Merline Lovelace (21 page)

Unwrapping the oilskin, Barbara extracted the document and tore it into tiny pieces. She dropped the bits into the slop bucket and watched them settle to the bottom before crawling back to the bunk.

“Hush,” she murmured to her restless, delirious patient. “Hush, Zach. I’m here.”

Once more she dipped the rag in seawater and wrung it out. The bitter irony of her actions didn’t escape her. Not three weeks ago, Zach had bathed her face and held her while she retched and heaved. She’d been certain she was dying and in her darkest moments had wanted only to end the agony.

Now Zach lay dying. She could shriek at Harry and deny it all she wished, but she couldn’t shut out the sight of that horrific smear of black pitch. The skin around it was burned and seared. Blood still seeped from under the tar.

“I’m here, my darling.” Gently, she drew the damp cloth over his face. “I’m with you.”

The voices drifted in and out of Zach’s head.

He heard them above the burning agony that consumed him. Clung to them through the darkness that spun madly, dragging him into its vortex.

One voice returned again and again. Always calm. Always gentle. With it came the blessed relief of a damp cloth moving over his burning body and a few drops of water or rum dribbled onto his parched lips.

Every once in a while he could see the face that went with the voice. In his most agonized moments, it was that of a golden-haired angel, soothing him, smiling at him. In his rare, all too brief moments of lucidity, it was that of a hollow-eyed, tangled-haired hag.

There were other voices, too. Some raised in excitement. Some in anger. Some with bluff, hearty tones he almost recognized. He tried to make out the words, but the mere effort sent waves of fire leaping up his back to eat at his brain.

The hag was there the next time he fought his way out of the flames. He could see her sagging against his bunk, one arm curled under her head, her hair straggling over her elbow. He lay still, breathing as shallowly as possible, and studied the face just inches from his own.

Slowly the tired, wan face took on the features of the woman who’d come to both bedevil and bedazzle him.

How long had she sprawled like that? How long had he? Zach couldn’t separate the hours from the days. Not that it mattered. Whatever time he had left was slipping away as steadily as his strength.

He was a solider. Despite the pain clouding his mind, he understood why he was lying flat on his face, his guts afire. He’d taken a ball to the back. He didn’t know what the bullet had hit or how much blood he’d lost, but the fact that he couldn’t so much as lift his head told him all he needed to know.

“Bar…bara.”

The mere effort of whispering her name sent black waves sweeping over him. He longed to let them take him, to sink back into the darkness forever. Sweat beaded on his temples as he forced another hoarse whisper.

“Barbara.”

She jerked her head up, her eyes wild and staring.

“Dear God! You’re awake!”

She flopped onto her knees and scrabbled for something on the floor. A crudely fashioned rag teat, Zach saw, sopping with some liquid. She held it to his lips, but he didn’t have the strength to suckle.

“Just a few drops,” she begged. “There’s sugar in it, and a powder Throckmorton swears cures every one of his crew’s ills.”

“Fetch…him.”

“The captain?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

He couldn’t explain. He didn’t have the time or the endurance.

“And…another,” he got out through gritted teeth. “To serve…as witness.”

The blood drained from her face. She stared at him with wide, haunted eyes before struggling to her feet.

“I’ll fetch Throckmorton and one of the crew straightaway. Hang on, Zach. Just hang on.”

Barbara stumbled into the passageway. She knew why he wanted the captain. He’d guessed he was dying. He wanted to make a last will and testament, with a witness to swear to it. Someone he trusted. Someone other than her.

Her heart as heavy as stone, she brought Throckmorton and his mate back with her. They crowded into the small cabin. Barbara pressed her back to the bulkhead as Throckmorton bent over Zach.

“I’m here, Morgan. Want me to hear your will, do you?”

“Not…will.” Zach raised his head a few, tortured inches. “Marry Barbara…and me.”

Throckmorton’s jaw dropped. Barbara felt her own sag in sheer astonishment.

The captain recovered from his shock first. “Here now! I never married no one afore, not even the three women what call themselves my wife. And if there’s anything resembling a Bible aboard this vessel, I’ll eat my vest.”

“You’re…captain. Just say…words.”

“No, Zach!” Barbara dropped down beside him. “You don’t have the strength for this.”

He drew in a shallow breath and let it out in slow, agonized pants.

“Won’t be…bas…tard.”

“What?”

She could barely hear the mumbled words. She stooped closer, her ear almost to his mouth.

“The…child. Not…bas…tard.”

