The Frontiersman’s Daughter (33 page)

And so he obliged, coming to stand behind her. Without a trace of awkwardness he opened the clasp and circled her neck with the strand of pearls. They lay cool and heavy against her warm skin, complementing her gown and catching the candlelight.

“Your gift—” she stammered in a near whisper. “It is so . . . kind.”

He swallowed and she could see his throat tighten. Was he as moved as she? But his voice, when it came, was rock solid. “I dinna mean it as a kindness, Lael.”

“Are these . . . from Boston?”

“Nae, Scotlain.”

“Scotland,” she echoed, reaching up to touch them.

“From Castle Roslyn, tae be exact.”

She looked at him, her face full of questions. “Are these family pearls?”

“They were my maither’s. My faither wasna but a poor preacher, ye ken, until he married my maither.”

A poor preacher! Hearing him speak of his past, her eyes widened. She remembered the small portraits on the mantle of his cabin. His parents? And these were his mother’s pearls? Priceless, indeed.

She looked up then and found Susanna and Will readying for bed. The children were making a fuss and taking their gifts with them, little Lael amusing them all by blowing kisses to Ian before she disappeared up the loft ladder. Watching them go, Lael felt a keen disappointment. It was late, nearly midnight, she guessed. But she suddenly felt far from weary. Was he?

She looked at him openly, wanting him to linger, not wanting the night to end. “You’ve rarely spoken of your family.”

“What do you want tae know?”

She grew thoughtful. “Tell me about your mother.”

He looked into the fire and crossed his arms. “Her name was Brenna Roslyn and she was an earl’s daughter.”

“And your father?”

“Alexander Justus. He was preaching at a revival in Edinburgh when my mother first saw him. She had a heart for spiritual matters. They married soon after.”

She could well imagine how it had been. The handsome Scottish preacher, so much like the son, and the lady Brenna, probably smitten at first sight. “And her family? Were they happy with the match?”

“No’ at first. But my faither, God be thanked, soon saw them all converted.”

She smiled at this, full of wonder at the tale. “And did they live at Castle Roslyn?”

“Aye, and spent half her inheritance printing Bibles.” He paused and looked more solemn than she had ever seen him. “They died in a smallpox epidemic when I was twenty.”

“Oh, Ian, I’m sorry,” she said in a rush, hardly knowing she’d spoken his name. But it was not lost on him. His eyes were full of light and mischief when they met hers again, as if daring her to take it back.

She studied him carefully. “Were you not . . . angry at the Almighty when it happened?”

“Nae, just full of sorrow. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, ye ken.”

“You have no other family?”

“I’m an only child.”

“And what,” she asked, “has become of Castle Roslyn?”

“It waits for me. Or my son. Though it might be a heap of rubble and old roses by now. I’ve no’ been back in five years.”

The poignancy in his face turned her heart over. But he spoke with such assurance, full of faith that it was there for him and always would be, and for his son after him. How she would love to see it, she thought, looking into the fire. The same wistful longing she tried so hard to put down returned. She imagined his future son. Handsome. Strong. A man of steadfast convictions. A man of faith. The kind of son she would be proud to call her own.

Her hand went to the pearls again, not cold any longer but warmed by her skin. How she longed to keep them! If she did, she would always have something to remember him by. A token of affection, he had called it. But hearing the story of Brenna and Alexander Justus, she knew she could not hold onto them. They were fine for a wife or a daughter, truly. But too priceless to be given in mere friendship.

“I—they are so lovely—but I—I cannot keep them.”

Because of Olivia
, she could not say.

She spoke slowly, afraid to look at him. “But if I return them, I’ll need your help.”

He hesitated but she’d already turned her back to him, waiting for him to unfasten the clasp. He took them off as effortlessly as he had put them on, and the sudden spareness of her neck was no match for the barrenness in her heart.

Had she hurt him? She feared she had and was hurt in kind. But his silence was in no way nettlesome or brooding or dejected. Clutching the pearls in one hand, his voice, when it finally came, was near her ear and held only warmth and understanding and tenderness.

“Till spring,” he told her.

57

“I’m so housebound I feel fretful,” Susanna exclaimed to Lael, shucking off her apron. “Let’s walk out to the knob.”

It was the last day of the year, the day before Lael would depart the Bliss cabin. She felt fretful herself but for entirely different reasons. There was to be but one more night of shared supper and conversation and Ian’s fiddling and the children’s funning, and Lael was already feeling the loss.

