The Doctor's Wife

by Cheryl St. John

“Ellie,” he said again, and this time his voice was so close to her ear it created shivers along her spine. Her whole body trembled. She did love his voice.

  She loved those gentle words and the concern in his eyes. She loved the way he had of setting people at ease and taking control of a situation. She loved the way he looked at her with that little tilt to his lips when she said something that amused him.

  She loved the way he made her feel when he stood close or when he turned those dark eyes on her. She loved the way he smelled, like freshly pressed linen and soap and man.

  Yes. She loved Caleb.

  Chapter Twelve

  The dream came again that night…and the next…and Ellie didn’t have the strength to wake herself from the feverish nightmare. The hands confused her.

  The hands had always hurt. But in some of the dreams the hands were gentle. The unexpected change was confusing. One moment the voice was taunting, full of spite, and the hands tortured her body. The next moment the voice was soothing and made her want to flutter her eyes open; the hands calmed and cooled.

  Ellie’s head pounded with the chaos, the tumbling push-pull of the incessantly changing scenario.

  She cried.

  She slept.

  She begged for mercy.

  Caleb had thought he’d lived through the worst when Flynn and Nate took ill with the fever. All he’d wanted to do was grab up his son and hold him tightly, and he’d had to fight that panicky desire with steely determination. Flynn needed him, too, as well as so many others. He had to ignore his doubts and all the possibilities that tormented him and concentrate on doing everything in his power to help them recover.

  He knew just what lengths this disease could go to. Even patients who lived could be deaf or have lung damage. Caleb had done his best to prevent its spread and save lives. He’d preached sterilization and rational thinking. Now all that fine theory and practice was being tested on his own family, and if he was wrong, he had a lot more at risk.

  With little or no rest for Caleb, the days passed in a blur. When Nate and Flynn showed improvement, he thought maybe, just maybe, they’d seen light at the end of the tunnel. Nate’s fever lifted first, and then Flynn’s. The boys rested comfortably, breathed easily and still had their hearing.

  Caleb didn’t even have time to be grateful.

  He should have been prepared for Ellie to fall ill. He had been prepared for more patients. He was a doctor, not a fool.

  Ellie was strong. She was as afraid as anyone, but she hadn’t given in to her fear. She’d been his right hand through the worst of the crisis. Now she lay helpless and suffering, and he was the only one to help her. He couldn’t give in to his fear, either.

  Caleb ignored the terror that welled inside him and relied on his instincts and training.

  Benjamin sat in the hall outside her room, his knees pulled up to his chest, his head on his fists. He’d pumped and carried so much water, Caleb had had to make him stop. As well as caring for Flynn, he had taken over all the routine tasks where Nate was concerned, feeding the baby and changing his flannels. He’d been more help than Caleb could have hoped for from one so young.

  But now that the younger ones slept and chores were taken care of, Benjamin held a lone vigil outside Ellie’s room. Caleb suspected he’d fallen asleep.

  Ellie tossed her head on the pillow. Her fever had risen and her clothing was soaked. He should have had Ben help him with it, but he didn’t want to frighten him any worse or embarrass the lad.

  “Forgive me, Ellie.” He unbuttoned her wrinkled shirtwaist and sat her forward to remove it. Her skirt and stockings followed. He’d been much more successful in bringing fevers down when he’d had the patient’s upper body stripped and had bathed them often, so he apologized again and removed Ellie’s chemise. She was a patient, he was a doctor. He wouldn’t ogle her just because she was his wife—a wife whose body was still a mystery to him.

  He soaked a cloth, rinsed it and ran it across the skin of her face and neck and arms. He bathed her shoulders and turned her on her side to wet her back and tuck a dry sheet beneath her.

  “You’ll be doing this often,” he told himself aloud, “so get used to it.” He turned her back over, lowered the sheet and ran the cloth over her upper chest, trying to see her as merely a patient. Her white skin was flushed in the lantern light, her breasts delicate and lovely.

