Nobody's Angel

by Karen Robards

  Ian was not here. Nor was he in the barn, or the fields, or anywhere else that Susannah, in that first frantic rush, thought to look. By the time she returned, still almost running, to the cabin, the entire household was gathered there, talking among themselves.

  "Something's happened to Ian!" she said, mounting panic sharpening her voice as they clustered around her.

  "Now, Susannah, you don't know that," Sarah Jane said.

  "Maybe Mr. Greer did something to him." Mandy sounded scared.

  "Or Jed Likens," Em said.

  "Craddock ain't never come back," Ben looked nervously around. "It's been a long time, too. Maybe whatever got him got Connelly."

  "Ben! You hush your mouth!" Sarah Jane sounded almost fierce.

  "We have to search for Ian." Susannah was striving to remain calm. She had to remain calm, for Ian's sake, and think. It was clear to her that a terrible struggle had taken place in that cabin. Maybe a fight to the death—though with whom? And who had won? If Ian had been the winner, where was he? She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering despite the already stifling heat.

  "You don't know that anything bad's happened to him, daughter. Maybe a bear got in here, or a bunch of raccoons." The Reverend Redmon turned back from studying the inside of the cabin, took one look at Susannah's white face, and put an arm around her shoulders. His expression told her that he didn't put much stock in his own suggestions. There was something else there, too. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in his touch—he had just realized how she felt about Ian. But there was no condemnation in the gentle hazel gaze, and his touch was warmly comforting.

  "Yes, I do. I can feel it," Susannah said. It was the truth. Deep inside her she could feel it beginning already, the sharp ache of loss. She remembered it from when her mother died. Only now it was a thousand times worse.

  She pulled away from her father and walked inside the cabin. The chaos made her shiver, and yet she could not leave. There was something here, something that she was missing. . . . Picking her way through the mess, she touched things: an overturned chair, the upended bed, a pile of cornhusk stuffing from the mattress, the mattress itself. It was then, as she looked at the mattress, that she realized what had troubled her. The mattress had not burst. It had been slit open cleanly, as with a knife. A large, dark brown stain formed an irregular circle near the slit.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, Susannah knelt and touched that stain. It was still damp.

  "Blood," she said, horror rising in her throat and threatening to choke off all other utterance as she looked at the substance on her fingers. "Dear God, it's blood!"

  "Susannah. Daughter, come away." From behind her, her father reached down and practically lifted her to her feet.

  "It's blood, Pa! Ian's blood!" She knew it instinctively, with a deep, certain knowledge that she could not explain. Still staring at her stained fingers in shock, she was led unresisting toward the door.

  "Be strong, child. God sends us no burdens that we cannot bear. If something has indeed befallen Con—uh, Ian, then you must strive to remember that it is His will."

  "A pox on God's will!" Her passionate outcry caused her father's arm to drop from around her shoulder.

  "Susannah Redmon, I am ashamed of you!" he said sharply, his gentle eyes suddenly stern as he condemned her for her blasphemy. Never in her life had her father spoken to her so or looked at her like that. But Susannah was too distraught to care. She could do no more than stare at her stained fingers and, despite her passionate disavowal, try to pray, as prayer was the only remedy she knew, the source of help in time of trouble that she had turned to all her life. Please, God, let Ian be all right. I'll give him up this time, I promise. I'll never lie with him again. I'll never dance again. I'll never question the teachings of the church again. Just let him be all right. Please. Please. Please. The cry ran feverishly through her brain.

  Looking down into her whitening face, her father's ex- pression softened. His arm came back around her shoulders as he urged her out into the light.

  "There, I know you didn't mean it." He squeezed her shoulder. "You're a good, God-loving girl. Sometimes the heart just rebels at The pain and suffering that are a mere mortal's lot in life."

  "I just found him," she said brokenly. "I can't lose him now. I just can't, Pa!"

  "There, there," the Reverend Redmon said. He sounded almost helpless in the face of his eldest daughter's misery. Always before it had been Susannah who had been strong, and he did not seem to know what to do in the face of her distress. Then, as he stared at her bent head, his spine stiffened, and he seemed to grow an inch or so taller.

