Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series)

by Bartholomew, Barbara

  When the first settlers came here and named the town, it had been a frontier with the Comanche battling the threat to their long-lived empire in much of Texas. When Susan said Lavender had happened, she meant the isolated island of a community where they now lived. That had occurred somewhere around 1883, Betsy knew.

  “And people in Lavender always got along. Nobody gave you trouble because your skin was a different color.”

  “Hey, I’m not the different one,” Susan teased. “I’m not pale as milk with skin that burns at a touch of sun. Face it, Betsy you weren’t bred to survive in this hot country.”

  It was true enough. Betsy didn’t tan, she burned and blistered and kept her homemade bonnets near at hand when she went out on a sunny day. Even now, the one she’d worn today lay on the table nearby.

  But Susan’s humor had faded. “This isn’t Eden, Betsy. It’s not as perfect as you like to think.” She hesitated, then went on. “Seems to me you want to live inside a bubble and that’s just not possible.”

  “Something has happened . . . something that has made me look at things differently,” she paused, not wanting to talk about the man in the gray uniform even to Susan.

  “I’ve known little of cruelty or misunderstanding,” her friend finally responded to her original question. “My mama was a child during the war, but she still remembers, maybe more than she wants. I remember my grandma, but she was a slave when she was young and worked hard all her life to take care of her family. She didn’t talk much about it, at least not to me, but I’d guess she saw the worst of things.”

  “Worst of things?”

  “It was brutal, Betsy. Even if you had what they called a good master, you were worked hard from first light to last. And, otherwise, you were beaten, starved, might be sold away from your family. You weren’t your own; you belonged to someone else like the cattle in the pasture.”

  Betsy closed her eyes. She felt rising nausea in her stomach. She nodded.

  “The people my grandma was talking about were the parents and grandparents of the ones we meet every day. They had the same names. The blood in their veins carried the same messages from the past.”

  Betsy didn’t like to think of it that way. She wanted to believe people were getting more tolerant of each other. Trouble was she’d been too well educated; she knew of so many atrocities that had happened over the time since those days of civil struggle.

  She looked at the life around her with eyes that had witnessed more than what had happened in the years just passed or what lay directly around her. Now she began to think that the burden of being a time traveler was more than any human should have to bear.

  “Don’t look so downhearted,” Susan told her now. “Take pride that it was your papa’s grandfather who encouraged Grandma Hetty to make such a difference in her life that it came right down to Mama and to me. There are always people who can see past the prejudices of their own time.”

  One thing Betsy knew for sure. She could never love a man who wore the gray uniform of the confederacy.

  Chapter Four

  Letters came from Forrest with some regularity. He must write Lavinia just about every day and she hugged those missives to herself, reading them over and over. The ones that came to Caleb, though less frequent, usually brought news of happenings on the battle front that he read hungrily, becoming more impatient to rejoin the other man, even as his leg seemed to get worse rather than better.

  No letters came to Doc from his son; the two had parted bitterly and had nothing to say, or write to each other. Though Caleb recognized that the older man was anxious for the younger’s well-being and so gave him the bits of comforting information about everyday life with the army that he could share. He told him little of the war news since he didn’t want to unloose yet another pacifist tirade.

  The way Tyler Stephens felt about this war was beyond his understanding. Hell, they’d been invaded by the union soldiers. Any man of conscience had a duty to stand up and defend his own. But there was no point in arguing with Doc about it.

  “Your leg will never get well,” Doc told him as he stumbled in carrying a load of wood for the fireplace, knowing his face must be white with the pain he tried to conceal.

  He dropped the logs unceremoniously to the floor and managed to get himself to a chair without falling. “I’m fine,” he said. “Leg just needs a little working out.” No way was he going to leave the heavy lifting to a woman and an old man, not as long as he could crawl.

  Doc’s long, serious face turned in his direction. “They say there’s nothing like an old fool, but I’m thinking they’re wrong. A young fool pushes the limit of human understanding.”

  Caleb barely managed to restrain himself from an angry response. Didn’t Doc know that he and Forrest were marching with the tide of public opinion. The majority of folks around here saw things the way they did. Oh, the planter folks, they mostly just wanted to hang on to what they saw as their property, but for Caleb and those who had little or no land and owned no slaves, this was a matter of resisting invasion.

  He just didn’t see how Doc could look at it any different. ‘Course Doc wasn’t just against this war, he was against all of them, and this idea made Caleb shake his head. What would happen to the world if all the good people just lay down their arms and let the enemy take over? He wouldn’t care to be alive in such a place.

  A man had to stand up for what mattered.

  It was late evening and he could hear the crickets chirping outside. Hetty had gone home to her family and Lavinia was upstairs putting the baby to sleep. This house had seemed like home to him when he was a lad and Doc had insisted he stay with them while his leg healed, but now he said, “Maybe I should go back to my place, Doc.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, son. We don’t have to agree about everything to be close as kin.”

  Caleb nodded, but he wasn’t sure his old friend was right. This war, this serious difference of opinion between equally well-meaning folks, was, they said, pitting brother against brother, friend against friend. He’d seen that right here in little Lavender.

