Elizabeth Grayson (27 page)

“Doc Meyers will fix Rue up as good as new, Annie,” Chase insisted. “Just you wait.”

NEITHER LYDIA NOR DOC MEYERS WERE ABLE TO FIX RUE up “as good as new.” That’s why the Hardesty family had gathered in Lydia’s parlor—to worry and wait. Silas Jenkins stood over Suzanne, who knitted fiercely in the chair by the fire. Will had tucked Etta Mae into the crook of his good arm. Evangeline sat sniffling into a handkerchief while D’arcy patted and consoled her. Enoch hadn’t once left Lydia’s side since they’d brought Rue up to the house.

While the rest of the Hardestys seemed to draw strength from being together—Chase sat with his head in his hands. Beyond the orders he’d given when they left the steamer, he hadn’t said a word to anyone. Ann could see in the sag of those wide shoulders and the stain of responsibility that darkened the blue of his eyes, that Chase blamed himself for Rue getting hurt.

She hitched as close as she could to him on the wide settee, but Chase was oblivious. He didn’t stir until Lydia came in.

“How is he, Ma?” Will asked, speaking for all of them.

Lydia’s face was scored with lines of concern, but her voice was level. “Rue’s lucky to be alive,” she began. “He hit his head and has been drifting in and out of consciousness. His leg is broken, and he’s cracked at least one of his ribs. Those are injuries we can take care of; they’re things that will heal.”

Everyone seemed to sense the gravity of what she was about to tell them. John straightened in his chair. The twins’ eyes went round. Even Suzanne’s knitting needles fell silent.

Ann clasped Chase’s hand in both of hers.

Lydia settled back on her heels as if she were steeling herself. “Doc thinks Rue might be bleeding inside. If he is, there’s not a thing any one of us can do to help him.”

Evie sobbed and buried her face against D’arcy’s neck. Etta Mae nestled close against Will’s side. Silas closed his hands on Suzanne’s wide shoulders.

“You mean, Rue’s going to die?” Benjamin asked, his boyish chin trembling.

“What I’m saying is that he’s in God’s hands.” Lydia’s mouth pinched tighter, as if she was going to have a few words to say to the Almighty about hurting one of her children. “What I’m saying is that while Doc and I are going to do everything we can for him, Rue’s fate isn’t up to us.”

Chase dropped his head into his hands again.

“You did everything you could,” Ann whispered, her palm pressed to his bowed back.

“I should have done more.”

Stuart Hardesty, square and bluff and two years younger than Rue, shook his head in protest. “How could he have fallen overboard? Rue’s lithe as a cat.”

“Maybe he caught his foot on a rope,” John suggested.

“Maybe the railing was loose,” Bartholomew offered.

“Maybe he took some ridiculous dare,” Will put in.

“Like the time you bet him he couldn’t walk the barn’s ridgepole?” D’arcy reminded him.

“And he slid right into the manure pile?” John recalled and everyone snickered.

“It doesn’t matter how he fell overboard,” Etta Mae pointed out, ever practical. “What matters is that there are people here to take care of Rue as long as he needs us.”

“Doc Meyers has agreed to spend the night,” Lydia told them, matching her daughter-in-law’s resolution. “Your father’s with Rue now. I mean to go back in a little while.”

“I’ll stay tonight,” Suzanne volunteered, covering Silas’s hand with her own as if drawing on his strength. “To keep Ma company.”

As the others made their plans, Lydia crossed the room to where Ann and Chase sat together on the settee. “I want to thank you,” she began, her gaze intent on her eldest son, “for bringing Rue home to me. I know the risk you took going into that river, and I want you to know—”

“How could I have done anything else?” Chase sounded impatient, almost angry.

A frisson of distress creased Lydia’s brow. “You’ve always looked after him, Chase, right from the day he was born.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of it this time.”

She cupped his cheek and tilted his face so she could look into his eyes. “I won’t have you blaming yourself for this.”

Chase pursed his lips, then glanced away, not able to accept the absolution his mother was offering him. Still, Lydia’s hand lingered on his skin almost as if she were seeking amid the planes and angles of that hard, masculine face the boy she’d held and comforted.

Then she turned to Ann. “I want to thank you for what you did, as well. Doc Meyers said you immobilized Rue’s leg every bit as well as he could have done it himself.”

