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

by Bartholomew, Barbara

  She took only an instant to wonder why he was pretending to know who she was before saying, “He seems to have reopened his wound. We found him here on the floor passed out.”

  He nodded, his attention focused entirely on the man on the floor. He went to his knees, grunting a little at the effort and began his examination. Betsy saw that he’d left his black medical bag near the doorway and got it, carrying it over to put it by his side.

  She watched as he went about taking care of the patient with the same cool concentration she’d seen in her parents. He asked for hot water and Lavinia stirred the ashes in the fireplace, adding small pieces of wood until it burned into life. She helped fill a large kettle by dumping the full bucket of what looked to be drinking water into it. Between them the two women placed the heavy iron kettle over the fire.

  After that Lavinia dismissed herself by saying, “I really must go see about my baby.” With a nod she headed toward the door and Betsy was too concerned about Caleb to more than vaguely wonder how Lavinia fit into the picture.

  She sat on the edge of a stiff wooden rocker, ready to help, but trying not to get in the way as Tyler Stephens cleaned and stitched the wound. When he glanced up, she asked what he needed and got it. Thankfully the injured man slept through the whole thing. “Will he be all right?” she asked when the doctor was finally still.

  “Damned fool doesn’t deserve to be,” the doctor answered, not looking at her as in indulged in a brief series of what she supposed to be swearing in a language that sounded like it might be German.

  He looked old and tired and in spite of that reminded her so much of Eddie that she felt a family connection. He’d been out half the night seeing to a patient, then had come home to this. She couldn’t blame him for letting go with a certain amount of expressive language.

  Finally he looked up, seeming to realize anew that she was there. “Beg your pardon,” he said in a tone that was only mildly apologetic.

  She had to help him get to his feet and when he did, she followed him as he took the water bucket and went outside to draw water from the well. Back in the kitchen, he splashed some in a wash pan, giving her first turn at washing the blood from her hands and arms before cleaning his own. Then he offered her a drink from a metal dipper before drinking deeply himself.

  “Do you think he will recover?” she tried to phrase the question tactfully.

  He sank on to a chair, seeming incredibly weary. She looked around, found the coffee pot and some grounds and with the fresh water soon had the pot placed on the still lively coals of the fire.

  It was too warm in here, but they didn’t have time to think about that. Besides the man on the floor probably needed to be kept warm to ward off shock.

  “Shouldn’t we put him to bed?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Afraid to move him. Might start the bleeding again. If you’ll look back there,” he pointed to a little side door she hadn’t noticed before. “You’ll find a quilt.”

  She pushed it open, but had to bend over to enter. It was dark inside the cubbyhole but she got enough light from the fire in the kitchen to see a neatly made up cot covered with a patchwork quilt. She took the quilt and went back to gently cover the man on the floor.

  Then she poured cups of coffee for the doctor and herself. He hadn’t offered her the reassurance she had twice asked him to give. To Betsy, that sounded like bad news.

  Chapter Five

  When he finally awoke with dawn looking in the single window in the cookshack, he thought he was back lying on the hard ground of the battlefield, half praying that he’d die from his injuries rather than go on suffering.

  Then he saw the woman slumped asleep in the chair only a couple of feet away and knew this was no such place. She looked like a fatigued angel with yellow curls dripping down on her forehead and alabaster skin. His gaze dropped lower and then he decided that no angel was built with curves like that. God wouldn’t allow it.

  He felt faint regret that he could have such profane thoughts when lying at death’s door, then began to remember one after another the happenings of the previous evening. Doc had left at a call from a patient, he’d spent long, dull hours unwillingly entertaining the lovely Lavinia and finally released from that duty he’d started back to the cookshack, intending to head for his bed in the lean-to.

  Instead he’d fallen hard to the floor, splitting his wound apart. Seeing as how he was alone, he’d known that, bleeding as he was, he most likely wouldn’t ever wake up.

  Now, looking at the delicate features of the sleeping woman, he was glad he’d opened his eyes again even if he was hurting like hell.

