The Randolph Legacy (18 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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“Indeed,” he agreed. “And a healed leg would serve to make little Alice no longer think me a pirate, yes? You will intercede for me with Jordan Foster, then,
petit chou
?”
“Oui
,
mon
uncle!”
“Oncle,”
he corrected.
“Oncle.”
“Très bun.”
“Mama and Grandmama and Miss Judith will intercede as well.”
Ethan grinned. “No wonder the physician resisted coming to Windover so long. He does not stand a chance against my women.”
He plunged his arms through his trampled coatsleeves, as Betsy found his hat. Aaron approached, with Cavalier.
“Can’t run, even trot him, sir, ’specially not with Miss Betsy on with you,” the bondsman warned, frowning.
Ethan placed his good leg in the stirrup, then swung the lame one over. He stood poised above the saddle, waiting for Aaron to lift his niece aboard, then anchor him on the other side. He’d feel as secure as any two-legged horseman astride the mount then. He loved that feeling, the sheer physical pleasure of it.
But he sensed something wrong at once in Cavalier’s shaking head, the nervous back-and-forth dance his feet did.
“No. Wait,” he said, as the big man lifted his niece. But the words didn’t come fast enough. Betsy’s small weight landed on the saddle.
The horse reared. Betsy grabbed Ethan’s middle. He searched the ground for Aaron, but found only a blur of him as Cavalier bolted.
The horse leaped along the ledge where the trail led down to the salt marsh. Betsy screamed. Ethan tucked her head deeper. His good leg was buckling under the strain of their combined weights. He would go down. If Aaron didn’t catch her, he would take this child down with him. He pulled slightly on the reins and felt the horse’s pain. But there, Aaron’s powerful sprinting legs were close.
“Take my arm, Betsy,” Ethan coaxed the terrified girl. “Only my arm,
petit chou.”
He felt her grip ease from his middle and grasp his forearm. “Good, good,” he said. “There’s Aaron—see him?”
“Yes, but—”
“You must let go when I say, Elizabeth.”
He could not hold the reins and her at once, so he knew it would have to happen quickly. He lifted her over the saddle, and aimed for Aaron’s steady arms. “Now,” he called.
When Ethan’s strength finally failed and he landed alone in the saddle, Cavalier screamed as if burned to his veins. The horse leaped toward the ledge. Then he stopped, lowered his head. The reins tore through Ethan’s hands. He got a quick, confused vision of the deck of the
Standard.
He was falling. Falling as Fayette had fallen.
A gift came after the terror: a fleeting feeling of flight. It was exciting, seductive. Ethan wanted it to last forever. He heard something rip,
felt the assault of the ground spoiling it all. Still, as the darkness came, he struggled to form the thought.
The pain’s not in the fall, but in the landing
. And the fall was Judith’s word:
Wondrous.
“Uncle Ethan?”
He had to open his eyes, it was a little girl—the cabbage or the gull or the one who thought him a pirate. She called again. He saw only the dense blackness of his own eyelashes. He struggled to untangle them. There. The cabbage, her pretty dress torn. He smiled. “Aaron caught you,
petit chou?”
he asked.
She nodded.
“Where is he?”
“Here, master.” Aaron’s voice, from his other side.
“You’re bleeding,” Betsy cried softly.
Yes, he felt the flow from his scalp, looked at his hand, drenched red where it hovered, close by. Frightening the child. “It is not so bad. Head wounds bleed more. Did your mother never tell you this?”
“My papa did once, when Alice cut her lip.”
“You see? I shall have a fancy scar and you will tell the story of our wild ride ever after, yes?”
He turned his head, looking for Aaron, and felt a searing wave of pain. His garbled struggle not to cry out made the small face disappear. When it washed back, Aaron was with her, holding a wet neckerchief to Ethan’s head and crooning in African cadences.
“Come back, young master. There. Stay with us now. We likes your talk, keep talking.”
“Under the saddle,” Ethan said, remembering the riderless horse.
“Cavalier’s saddle, sir?”
“Yes. Sharp, hurting. Help him, Aaron.”
“I will, sir,” he promised.
A filmy vision overlapped the reality that was his niece and Aaron tending him. “Judith?” he whispered.
“You wants your lady, sir?”
“Yes. She is in Sally’s flower garden, with the doctor.” He released the small fingers, hoping he hadn’t squeezed them too hard. “Go with Aaron, Betsy,” he told her.
“But—”
“I’ll be all right. Go on.”
He felt their fading steps, heard the bondsman’s deep, melodious bass voice answering Betsy’s protests. “No, he ain’t alone, child! He got all them ragged black angels of his lookin’ after him whilst we fetch the doctor and Miss Judith.”