Barbara Chamberlain and Zachariah Morgan were married aboard the sloop
Chesapeake
as it pitched and rolled through the Atlantic.

Word of the ceremony had raced through the boat like St. Elmo’s fire. Every member of the crew except the watch crowded the passageway outside the cabin, tossing wagers back and forth as to whether the groom would cock up his toes before old Jiggs figured out what words to say.

The bride’s brother shouldered his way into the cabin as well. Arms folded, eyes alight with speculation, he watched the proceedings with something that could have been a smile playing about his mouth.

To the intense delight of those who’d wagered on him and the bitter disappointment of those who’d bet against him, Zach survived the ceremony. Throckmorton left the cabin sweating from the ordeal of finding words with a matrimonial ring to them. Once in the companionway, he and his second in command exchanged glances.

“You’d best dig some canvas from the sail locker,” the one-eyed captain advised. “You’ll need to start sewing a shroud.”

L
ooking back, Barbara could never quite pinpoint the hour or the day she began to believe Zach would survive his horrific wound. Certainly not while the
Chesapeake
cut like a blade through the green waters of the Atlantic. Nor during those first hellish days in Charleston, which Captain Throckmorton had made for with all speed.

Harry took rooms for them in the city and Barbara hired a succession of surgeons to attend Zach. The physicians’ admission they could do nothing for him sent her tentative hopes plummeting. Zach’s bad-tempered snarl when the last one poked and prodded his wound set them soaring again.

Every day she forced liquids down his throat. Every night she stretched out on a pallet beside him.
As December gave way to January, the festering skin of his back began to heal.

Barbara barely had time to exult over her patient’s slowly improving condition before he began to test both his fragile strength and her threadbare nerves. Ignoring her strenuous objections and the grinding pain in his back, he attempted to sit up…and promptly pitched over onto his face.

When he regained consciousness, he began to push himself mercilessly. He would sweat and strain and exhaust himself trying to force his lower body to move. Barbara hovered over him until he snarled at her, too, and told her to get out. Harry stalked into Zack’s room, then, and slammed the door shut behind him.

Barbara didn’t know what was said. She suspected she never would. But Harry emerged with fire in his eyes and Zach’s face was masked with fury when she reentered the sickroom. Thinking he wished for someone other than a Chamberlain to attend him, she offered to write his parents and advise them of his condition.

Zach almost bit her head off. “No!”

“They should know about the injury to your spine.”

And about his marriage. Although both she and Zach knew the arrangement to be temporary, she suspected Louise Morgan would not take the news well.

“There’s no need to worry them,” Zach growled. “When we’re ready to start back to Indian Country, I’ll write to tell them we’re coming home.”

Home.

She refused to let the word unsettle her, but the bargain she’d struck with Zach weighed more heavily on her mind with each passing day. He’d held to his promise to help free Harry. She’d hold to hers and return to Indian Country until the babe now swelling her belly was born.

After that…

She and Harry would go the way they always had, she supposed. Without her baby. In her heart of hearts Barbara knew the child would be better off with the Morgans, raised in a home filled with love and laughter. Yet the idea of walking away from Zach and her child filled her with almost as much dismay as the thought of returning to her harum-scarum life with her brother.

Bit by bit, Zach built up his strength. By early February, he’d regained some use of his lower limbs and could drag himself across the floor. By the end of the month, when he, Barbara and Harry boarded the train that would take them from Charleston to New Orleans, he could stump along on crutches.

Midway through the steamboat trip upriver from New Orleans, Zach tossed the crutches overboard and began to shuffle with a cane. Despite his best ef
forts, though, he still couldn’t manage the steep gangplank. At each stop, he remained on board rather than submit to the indignity of being carried off the boat on a crewman’s back.

So when the
Memphis Wheeler
steamed up the Grand River and arrived at Fort Gibson the first week in March, Barbara made her way down the gangplank on Harry’s arm. Her bonnet strings blew about her face as she stepped onto the rock shelf that constituted the fort’s riverboat landing.

The outpost looked little different from the first time she’d seen it five months ago. Fingers of dirty snow lay in the shadows of the palisade walls and scattered outbuildings, but tender green shoots pushed up through the parade ground. Soldiers detailed to garden duty hacked at the earth with long-handled hoes. Others hewed logs or chinked mud as part of the ever-constant task of maintaining structures at the mercy of rain and rot.

But it was the group in civilian dress waiting at the landing that drew Barbara’s intent gaze. Her fingers dug into Harry’s sleeve.