  “Still alive, son?” Doc’s voice came to him from somewhere on the other side of the room, but he didn’t dare move for fear of reopening an obviously patched together injury, or, even worse, causing greater pain.

  “Best as I can tell,” he whispered, not wanting to awaken the almost angel. He hardly recognized his own voice; it sounded cracked and weak.

  Doc came slowly into view, looking half dead himself. “You’re too old to be working like this,” he whispered.

  “And you’re too young to be such a dang-dong idiot.” It was their customary exchange of salty insults and Caleb felt a little bit better.” Surely if he was dying, doc would be more polite. Probably not though, he decided on reflection.

  “Hard bed,” he complained to the man who had most likely saved his life.

  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope.”

  Caleb considered that familiar saying while Doc checked the damage to his leg. He never had understood that old saw. Seemed to him a person who was going to be hung with any kind of rope had a right to object.

  “Who’s the angel?” he asked, trying not to flinch at the doctor’s touch.

  Doc glanced at the sleeping woman. “Lady who found you knocked out on the floor, stopped the bleeding and saved your life,” he said matter-of-factly. “Lavinia and I only came on the scene after she’d taken care of the preliminaries. And I don’t think she’s an angel.”

  “Lord, I hope not,” he said fervently.

  Doc chuckled. “Son, I believe with that attitude you might just live.”

  “Guess I was lucky the angel found me. Lavinia would have probably let me die.”

  “From what I understand, Forrest’s wife accounted for herself well enough. You owe her a vote of thanks as well.”

  Caleb didn’t try to conceal his surprise. So far Lavinia hadn’t had many kind words for him. She obviously considered him an unnecessary burden on her husband’s household. He looked again at the beauty in the chair. She must be tired out as she was still dead to the world in spite of the bustle the doctor was making looking after him.

  “What’s her name?”

  Doc glanced at her. “Says its Betsy Stephens. I have a great-granddaughter, but her name’s Edith. That’s Lavinia’s middle name.”

  The old man was doddering. He did have a grandson, little Evan who was sleeping upstairs, but he was too old to think about living long enough to see the boy’s children who would be his grandbabies.

  “I’m saying she’s a distant cousin come to visit.”

  Caleb wasn’t in such a bad way that he didn’t realize that Tyler hadn’t said she was his cousin.

  Doc gave him some medicine, pills he found hard to swallow, and it wasn’t long before he realized he’d been doped. Well, that wasn’t a bad thing. He’d escape the pain by sleeping a little, knowing all the time that an angel was standing guard over him.

  “Mercy sakes and who might you be?”

  Betsy woke to the sound of a melodious female voice, remembered where she was, then sat straight up in her chair, overwhelmed with fear. “Did he die?”

  “He’s still alive, Miss Stephens,” Dr. Tyler called from somewhere in the distance and the face looking down at her smiled with Miranda Murphy’s smile. But this wasn’t Miranda and she wasn’t at home in Lavender anymore.

  At least
not the Lavender she knew. Everything that had happened last night came back to her and she saw with relief that Caleb was still on the floor, but though unconscious didn’t look at all dead.

  “Hetty,” her host said. “This is my cousin, Betsy Stephens.”

  “Hello, Hetty,” Betsy said politely, feeling she should indicate that they had mutual acquaintances. But you could hardly tell a woman somewhere in the early 1860s that you knew her daughter and granddaughter in 1908. And the rest of the story was even more fantastic. “Glad to meet you.”

  Hetty was a woman not easily taken in. “Now Tyler, I never heard that you had a relative who was a pretty girl named Betsy.”

  Betsy tried to look very non-threatening. “Cousin Tyler thought he needed some help around the house, so he sent for me,” she said, feeling fairly sure Tyler Stephens would back up whatever she said. For some reason, he didn’t seem particularly surprised at her appearance.

  “Is that so?” Hetty asked indignantly, staring not at Betsy, but at Tyler. “My work not up to snuff, doctor?”

  Uh oh! “I’m sure he didn’t mean . . .”