Aaron saw them too, then? Of course. He’d felt them before, when they were on board the
Standard
, hadn’t he? The filmy apparitions turned into seabirds, squawking, curious. He was Washington again, and ravished by longing for the open sea. He didn’t want to die here. He wanted the ocean to take him as it did Fayette. How far away was the ocean?
He felt his head. Under the cold handkerchief the wound’s flow was down to a trickle. Slowly, he rose to his elbows, looked down. Pain. The worst pain. There. He yanked Aaron’s coat back.
“Mon … dieu.”
He didn’t think his lame leg’s ugliness still had the power to shock him. But the sight of the ripped, blood-soaked trousers, the muscle and frayed cartilage protruding, made the red wine, the bread and cheese he’d eaten with Judith on the quilt come up his throat. It spilled over his chin and across his opened shirt.
Initials were there, on the shirt’s hem. He would not die nameless this time. Ethan Randolph of Windover, on the James River in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the United States of America. Who was that? A boy, who wrote letters to his mother, his sister, that’s all. He’d died long ago. It didn’t matter anymore. He was Washington. Who would sew him into his hammock, who would pierce the cartilage of his nose? That didn’t matter, either. His hands found the root of a scrub pine. He began to pull himself toward the sea.
—
Where are you going, my friend?
Ethan couldn’t think of an answer that would not offend Fayette’s rational mind, so he just watched his face, gloriously happy to be seeing him again. “I’m lost here, Fayette,” he finally whispered.
The heel of his friend’s hand, pressing into the head wound, smelled of the depths of the sea.
—
You have hit that stubborn skull hard enough this time. Had I known this, I would have thrown you from the mizzenmast long ago and saved my poor back, yes?
Ethan reached out.
—
Stay still now, so they can find you
, Fayette instructed.
Ethan heard voices in the distance. He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Don’t go,” he implored.
—
I am here,
Fayette promised, before his face turned into Jordan Foster’s.
Ethan grabbed his waistcoat, fisted it. He growled back the pain. “You have no choice now,” he said.
“You have not provided the best of conditions.”
“The sea heals.”
“Broken skulls? Compound fractures?”
“Everything. You helped the soldiers. In the war? The one I missed? You have seen the likes of me before.”
Jordan Foster shook his head. “I’ve never seen the likes of you.”
The doctor’s face swam out of focus. “Don’t take my leg,” Ethan charged, while he still had a voice, a grip.
Roses. Intense, from her moist places, where she was sweating. Judith. “Ethan. Behave yourself,” she commanded. “Dr. Foster won’t do anything without telling you first. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” He heard the doctor echo his voice.
Ethan watched Jordan Foster open his portable chest and hand Judith an ugly-looking root. “Between his teeth, Miss Mercer,” he instructed, “so he does not bite off that brazen tongue while we reduce the fracture.” The root did not taste ugly; it tasted of licorice. The physician took Ethan’s face. “It will be very painful, for a moment. But after, you will feel much better, I promise.”
Ethan nodded, anchoring his eyes on Judith’s face. Aaron gently shifted him to his side. Micah and Elwood flexed Ethan’s thigh and knee. The doctor was stationed at his ankle. Ethan knew which pair of hands were Jordan Foster’s. Long, experienced. As the men reined him, those hands did their work. Pulled. Unbearable pain. His teeth ground into the root.
Relief. Better. He did feel better, Ethan wanted to tell the doctor’s anxious eyes. But the thicket of lashes descended again.
“Ethan?”
He heard, but couldn’t summon the strength to answer, to open his eyes. He felt Judith gently loosen his jaw’s hold, remove the root.
“I’m going to do it now, while he’s fainted.”
But he wasn’t fainted, he wanted to tell them, as he felt Judith’s warmth slip away. Aaron took her place. Then the doctor’s long hands again, at his ankle, turning, turning. Snap. His bones, breaking. He bolted, fighting Aaron’s hold, and heard Dr. Foster’s sharp surprise.
“Good God, I thought—”
“Don’t stop.”
“Ethan—”
“Finish!”
Was this what he’d begged for? Ethan clenched his teeth together, but the cry escaped. A million more cracks echoed inside his head before the darkness finally came.
 
 
T
hen he was sailing the James, his head in Judith’s lap. Windover’s slaves stood onshore, their lanterns held high, singing softly, as their ancestors sang for him in the bowels of the
Standard
.
Why were they so good to him? He tried to ask Judith again, but heard only a guttural moan from the cloth remnant in his mouth. Aaron poured something into it. Whiskey. American whiskey, made from corn. Bourbon. It tasted like liquid fire at first, then it eased the edges of the glaring pain. It let him see that Judith’s eyes were the pale green of the surrounding marsh, like the mermaid’s he’d carved on the bow of the
Survivor.
His finger found her rolled-up sleeve, tugged for her attention. She took the cloth from his mouth. He caught her scent.
“Lemons,” he murmured. “Just how close has this gotten to you, mistress?”