  It was silly for him to feel so guilty for noticing; he was her husband after all. He wished with all his heart that he was seeing her body for the first time under different circumstances. He gave up and filled his eyes with the exquisite sight of her, her enchanting brow and nose, the lips that he knew were sweet, the sweep of her dark lashes, down to the graceful column of her neck and her feminine collarbone and shoulders.

  Her breasts rose and fell with her labored breathing, and his gaze moved to the rosy-tipped mounds. A silvery line caught his attention and he frowned, wondering. He looked more closely, though he’d told himself he wouldn’t, and found a few more of the nearly invisible streaks.

  Startled at what they implied, he pulled the sheet to her hips and opened the front of her drawers. Several pinkish scars lined her abdomen.

  Shock numbed his thinking.

  He sat on the edge of her bed in a state of weary astonishment.

  Had Ellie given birth to a baby?

  The question ate a ragged hole in his heart. Could his wife, this wife he’d never touched, have given birth to a child? Had some man, other than him, feasted his eyes upon her body? Had he touched her and made love to her and given her a child?

  A feeling he’d never experienced clamped his insides in a knot. If so, where was this man now?

  He washed her again, seeing her through different eyes, then pulled the sheet up over her and tossed her damp clothing in a pile. Anger and betrayal pressed in, though he didn’t want to acknowledge them.

  Why did the possibility bother him so? She hadn’t lied about it—he’d never asked. He didn’t even know if she’d been married before. Had she been married? Or had she simply made a mistake and allowed some scoundrel to seduce her? If she’d had a child, what had become of him?

  She’d been so fervent about not wanting a baby—about not wanting to sleep with him. That refusal hurt worse than ever now. Why had she spurned him? Had she loved someone and didn’t want to settle for less?

  His mind reeled, trying to make sense of what he feared had happened. But when? Flynn? She didn’t look old enough to have given birth to Flynn.

  She moaned in her fever-induced sleep and Caleb smoothed her damp hair away from her forehead. When had she become so lovely to him? When had the secrets of her past taken on such importance?

  It mattered because she was his wife now, and he’d married her with every intention of being faithful and spending the rest of his life with her. It mattered because the feelings he’d had for his first wife didn’t compare to those he had for Ellie, and he’d begun to hope.

  “It’s all right, Ellie,” he said softly. “Just rest.”

  She coughed, and he spooned a little water between her lips to soothe her throat.

  “There’s a pie cooling on the back porch,” she said in her delirium. “Cover it so the flies don’t get it.”

  He smoothed glycerin into her cracked lips. “I’ll cover it.”

  “Is the door locked?”

  “It’s locked.”

  She relaxed against the pillow. “Somebody wash that oatmeal out of Nate’s hair. Laura will think I’m not a fit mother.”

  Not a fit mother. Perhaps her baby had died. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t bear to have another, if she feared the same would happen. The desperate way she had looked at Rachel’s newborn baby took on a whole new meaning. Caleb had been caught in the emotion of the moment, in the beauty of the miracle of life. He’d assumed Ellie had felt the same.

  Had she watched that birth through the eyes of someone who’d done it herself—and lost a baby?

  Thr
ough that night and the following day, Caleb bathed Ellie’s skin and spooned antitoxin between her lips. Her shakes and nightmares were worse than any he’d seen. Sometimes she fought him when he tried to calm her, other times she cried brokenheartedly, pleading with him not to hurt her. Even after her rash had passed, the fever persisted.

  Only in the deepest moments of fatigue did he doubt his ability to save her. Flynn and Nate had improved and Ben still showed no signs of contracting the illness. The other patients had recovered, even Suzanne, who’d had a case of fever nearly as bad as Ellie’s.

  His knowledge and his intuition had paid off.

  In those cases, that irritating voice inside his head taunted. He’d assisted a birth, too, but no complications had arisen for him to falter over. Not like when his wife had died. He hadn’t been able to save her.

  Winston Parker had asked if Caleb planned to kill another wife. Throughout another endless day, Caleb studied Ellie’s delicate profile, the fluttering pulse at the base of her throat, seeing her as a woman who’d become important to him. Damn Winston for putting those torturous thoughts in his head!

