Springwater Seasons

by Linda Lael Miller

  She clapped her hands together twice, and sharply. “That will be enough giggling and talking!” she said, in her best schoolmarm tones.

  Marcus Kildare waved one hand in the air, and Rachel called on him to speak, even though she knew he was up to something. “Emma says she’s going to get a baby brother or sister soon. Is that true?”

  Emma folded her arms and lifted her chin, her eyes bright with certainty.

  Rachel felt color flood her face, but she did not allow her shoulders to droop, nor did she avert her gaze. As it happened, she suspected that she was already in the family way, but she had told no one but Trey and June-bug. The physical part of her marriage was intense, but Emma couldn’t have known that, since she was staying with the McCaffreys until the mail-order house arrived and was set up.

  “Mr. Hargreaves and I hope to have a child soon, yes.”

  Emma looked vindicated. She turned to Marcus Kildare and put out her tongue. He responded in kind.

  “Enough,” Rachel said. “We are here to learn.” With that, she began her first day of classes. When school let out at three o’clock, she made a point of not hurrying across the street and around to the rear door of the Brimstone Saloon, lest that raise undue speculation.

  Trey was standing at the stove when she came in, sipping coffee, and he’d already turned the bedclothes back. “Hello, Mrs. Hargreaves,” he said. “How was your day?”

  Rachel closed the door and lowered the latch. “Long,” she answered, but she wasn’t the least bit tired and they both knew it. She started to undress, but Trey crossed the room and stopped her, taking both her wrists in his hands and bending his head to kiss her. It was a ravenous exchange, no tamer on Rachel’s part than his.

  “Just let me get out of these clothes,” she murmured, barely able to speak, when he withdrew his mouth.

  “No,” he said, and raised her skirts to unfasten her drawers and peel them down over her hips. She stepped out of them, never looking away from his eyes, and he sat down and drew her with him, causing her to sit astraddle of him. She flung back her head in an agony of exultation when he unfastened his trousers and then entered her, filled her.

  He opened her bodice then, to tongue and suckle her breasts, all the while raising and lowering her along the length of him, his hands firm and strong on her hips. They climaxed together, and Rachel fell forward, to let her head rest against his shoulder. She could still feel him pulsing within her.

  “How long can we keep this up?” she asked, when she could manage even those simple words.

  “Oh,” he drawled, “for a long, long time, Mrs. Hargreaves. Maybe forever.” With that, he stood, carried her to the bed, and made love to her again, even more thoroughly than before, and far more slowly.

  Neither of them heard the stagecoach thundering into town, right on schedule, the driver shouting, the hooves of the horses pounding on the hard ground, the wheels squeaking as if all the demons of hell were in close pursuit. They had other concerns, Mr. and Mrs. Trey Hargreaves, and for them, the outside world was a very distant place.

  Savannah

  For Kate Collins,

  always gentle, always sweet, always there.

  Thanks.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Summer 1875

  THE GIRL MOANING on the opposite stagecoach seat was painfully young, by Savannah’s astute reckoning, not more than seventeen. She was probably very pretty under normal circumstances, with her thick chestnut-colored hair and wide-set violet eyes, but for now, with her belly swollen nearly to the bursting point under the front of that tattered calico dress, and her face contorted in an agonizing effort not to scream, she just looked small and scared and very much alone.

  Savannah nudged the dark-haired, beard-stubbled man slouched on the seat beside her, gazing out the window as if he were trying to will himself away to someplace far from the interior of that smotheringly hot, cramped, and bouncing stagecoach. He wasn’t much past thirty, but he might have been Methuselah’s older brother if you went by the look in his eyes. “Do something,” she commanded, in an impatient whisper. She knew he was a doctor of some sort, for all that he’d spent most of his time in the smokier recesses of the Hell-bent Saloon, having turned up in Choteau a week or so before. He’d promptly lost his horse in a faro game, and Savannah had taken it as a bad omen when he’d suddenly boarded that same stage. She’d planned on having it to herself, at least as far as Springwater station.