“Chase and Beck Morgan helped,” Ann answered.

“I’ll make sure I thank Beck before you leave.”

Ann hadn’t even considered that they had a schedule to keep. No matter how Rue was, they had goods to deliver before they spoiled, passengers who needed to make connections, and mail contracts to fulfill. But how was Chase going to climb aboard the
Andromeda
and head downstream? How were they going to leave Hardesty’s Landing not knowing if Rue was going to live?

Just then, Enoch appeared in the doorway. “Lydia,” he said sharply. “Rue’s coughing blood. Doc says come.”

Lydia brushed past her husband and hurried down the hall.

Enoch lingered in the doorway, his gaze drifting over each of his children. The way his eyes gleamed said how much each of them meant to him: Will who’d returned from the war battered but unbowed, D’arcy with her dark beauty and quiet strength, the twins only half-grown but already shining with the promise of the men they would become. He turned to each of them in turn as if he were drawing his own strength from seeing his family together.

Finally, Enoch looked long and hard at his eldest son. Though a scowl pinched the corners of his mouth, Ann saw beyond that rough, weathered face to the tenderness in his eyes. They shone bright with pride and approval, things Chase had never been able to see because he was too stubborn—or too afraid—to look for himself.

Chase never saw that his father understood the burden he was carrying by putting his love for the people in this room beyond all else. Enoch understood, because it was him, not Lydia, who’d taught Chase what family could mean to a man.

Enoch’s gaze lingered a moment longer, then moved to Ann herself. She immediately felt the weight of Enoch’s expectations. Silas had settled Suzanne’s fluttering with his touch. Etta Mae had taken up the mantle of Will’s leadership. D’arcy was looking after Evie. Even the boys, for all their youth, seemed to have banded together.

In that moment Ann saw that Enoch expected her to stand by Chase, to see to him and console him. But what did Ann have to offer when Chase didn’t think he deserved to be comforted? What could she give him when she was leaving Chase and the
Andromeda
when they reached St. Louis?

Then, with a reassuring touch on Evangeline’s shoulder and a murmur to Will, Enoch turned and went back to the room at the end of the hall.

Once he was gone, Ann rose hesitantly.

“Where are you going?” Chase demanded, glaring up at her.

“I’m going back to the
Andromeda,”
she said, “and I’d like you to come with me. We have a schedule to keep, and even if Lucien Boudreau is taking Rue’s watches in the pilothouse, you have duties of your own to see to tomorrow, don’t you?”

“But Rue—”

“Ann’s right,” Suzanne insisted as she jabbed her knitting needles into the knob of wool. “Rue has all of us here to look after him.”

“Go on, Chase,” Will encouraged him. “You got Rue here; you did your part. We’ll do the rest.”

“If we need you,” Silas assured him, “we’ll come get you.”

D’arcy rose and glided toward them. “Since Christina’s already asleep upstairs, why don’t you let Evie and me look after her tonight.”

Seeing how these people took care of one another made Ann’s throat ache with tenderness. She hugged D’arcy by way of thanks, then with Chase unwillingly in tow, she knocked on the door at the end of the hall to say good night.

“He’s holding his own,” Lydia reported.

Beyond the open door, Ann could see that Rue lay pale and inert in the middle of Enoch and Lydia’s big bed. He looked even more battered than he had this afternoon and far more fragile.

“Are you going back to the
Andromeda
?” Chase’s mother asked.

“Ann’s making me,” he protested.

“As well she should,” Lydia answered and wrapped her arms around her tall son. “You risked your life to pull Rue out of the river when any other captain would have considered him lost. You think on that tonight, Chase, instead of blaming yourself.”

Chase nodded and stepped away.

As Ann said her own good-nights, Lydia pressed her warm, wrinkled cheek to Ann’s far smoother one. For a moment Ann wallowed in the scent of rosewater and the comfort of having Lydia’s arms around her. It had been so long since anyone had mothered her, longer still since she’d experienced this sense of belonging. The knowledge that in a week’s time she was going to turn her back on the Hardestys tore her heart anew.

“Thank you for taking such good care of one of my sons this afternoon,” the older woman whispered. “Now I’m asking you to look after the other. See that Chase rests. See that he doesn’t spend the night brooding over something he couldn’t help.”