  He doubled his efforts to reduce her fever.

  The bell rang late in the evening, and Ben brought Doc Thornton upstairs.

  “How’s the wife?” the old man asked. Hearing someone else call Ellie his wife made Caleb’s fears all the more real.

  “Her fever’s no better.” He revealed her feet and showed Doc that the soles were peeling. “Did they all do this?”

  Doc nodded. “All who had the fever bad. The little girl lost whole pieces of skin from her fingers.”

  “No one has died?”

  Doc shook his head. “No one.”

  Caleb sighed with relief.

  “And we’ve only had one other case. Clive Sanders’s wife.”

  “She okay?”

  “I’m going back out there now.” The man rubbed his beefy nose with his index finger. “She was at the mercantile the day Kate Jenkins was there.”

  Caleb nodded. “We won’t be in the clear until another week has passed, though. This has about a five-day incubation period.”

  Doc’s clothes were dirty and rumpled, but his hands were satisfactorily clean. He gave Caleb a sideways look. “Guess you won’t have to admit you were wrong. This could have been a lot worse if we hadn’t done it your way.”

  Caleb shrugged. He’d been right, but it wasn’t as though he’d won a victory of any sort. They’d simply prevented more cases…and possibly a few deaths. That was probably the only gratification Caleb would receive, so he accepted it.

  Doc shuffled over to peer down at Ellie. “Still hard to believe there’s something there so tiny that we can’t see it, and yet so dangerous. Thought it was a joke the first time I heard it.”

  “Some of the bacteria you can see with a microscope,” Caleb said. “First time I saw it was in the laboratory at the university.”

  “You got a microscope?”

  He rubbed his face tiredly. “Matter of fact, I do.”

  “Mind if I come over and have a look one of these days?”

  “Don’t mind a bit.”

  Doc shuffled out and Benjamin saw him down to the door.

  The night that followed was one of the longest Caleb had ever lived through. He had so many questions. So many doubts. He had done all he knew to do for Ellie. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He couldn’t allow himself to imagine the ramifications if she died under his care. And how he could even think that seemed so selfish that he hated himself for the thought…and the doubt.

  Her life was in the balance and he was thinking of himself.

  She slipped in and out of delirium while he couldn’t rid his mind of the thought of another man touching her.

  He told himself he was delusional from lack of sleep and he did the only thing he could do for her now, and prayed.

  The next day her fever broke. Her skin cooled and she stopped tossing. Caleb dressed her in clean, dry nightclothes and tucked her into fresh sheets. She immediately fell into a deep, restful sleep.

  He made himself a pallet on the floor beside her, removed his boots and socks and stretched out. Her breathing came easier. His sense of relief was palpable, but it was dimmed by this new and disturbing emotion. He shouldn’t have felt the ripple of betrayal that washed over him each time he thought of her having a child. He hadn’t known her until this very summer.

  But the feeling was there all the same. She was his wife and he didn’t know anything about her previous life because she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him. Had she ever planned to tell him? Should he have asked? Would she have told him if he’d been insistent?

  Caleb drifted into sleep with those troublesome thoughts at the forefront of his mind.

  Ellie woke during the night and sat up straight in the bed.

  A lamp burned on the bureau.

  “Caleb?”

  “Ellie!” He sat and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Caleb, are Flynn and Nate all right?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “J.J.’s family?”

  “They’ve recovered. Even Suzanne. The only case right now is Clive Sanders’s wife.”

  “The nice lady who had her husband bring me here when I broke my arm?”

  He nodded.

  She turned to poke one foot from beneath the sheet toward the floor. “We need to go help her.”

  He got up and pushed her back onto the sheets. “You need to get some rest and build up your strength. Doc Thornton is taking care of her.”

  “You trust him?”

  “In this I do.” She noticed then the dark circles beneath his eyes and the unfamiliar growth of whiskers along his jaw. She’d never seen him look so disheveled or tired.

  Exhaustion claimed Ellie’s mind and limbs and she closed her eyes.