  He beckoned to Ben, who stood with Sarah Jane and Mandy and Em a little distance away.

  "Go to town for the constable, and tell him to bring some men for a search," the Beverend Redmon said to Ben with quiet authority. It was the first time in years that Susannah had heard that tone from him, and she glanced up at him in surprise. Suddenly it was as if she were seeing him the way he used to be, before her mother's passing had torn the heart from him. She had forgotten how strong he had been then, strong despite the gentleness that had always been so intrinsic a part of his nature. When she was a little girl, she had thought that her pa was omnipotent. He was the most powerful, bravest, smartest man in the world, and she had adored him. For a moment, just a moment, that was the man she saw again.

  "In the meantime, daughter, let us go into the house. We'll do no good by standing about here."

  Susannah rested her head against her father's shoulder as they went.

  33

  Two months passed. Two months that were closer to hell on earth than anything Susannah had ever experienced. Two months of unrelenting misery, of an ache so deep that she could not cry, of grief so debilitating that it seemed as if she would suffocate under the weight of it. It took every ounce of strength and courage and stubbornness she possessed just to get through the hours from one gray dawn to the next. And with Ian no longer in it, that was the color of her world: an unremitting gray.

  She very much feared he was dead, although every now and then a tiny flicker of hope would insist he was not. But if he was not dead, then where was he? That he had simply run off, as the constable suggested, she could not, would not, believe. He would not just leave her without a word. Not after what had passed between them. She was as certain of that as she was of anything in her life.

  Officially he was listed as an absconded bound servant. Handbills were printed up with his description and distributed as far away as Richmond. He was subject to arrest on sight. But not a single sighting of him was made.

  A body was found by searchers in a nearby swamp, and for a little while Susannah's sense of dread heightened to sheer terror. The corpse had been partially dismembered by hungry alligators, making identification difficult. At the thought of Ian, her beautiful Ian, suffering such a fate, Susannah threw up. But eventually the dead man was discovered to be the missing Craddock. It was widely supposed that, while in a drunken state, Craddock had stumbled into the swamp and either drowned or been killed by the alligators that mauled him. Though she knew she should have felt proper sorrow at their farmhand's tragic end, Susannah was conscious only of a profound relief. Through the funeral service and burial she could summon scarcely a single prayer for the repose of Crad- dock's soul. What kept running through her mind, over and over again, was, Thank God. Thank God. Thank God it isn't Ian.

  A week or so later another corpse was found. This man had been buried in a shallow grave scooped out beneath the carpet of fallen needles that blanketed the piney woods. Searchers were drawn to the site by the strong odor of his body as it returned to the dust from which it was made. From the first it was clear that the dead man was a stranger, so Susannah felt only the mildest curiosity about the mystery that had the rest of Beaufort abuzz. Who was he, where had he come from, and how had he come to be buried there in the woods? The questions went back and forth, though Susannah was unconcerned with the a
nswers. All she could think was, at least it isn't Ian.

  Hiram Greer still called at the house, under the pretext of bringing news about the search for their missing bound man. Mandy refused to accept his renewed apologies and stayed clear of him. But as no one else knew of his transgression and Susannah was too frightened of missing the smallest bit of information to forbid him the house, he stopped by every few days. Indeed, she couldn't even summon the energy to hold a grudge against him for his behavior that night in the rose garden. She simply preferred to forget about it, because remembering also brought with it sharp, searing memories of Ian.

  At least she was not with child. Her monthly courses came and went just as before. She knew that its arrival was a blessing from God, but still she mourned the dream children she would never have just as she mourned Ian.

  She was so upset that she couldn't even cook. Never before had she been unable to take solace in her kitchen, and the circumstance would have alarmed her had she been able to summon an emotion other than grief. But she could not. Despair filled her to the exclusion of all else. Besides that, she felt nothing.

