Hope Springs (37 page)

“Joseph—” Damion MacCormack began a protest, but got no further than that one word.

“No mercy for the merciless, MacCormack,” Joseph answered. “No mercy.”

“You can’t take my home, Archer,” Mr. Archibald growled.

“I
own
your home, and you missed a payment.” Joseph’s eyes darted between them all. “You have all forfeited your claims on my sympathies. I will have full payments by day’s end from each and every one of you,” he snapped. “Failure to do so will result in evictions. Am I understood?”

Utter silence fell over the crowd.

Joseph turned his back and walked with quick and determined steps up the road.

Katie knew all too well the fear she saw in the faces around her. They had lost their homes. With snow thick on the ground. With no place of refuge within two days’ drive.

This couldn’t happen. The children would suffer for it. So many people would be in desperate straits.

Katie abandoned her place behind the mercantile post and hurried after Joseph. Tavish emerged from the chaos and caught up to her. She didn’t acknowledge him. She had to stop this. People would freeze and starve and suffer.

“You can’t do this, Joseph.” She followed close on his heels, Tavish close on hers.

“They knew the consequences of this.” He didn’t look back at her.

Was this the same man whom she’d found just that morning sleeping with a five-year-old girl sprawled across his chest? The same man who’d listened so tenderly to her sob through her worries the night before?

He seemed so cold and uncaring. With bruised faces and bleeding noses, the townspeople, who had only moments before been beating each other without restraint, were making their way from town as well. Looks of accusation joined muttered words of contempt. Even facing the loss of their homes, they couldn’t set aside their anger.

“Joseph.”

“If they wanted to stay in Hope Springs,” he said, still marching away with no hint of hesitation, “they should have left the guns at home. They should have stayed there themselves.”

“They’re frightened.” She picked up her pace enough to step in front of him. “They know half the town hates them—that just across the way are people with guns.
Guns,
Joseph.”

He stood with his hat in one hand, arms at his sides. He’d adopted that exact posture the first day she met him. ’Twas his “I won’t be swayed” posture.

“I am sorry the Irish will be impacted by this—”

“I wasn’t speaking only of the Irish. Every person here today was afraid. Every person here was hated by half the other people. All of them.”

He looked at her for the first time since she’d stepped around him. “You weren’t arguing for your countrymen alone?”

“I cannot believe you would think that of me.” She was so angry, she wanted to scream.

“I’ll take you home, Sweet Katie,” Tavish said.

But she wasn’t ready to go. “I have no desire to see anyone thrown off their land, Joseph Archer. I know how that feels. I know the fear and the pain and the devastation of that. And I have never—” She took a sharp breath through her nose, trying to keep herself calm and collected. “I have never taken sides against anyone in this town. I won’t turn my back on any of them now.”

“They didn’t give me a choice.”

She threw her hands up. “You
always
have a choice.”

“I don’t have any leverage but this.” He spoke in the determined, confident tone she’d tried to emulate so many times but never seemed to manage. “They won’t stop otherwise.”

“Well, now they will because they will be gone.” Just the thought brought tears to her heart.

Tavish slipped his hand in hers. “Let’s head back up the road, Katie. There’ll be difficulties enough to deal with there.”

She’d had her say but felt like she’d not made any progress.

Tavish tugged a bit, but she didn’t step away.

“You can’t do this, Joseph.”

Some of his confidence slipped. “I can’t do anything else. They won’t listen to reason.” His tone took on a hint of pleading. “They won’t stop if there are no consequences. As much as I hate forcing these families out, it is the only thing that will stop the violence.”

“Not everyone who was part of this today are the usual troublemakers,” Katie said. “Mr. Clark from the Red Road is usually peaceable, as is Mr. Murphy from the Irish. You have to know they were simply here at the wrong time and were caught up in what others started.”

Tavish kept a hand on her arm as she stood there, pleading with Joseph. He didn’t stop her, didn’t interfere. And he was no longer insisting she return to Granny’s.

“Joseph.” She would convince him to show some compassion. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t at least try. “I know what it is to wander through the cold, with no place to go and no food to eat. You’ll be tossing out children too, Joseph. How many will lose their toes or their fingers in this cold? How many will end up in the frozen ground?”

He turned his face away, but she moved back into his line of vision.

“Please don’t do this,” she whispered.

“I have to.” His shoulders visibly dropped. The pain in his expression struck Katie with such force that she couldn’t breathe. “Gregory Tyler had a gun today. If this doesn’t stop, others will do the same next time, and in their hatred, they will fire on each other. This will become a town of murderers.”

She knew he was right. “And if this doesn’t stop, you will have to do this again, won’t you? Evicting more and more until the town is either peaceful or empty.”

A bone-deep tiredness entered Joseph’s eyes. “The only way to save this town from itself is to be cold and cruel.”

Cold and cruel. Two things Joseph was not. The necessity of it was clearly eating away at him.

Her heart broke for him.

“I wish I could do something, Joseph.”

He pushed out a heavy sigh. “And I wish I could do something
different.
”

Katie felt utterly helpless. So many people were suffering.

“The girls may need to stay with you and Mrs. Claire a little later today than usual,” Joseph said. “I have to deliver evictions.” An ache filled his voice.

“They won’t be able to make their full payments, then?”

Joseph shook his head. He walked past them up to his house without looking back. The sight of him so alone, his shoulders drooping in a way she’d never seen before, broke something inside her. Pain clutched at her heart.

Oh, Joseph.

“Let us hope this truly does end here today,” Tavish said, still standing at her side though she’d nearly forgotten he was there.

