Sweet Boundless (21 page)

Carina looked out at the snow with mingled disappointment and relief. Mr. Makepeace would not be exploring the cave today. But he did come over a short while later to speak his disappointment.

“Have you any idea how long it will last?” He frowned at the snow surrounding him like curious moths as he stood on her stoop.

“I haven’t spent a winter here, Mr. Makepeace. Your guess is as good as mine. One thing I do know, you don’t go far from home once it starts.” She thought of the blizzard she and Quillan had survived together. It had started as innocently as this one but turned deadly soon enough. Where was Quillan now? Not on the road, surely.

“No, I wouldn’t think so.” He shook his head heavily. “Know anyone who plays chess?”

Carina smiled at Mr. Makepeace’s amiable shift in temper. “I don’t know. Alan Tavish plays checkers; perhaps he also plays chess.”

He glanced behind her into the small single room. “Will you be all right in there alone?”

She raised a brow. “Would you join me?”

He opened his mouth and paused, uncertain how to take her comment until he saw the amusement in her eyes. “Only if your life depended on it, thereby saving both your virtue and my neck. I rather doubt Mr. Shepard is as lax in his care for you as he is for his mine.”

Carina almost corrected his misconception but held her tongue. “Oh sì, he is like a watchdog.”

He eyed her staidly. “Quite. Well, then, I know when I’m beaten. But at the first thaw we’ll take that cave by storm.”

On a snowy morning with a warm stove behind her and a day of cooking ahead and Mr. Makepeace’s confident smile, she laughed. “Bene. We will take it.”

Quillan couldn’t stop the dreams. He was a youth again, smarting from a recent caning and wondering what he was supposed to have done this time. He wouldn’t refute it. He’d promised himself that long ago. He no longer told his side, no longer countered the lies. He could look for no quarter, and his denials only made it worse, piling the supposed sin of false witness upon whatever accusations already stood to his account.

But he liked to know for what he’d been punished. He’d determined to take up whatever vice it was assumed he practiced. If he was accused and punished for it, then he planned to do it in earnest. That was his pact with the devil, who, regardless of Reverend Shepard’s warnings, seemed the lesser of the evils in Quillan’s life.

Only this time he hadn’t been told. Reverend Shepard had merely taken him aside, rod in hand. With a stern, sorrowing face, he’d used pain to purge the sin. And Quillan was determined to learn what new depravity he could indulge in. But first he had to shake the cough.

It tore his throat down to his chest. He heard voices. An infection of the bronchi. Fever’s too high.
For lo, thine enemies, O Lord, for lo,
thine enemies shall perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered
. Quillan felt himself being scattered by the wind. The wind was so cold. Then why did he sweat? He was too close to the sun.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’ d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Quillan felt the plunge. Into a lake of fire. An eternity of flame.
And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every
tree which bringeth not good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Quillan felt the heat. He was in the bed between his parents. The flames surrounded and engulfed them. He clung to his mother, but even as he clung, her flesh peeled from the bones, and he looked into the skeletal hollows of her eyes.

He hollered, and a hand came down on his forehead. Something cool and damp, a cloth. It was pressed to his lips and he sucked.
And
he made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock
. It was neither honey nor oil, but cool fresh water he sucked.
My doctrine
shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew, as the small rain
upon the tender herd, as the showers upon the grass
.

Quillan trembled with the sheer relief. He felt so weak. Utterly helpless.
For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died
for the ungodly . . . for the ungodly . . . for the ungodly
. Cain’s voice, but Quillan couldn’t conjure his face. How could he have forgotten? He groaned.

Again the hand soothed his forehead.
Christ died for the ungodly
. But Cain died for the ungodly as well. Cain died for him. Quillan forced his eyes open. It was the only way to stop the thoughts. A woman hovered near, large and long of face. Her small oval eyeglasses caught the light. Augusta Tabor.

Now he could put himself inside a place as well. Leadville. He was still in Leadville. Hell receded.

“Feeling stronger, are you?”

He felt weak as a bum lamb.

“Here, let’s try some broth.” She raised his head and spooned liquid between his lips. He swallowed, but his stomach revolted, and he spewed it back into the cloth she held ready. Then he coughed, and he knew he was coughing out the very tissues of his throat. He dropped back to the bed, shaking with chills.

She wrapped him tighter. “Sleep, then. Just sleep.”

And now he remembered. Mrs. Shepard had accused him of visiting the bawdy house. He overheard the reverend’s gentle questioning. Was she certain? And her reply:
“What do you expect when he sprang
from the loins of a harlot?”
Quillan shook with rage at this particular accusation.