  Waking again late in the morning, she sat unsteadily. Caleb had been lying nearby on the floor, but he was gone now, the blankets folded and lying in a pile. The past days were a blur of scorching nightmares, cooling hands and unbearable pain in her head and throat.

  Caleb had been with her through all that, she was sure. His soothing voice had been her security, her lifeline. She remembered his expression of relief and the weary look he’d worn. His sacrifice touched her deeply.

  Ellie wondered how many days had passed. Her mouth felt horrible and her hair was tangled and dirty. She wore one of her batiste nightgowns. She touched the fabric, then her cheek, imagining with mortification Caleb dressing her while she was too ill to help.

  “Ellie!” From the doorway, Benjamin had spotted her sitting up, and cried her name.

  “Ben. You didn’t get sick?”

  He rushed into the room, kneeling in front of her.

  She ran her fingers through his sandy hair, along his fuzzy jaw, and then rested them on his shoulder. “Flynn’s all better?”

  “Caleb took care of him, and of you, the whole time.” His voice didn’t hold the contempt she’d heard before when he referred to Caleb. He was no doubt feeling as grateful as Ellie.

  She brushed back her hair with a hand, coming in contact with tangles. “I really need to bathe and wash my hair.”

  “I’ll bring up the tub.” He stood. “Flynn can help me carry water.”

  “Wait, where’s Caleb? And who’s watching Nate?”

  “Caleb went to check on the Sanders woman. And Mrs. Jenkins is here looking after Nate.”

  Ellie digested all that information slowly. “Kate Jenkins? J.J.’s mother?”

  He nodded. “She showed up this morning. J.J. is all better, too. She heard you were sick and she wanted to help, so she’s here.”

  The woman’s kindness brought tears to Ellie’s eyes. She blinked them away.

  The boys brought water, and Ellie was so delighted to see Flynn well and his freckled face filling out that tears trickled down her cheeks.

  Concern filled his dark eyes. “You sick again?”

  She hugged
him tightly. “No, sweet boy. I’m just so glad to see you better.”

  “I’m glad to see you better, too.” He pulled back. “Caleb stayed with us the whole time,” he said. “I don’t remember everything when I was sick, but I remember every day when you were. Me an’ Ben took care of Nate an’ we did a real fine job. Caleb said so. But Nate got cranky sometimes an’ we didn’t know what to do for him then, so he cried some. He wasn’t hurt or hungry or nothin’. He just cried. Caleb said he probably missed you ’cause he’s used to you an’ all, an’ you have a special way with him.”

  “Caleb said that, too?”

  He nodded.

  She ruffled his hair. “Bring another bucket for me to rinse with now and then leave me to my bath.”

  “Mrs. Jenkins said to ask if you wanted her to help you.”

  “Tell her I’m doing just fine, but I’ll holler if I need her.”

  “Okay.” He shot out of the room.

  Ten minutes later, she submerged in the warm water and tingles of pleasure washed over her skin. It felt glorious to scrub her scalp. She used the rinse water, worked the suds out and then soaked until she got chilled.

  She made her way to the kitchen, freshly washed and dressed, but unsteady. Kate greeted her with a welcoming smile. “Ellie!”

  “I’m pleased to see you looking so fit,” Ellie said to the woman.

  “We all had a quite a scare there, didn’t we?”

  Nate pounded his palm on the tray of his chair. Ellie gave him a smile and he gurgled delightedly and emitted a squeal, raising a hand toward her. She hurried over and picked him up, hugging him against her breast. She was surprised at how heavy he seemed to her in her weakened state. She kissed the top of his head. “I was so afraid for the children.”

  “Everyone’s calling Caleb a hero,” Kate said, delight evident in her tone. “Seems Doc Thornton told the newspaper how Caleb made him listen and go along with his treatment. There was an article in today’s paper saying so. There was a warning, too, for everyone to stay to themselves as long as they can until five days have passed without another case. ’Course the paper goes out no matter what, and the iceman’s been delivering in town. He doesn’t go inside, though.”