  He smelled of whiskey, old cigar smoke, and a souldeep sorrow, his dark hair was rumpled, and he was sorely in need of a shave, as well as clean clothes, a decent meal or two, and a good night’s sleep. He’d taken the seat across from Savannah and kept his thoughts to himself, at least until the driver had stopped the rig somewhere along the trail—quite literally in the middle of nowhere—to pick up the pregnant girl. He’d moved to Savannah’s side then, with a desultory sort of courtesy, to make room for the newcomer.

  Savannah nudged him again, for she was used to having her orders obeyed, and promptly. “Did you hear me?” she whispered, though there was, of course, no hope that the girl wouldn’t hear as well, jammed in knee-to-knee with her fellow passengers the way she was. “This child needs your help!”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor,” he ground out, with a long breath. He carried a time-beaten medical bag at his feet, his only visible baggage, a flag of his profession, though his clothes were sorry indeed—scuffed boots, Army issue no doubt, dark trousers worn to a shine, a once-white shirt of good linen, and black leather suspenders. He had especially fine teeth, Savannah noticed, for the first time, and, under all that self-absorption and debauchery, his features were aristocratic ones, finely carved. His jawline was strong and square, his mouth sensual and expressive.

  “I don’t care if you’re a horse doctor,” Savannah snapped back, ready to elbow him again, and with a lot more force, if necessary. In fact, she was quite prepared to open her beaded drawstring bag and ferret out her derringer, should matters come to such a pass, and insist that he do his duty as a physician. “Either you look after this girl or you’ll have me to deal with.”

  “She’s going to have a baby,” he answered, as though this clever diagnosis should suffice to settle the entire matter once and for all.

  Savannah might have struck him with her derringer-weighted bag, if there hadn’t been such a dire need for him to remain conscious. “Jupiter and Zeus,” she swore, “any fool could see that!” She paused, trying for a semblance of diplomacy. “She needs some help getting it done, Doc. And we’re all she’s got at the moment. You and me.”

  The girl sank her teeth into her lower lip, gasping and clutching her protruding stomach with a pair of grubby hands. She looked as though she’d just come from weeding some vegetable patch or mucking out a pigpen, and she didn’t smell a whole lot better.

  The doctor sighed and sat forward. “What’s your name?” he asked, with a sort of gruff gentleness that raised Savannah’s opinion of him, though only a little, and briefly.

  “Mir-Miranda,” she said. “Miranda Leebrook.”

  He reached down for his bag, lifted it onto his lap, and rummaged inside. Taking out a bottle and a bit of surprisingly pristine cloth, he doused his hands with a pungent chemical of some sort, and wiped them clean. “Where did you come from? I understood there weren’t many homesteads out this far.”

  It seemed to Savannah that Miranda attempted a smile, though it might have been a grimace of pain. “My pa and me had words, and he put me out to make my own way. We was headed toward Butte in the wagon, me and Lorelei and him.”

  “What about the father of this baby?” the doctor asked crisply, but without judgment or rancor. “Where’s he?”

  Tears glistened in Miranda’s expressive pansy-purple eyes. “He’s a long time gone,” she said. “Won’t never be back, neither.”

  Savannah’s heart constricted at this, but she was used to hearing stories, all sorts of stories, and she’d learned a
long time ago that it didn’t pay to go wading too deep into other folks’ troubles. She said nothing, but simply pounded hard on the roof of the coach with the handle of her parasol.

  The driver brought the coach to a bone-jostling stop, while the conversation between doctor and patient continued, quiet and calm on his part, breathless on hers, and interwoven with frantic cries.

  A broad, dusty face, rimmed in an aura of ginger hair, appeared at the window opening. “There a problem back here, ma’am?” the young driver asked.

  Savannah held her temper. “Yes,” she said, putting a fine point on the word nonetheless, and aiming for a soft spot. “One of us seems to be giving birth. The doctor here is prepared to deliver the child, but it would certainly help if the coach weren’t rolling and pitching the whole time.”

  The driver looked regretful, and tugged at the brim of his disreputable hat. “We ain’t but three miles from the station, ma’am. It’s just the other side of Willow Creek.” He glanced in a westerly direction, tracking the sun. “We got to keep goin’. It’ll be dark soon, and that’s no time for decent folks to be out and about.”