  “You and me we’re getting old, Hetty. Time we both retired.” He was just egging her on. Obviously she was decades younger.

  “That’ll be the day. Betsy, you get yourself up and moving and I’ll start your breakfast. You look like a hen that’s been nearly drowned twice.”

  “But what about Caleb?” she worried. “Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”

  “Came to about dawn, talked a little about the angel at his bedside.” Doc grinned. “Didn’t figure it would be good for him to get excited so I gave him a small dose of morphine and he slid right back to sleep.”

  Angel? He meant her. Oh, my goodness.

  Betsy managed to stir herself, still feeling in a fog. But when she was directed outside to go to the toilet in a neat little outhouse, she came back, fearing she would cross the threshold back to 1908 and never know if Caleb recovered or not.

  Nothing unusual happened, though, and she was back in the cookshack, washing her face and hands in the same wash pan she’d used the night before, than smoothing her hair with a comb Hetty brought her.

  She sat down to a breakfast of homemade biscuits and gravy, served with hot coffee. Hetty brought her own plate to join her while Dr. Tyler only accepted a second cup of coffee.

  He allowed her to eat at least two bites, her gaze on the unmoving man on the floor, before he began to ask questions.

  “How did you come to be here? A little town like Lavender in the former state of Texas isn’t exactly on the mainline. You come by buggy, on horseback, or did you walk from the nearest rail line?”

  Betsy swallowed a bite of biscuit and considered. This man had always been described to her as a genius and the keen eyes regarding her from the wrinkled face didn’t give her much hope of getting away with one of her made-up stories.

  “I walked from the kitchen in my house to this one,” she said without putting any fanciful fringes on the statement. On the other side I was in the house in 1908. When I stepped across the threshold, I found myself in . . .whatever and whenever this is.”

  She got the impression that Hetty wasn’t usually caught unaware, but now she stared speechlessly at Betsy. Dr. Tyler, however, didn’t seem all that surprised.

  “So it works,” he said, then chuckled soft and low. “And all the learned scientists of Europe said I was delusional and forced me into hiding to keep from being locked up as a madman.”

  She suspected she knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “Time,” he said thoughtfully, “as easily navigable as the wide oceans once you catch on to the science.”

  She wasn’t so sure about that, but then in his time, maybe sea travel wasn’t all that easy.

  “You might say that,” she circumvented the question. After all, her abilities weren’t as the result of his science, but seemed more an inheritance from her ancestors. Nobody else in Lavender, not even this old man’s closest relatives, could stroll casually across time’s dimensions.

  She ate another bite of biscuit while she considered how much she should tell him. She didn’t want to be the butterfly flapping its wings and making changes that meant she would never see her family again.

  He waved a hand in the air. “No, don’t tell me. I have to figure it out for myself, but I can’t tell you how much encouragement it is to know that I finally worked out the last steps.” He stopped in sudden dismay, asking anxiously, “It was me? I did figure it out.”

  “Oh, it was you, Dr. Stephens,” she assured him in her driest tone.

  “But Doc,” Hetty tried to protest.

  Still feeling a sense of unreality from the medicine he’d been given the night before, Caleb lay unmoving on the floor, taking in the conversation from above him. So she wasn’t an angel after all, he thought with a certain glee, so maybe he wasn’t in imminent danger of dying.

  Drat that Doc and his crazy theories. He hoped the girl wasn’t as out of her mind as Dr. Tyler, but was only chivvying him along. No doubt, a stranger in this place, she was reluctant to confront the old man.

  Hetty would see to her. Hetty was the sanest person he knew.

  “Betsy,” he said aloud in that musical Texas cadence he’d acquired during the years he’d lived here, kind of a cross been Mexican talk and the drawn-out sounds of the south. The three of them turned to look at him.

  “I hope you’re feeling better,” she was the first to speak, “Mr. uh . . .”

  “Carr,” he said. “Caleb Carr. And I suppose I should be calling you Miss Stephens having heard your proper name last night.”