  Yesterday at the store, Bud Hill had shown up with a black eye and he’d sworn with loud profanity that his former best friend and neighbor Henry Connelly had punched him. Bud’s family had migrated to Texas from back in Pennsylvania while Henry’s had come from Georgia.

  Though aging Tyler still got around well enough as he got out the simple supper that Hetty had left for the two of them. Lavinia, scorning the homespun cornbread and sweet milk that was the basis of their meal, had dined earlier on more dainty fare, but as far as Caleb was concerned nothing beat Hetty’s cornbread crumbled in milk and eaten with homemade pickles.

  Out alone on his little property west of Lavender, he didn’t fare so well. His cornbread didn’t match Hetty’s.

  After supper, he tried to help Tyler with the cleanup, then settled alone before the ashes of the fire while the older man, his evening interrupted by a call for help, went out to his buggy to follow a neighbor on horseback who had an ailing child. He might be half the night and Caleb, restless and lost in dark thoughts, began to push around the chess pieces on the board where he and Tyler often whiled away the hours between patients. He rarely beat Doc, but over the years had learned enough to give him a fair match.

  “I shall die of boredom,” a dramatic feminine voice interrupted his reverie and he looked up to see Lavinia Stephens poised dramatically in the entrance, her glistening chestnut hair hanging casually down her back rather than up in the formal style she wore during the day. She wore a light blue dressing gown that looked too much like nightwear for Caleb’s comfort. Usually they avoided each other’s company when neither Hetty or Doc was around, not became of any attraction between them, but for the sake of propriety.

  Caleb sure didn’t want any talk about him and Forrest’s young wife. Besides the two of them really didn’t get along. She thought he was a bumpkin and he thought she was a snob.

  She must be
desperate to come down tonight when she’d had to have heard Tyler leaving the house. She made a show of shivering violently, “It’s so dark and lonely here tonight. Why do you always stay here in the kitchen?”

  He could hardly say it was because that way he could keep from foisting his obviously unwanted company on her. “Baby sleeping?” he asked instead.

  “My goodness, yes. Evan is an excellent sleeper,” she said as though the ability to sleep was a real talent. She’d gone from the first days when she’d looked at the baby as though he were a hideous piglet to acting as though he was the most remarkable child ever born. As far as Caleb could see he was a fairly ordinary kid with a nose and mouth, ten toes and all the usual apparatus. He’d been born after Forrest left so his papa had never set eyes on him.

  “I declare but I just can’t sit in the kitchen like a maid or somethin’,” she went on. “You must come out to the parlor and keep me company for a while or I’ll just go half crazy with lonesomeness.”

  Reluctantly he managed to get to his feet, trying not to grimace with the pain, and reached for the stick he’d carved out of a sturdy branch. Leaning against it he was able to follow her through the back yard and into the main house.

  From his point of view, the parlor was on the fancy side with its crushed velvet sofa and chairs and the drapes Hetty had made. Though modest, the house was much finer than most of the homes in the little town, but Lavinia had made it clear from when Forrest first brought her home that she considered it a mere shack. The youngest daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, she was used to elegant living.

  She had been so obviously disappointed with her new home and community that Forrest had promised to build her something ‘really nice’ as soon as the war was over and things had calmed down a bit.

  Now, his leg aching, he sat listening to her talking about her family, the beautiful home she missed, and all the servants they’d had to do their work back in Georgia. She didn’t come right out and say that she regretted having come to Texas with Forrest, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to see through her words.

  He burned with indignation for his friend’s sake and generalized from this situation to determine that most women just married for what they could get. He’d never be caught in that trap. It was the bachelor’s life for him, assuming he got through the war alive.

  She was used to being waited on and sent him for cold buttermilk and sugar cookies, then asked for a drink of water as though she couldn’t manage to get it for herself. He gritted his teeth, leaned on his cane and did what he could to make her happy.

  The last thing he wanted was for Forrest to come home and find his wife had taken their baby and abandoned him to what she obviously considered the wild Texas frontier.

  With each trip his leg ached more and he longed just to be able to go back to his bed in the lean-to back of the summer kitchen.

  Finally they heard the baby crying from upstairs and he was grateful when she rushed off to see to his needs that he had a chance to escape. In his hurry, he stumbled over the raised doorway into the kitchen and fell hard onto the wood floor, jarring his leg painfully.

  He lay there, stunned with the howling protest of his injured limb and then reaching down, realized blood was soaking through his pants. The fall had ripped open the wound where he’d been shot and he was bleeding fiercely.

  He had to get up, had to stop the bleeding, but between the pain and loss of blood, he only managed to drag himself halfway through the room when blackness overcame him.

  Betsy watched her little sister pop corn on the top of the stove in the kitchen, waiting until she was needed to help carry the refreshments into the front room where the family was gathered with their guests. They’d already served glasses of apple cider.

  Tonight was an informal gathering and they’d most likely end up on the front porch as it was still hot inside the house, most especially in the kitchen. This was why the summer kitchen had originally been separated from the rest of the house, to avoid heating up the other rooms and to lessen the chance of fire.

