arms. “Are you
all right?”

“Are you?” She dearly wanted to see his face,
but settled for touching his jaw his cheek, landing a kiss on his
forehead.

“Ouch!”

“Good,” she said, finally able to see a glint
from his eyes. “It’s just your head.”

“Thank you, madam.” His grunt of a laugh
calmed her, his gentleness soothed like balm as he scrubbed her
hair out of her face. His hands shook. “Your wit survived
intact.”

“Dear God . . .” It wasn’t the moon that lit
the hard planes of his face, but a faraway glow of orange-red.
“Fire, Mr. Claybourne! Up ahead—the engine, and the coal car.” The
very worst thing that could happen at a crash—

“Damnation.” He struggled to his feet,
stumbled over broken glass and pulled her along with him toward the
doorway of their car, now a gaping dimly orange glow above them.
“Out you go, wife.”

He shoved her up through the hole to the
outside of the railcar, followed her in the next instant and knelt
on the canted siding, his hair lifting in the rising night wind,
his strong, bare hand clamped around her calf as she clung to the
door frame. Their railcar was nose-down in an embankment, resting
in a gully that rose again on the other side.

“The fire is somewhere up ahead on the
track,” he said, bracing his balance against the metal ribs of the
exterior cladding. “I can’t see a thing beyond our car. Wait
here.”

“Careful—“ But her husband had already slid
over the side and landed on his feet below her.

“It’s stony gravel down here. Come, quickly,
wife. I’ll catch you.”

“Do you hear it, Mr. Claybourne?”

A great shouting and wailing had begun during
the few moments of their struggle, the human sound mixed with the
steady shriek of the train whistle and the thundering thrum of the
drivers still spinning freely.

“Quickly!” Trusting him without another
thought, Felicity threw her legs over the side and dropped right
into arms that circled her waist and pressed her back against his
broad chest.

“You are to stay out of the way, wife,” he
said as he handed her to the ground and turned her to face him.
“Right here, do you understand, where you’ll be safe . . .”

“There’s nowhere safe, Mr. Claybourne.” She
turned from him and staggered down the embankment, through the
bracken and brambles to the opposite side of the gully, where she
could lean over a crooked-limbed man who had been thrown free of a
first-class compartment. She heard her husband move up behind her.
He’d found and lit a lamp and now held it aloft.

“You’ll need this,” he said, kneeling beside
her.

“Thank you. But I’m afraid the poor man is
gone. His neck seems broken.”

She righted the dead man’s clothes, closed
his eyes, and settled his hands across his chest, taking great
comfort in it. She’d done the same for her father when he died, had
tucked the collar of his nightshirt neatly against the lapel of his
robe. A detail of death.

She feared there would be so many others
before the night was through.

Hunter reluctantly left his stubborn wife and
searched the two other cabs of their railcar, but found no sign of
anyone. His wife had already scaled the embankment to the tracks in
search of wounded passengers. There was no use in trying to change
her mind about staying out of the way. When he reached her on the
tracks, she had made a hospital between the wheels of a fallen
freight car. She offered bandages and words of comfort to a
white-faced woman whose arm trailed too loosely across her lap. A
man and a child staggered toward them out of the clouds of smoke
and steam. She gathered them in and settled their fears as easily
as if they had come to tea.

As for himself, hell beckoned from farther
down the tracks, where blinding flames and utter darkness danced
wickedly together to the desolating voice of the still-screaming
engine.

He ran toward the locomotive and the flames,
past railcars that lay scattered like toys tossed in a tantrum
around a playroom. He sent the injured toward his wife, and urged
the able-bodied forward toward the worst of the nightmare.

The shrieking of the whistle began to
subside, the useless spinning of the drivers slowing. But the
sounds of human anguish had only increased.

He swore as he reached the embankment. One of
the rails had snapped free of its stone block ties and the
locomotive had spilled off the track into a ravine, taking the
tender, two freight cars, and a third-class car with it. Flames
that fed off the oil and the engine fire leaped up the heavily
wooded embankment. Another thirty feet and the fire would be
licking at the car, heating the metal siding until it roasted the
passengers alive.

