The Randolph Legacy (38 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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“P
ut the seabirds in mine, too!” Alice clamored, thrusting the cut black silhouette back at him again.
“Alice!” Barton Gibson scolded his middle daughter.
“I’m sorry, Father. I mean, if you please, Uncle Ethan.”
Ethan laughed. “This is a child who knows what it is she wants, yes?”
“You’re sensing a family resemblance?” Sally asked.
“Exactly.” He drew the child in question up onto his lap. They studied the silhouette he’d cut of Del and Ida’s lighthouse together. “Now, Alice, show me where the birds should appear.”
Judith swept by and ran her fingers through his unruly hair, drawing
it off his brow. He caught her hand, kissed into its palm. Judith thought of the first time he’d done that, on board the
Standard.
It was the first of so many gifts. And now her captive sailor had given her what she never thought she would have again—a family.
“Was Ethan a willful child, then, Sally?” she asked.
“Oh, something chronic! Winthrop and Clayton could not make him skip to their tunes at all!”
Ethan frowned. “They had bullying tunes,” he muttered. Betsy’s arm slipped around his shoulder protectively.
“If Ethan caught something up in his mind,” Sally continued, “and it captured his fancy, he would see it to conclusion. Once I suggested trying one of the experimentations you’d taught us, Jordan.”
The doctor’s head came up from his study of the lighthouse silhouette. “You remembered my experimentations?”
“Remembered? When Ethan found our record book, he insisted we do each one of them all over again. Which was the best, Ethan?”
He grinned. “Flight.”
“Oh, yes! We sent a toy up in a hot-air balloon, Judith.”
“You didn’t!”
Ethan frowned. “It was not a toy. It was my dearest friend. I went to sea with Androcles.”
Judith realized that Jordan Foster leaned in closely as the brother and sister talked of their childhood. His eyes brightened. Judith saw glimpses of him as a younger man, eagerly sharing his love of learning with the older Randolph children. Later, as Ethan drew his sister up to dance to her husband’s hornpipe tune, those eyes brightened further. When his nieces insisted she try, Ethan favored her with a bridal waltz. It was not difficult, because his arms remained around her and her steps followed his. This was dancing, then? No, this was the waltz, that many believed scandalous. Barton’s music slowed, went wistful. Judith was even able to relax enough to catch the spark from her partner’s eyes and wish they could continue this dance even closer. She blushed hotly, seeing Sally’s nod of understanding. When Barton finished his tune, Jordan Foster put his hand on Ethan’s shoulder.
“Our rounds begin at dawn, apprentice,” he warned, then bade each of them good night before leaving their small upstairs sitting room and climbing down the winding stairs.
Sally’s fingers drummed against her flush lips. “We’ve overstayed, Barton,” she announced. “But perhaps Jordan will forgive us this once. Girls, gather your things while I wrap the baby.” She kissed Ethan’s brow. “To bed. He’s worried about you.”
“Worried?” Ethan laughed. “About getting a full day’s labor, perhaps.”
“No, Ethan. About you.” She looked to Judith. “I don’t envy you your place between these two, my sweet new sister,” she said.
Ethan trailed behind the doctor, who followed the maidservant.
Low ceilings of the half-timbered house made them all stoop. Finally, the bedroom, cluttered with shelves lined in lace. And crockery. Not useful crockery, like Judith’s bowls, plates, and serving dishes, but crockery dogs. Ornaments, with no purpose. Judith would be mystified in a room like this, Ethan decided. He was mystified. He smiled. Was she making him a common-sense Quaker already?
The maid propped the pillows behind the head of a frail woman. Warming her lap was a small spaniel who was not yet represented in the crockery gallery, but destined to follow his predecessors, Ethan thought. The animal stared hard at Jordan.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Willard,” he said.
“What’s kept you?” The woman’s querulous voice contrasted with her appearance. “It’s past tea. I’ve sung your praises to my own detriment. You’ve got too many patients now to care promptly for me.”
“It has been a busy day.”
“Leave us,” she instructed her maid, but watched the tilt of the girl’s head as she passed Ethan. “Well,” the old woman demanded then, “who is that shadow that sparks Nancy’s eyes?”
The doctor turned. “May I introduce—”
“Come into the light, man! Closer! Why Jordan Foster, he’s—”
“My new assistant, Mrs. Willard. Ethan Blair.”
“Blair, Blair? And what is wrong with you, young man, that you are not called by your father’s name?”