“There they are.”

His glance swept the small group. “Well, well,” he murmured. “So those are the Morgans of Indian Country.”

They were all there. Every member of the family had turned out in response to Zach’s letter advising them he’d been injured and was coming home. Dan
iel Morgan standing as tall and rigid as an oak. Louise Chartier Morgan, her skin stretched taut across her high cheekbones. Zach’s sisters and young Theo, looking nervous and excited. And Hattie. Even Hattie had turned out to greet her wounded hero.

Fighting the cowardly urge to turn around and dash back up the gangplank, Barbara loosened her hold on Harry’s arm. She’d come this far. She’d not turn tail and run now. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she stepped forward.

Louise disdained any words of greeting. “Where is my son?”

“They’ll bring him down after the rest of the passengers disembark.”

Her narrowed gaze burned into Barbara. “There is a legend, one the old people still sing of. It speaks of a blue-eyed maiden who brings calamities on her people. The first time I see you, I think of this legend and my heart tells me disaster walks with you.”

“Your heart didn’t lie to you.”

“As you did.”

“As I did.”

Louise’s gaze dropped to the swell of Barbara’s belly, barely visible beneath her coat.

“Is that, too, a lie?”

“The child is Zach’s. Whether you…or anyone else…choose to believe so matters not to me.”

They might have been alone amid the bustle that came with a steamboat docking. Passengers streamed
past. Mules hitched to the drays waiting to haul military supplies and cargo shifted in their harnesses. Neither woman paid the slightest heed to the milling crowd.

“You say it matters not what we believe. Why have you come back to Indian Country, then?”

“I made a promise to your son.”

“Pah!” Scorn flashed in the older woman’s eyes. “Promises from one such as you are written on the wind.”

Scowling, Harry stepped forward. “I must ask you to watch how you speak to my sister, Madam Chartier.”

“The name’s Morgan,” Daniel drawled, laying a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “And I would advise
you
to have a care how you speak to her, sir.”

The two men sized each other up. Harry had regained weight in the past three months. He’d also purchased an entire wardrobe from the funds Zach had provided Barbara that last fateful morning in Bermuda. A beaver top hat now crowned his shining gold locks, and snowy linen circled his throat. With his gleaming boots and malacca cane, he looked every bit the English gentleman.

How strange, Barbara thought. Harry carried a title and an air of sophisticated assurance, yet Daniel Morgan seemed so much more the man. His confidence came from someplace deep inside him, and his chiseled features were stamped with the mark of
this vast, rugged land. So like his son’s, she thought with a little ache.

“I should like to make my brother known to you,” she said quietly. “Harry, this is Zach’s father, Daniel Morgan, and his mother, Louise Chartier Morgan. They were kind enough to—”

“There he is! There’s Zach.”

Vera’s cry wrenched them all around. A vise tightened around Barbara’s heart as a uniformed figure shuffled out of the shadows cast by the upper deck. Leaning heavily on a knobby oak cane, Zach approached the gangplank. Two burly crewmen stepped forward and gripped each other’s wrists. With the cautious movements of an old man, her husband lowered himself into the cradle of their arms.

Louise’s breath rattled. Daniel’s jaw worked. Barbara understood their anguish.

“The bullet lodged in his spine,” she explained softly.

Zach had informed them by letter that he’d taken a ball in the back, but had been purposely vague as to the circumstances. He could hardly put into writing the fact that he’d assisted a convicted felon to escape.

Nor would Barbara or Harry allude to the circumstances. It served them best, after all, to let the world believe Zach had negotiated Harry’s release and suffered an unfortunate accident in the process.

“He doesn’t like to have a fuss made over him,” she told the Morgans. “It’s best to let him get his feet under him before you…”

Louise whirled on her. “Do not
dare
to tell me what is best for my son.”

Rushing by, the older woman made for the gangplank. Her husband followed, and the rest of his family flocked after him. Hattie cast a look brimming with hate at Barbara and went with them.

The Chamberlains stood alone. As they always had.

They remained apart while the family crowded around Zach. Barbara could share vicariously in their joy and tears. And hold her breath, as they did, when he pushed unsteadily to his feet. But only she knew the agony it caused him to bring his shoulders back and straighten his spine. She admired his courage even as she cursed his soldier’s stubbornness.

Chewing on the inside of her cheek, she said nothing when little Sarah threw herself at Zach and wrapped her chubby arms around his left leg. Nor did she comment when Theo rebuked his sister and yanked her roughly away. When she saw sweat begin to bead on Zach’s temple, however, she knew it was time to speak out.