At fourteen, with his body acting foreign and unpredictable, he knew well enough what she was suggesting—the one thing he would never do. The one vice never added to his list. He would never look upon nor touch that sort of woman. His mother’s sort of woman. Had she guessed? Did Mrs. Shepard know this was one time she would win? Or did she mean to drive him to that sin, to make him like Wolf. . . .

He thrashed. He couldn’t let her win. He thought again of his friend, of his plan to shake the dust of Laramie from his heels, to seek reckless adventure. Quillan would go. All he need do was meet Shane at the bank while he made his withdrawal. Then they’d be off for good.

Off for good. He’d gone off, all right. But not before his friend had left him to take the fall for the robbery, before the judge had warned him off his wild ways with a stern injunction to mend himself or learn the full power of the law. Quillan kept his breath slight to resist the cough clawing its way up his throat. If only he could ward off the memories.

The storm passed as quickly as it came. The next day the sky was clear, though the temperature remained harsh. It warmed substantially by the third day, though when Mr. Makepeace came to her door, Carina still felt a bite in the air. But with the clear skies, she knew he would not be put off again. She bundled into her coat and the caramel kidskin gloves Quillan had given her. She was ready.

Together they rode to the Rose Legacy, Mr. Makepeace well equipped with rope, lantern, a blanket, even a kit of the tools and gadgetry of his trade, she assumed. He lit the lantern at the top of the shaft and gave it to her to hold. “We’ll leave that burning up here, though I shouldn’t with all this ancient timbering.”

“What will we use for light down there?”

He held up two tin-encircled candleholders. “Once we’re down we’ll light these. We’ll have to descend in darkness, though.”

Carina looked into the shaft. Alex Makepeace had assured her the rope would hold firm and she would not plunge to the bottom of the well, if it even had a bottom. But the thought of sinking into that blackness . . .

He took the lantern and set it firmly on the floor of the drift at the mouth of the shaft. “Now, step into this.” He held out the harness.

Beneath her fur-trimmed coat, Carina wore the miner’s pants and woolen shirt she had bought to disguise herself before the vigilantes rid the town of the roughs. She stuffed one panted leg through the rope harness, then the other.

Mr. Makepeace worked it up around her waist and tugged it tight. “Now take hold of this section, and let yourself over the side. I’ll lower you slowly.”

“I’m to go first?”

“How else will I let you down?” He smiled indulgently.

She looked at the hole again. “You’ll come right behind?”

“Right behind.”

“Madonna mia, I must be pazza.” Carina stepped to the edge while Mr. Makepeace winched the rope over a thick timber, then braced his legs.

“All right. Down over the edge there.”

Carina went to her knees, signed herself with the cross, then swung her legs over the plummeting darkness. She slid down to her belly and felt Mr. Makepeace take up the slack. Then she was clinging to the rope and walking down the timbers. She reached the ledge, balanced there for a minute, then swung down into the space of the cavern below.

Before God’s healing, she would have fainted. Even now the plunge into nothingness made her heart rush with fear. The darkness was complete. It seemed she hung there forever, disoriented and confused. Then her feet touched, and she gave a little cry.

“I’m down! I’m on the ground!” Her voice echoed mightily.

Mr. Makepeace’s answer sounded weak and far. She felt her rope grow taut as he made it fast up above. She would have to climb out of the harness to go anywhere at all. But she had no intention of taking one step without him. How could she when there was no up or down or left or right?

The cavern was about the same temperature as outside. There was no feel of moving air, but she heard a soft moan and prayed it was the wind, though it had a human quality that sent a shiver through her. A minute later she heard Alex Makepeace begin his climb down. He couldn’t come soon enough.

Behind her somewhere water dripped, and to her left the subterranean well continued its plunge into the earth. If she dared, she’d drop a pebble and listen for its plunk. But she didn’t dare. There was a watchfulness in the silence, almost a malevolence. What was down there did not want to be disturbed.

She crossed herself and said the Paternoster with silently moving lips. Had she the strength she would climb back up before Mr. Makepeace reached bottom and convinced her otherwise. But already she felt and heard his approach. Even when he was directly above her, she couldn’t see him.

He landed beside her. “All fine?”

She nodded, then realized how foolish that was when they could not see each other standing only a foot apart. “Yes.” Again her voice was caught up into the cavernous hollows. Something rustled overhead.

She heard the scratch of a lucifer match and the tiny white blaze flared up, then sank to a small yellow glow as Mr. Makepeace held it to the candle wick inside one tin holder. The rustling overhead increased, and something brushed by her with the smell of decay. She cried out, and the air was filled with a flapping wind. She grasped for Mr. Makepeace, and he caught her arm firmly.

“Bats. Don’t worry.” He held the candle up, watching the cloud swirl up and away. “That’ll be the direction of our wind hole, then.”

“Take me up now.” Carina’s voice was urgent.