“This way, damn it!” he shouted at the
stunned group of men and boys, setting some to work battling the
flames with anything they could find, then climbed on top of the
car itself. It lay on its side, the single door buckled and
immovable. The inadequate metal roof had collapsed onto the body
like a lid shut down on a tin of biscuits.

“Find me a crowbar! Or something,” he
shouted, stripping off his waistcoat, while behind him on the
embankment, the flames of hell tried to peel the shirt from his
back.

Please, God, let his wife stay out of
trouble.

“She’s real bad off, miss.”

Felicity knelt down beside a little girl who
was holding the hand of an elderly woman. A younger boy was with
them, sitting on his heels and crooning a bedtime song.

“Is this your grandmother?” Felicity asked.
The old woman’s translucent skin had been torn off her brow like
paper, but she was conscious and moaning.

“Oh, no, miss, we ain’t got no gran, do we,
Andy?”

“No, miss,” the boy said, wiping his nose
down the length of his sleeve. “Betts and I don’t have a gran.”

“Well, then, you’re being very kind to
someone else’s grandmother, and I’m sure they’d be very happy to
know it.”

She covered the woman with a man’s coat to
keep her warm, wrapped a flannel bandage around the woman’s
forehead and comforted her.

When she moved on to the next victim, Betts
and her little brother followed on her heels. She soon had them
expertly tearing bandages for her from the clothes that had
scattered across the carnage when luggage burst open.

“Your mother and father, Betts, were they on
the train with you? Have you found them?”

“No.” Betts lifted her bony shoulders in a
shrug. “We’re alone, miss.”

“Well, your parents will be proud of you for
being a great help. Will you stay here and make more bandages for
me?”

Andy nodded gravely. “On our word, miss.”

She left the two children to work among the
shocked and the injured, and walked the track and the embankment
looking for stragglers who might have been thrown. Her throat and
nostrils seemed coated with the metallic taste of blood, her lungs
filled with sick-making plumes of burning oil.

The sight of a bloodied knee usually made her
sway on her feet, but this was different. It wasn’t the gore that
coiled her stomach into her throat, it was all the helpless
suffering: the weeping children and their terrified parents, the
sight of a courageous young woman cradling an elderly stranger.

She had begun to hear stories of a man who
had taken command of the horror. She hoped that her hardheaded
husband would help this brave hero who had sent her a half-dozen
women to help sort out the severely injured from those who were
merely dazed and scraped.

She caught sight of Claybourne as she came to
the edge of the embankment, a giant silhouette against the roiling
fire. He was standing on top of the tilted side of the third-class
car, the very same car she’d have been traveling in had he not
insisted she ride with him. She ran forward, wondering where the
passengers had gone, how they had escaped such a twisted
wreckage.

Then she heard the keening coming from
within. Dear God, there were people trapped inside!

“Mr. Claybourne!” She ran to the car and
stepped up onto its wheel, about to insist that he hurry. But as
the words formed, she noticed the huge hammer and the thick rail
spike in his hands. He could have been one of her father’s railway
construction workers. She was struck dumb by the sight.

“Hey, Claybourne!” A man scrambled toward him
on his hands and knees along the side of the listing car. “Over
here! We’ve found a breach. Saw a finger poke through. Looked to be
a child’s.”

Her husband shouted orders, and the other men
scrambled into position as if he were a general and they his
regiment of battle-hardened soldiers.

Hunter Claybourne—taking charge of the rescue
effort? Was he the man that everyone had been praising? The hero?
Not possible. What was in this for him? Perhaps he’d discovered a
way to salvage something from the disaster. George Hudson’s railway
line would certainly be a penny on the pound bargain after
this.

Claybourne was moving like a man possessed,
as though he were riding the scaly spine of some vengeful dragon.
She watched in awe as he shoved a makeshift crowbar between two
pieces of siding, as he bore down on it repeatedly with all his
weight, exhaling great grunts of air each time.