Leaving the children behind with the men, Lael and Susanna started out. Soon they were carrying their coats as the sun winked at them, melting the frost and warming the woods to almost spring-like temperatures.

“I never did see any Indian sign up here atop the knob,” Susanna told her. “But it would make a fine lookout, be it redman or white.”

“Seems like you can see clear to Virginia,” Lael said as the knob came into view. “Can’t you just picture a cabin right here, with a wide porch taking in this pretty place?”

“This land’s here for the takin’, ” Susanna told her. “Though up so high and on so much rock it’d be awful hard to farm. But say you were to marry somebody other than a farmer. I reckon the doctor could give a string of them pretty pearls for this piece.” Lael looked at her friend, about to hush her teasing, but there was no mirth in Susanna’s eyes.

“Lael, we need to speak plain to one another.”

“All right.”

They continued on side by side until they stood atop the rocky knob, a dizzying drop just steps away. The sun shone unhindered here as the trees had fallen away, leaving only a mass of jagged dark rock overlooking the river valley below.

Susanna spoke slowly, as if weighing her words. “I never saw you and Doc Justus together in one place until here lately. Always before, you come alone or he did. I knew you’d met, is all. But I never figured on him falling in love with you.”

Lael turned, suddenly feeling as though she were falling. “What?”

“Over Christmas it was made plain to me. To Will too.”

“But he hardly looked at me!”

“I know. And that was what give him away.”

Lael said nothing, only shook her head.

But Susanna kept on, as gently as she could. “Seems like you were a terrible temptation to him, lookin’ as you did. He’s a different sort than Simon, Lael. The doctor’s got a lot of self-control. Maybe it comes from tryin’ to live a godly life. But you nearly got the better of him.”

“Susanna!” Hearing such talk, so private and unspeakable, made her face burn like never before. Oh, it was one thing to think such things, but never to speak them. Never to—

“Now I know you meant no harm by it, Lael. You merely wanted to look sightly and wear your fancy dress, same as me. It was Christmas, after all. But it seemed at times like it was more than he could bear.”

“You make it sound so . . .
wicked
.”

Susanna cracked a knowing smile. “I think he wanted to kiss you good and hard, is all.”

Lael turned away and looked out on the gentle swell of mountains without truly seeing them. In her most private thoughts, she’d stopped short of having Ian hold her . . . kiss her. Nay, that was not altogether true. Lately, on cold nights, she’d wondered how it would be to lay alongside him, to be warmed by him.

“I don’t know as a man can be in love—for sure and for certain in love—with more than one woman at a time. Will says it’s nigh impossible,” Susanna confided. “So I don’t know where that puts poor Olivia.”

Poor Olivia? Ian Justus in love with Lael Click?
Even the joining of those words, the very idea, seemed laughable. Susanna came and placed an arm around Lael’s shoulders. “You don’t have to say anything at all, Lael. I can just look at you and tell you love him right back. You might as well try hidin’ a light underneath a bushel basket.”

Lael sighed. There was no use pretending she didn’t, perplexed as she was. “So you think he knows too?”

“Nay, that’s the bewilderment of it. I don’t think he knows at all. I think he believes you’re still pinin’ for Simon.”

Or Captain Jack.

Dismayed, Lael looked down at her borrowed boots. Was this what he’d thought when she’d given him back the pearls? But there was still the matter of Olivia. They were more Olivia’s pearls than hers.

“Oh, Susanna.” Her voice was almost pleading in its sorrow. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know as you can do anything. Except pray.”

On New Year’s Day, Lael felt a despondency she’d never known. She rode back down the ridge behind Ian, with the mule and Tuck in tow. Neither of them spoke a word, but the silence between them was not burdensome.

All about them the snow lay melting under a January sun. Her breath came in ragged clouds on the crisp air, and although it was not bitter, she leaned into him as she’d done on Christmas Eve. Her arms were anchored firmly about his waist, and the big bay beneath them moved with an easy grace.

At the south fork of Cozy Creek, the trees thinned and provided them with a view of the river bottom below. In the distance, not far from the meandering Kentucke, was her cabin, crowning the rise and bordered by a bleak winter tracing of trees.

They halted, taking in the expansive sight, and his voice cut into the stillness. “Are you expecting company, Miss Click?”