  Savannah was beyond exasperation. “Can’t you see that this girl—?”

  The young man shook his head and settled his hat again. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Miss June-bug McCaffrey, up ahead at Springwater, she’ll take good care of the whole matter. We got to press on.” With that, he was gone, the coach bouncing on its springs as he climbed back into the box to take up the reins again.

  The doctor was already engaged in a thorough if awkward examination of his patient. Savannah looked away quickly, but not quickly enough to spare herself a burning flush of embarrassment. For all her reputation, she was not a loose woman, and she had the appropriate sensibilities.

  “Can’t you say something to the driver?” Savannah demanded. She had little to contribute at the moment, but for her opinions, which seemed unwelcome.

  The physician shrugged one sturdy shoulder. “Sounds to me like he’s got his mind made up,” he said, and gently covered Miranda’s legs with her skirts again. He got out the chemical and another cloth and began to wash his hands once more. “Besides, I think you’ve said enough for all of us.”

  “Is my baby going to be all right?” Miranda asked, in a tiny voice.

  He pulled the stethoscope from around his neck and tossed it back into the ancient bag. Then he flashed a smile, so unexpectedly, ferociously charming that Savannah was taken aback, though for just the merest moment. “I’d wager a good deal that that child is just fine,” he said. “Eight pounds, maybe ten, with the constitution of a mule.”

  Savannah recalled the perfectly good horse this man had lost at faro and refrained, for Miranda’s sake, from pointing out that wagering was clearly not his greatest talent. The stagecoach lurched forward again, pitching and rolling over the rocky ground, nearly sending both Savannah and the doctor hurtling across the small gap between seats onto the girl.

  “Can we make it as far as the stagecoach station?” Savannah hissed, though there was, of course, no hope that Miranda hadn’t heard.

  He raised one dark eyebrow. “We can,” he said, “but there might be four of us by the time we arrive.”

  Panic roared into Savannah like floodwaters into a gulch, swirling and splashing and tearing things up by their roots. In her eventful lifetime, she’d helped her father, a barber and erstwhile undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri, to remove everything from common splinters to bullets, arrows, and buckshot from human flesh, and her grandmother had been a midwife of sorts, full of tales and legends. For all that, the idea of actually witnessing childbirth made her light-headed.

  She swayed slightly, and pressed the fingertips of her right hand to one temple.

  The doctor’s face darkened. “I’m fresh out of smelling salts,” he told her, in a sharp whisper. “So don’t you go falling apart on me.”

  Savannah was incensed at the suggestion, even though there had been some merit to it. She stiffened her spine and shot him a look fit to pierce a dartboard. “I am quite all right, thank you,” she said.

  Miranda, perspiring profusely now, began to whimper. “It hurts,” she said. “It hurts real bad.”

  He shoved a hand through his mussed hair. “Yep,” he said, resigned. “I imagine it does.”

  Savannah was once again seized by the desire to strike the man with something heavy; instead, she moved over to sit beside Miranda, draping one arm around the poor little creature’s thin and quivering shoulders. “We’ll be at the stagecoach station soon,” she said, and though she was speaking gently for the young woman’s sake, she was gazing at the doctor, and she knew her eyes were snapping with fury. “There’ll be a nice clean bed for you to lie down in. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.”

  “Where were you headed, anyway?” asked the doctor, ignoring Savannah’s displeasure to watch Miranda’s face with narrowed eyes.

  “No place in particular,” Miranda gasped out, her back arching, seemingly of its own volition. “I reckon me and the babe would’ve died out there, if it weren’t for this stage coming along just when it did.”

  Savannah spared a bitter thought or two for Miranda’s uncaring father, but the present situation was for too desperate to allow for much distraction.

  “What about your mother?” the doctor pressed. “Didn’t she try to intercede for you?’

  “I don’t guess I know what that means,” Miranda confessed, pressing each word, separate and distinct, between tightly clenched teeth. “For somebody to ‘intercede,’ I mean. Anyway, my ma’s been dead a long while now. The woman my pa took up with—her name’s Lorelei—doesn’t have much use for me.”