“She’ll do her best, Lydia,” Enoch said, coming up behind his wife and resting his hands on her shoulders. “You will do your best to take care of him, won’t you, Ann?”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly. “I promise.”

ANN SAW ALMOST IMMEDIATELY THAT SHE WASN’T GOING to be able to keep the promise she’d made to Enoch and Lydia. Chase wasn’t going to let her get close enough to take care of him. She saw how agitated he was, and though he spoke barely a dozen words the whole way back to the
Andromeda,
she could hear the litany of blame and self-doubt that ran beneath his silence.

When they reached the door to the captain’s cabin, Ann grabbed his wrist and asked, “What are you going to do now?”

He shifted skittishly from foot to foot. “What I
want
is to go sit with Rue, but I know Ma won’t let me.”

She squeezed gently. “You did your part this morning. You saved his life.”

He glanced back toward the house. “That isn’t enough.”

“This isn’t your part of the fight. Leave Rue to your ma and Doc Meyers.”

He swung around and glared at her. “And what would you have me do in the meantime?”

“You need to rest.”

“Hell, Annie!” he burst out. “How do you expect me to rest when Rue might be dying up there?”

“All right, what can we do instead?”

“Do?”

“Is there someplace we can go for a little while?” she suggested. “Someplace cool, someplace quiet?”

Chase hesitated, then grabbed her hand. Barely a minute later, they bolted across the gangway as if the hounds of hell were at their heels. They ran the length of the woodlot and scrambled up a steep, twisting trail only someone who’d followed it a thousand times could navigate in the dark.

They climbed until Ann was stumbling and gasping for breath. At the top of the path, Chase led her through woods so close and dark she could barely see his silhouette ahead of her. They clambered through a maze of towering rocks, then stepped into a clearing at the top of the bluffs.

A world veiled with midnight opened up before them. The Missouri, dimpled with moonlight, shimmered a hundred feet below. The sky spread clear and black, sliced by a sly smirk of crescent moon and stippled with stars. The valley that stretched to the horizon lay cloaked in crepe.

“Where are we?” Ann asked breathlessly.

“This is the point,” Chase told her. He seemed calmer somehow, as if the climb had burned off some of that frantic energy. “It’s the highest spot for miles around. When I was a boy, I’d come up here and watch the river.”

“Is this where you decided to become a riverboat captain?”

“Oh, I never aspired to anything so grand as that. But I knew even then the river was where I belonged.”

Ann stepped into a shallow grassy bowl just back from the edge of the cliff and sat down on her heels. From far below, she could hear the faint hush of the river’s passage and smell the rich fecund dampness of earth and night. A soft, sultry wind feathered up the cliffside, and the trees along the edge of the bluff sighed with pleasure.

“The view must be glorious in daylight,” she whispered.

Chase dropped down on the grass beside her. “You can see half of Nebraska across the river.”

Ann lay back and stared up at the sky. “I think I can see a million stars....”

Chase stretched out beside her. “Look,” he offered, pointing. “There’s the constellation Andromeda.”

They lay in the soft, whispery grass listening to the river and watching the sky. The cool and the quiet worked their magic.

“I remember the night Rue was born,” Chase said.

Ann rolled toward him. “You do?”

“It was just about nightfall when his mama came knocking at our door.” Chase was calling up the memory to keep Rue close tonight. “Francie was an octoroon and had been a white man’s mistress somewhere in Louisiana. She decided to head North so her first child would be born in freedom.”

Ann reached out to squeeze his shoulder, encouraging him.

“The people who’d been helping Francie had rowed her across the Missouri a few miles south of here. She was supposed to keep to the woods and bypass Hardesty’s Landing.”

“But she needed help.”

“It was her time,” Chase confirmed. “Ma took her in and made her as comfortable as she could. Francie must have been in labor, though I don’t suppose I knew that then. What I do remember is Ma waking me in the middle of the night and handing me this squalling baby—”

“Rue,” she guessed with a laugh.

“My God, Annie! He was little and red-faced and yelling like he wanted folks in Omaha to hear him. ‘He’s yours to look after,’ Ma told me, ‘ ’til I get his mama in the ground.’ ”

“Rue’s mother died giving birth?” Ann couldn’t seem to help the waver in her voice. The night Christina was born came back to her, how frightened she’d been. How sure she’d been that neither she nor Christina would survive.