The smile on her face, brought about by his teasing tone, faded as she caught sight of the cabin. Thick gray smoke plumed from its rock chimney and rolled toward the river, buffeted by a west wind. A tremor of alarm shot through her and she felt a fierce, protective rush toward her homeplace. In that moment she wondered how she could leave it, now or ever.

“Expecting trouble is more like it,” she replied, wondering at the gall of someone who would set up in her cabin while she was away, building such a fire as to burn the place down. And her rifle! She’d left it behind in its rightful place over the mantle, thinking it undisturbed. If anything should happen to her gun . . .

If it were a traveler put out by the storm, in want of a dry spot, she could understand. But travelers were few in winter, and by now, with the thaw, any such trespasser should have been well on his way.

By the time they reached the cabin, her dander was high. Without waiting for him to help her down, she slipped off the bay and made for the porch in her stocking feet, taking notice of the large, muddy footprints of someone who had gone before.

With Ian at her heels, she pushed open the cabin door. And there at the table, cleaning his rifle, sat Ransom.

Ransom Dunbar Click had come home. That first night he lay a considerable sum of money on the table from Neddy’s savings and divided it equally with her. When she protested, he said slowly and thoughtfully, “I reckon you earned it, seein’ Uncle Neddy like you did when nobody else would. Besides, he’d want you to have it.”

And so she tucked her portion away in her trunk, thinking of how it might carry her to Briar Hill come spring. But the money mattered little and by the second day was forgotten. What mattered was that Ransom was home—Ransom, who had grown so tall he had to stoop to enter the door frame, whose big boots now dwarfed her moccasins as they dried together by the fire, and whose appetite promised to keep her elbow deep in flour and meal as he ate his fill of bread and pudding and pie. And he was only fourteen.

That first night they sat up and talked long past midnight.

“When I got your letter about Uncle Neddy, I knew I’d best shuck off. But I had to study on things a while first,” he told her, depositing a small plug of tobacco in his jaw. “Turned out to be what I’d been waitin’ for, hatin’ Bardstown like I did.”

“I hardly recognized you, it’s been so long.”

“Too long. I ain’t no town-lover, that’s for sure. Bardstown was makin’ a hard man out of me. Ever spring I dreamed of settin’ out corn and tobacco and havin’ my own homeplace. But I couldn’t leave Ma, not till she was settled. When I got your letter and learned the facts about Neddy, I just had to come.”

Her smile was bright despite Ian’s simple good-bye on the doorstep and the hollowness she felt without him. “I’m glad you’ve come back, Ransom. You’ll be good company, truly.”

He looked about the tidy cabin, noting its clean spareness and the herbs that crowded the rafters. It might have been a man’s cabin, save the colorful quilt atop the corner bed and the rag rug at the washstand. A bunch of bittersweet graced the table.

“I misdoubted you could keep on here, being so lonesome and the like. But I done took a look around and things ain’t unsightly. You sure got a heap of firewood.”

“The wood’s not my doing,” she admitted, and told him of coming home and finding it split and stacked, as well as the fence mended and new shingles on the shed. She told him too about the burning of the barn and Hero McClary and how not a cinder had touched the cabin or the springhouse on that windless night. But she didn’t mention how the McClarys met their demise.

Despite his fatigue from travel, his eyes shone. “I been prayin’ the Lord would give you your daily provision and keep you from harm. I reckon He has.”

His words gave her a slight start, and she felt the boy before her was more stranger than brother. But the warmth of his manner and the openness of his speech drew her in. She studied him, trying to tease out what had changed about him, despite his being much the same. He was lean like Neddy and taller than she herself, and the winning smile that had been his in childhood was warm and unaltered, as was his shock of dark hair.

“You ain’t my baby brother no more, for sure and for certain,” Lael teased, lapsing into settlement speech.

With a grin, he leaned forward and spit into the fire, a gesture she had always disliked but one that oddly did not mar his charm. All at once he sobered and discarded the tobacco.

“I ain’t the same, Sister,” he said. “I died back there in Bards–town. Died to my trespasses and sins. You see, like it or not, I’m a believer.”

A believer.
What did it all mean? Lael recounted the number of believers she knew. Ian Justus. Will and Susanna. The mother of Sadie Floyd. And, in her quiet way, Ma Horn. And now, her own brother.

Truly, they needed a preacher in the settlement.