  “Hush up, Caleb,” Doc said testily. “You’ve no business talking, weak as you are. Lie there and try not to do yourself any further damage.”

  Hetty got to her feet. “I’ve got some broth heating. “I’ll feed you a few spoonful’s to give you strength.”

  “Broth!” he protested, though in truth he wasn’t sure he could keep anything down as his stomach was feeling somewhat disturbed. “I want breakfast.”

  “You sound limp as a kitten,” Hetty said decisively. “Broth is what you’ll get.”

  It took too much energy to argue, but he disliked the feeling that he wasn’t presenting himself well to the beautiful visitor. When she came over, however, to touch his forehead gently to test for fever, he decided he might as well relax and enjoy his current status.

  He was tolerating a few tastes of Hetty’s chicken broth when a loud knock at the door jolted every bone in his severely aching body.

  He didn’t even try to turn his head to see who might be calling at this unlikely hour of the morning. He heard Doc call out, “Come on in. Door’s not locked.” Heavy footsteps sounded and he heard a familiar voice say,” What’s happened to Caleb there? He dead?”

  He didn’t have to look around to know this was Bolter Jackson, a longtime neighbor and particular friend of Forrest’s. Until he’d brought Lavinia home as his wife, Bolter and Forrest had spent many a day hunting and fishing together, and nearly as many long nights playing poker. Bolter owned the nearby Cottonwood Creek Plantation. A son of South Carolina, he’d migrated here after getting in too much trouble in his youth, bringing with him a good-sized group of slaves given him by parents fairly pleased to see him setting up in distant Texas.

  Forrest had tried to persuade his friend to go with him to the center of action, but Bolter had declined saying he reckoned there’d be plenty to do right here in Texas when it came to fighting the Federals. He’d been instrumental in getting General Twiggs to surrender his command to the Texans and, even though Caleb couldn’t see him from where he lay, was fairly sure he would be wearing some version of southern grey.

  “He’s alive,” Hetty said flatly. “Just hurt his wounded leg again and we’re looking after him there on the floor until we can safely move him.”

  It was as though Hetty wasn’t there. As a slave owner, Bolter was considered a ‘good’ master,
but he didn’t like to acknowledge people like Hetty who were both black and able to manage independently. Her way of life was in itself a criticism of his, Caleb suspected.

  He didn’t like to dwell on injustices that were simply a way of life, things he couldn’t do anything about. But Hetty had been a part of his life ever since he’d first come to work for Forrest as a boy. She was exceptional and he didn’t like that Bolter Jackson tried to ignore that fact. He should treat her like the lady she was.

  His anger heated as he heard Bolter making a fuss over Betsy, calling her ‘this pretty young lady’ come a-visiting and offering her the hospitality of Cottonwood Creek Plantation. Bolter was a widower and as such had a right to flirt with any unattached woman he chose, Caleb supposed, but Betsy was his angel and here he was lying flat on his back and not able to do a thing about his neighbor’s overtures.

  It was frustrating as hell.

  Chapter Six

  Already Betsy had determined that she could never like Bolter Jackson. She estimated he was in his forties and was almost as good looking as Rhett Butler, but she didn’t like the way he passed over Hetty as though she were a social inferior, nor did she like the condescending way he addressed her. Pretty young lady, indeed!

  It barely crossed her mind that if Dr. Tyler had used the same words she would have simply regarded him as endearingly old world. It all came down to how the words were said.

  She tried to be courteous for Grandpapa Forrest’s sake since this man had indicated they were friends, but it wasn’t easy. She hid a smile when she saw that Dr. Tyler was barely polite, his tone sarcasm-laden as he chatted with the obviously unwelcome visitor. Hetty got up without having finished her breakfast and headed back toward the main house.

  When she left, Bolter seemed to relax a little. “You know Forrest and I have been friends for ages now, Doc, and it’s for his sake that I’ve come by.” He looked over at Betsy, smiled, then added, “Political talk doesn’t probably interest you one little bit, Miss Betsy.”