“Have you all quite finished?” She made a show of fluffing up her coat collar. “I should like to get out of the chill.”

The relief that flitted across Zach’s face more than made up for Louise’s furious sputter and Hattie’s malevolent glare.

“Shall we take this homecoming celebration inside?” Zach suggested. “I don’t want to keep my wife standing about in the cold.”

“Wife!”

Louise spit the word as if it were venom, but Daniel intervened before she could voice her obvious opinion of the union between her son and the woman who’d betrayed him time and again. He hadn’t missed the worry Barbara tried to disguise behind her cool facade. His keen eyes had noted as well the relief buried in his son’s response. Whatever else Daniel might think of this unlikely match, it was now Zach’s business.

“Barbara is breeding,” he reminded his wife. “It won’t do to keep her on her feet too long.”

“Ha! You say this, yet you trekked through the wilderness beside me right up to the moment of Zach’s birth.”

“As I recall, you gave me no choice. You were determined your son would draw his first breath here, in Indian Country.”

Louise had no argument for that. Scowling, she yielded the ground to her husband. Daniel accepted her acquiescence with a nod and turned to his son.

“I know you can’t ride…”

“Yet.”

“I know you can’t ride
yet,
so I padded the wagon bed with straw and blankets. I’ll try not to jostle you too much on the way home.”

Leaning heavily on his cane, Zach shook his head. “I’m not going back to Morgan’s Falls.”

“What’s this?”

“I’ve used up all my furlough time and then some. I’m reporting back to duty.”

“I’m sure Colonel Arbuckle will grant you sick leave.”

“I’m sure he would, sir, but the long and the short of it is that I promised President Jackson I’d help train the new regiment of dragoons.”

“Did you now?”

“I spoke with him about it in Washington. He promised me a captaincy.” A smile worked its way through the lines of pain grooving Zach’s mouth. “I’m thinking the new regiment will also need mounts. Mounts bearing the Morgan brand.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” Daniel replied.

Louise threw up her hands. “This is beyond anything foolish! Zach can barely stand, yet already the two of you speak of horses and drilling a troop of soldiers.”

“I may not be able to ride—
yet
—but I can certainly scribble out training manuals and equipment requirements for the new regiment.”

“Pah!” Louise took out her frustration on her husband. “He is as pigheaded as you, this one.”

“Do you think so? Seems to me he takes after his dam in that regard.”

Barbara couldn’t imagine a more reluctant ally, but Zach’s mother managed to swallow her enmity long enough to appeal to her.

“Tell him he must not do this.”

“I’m afraid you fit the peg in the right hole. He is, indeed, pigheaded. He refuses to listen to me on this matter, either.”

Hattie had been standing mute to this point. Tugging on a strand of her brown hair, she astonished everyone by voicing an opinion.

“I think Zach has the right of it. He should remain here at Fort Gibson. President Jackson’s done named Colonel Henry Dodge commander of the new regiment. The colonel could be making his way to Fort Gibson any day now.”

Zach’s eyebrows soared. “Where did you hear that?”

“At John Stallworth’s taproom. I hired on there after I got back to Fort Gibson.”

While she waited for Zach to return, Barbara guessed. She didn’t know what he’d told the maid when he’d bundled her aboard a stage in Washington, but two things were now painfully obvious. Hattie’s feelings for the man who’d rescued her from her brutish master had progressed far beyond hero worship. Her feelings for her former mistress, on the other hand, now bordered on hate. Hattie blamed Barbara for the bullet now lodged in Zach’s spine, as did his family.

They couldn’t blame her more than she blamed herself.

With a disgusted shake of her head, Louise gave up hope of dissuading her son. “You’re set on staying at Fort Gibson, then?”

“I am.”

Lips pursed, she turned to Barbara. “What of you and your brother? Do you return to Morgan’s Falls with us?”

Harry replied with a short bow. “I thank you, but I’m heading back to New Orleans on the next steamboat.”

His mocking eyes met Barbara’s. She’d made Harry
swear
he wouldn’t use either her marriage or her child to extort money from the Morgans. They’d paid for his freedom. Zach had nearly died achieving it. That was enough. More than enough.

With great reluctance, Harry had agreed. It went against his grain to let such plump pockets go unpicked, but he’d used their brief stopover in New Orleans to scout out that bustling city. He’d already set his sights on larger, more lucrative marks.