Ethan halted midstep. His smile froze.
“Madame? Je ne connais-pas—”
“French! Jordan, you rogue, he’s French?” The spaniel in her lap cowered. “I’ll have no revolutionary touch me!”
“He’s as American as you or I, Mrs. Willard. You’ve frightened him, that’s all. Ethan, speak English.”
But he couldn’t speak at all. Ethan felt the doctor’s hand on his shoulder. The woman continued shouting.
“
I’ve
frightened
him?
Bloody revolutionary!”
“Look at him, woman, he’s but three-and-twenty! How could he have guillotined your relatives before he was born?”
Jordan looked exasperated. The dog began a high-pitched whine. Ethan wished he could help, but fear was still caught in his throat. He felt his life in Richmond unraveling. How did this woman know he was using his mother’s name? What else did she know of him?
Listen
, he told himself. That was most of doctoring, listening.
Mrs. Willard stroked the dog silent. She turned to Jordan. “Why did you not school him in Edinburgh, like yourself? What could he learn from Frenchmen?”
Jordan Foster’s thumb and fourth finger pressed his temples between them. “Mrs. Willard, you have misunderstood.”
“I am fourscore-and-ten. I understand perfectly well about youthful indiscretions! It’s hardly a terrible punishment that this one has come under your wing at last, is it? Now that the work of raising him to manhood is done and you have need of an associate? Come closer, young man.”
Ethan obeyed the woman surrounded by even more white lace than that which choked her shelves. Her dog bared his teeth.
“Closer,” she insisted.
He released the handles of the doctor’s bag and stooped until he was below her gaze. Her light eyes peered down at him from the mountain of pillows. He held his hand out under the dog’s jaw, the way he had with the animals at Windover, and those meant for slaughter on board the
Standard.
The dog licked his palm. The woman shouted as if Ethan were hard of hearing, as well as French. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,
madame.”
“You are very fortunate. Other fathers would not give a second thought to children conceived as heedlessly as you were.”
That was it, Ethan finally realized. She’d seen their common coloring. She thought him Jordan’s son. Illegitimate son, conceived without design in France. That was all. Relief flooded him. He almost laughed, but willed his mouth, if not his eyes, sober. “I feel fortunate indeed,
madame.”
Her curious, Cupid’s-bow lips set in an aged face pursed, almost sweetly. “Good, good,” she approved.
“Mrs. Willard, this is insufferable!” Jordan Foster proclaimed.
Not even he himself had ever made his master this angry.
“You don’t have to get choleric over it all these years later, Jordan,” his patient chastised. “It’s commendable, what you now seek to rectify.” She returned her attention to Ethan. “I don’t like being bled or purged, young one.”
“Oh, neither do I.”
She raised her scant eyebrows in surprise, then smiled. “There, then. An agreement between us. Now tell me about this new salve.”
Ethan opened the doctor’s bag, offered the jar. “It’s more the old salve touched by my wife,
madame.
She grows medicinals on our windowsills.”
“Wife. You have taken a wife?”
“Yes.”
“American?”
“Judith’s from Pennsylvania.”
“And you are faithful to your Judith?”
“Yes,
madame.”
“This is very good. It shows you can overcome your unfortunate heritage. You’ll have a chance here, young man, in America.”
“I have heard such things. And I am grateful for the opportunity Dr. Foster has afforded me.”
She patted the side of his head as she took his offering. “He’s got your becoming modesty, Jordan, to make up for that rakish look about the eyes,” she said, opening the jar. “You must remain true to your wife, Ethan Foster. She is cursed in her marriage.”
“Cursed,
madame
?”
“Foolish women fall in love with men like you on sight.”
“But, Mrs. Willard, my wife is the most wise person of my acquaintance.”
“And she fell, the same as the rest.” She sniffed at the jar’s contents. “Like your mother did, for that one.” Her dismissive wave turned into a grasp at the air. “Where are you going, Jordan Foster? Attend me!”
The doctor turned slowly in the bedroom doorway. Ethan could not bear the look in his eyes. He tried to think past his own hurt, to come out of the world the woman had created, to what was real. This man had had children, once. “Mrs. Willard, perhaps your words remind Dr. Foster of his true son, the one he lost.”
“Lost? Lost? Well, now you’re found, can he not see that?” she demanded loudly. “Jordan, this child cannot help his circumstances. Give him your name! Where are you going? Examine my throat!”