Flames crept up the embankment, engulfing the
brush and scrub alders, gaining ground even as the straggling crew
tried to flag out the blaze. She felt utterly helpless, could only
wait for the injured to be rescued.

“Add the other,” he shouted. The man beside
him wedged an iron brace into the gap that Claybourne had just
created. Still another length of bracing was added, and more
pressure applied by the other men until a rivet popped and the
siding came loose from the beam.

A cheer went up and she held her breath as
her husband and his crew bent the metal siding backward to give
access to the inside.

Claybourne knelt over the gap. “Christ! The
hole isn’t big enough!”

Unable to stand idly by, she had climbed onto
the side of the car and was already peering into the hole. “Let me
go down there, Mr. Claybourne,” she said.

“Absolutely not.” He tried to brush her away,
but she clung to his arm and the buckled metal of the panel.

“If they’re injured in there, I might be able
to help.”

“No! You’ll be roasted alive.”

“Blast it, Mr. Claybourne! Look around. I’m
the only one who’ll fit inside.”

His face glistened a red and black amalgam of
sweat and soot and dancing flames. He suddenly laced his fingers
through her hair and cradled her head between his hands, said
something she didn’t catch, then planted a rough kiss on her mouth.
He tasted of oil and gritty cinders. His eyes were bright as he
studied her for the briefest span of time.

“You’ll come up from there when I command it,
Mrs. Claybourne. I’ll have no argument from you on this point.”

Felicity nodded, hoped she meant it. “I
promise.”

He gathered her hands in his, raised her feet
above the opening then lowered her into the darkness. A hand caught
her from below, tugged on her skirt.

“Help us, miss!”

“Clear the way, please,” she said, wriggling
her feet but never doubting that her husband would hold her until
she was safely landed. “I can’t help anyone until I’m all the way
down.”

“Be careful, wife,” Claybourne shouted as she
touched down. He was only a pale orange glow from above, and then
he disappeared and the hammering and straining began again above
her, more furious than before.

“My mother . . .” came a feeble voice in the
darkness, “she’s bleeding awful bad.”

Someone took Felicity’s wrist and whimpered,
“Please . . . I can’t see.”

“I think my arm’s broke,” wailed another.

“We’ll get to everyone,” she said, trying not
to think of the flames that threatened just outside their metal
prison. The children would fit through the hole as it was. The
injured would have to be hoisted out. She gathered the children
together and called out to her husband over the ringing sounds of
the tearing metal.

“Mr. Claybourne!” His head appeared and she
lifted one of the children. “Take him! Please!”

“How many?” he shouted as he grabbed the
boy’s scrawny arm and hauled him up.

“Six more children. Maybe two dozen others!”
She and the man who had helped her into the car now handed up the
children one at a time, straining under their weight. Claybourne’s
growling gave her hope, even as the temperature rose inside the
iron box. At least there was no smoke.

“Come out now, woman!” he hissed. “We’re
losing to the fire! And we can’t make the hole any larger.”

“But you must, Mr. Claybourne. They need help
in here. I can’t leave them.”

“I said come! Now!” His voice was a fearsome
roar that reverberated inside the car. He reached down and made a
swipe toward her with his powerful arm, but she was far out of his
reach and thankful that he couldn’t fit his shoulders through.

“We both have work to do, Mr. Claybourne.
Make a sling. You’ll have to drag the rest out.” She left him to
his blazing anger and crawled among the injured. Most looked as
broken as the benches and the sprung baggage.

She bandaged a young man’s eyes, and
stabilized a woman’s broken arm against her chest. The inside of
the car was growing hotter. Sweat ran in rivulets off her brow and
down her back. She knew she ought to be frightened out of her mind,
but Hunter Claybourne was up there with his crowbars and his
hammering, a man they were calling hero, and she was positive that
he wouldn’t let her or anyone else die.