  When Grandpapa Forrest built his new house some years ago, he’d followed the old pattern, only his kitchen, a strongly built structure with a covered breezeway connecting it to the main house, was used year round.

  Now Betsy watched Sylvie add a generous amount of butter to the huge mound of popped corn and considered the story she planned to tell tonight. Her storytelling talents were much valued in Lavender and people would come from miles around to attend her public performances, but an invitation only event such as tonight was a special treat for the closest of friends.

  Should she tell something fanciful about princesses and dragons, the kind of story Sylvie liked, or something closer to reality about brave men facing terrible dangers. That thought took her back to the place to which her mind had been wandering all day where she’d seen the man in the gray uniform.

  She could hardly tell a story about Civil War days, not right off the top of her head, when the older folk present had been so much closer to those terrible times than she. Her own papa had been an infant in Civil War days, Susan’s mama had been a little girl. Older folk like Grandpapa Forrest would have their own memories. Grandpapa never told stories about back then. She’d always supposed it was too painful.

  Tonight she’d go with the princess and the dragon.

  She followed Sylvie, the younger girl chattering about a boy at school she liked. Sylvie looked to be as much a success with the other youngsters as Betsy had been at her age and even at fourteen was attracting admiring attention from her male classmates.

  Betsy was halfway through the dining room when she remembered she hadn’t brought the salt shaker. Some of the guests might wish to add extra salt to the popcorn. She turned around to go back to the kitchen, went down the breezeway still thinking about how she would begin her story. As her foot touched the threshold, the scene before her changed and she wasn’t even aware that she dropped the bowl she was carrying and popcorn spilled all around her.

  What she saw in front of her flickered between the well equipped kitchen where she and her sister had just been popping corn and another dominated by a huge fireplace where ashes glowed against the darkness. Capturing her attention, however, was the gray-clad man sprawled helplessly on the floor, blood coming out from his right leg.

  Caleb! He was hurt or maybe dead. She rushed forward, only find herself back in the wrong kitchen. Hastily she backed up and tried to time the flickering movement as she stepped forward once again.

  She felt the cooler night air. It was full dark, later in the evening than when she’d been about to go out to tell her story while family and guests enjoyed popcorn and cider. And behind her, instead of the covered breezeway, she felt open air.

  Not taking more than a second to consider these things, she hurried to kneel over the unconscious man. He moaned slightly when she touched his right leg with her hand. “It’s all right,” she murmured the soothing words automatically, knowing as she said them that he was anything but all right.

  She had no turn for dealing with medical problems, but even so she could see that blood was coming too fast. She leapt to her feet, found a knife on a nearby cabinet and began to cut away his pant leg until, impatient, she was able to rip it open enough to see the torn-apart wound from which blood was rushing.

  She was able to find dish towels in a side closet, kept with dishes and other useful kitchen items, and with several of them pressed tightly against the wound she yelled for help in her loudest voice.

  Back home with the well-built enclosed kitchen, it would have taken something exceptional for her to have been heard in the rest of the house, but here the summer kitchen was only a thin-walled shack and before long, she heard a woman’s voice behind her, “What in the good Lord’s sake is going on?”

  “He’s bleeding to death,” she said, hardly aware of more than that help had come.

  “Oh, my stars!” the young woman bending at her side exclaime
d. She ran away and came back with what looked like an old bed sheet, tearing it into strips as she came. They fashioned a tourniquet and between that and pressure against the wound, they were able to slow the flood of blood to no more than a trickle.

  “It’s late,” the other woman said, “Papa Tyler should be back soon. Hopefully.” She brushed at her forehead, pushing back light brown wisps of hair with a visibly bloody hand.

  Now that the most intense emergency was past and she could see by the rise and fall of his chest that the man on the floor was still breathing, Betsy could afford time to take in the other woman’s appearance.

  Slimmer than herself, probably a little younger. Brown hair, doe-like eyes, she was pretty, but not striking. The woman nodded in her direction. “Guess we were lucky you happened to be passing by,” she said, her soft southern tones still showing open curiosity. Strangers most likely didn’t just happen by on a regular basis, especially not young women in what was no doubt hardly proper dress. It wasn’t odd that at this time of night, her hostess was wearing what looked like a fancy housecoat. “I’m Betsy Stephens,” she introduced herself, still keeping close watch on Caleb’s barely seeping wound and wondering if the tourniquet shouldn’t be loosened. They didn’t want to permanently cut off circulation to his leg.”

  The large eyes watching her widened with surprise. “Stephens? Well, I reckon! I’m a Stephens too, though by marriage. My name is Lavinia Stephens, Mrs. Forrest Stephens,” she added with a certain pride.

  Betsy’s brain jolted. Forrest Stephens was Grandpapa. This very young woman was married to her step grandfather?

  “Are you a relative?”

  “A distant cousin,” a deep male voice displayed an edge of foreign accent as it spoke to them from the doorway. “Glad you finally arrived, Betsy.”

  This had to be Forrest’s papa, the infamous Dr. Tyler Stephens. People in current day Lavender either worshiped or reviled the man who had locked their community in time. She would have recognized him as a family member instantly because of his strong resemblance to her stepsister Eddie.