Ethan smiled uneasily. “I believe it’s improving, Mrs. Willard,” he suggested.
Her chin braced a girlish pout as she stroked her dog’s back. “Don’t the old have any privileges?” she fretted. “May we not be allowed to speak the truth without consequence?” Ethan stared at the doorway, where the servant Nancy made a helpless gesture. “Are you angry with me, too, young one?” Mrs. Willard asked in a smaller voice.
“No,
madame,
” Ethan assured her.
“Will you examine my throat, then?” she asked, offering a palsied finger’s dose of Judith’s salve.
“Of course.” He took it. “I am honored by your trust.” His hands smeared the fresh-scented salve as he checked under her jawline for swellings. There were none. Jordan had allowed him to do this for others, before. He’d allowed what Ethan did next. While Nancy held the lamp close, he placed the flat stick against the woman’s tongue and peered into her mouth and down her throat.
“The congestion is almost gone.”
She noticed his trembling hands and smiled. “Your wife has blended a sweet mint into that horrible concoction, has she not, young Dr. Foster?”
Nancy hid her smile. Ethan knelt, pressed the old woman’s hands between his, gently. He felt her bones through paper-thin skin, fragile as twigs on a dead tree. “Yes, wintergreen. My Judith is the best of our household, Mrs. Willard. Dr. Foster is its head. I am apprentice only. Not doctor, not Foster. I am my mother’s son. Hers alone, yes?”
What was wrong with his own throat? Ethan thought irritably, swallowing past the obstruction, the twinge of loneliness.
Mrs. Willard’s pinked lips smiled, almost kindly. “Someday your wife Judith’s children will teach you differently,” she said.
 
 
T
he cook had shoved a meat pie in his hands and a manservant had spiraled him out the front door with Jordan’s bag under his arm. Ethan walked down three steps and sat. Now what was he supposed to do? Where had Jordan gone—to their next patient? But even in his anger, how could he have left this one? It was against everything he’d taught Ethan about a doctor’s responsibilities.
Was this a test? Ethan looked out over the busy street. He had no idea where he was. That was it. That was the nature of the test, to see if he could get himself to the next listed patients on his own, he decided. Wasn’t Jordan always complaining about his sense of direction, better suited to the sea?
Ethan lifted his head, sniffed the air. Through the man-made city smells came the scent of the James. Mostly fresh water here, so far from the Atlantic, but water, he could smell it. He was on Richmond’s south side. There. He knew that much. A broad, busy street on the south side. The list of Jordan’s next three patients was in the bag.
It was an ordinary day with ordinary rounds, on foot, to three more people who only needed fresh jars of Judith’s salve. He would be providing delivery, listening to progress through ailments, not much more. Yes. That’s why the doctor had abandoned him.
Jordan Foster was a rude man. They raised rude men in Boston, he would tell Sally on their next visit. She would slant her brows in sympathy and laugh, easing his troubled mind about remaining the physician’s student.
Ethan placed the pie on the flat bottom of the bag. He wished he could go home to Judith. He pictured her in the back of their house, sewing her strong seams, or tending the garden. He would creep up behind her, to see her fine eyes fire before he kissed her. She’d scold him, reminding him that they lived close to their neighbors in a city now, and that Mrs. Atwater was likely watching them from her window above. But if he’d sparked Judith well enough by then, she’d leave her work and go upstairs with him.
Yesterday, they hadn’t reached the bed. They’d loved each other against the curving wall of the stairwell, in that square the sun warmed from the window above. How wonderful she had felt, her strong legs wrapped around him as he’d entered her.
Had he pleased her well enough in return? She’d laughed—that high-pitched musical tone at first, the one that reminded him of the bells at St. Martin’s, the Catholic church down near the docks. Then, as he pressed closer, deeper, her laughter had turned guttural and not religious at all. Did he dare think of Judith as being, even for a moment, not religious at all? Did he dare think a woman who spoke with God might love him forever?
Today would be different, better. Today he would coax her gently, then carry her upstairs, onto the bed. He would praise those strong legs, her laughter, and her sweet nature as he watched her sea-change eyes for what pleased her, and when. He would love her until the light faded. Then they would rise, eat all the pie, and leave Jordan with gruel and greens for supper.
Ethan shook the images from his head. The sun was lowering in the sky. His bad leg had already begun to ache. He looked down at the doctor’s efficiently checked-off list. Where in hell was Easton Street?

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