Silk and Stone (4 page)

He scowled. “Frannie, if I take you away from your family like this, they’ll say I didn’t have the guts to do right by you. They already think I’m after the Duke money.”

“I don’t need them. I don’t care if I ever see any of them again. I’ll write to them when it’s safe. After we’re married. They can’t do anything about it then.” She looked at him firmly. “I love you too much to risk losing you again. If you love me that much, then don’t you take the chance either.”

He pondered this in grim silence, then sighed and said, “Frannie, are you sure?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“I was sure the second I laid eyes on you. Still am. I’ll be good to you. I don’t have a bad temper, and I don’t drink, and I work hard, and—”

“I know.”

“But I don’t think we’ll ever be rich on a sergeant’s pay, Frannie.”

“I don’t like
rich
. In fact, I hate
rich.
”

“Don’t go crazy, now.”

“Crazy about you.”

“That’s good, then.” He stood and helped her up. They looked at each other in solemn consideration. “I wish we could have a wedding like this,” he said, nodding toward the house. “You deserve what your sister has.”

Frannie shuddered. “I hope not,” she answered. She grabbed his hand. They disappeared into the darkness, and she never looked back.

Sarah lay deeply entwined in Hugh’s arms, but even his warmth and the peaceful darkness of their bedroom couldn’t comfort her. She tried to concentrate on the sounds of the old comfortable log house—the soft creak of an oak limb against the second-story roof, the murmur of spring crickets outside the open window, the faint, tinny drone of Rachel Raincrow’s radio coming from the bedroom across the hall.

Hugh stroked her shoulder. Dr. Hugh Raincrow. What a lovely piece of work he was. There had been plenty of gossip when they married, lots of “He’s a credit to his race,
but
 …” talk, and she hadn’t ever listened. He loved her as much as she loved him, and the world was opening up for couples such as them. Camelot had arrived with the Kennedys.

Sarah curled closer to him, his bare thighs warm and hard under her leg, his chest rising and falling slowly under her palm. He stroked her hair, each soft caress absorbing her misery. She was thinking that there was one story in the history of Pandora that deserved special reverence: The friendship between the Vanderveers and the Raincrows, and the Pandora ruby. Two families, two cultures, one symbol of loyalty, stretching back more than 120 years. There might be no Raincrows left in Pandora if the Vanderveers hadn’t helped them hide when the army rounded up the Cherokees for removal.

The ruby had been a gift from the Raincrows for that friendship. Generations of Vanderveers had cherished the heirloom, and each passed it down to the next generation through the eldest daughter. Where there was no daughter, it had passed to a Vanderveer niece.

Next year, when she turned twenty-one, it should have come to her.

But not now.

Her thoughts turned to the woman who had appropriated
her brother—and her ruby. Alexandra Duke had more kin than a dog had fleas. The Dukes were a respectable-looking bunch: Sarah gave them that. They had money all right, a potful of it, but they were social outcasts, and they knew it. They liked to hint that they were distantly related to the tobacco-dynasty Dukes who’d endowed Duke University, but everyone knew that was just wishful thinking: This Duke clan had scratched its way upward in the textile mills, paying their workers slave wages for long hours at the looms, holding their people hostage during the hard years of the twenties and thirties. Some of the ugliest strikebusting in the history of the state had occurred at Duke mills.

Society didn’t forget stories about mill workers being beaten and threatened. To Sarah, like most self-sufficient people born and bred in the mountains, the idea of controlling other people’s lives, or being controlled, bespoke a sinister loss of grace.

Plus the Dukes were lowlanders, and that conveyed a lack of proven durability in the eyes of mountain people. Life in the rolling, accessible regions of the piedmont, with its big cities and industries, was easy and safe compared to the existences people carved out among mountain peaks and steep gorges. In every sense of the word, the Dukes were on their way up now. But she didn’t want her brother, Judge William Vanderveer, to be one of their ladders.

William was nearly twenty years older than she—shy around women, scholarly, infinitely strict but honorable. Their parents had died when she was a child; William had raised her like a father. William had put that responsibility ahead of his own social life, she realized sadly, and now, with her grown and married, he was desperate to make up for lost time. Too desperate.

Hugh’s deep, sympathetic voice distracted her. “Is the stone worth alienating yourself from your brother?”

Sarah sighed. “How can I face our children if I won’t fight for what’s theirs?”

“Sarah, when we have children, they’ll know what’s important, just like you ought to, and I know—”

“You ought to listen to your mother. She says it’s a medicine stone.”

“I know, I know.” Hugh kissed her, his breath feathering her face softly. He recited dryly, as if his mother were speaking, “And if I used real medicine instead of white medicine, I’d appreciate its power. But I can’t work both sides of the road. If I start chanting and tossing tobacco to the four winds whenever a patient walks into my office, I suspect I’ll lose my practice. And my medical licence. The old ways are useless, sweetheart. They won’t get the people anywhere.”

Because she was tired and depressed, she blurted out, “Is that why you married
me
? To get ahead?”

He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her. A trace of moonlight glittered harshly in his eyes. He was the most gentle, loving man in the world, slow to anger, quick to forgive. At the moment he was angry. “I lost a dozen white patients in town when I married you. And when I made my rounds at Cawatie after our wedding, one of the Keehotee boys slashed my tires.
Slashed my tires
, even though my brother died in the same platoon with their uncle in Korea. My own aunt Clara trotted out of her house and threw a bean dumpling at me.”