  “Take it easy,” he said, giving the young woman both his hands, which she squeezed fiercely against the pain. “Breathe slowly and deeply. We’re going to look after you, Miss—er—well, this lady and I.”

  “It would comfort me some to know your right names,” Miranda said.

  “I’m Savannah Rigbey,” Savannah responded gently, wishing there were something, anything, she could do to ease the girl’s suffering.

  “Parrish,” the doctor added, and though his tone was cordial enough, the glance he spared Savannah was a mite on the grudging side. “Prescott Parrish.”

  The coach hurtled downhill, careening wildly from side to side, fit to fling open both doors and toss them out; and then it splashed into axle-deep water. Savannah peered out at Willow Creek with alarm, half-blinded by the late-day light dancing on the water. She might have prayed then, if she hadn’t given up on God a long time before. It wasn’t deep, that stream, but she had a swift and terrifying vision of the coach turning over, trapping all of them inside.

  “We’re almost there,” Dr. Parrish said, while the girl continued to grip his hands.

  Miranda flung back her head and shrieked like a mountain cat. Her teeth were bared and she writhed, as leanly muscular as any lioness. When she got her breath, she cried out to God for help and mercy, and Savannah and the doctor exchanged yet another look, not heated this time, but somber.

  The team scrambled up the opposite bank of the creek, dragging the half-rolling, half-floating coach behind. The ride was so rough after that that Savannah half-expected the baby to shake loose of Miranda’s insides and bounce right out onto the narrow floor.

  The mother-to-be alternated between screaming her lungs out and making a pitiful, keening sound, something like a long, unbroken sob. Her colorless dress was nearly wet through now, though when Savannah gave Parrish a questioning glance, he shook his head.

  “Water hasn’t broken,” he said.

  Savannah hoped that was a good sign, but she didn’t think so. She recognized the quiet worry in Prescott Parrish’s dark eyes, even if Miranda couldn’t.

  At last, at last, the driver shouted something to the horses, a coarse and unintelligible roar, and the brakes screeched against the iron-rimmed wheels, grinding the coach to a halt in a great surging billow of gritty,
yellow-brown dust.

  “Springwaaaater staaation!” he called out, as though there might be some confusion on the part of his passengers.

  Dr. Parrish thrust the door open and jumped down, pulling Miranda off the seat and into his arms. “Bring the bag!” he commanded, and Savannah complied, hurrying after him through the roiling dust.

  A tall man with very dark hair and kindly eyes awaited them on the porch of the station house, arms folded. “Best get her bedded down right quick,” he said. “Straight through the dining room, at the far end of the hall.”

  Parrish nodded and strode on, and Savannah followed, coughing from the dust. Springwater station was her final destination, for the moment, since Trey Hargreaves and his new wife were already occupying the space over the Brimstone Saloon. She would rent a room and stay on here until she and her business partner could work out some other arrangement.

  “Jacob McCaffrey,” said the tall man when she was inside. He offered a large, work-gnarled hand in greeting.

  “Savannah Rigbey,” she responded, watching out of the corner of her eye as Parrish disappeared down the indicated hallway. “I understand your wife might be able to assist the doctor—”

  McCaffrey shook his head. “She’s on the mountain, my June-bug, tendin’ to Granny Johnson. The old lady’s laid up with rheumatiz.”

  Savannah felt her knees go weak, “Isn’t there someone—?”

  “Miss Rigbey!” Parrish bellowed, from somewhere in the back of the station. “Kindly get your bustle in here!”

  She looked desperately up at Mr. McCaffrey, but he merely shrugged.

  “Jupiter and Zeus,” Savannah muttered, unpinning her hat and setting it aside, then shaking the dust from her skirts as best she could. “I’m coming!” she called back and, after straightening her spine and squaring her shoulders, she marched toward the distinctly unsettling sounds of childbirth, bringing the doctor’s bag along with her.

  Parrish had laid the girl on the pristine sheets of a wide bed, and was shoving up his sleeves as Savannah entered the room. He didn’t spare her so much as a glance. “Get me hot water, and all the clean cloth you can find,” he commanded, his voice a brusque bark.