Silence. Her brow arched. “Closer than thee has. Yet,” she parried back at him.
Laughter. Even from the doctor this time.
His mother and sister waited at the dock. Clayton, too, with the unfamiliar scent of gunpowder about him. How was it dark so quickly? Anne Randolph had forgotten her shawl. “Mother,” Ethan tried to reprimand, “it’s too cold for—”
“My son is cold!” she shouted, and within a breath a patched slave’s coat was draping his chest. Too much movement. And bourbon. He closed his eyes.
He caught the scent of books, heard the fire’s crackle. The physician’s calm voice called again. “Ethan. See where you are?”
“How did the bed get in the library?”
“Your mother’s idea.”
She came into view over the doctor’s shoulder, her eyes red, swollen, but her beautiful voice clear. “You sleep here more often than in your room, don’t you? Now you can have your books close. And Aaron will not have to climb the stairs all day with volumes.”
“You are thoughtful toward us both,
madame.”
Anne Randolph sat on the bed, touched his soiled shirtfront with a mother’s tenderness.
“Ruined,” he apologized.
“We’ll wash it. Won’t we, Sally?”
Together the two women, the mother and sister of that boy, removed his foul coat, unbuttoned and slipped off the silk waistcoat. He didn’t know them, he knew only Judith. Where had Judith gone? They began to remove his shirt. No, only Judith. There was something under it. Something they should not see, the mother, the sister. But the bourbon made his mind slow. “Don’t,” he warned, too late.
They stared at the diamond-patterned scars of his punishment. “Good God,” Anne Randolph whispered.
“What did I do wrong?” the boy inside him asked her.
“No-nothing,” she assured him. She was the wrong person to ask. Her affection for her son was free. She would love him no matter what he’d done.
 
 
J
udith shook her head at Phoebe’s request to relieve her. She would not let any crowd her away from him. She had her lifetime to sleep. Now, on this third day after the fall, Ethan’s grip on her hand was strong, secure, as Dr. Foster applied the dressing to his leg wound.
“Tighter,” Ethan urged.
Jordan Foster looked exhausted, out of patience with him. “Are you still telling me my business?” he demanded.
“When first it broke, Fayette said that the ship’s-surgeon’s bandage was too loose. There was fresh bleeding, displaced bones. Displaced bones grew together, and I went lame. Tell him, Judith.”
“Judith doesn’t have to tell me anything. I have eyes!”
“I only meant—”
“Listen to me. If the dressings are too tight, blood is decreased, and will increase inflammation, possibly excite a fever, leading to—”
“Tighter,” Ethan cajoled again, smiling. “The head wound will kill me first, I promise. Nobody will say it was your fault, if it’s the head wound, yes? ‘He was a little crazy already,’ they’ll say. ‘Did not even know his own name.’ Your reputation will remain spotless. My gift to you, Doctor, for all your trouble. An intact reputation.”
“You are too kind,” Jordan Foster whispered, without looking up.
Ethan smiled. “Not at all, sir.”
The doctor completed the dressing in silence, then plunged past Aaron and Betsy on his way through the room cast in twilight. Ethan turned to Judith.
“Am I so hard on him?”
“He’s worried about you. And so tired.”
“Of course. I’m an idiot. Find him, Judith. Tell him I’m sorry. Make him sleep.”
Judith hesitated. He looked so pale. Or perhaps it was only her fear, and the descending night?
“Go on, go on!” he urged impatiently. “Aaron and Betsy remain here, my keepers. They will see I don’t go dancing!”
She squeezed his hand. It was moist, cold. Judith put down her sewing. “I’m going.” She frowned. “Pest.”
 
 
E
than hoped Judith would find the doctor. She would say his apology better. Jordan Foster would listen to her and rest. Perhaps that would restore his humor, if the blasted man had any humor. Ethan watched the shadows play on the works of Pope, Milton. A small girl appeared, gently lifting the hair from his forehead.
“It will be a lovely scar, Uncle Ethan,” she told him. “Just as you said. Dr. Foster makes stitches as even as your own on the masts of our boats.”
“Ships,” he corrected her.
She giggled behind her hand. “Ships,” she said.
How he loved this child. What was her name? Whose child was she? He couldn’t think. He couldn’t think at all well suddenly. “I am so …” He couldn’t remember the word.
“Thirsty?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll call Aaron. He’s just by the window.”
The black man held his neck gently. Once he’d poured the contents of the cup down his throat, his large, work-callused hands wiped Ethan’s mouth with linen, set his head back in the pillows. What did this man do with those hands? Boots. He made shoes and boots, the boots he’d gone to sea wearing. Or was that a dream, or a story the boy with his face once told him? That boy. What was his name? No, it wasn’t there, in his head. But there was another name. Of another boy, who looked like this man.

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