“You never told me,” Sarah whispered.

“Because I didn’t want to hurt you. When you hurt, I hurt. That’s why I don’t want you to brood over the damned ruby. I want you to forgive your brother and tolerate Alexandra, even if she’s a first-class—”

“Witch. She’s a witch.” Sarah hissed the words. “Your mother says witches are real, and I believe her.”

“She’s a horned toad, for all I care.”

“William’s the one who hurt me.” She swallowed hard, her throat on fire. “He was always so much older—after our parents died, he was … he’s more like a father than a brother.” Her voice rose. “She’s going to make him miserable, Hugh. He loves her and he can’t see that. And if I let her run over me too, I’ll be helping her ruin him. No. I won’t pretend it doesn’t matter.”

“I understand, but—”

“No, you don’t. I’m
pregnant.
”

After a startled moment, Hugh pulled her closer and kissed her. They murmured questions and answers to each other softly, joy mingled with the day’s poignant disappointment. For a while he thought she’d forgotten about her brother’s blind betrayal. Touches, kisses, small smiles, segued between them, and she seemed content. He drew her head into the crook of his neck and sighed happily.

But she breathed against his ear, “Your mother told my fortune. She says we’re having twins. That ruby is theirs too.”

Exasperation strained his serenity. “It’s just a rock when you get down to the facts. An expensive rock.”

Hugh moved over her, stroking her belly with one hand, then settling between her thighs when she shifted under his teasing fingers. Sarah shoved lightly at him. “What are you
doing
?”

“Paying a visit to our babies. Distracting their mama so they can get some sleep.” He brushed a kiss over her mouth. “Do you want their first words to be ‘Where’s my ruby?’ ”

“No.” Sarah put her arms around him and buried her face in the crook of his neck.
Yes
, she admitted silently.

Depending on which story a person liked best, their beloved North Carolina town had been named for a Greek myth or a local whore, or both.

Today she was inclined toward the Pandora whore story. It seemed appropriate, considering the woman her brother had just married.

Chapter
            Two
 

P
andora’s town limits encompassed most of a small plateau at almost precisely 5,280 feet above sea level—one mile high, in the tops of the Cawatie Mountains. The town had more than twice as much altitude as residents—maybe 2,000 people, and most of them scattered on tiny, secluded farms along the ridges and deep in the coves below town.

The earliest Scotch, Irish, and Dutch immigrants had been drawn to the misty, ancient mountains of western North Carolina by rumors of rubies and other precious gems mined by the Cherokees. The rumors were more than true. The newcomers plucked fine stones from the riverbanks, from the hillsides, from the ruts in deeply churned wagon roads. They riddled the mountains with mine shafts, looking for more. But the easiest pickings were taken within a generation, after bloody feuds over the mines.

When the mines played out, the hardiest survivors stayed on, independent and passionately devoted to a land of breathtaking beauty and isolation, of freedom.

The Indians were reduced to hiding, for some years, from federal troops. Those fugitives were all that remained, after thousands had been marched to the Indian Territory out west. The whites opened shop, built churches, farmed the creek valleys, and ran lumber mills supplied by an endless vista of virgin forest. The Cherokees—those who survived despite starvation and threats—did the same after the government granted them amnesty. Some intermarried with the newcomers, some withdrew bitterly to reservations, and others simply kept to themselves, clinging to pieces of land so rugged, no one would challenge them for it.

Clara Big Stick clung to traditions just as tenaciously.

The Raincrow babies were a matter of professional concern to Clara. As a medicine woman, it was her duty to give them the proper protection against evil after they entered the world, even if she disapproved of their parents’ mixed marriage. She was, after all, honor-bound to treat members of her own clan, which the Raincrow twins were, but only on a technicality.

Clara brooded over the ethical quandary as she followed Rachel Raincrow’s spry path up the brick steps of Pandora’s small hospital. Certainly she had an obligation to Rachel Raincrow—a respected elder, and her distant cousin—who had requested her services. She figured the matter of the babies’ clan would have to be accepted, problems and all. By rights they belonged to their mother’s clan, but because Hugh Raincrow had seen fit to marry a white woman, and whites had no clans, traditions would have to be juggled.

The spirits might not be entirely fooled, but some protection was better than none at all.

Short, sturdy, and strong—at forty, she was in the prime of her career—Clara easily shouldered a heavy woven bag filled with her materials. She cast dour looks at the squat little hospital’s lobby as Rachel Raincrow led her through, ignoring the curious stares of the nurses.
Sacred ceremonies could not be confined to impersonal places. White people were so ignorant.

“My son is not here right now,” Rachel whispered in Cherokee as they made their way through a maze of short hallways and then double doors marked
MATERNITY WARD
. “He went home to sleep. Sarah said we should come now. She knows this is important, and he doesn’t believe.”

Clara frowned thoughtfully. “She’s a wise woman, even if she’s not one of the people.” This fact reassured Clara. Surely the mother’s good heart would account for something.

They entered a small private room filled with flowers—that was a good sign—but smelling unpleasantly of useless things like antiseptic. Clara saw immediately she had her work cut out for her: Rachel’s freckled, red-haired daughter-in-law was lying in the bed, and looked none too well. This show of weakness might encourage bad spirits to waltz right in. “Sit up,” Clara told her, dropping her medicine bag into a chair and going to Sarah.