Tavish walked with her toward the Irish Road. Eoin O’Donaghue kept guard at the icy bridge. Katie looked back over her shoulder in time to see Joseph step inside his house. Beyond that, Bob Archibald stood talking to someone standing guard with a shotgun in his hand at the turnoff to the Red Road.

Hope, Biddy had told her, springs eternal. Katie was struggling in that moment to believe that was still true.

Chapter Thirty

Tavish passed a difficult night. The eruption of violence had him worried. So did Katie. The events of the day before had shaken her. The look of resignation she’d worn as they walked up the Irish Road weighed heavily on his mind. He wanted to do something to help her, to reassure her, but had no idea what.

The sky was still dark along the eastern horizon when he decided he wasn’t likely to get much sleep. He dragged himself to the corner of his house that served as a kitchen and set about making himself a pot of coffee. Though he couldn’t put his thumb on when or how the change had occurred, things were different between him and Katie. She was more distant, and he didn’t know how to get her back.

The sound of raised voices echoed from outside. Apparently there were others on the Irish Road too burdened to sleep. Joseph had made good on his threat. Five families on the Irish Road had received notices of eviction and were ordered to vacate their homes within ten days.

But why would they be out on the road at this hour?
Heaven help them all if someone had decided to attack the Reds in the middle of the night.

Tavish crossed to his front window. A significant number of people were running down the road. But it was not an angry mob; his neighbors were panicked and afraid.

He snatched his coat and hat off their pegs and pulled on his boots. He rushed out onto the road. He didn’t need to ask what had brought them all out on a bitter cold morning. He could smell smoke heavy in the air.

His gaze followed the rush of people. Down the road, precisely where the bridge sat, a column of flames reached toward the sky.

Tavish ran down the road. Frantic shouts echoed in chaotic patterns against the backdrop of crackling flames and the taste of ash in the air. The Irish huddled along the riverbank, chipping at ice in an attempt to reach the water beneath.

Tavish dropped down beside Keefe. He snatched a rock from the bank and pounded at the ice nearest him. It was too thin for standing on, but still thick enough to frustrate their efforts. Buckets sat empty, a stark symbol of the losing battle they were fighting.

Someone a pace off managed to break through to the river water. A brigade formed on the instant. They tossed bucketfuls of water at the flames, but Tavish could see in their faces that they knew as well as he did that they were too late.

Long minutes passed as they fought the flames. Bits of the bridge dropped into the water, steam and smoke rising up as it did. The bucket brigade slowed as the fire extinguished itself.

Tavish stood amongst his now silent friends and family. The sun peeked over the horizon, illuminating the smoldering skeleton of their bridge. Keefe was directly beside him, a look of horrified shock on his face.

“What . . . ?” Tavish couldn’t find any other words.

“Damion and Eoin came to relieve Matthew Scott from guard duty. The bridge was burning.” Keefe spoke with very little inflection, his eyes never leaving the charred pillar stubs sticking out of the icy river. “He woke us, but it was already . . .” He shook his head.

Tavish looked over the crowd. “Where is Matthew?”

“We don’t know.” Keefe rubbed at his face. “He wasn’t here. No one’s seen him. Ciara ran up the road to check at his place, see if he’d gone home. He’s disappeared, Tavish.”

Matthew wouldn’t have abandoned his post. He would have fought whoever had come to set fire to the bridge. And now he was missing.

Saints above.

Tavish spotted Katie among the crowd and made his way to her. Her troubled gaze took in the river and the banks and the smoldering bits of wood jutting out of the water. She stood with her arms wrapped about her middle, the hem of her nightgown peeking out from beneath the bottom of the overly large man’s coat she wore, the same coat she always wore. It was one of Joseph’s—Tavish knew it was.

She glanced at him then back at the river. “How do we get across now?”

There was the rub. The bridge was the only way to cross the river from the Irish side. “We don’t,” Tavish answered. “Even if we head in the other direction, the river loops back and grows wider and flows faster. This is the only place to cross.”

“We’re trapped, then?”

“Like rats,” Seamus growled from nearby. “And every one of those blasted, no-good Reds knows it.” He paced away, muttering a string of words Tavish hoped Katie couldn’t overhear. “Burned down my shop. Burned down the bridge. They’ll be setting fire to our fields and houses next.”

Tavish kicked at the blackened bits of wood on the riverbank. “They can’t set fire to anything over here. We can’t get over there, but neither can they get over to this side.”

“’Tis little comfort,” Seamus grumbled. “We also can’t get any food over here. We can’t make our drive out for firewood without crossing the river. What happens when our supplies run out? We all sit here, frozen and starved in our homes? Those of us who even have homes left, that is.”

Katie’s coloring fled entirely.

Tavish held back the very real worry he felt, focusing instead on thinking of a way to take this worry off her shoulders. “We’ll think of something, Katie. Don’t fret.”

“Don’t fret?” Frustration immediately took hold of her tone. “Few families have the supplies to see them through the winter. We can’t wade across so wide and deep a river with ice floating all around in it. There’s no means of getting food here or firewood. We’ve not even reached the worst of the winter yet. That seems like ample reason to fret.”

“I only want you to not be burdened by it.” This seemed to be the theme of their disagreements lately. He wanted to help, but she didn’t want the help he offered.

Ian joined them at the riverbank. “The river freezes at some point every winter.” He spoke as though reassuring himself. “Eventually we’ll be able to walk over.”

“How long is ‘eventually’?” Katie asked.

“It always freezes by January,” Ian said.

Katie stepped away a pace. “We’ve not even reached December yet. How many families can last until January?”

“I don’t know.” Ian slowly shook his head. “I don’t know.”