  Sarah Jane's wedding approached, and Susannah had to rouse herself to make preparations for that. At least, if she wept as she stitched her sister's wedding gown, it was assumed that her tears were at the prospect of the parting that grew ever nearer. Only Susannah knew the truth: the tears were for herself, for the wedding to Ian that she would never have. For their dream children, who would never be born. For the bright, shining future that had been dangled before her, then snatched so hideously away.

  Susannah acknowledged her own selfishness, but such was her malaise that she could not even summon a feeling of shame.

  Her family watched as she grew pale and listless, and worried. It was Sarah Jane who suggested that they travel to Charles Town, which was a distance of some forty miles away, to escape the August heat for a fortnight. Such seasonal migrations were common on the part of the planters and their families—indeed, the Haskinses and Mrs. Greer and several other local aristocrats had already removed themselves for the remainder of the summer to the town homes they maintained there—but the Redmons, being of plain farm stock, had never even considered doing such before. The festivities and social activities that marked the summer months in Charles Town were anathema to the Reverend Redmon. Though he approved of Sarah Jane's idea—a change of scene might be just the thing to restore Susannah's spirits—he declined to make the trip with the perfectly legitimate excuse that, if he went, there would be no one to preach of a Sunday. Ordinarily Susannah, too, would have scoffed at the idea of such a journey— after all, who would do her work while she was gone?— but such was her pain that she let her father and Sarah Jane make the arrangements without protest. Only when it occurred to her that in Charles Town she would not be able to instantly hear any information that might turn up about Ian did she think to object, and by then it was too late, because they were already aboard the ship that spent the summer months plying the coast.

  Even at sea, it was suffocatingly hot. Susannah and her sisters spent most of the voyage on deck, seated under a canopy rigged for the ladies' comfort. The constant motion rendered both Susannah and Sarah Jane vaguely nauseated, and for a while they contented themselves with closing their eyes and enjoying the warm breeze on their faces. Mandy and Em were so excited they could scarcely sit still, and they kept jumping up to exclaim over the silver flash of a jumping fish or the sighting of a distant sail. The company was congenial, and the atmosphere on the deck was rather like that of a church social. As the hours slid by and her nausea receded, Sarah Jane even managed to partake of some lemonade and cakes and enter into her younger sisters' banter. Susannah, on the other hand, only grew sicker and wished the journey might soon end.

  It occurred to her that, without Ian, nothing gave her pleasure anymore.

  It was almost dark when the Bluebell, for that was the ship's name, sailed briskly into Charles Town Harbor. They had missed the tide, the captain explained, and there was a strong west wind blowing. Thus he meant to anchor the Bluebell in the bay overnight and dock in the morning. Meanwhile, the passengers could go ashore by longboat.

  There were eleven passengers all together, and so the longboat was crowded. Susannah, who made it down the swaying rope ladder more by sheer force of will than anything else, was afraid that she was going to be actively sick as the small boat pitched up and down over the bobbing waves. Some combination of heat and motion had rendered her stomach most unreliable. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and prayed to reach shore without disgracing herself.

  When at last the boat tied up at the landing, the sun had sunk clear beneath the horizon, leaving behind streamers of bright pink and orange and gold to unfurl across the deepening purple of the sky. A grinning sailor practically lifted Susannah onto the dock. Sarah Jane, Mandy, and Em, who'd disembarked just ahead of her, hovered over their sister with solicitous murmurs.

  "Happen she's just got a touch of the mal de mer," the sailor said as he moved away to help unload the baggage. "Give her a bit to get her land legs beneath her, and she'll be right as a trivet."

  Susannah gritted her teeth and opened her eyes. "He's right," she said faintly to her sisters. "Just let me stand here for a minute. I know the dock isn't moving, but it feels like it is. I'm a poor sailor, I fear."

  "Let me go see about a carriage," Sarah Jane said, looking around. "I understand they can be hired right in front of the dock."

  "You can't go alone." Susannah spied her own trunk being lifted from the longboat and tottered over to sit down on it with a sigh of relief. If only she could lie down. Her head was swimming, her stomach churned, and, when she glanced toward town, the horizon with its jagged row of buildings and two tall steeples seemed to tilt on its side. If she turned her head out to sea, her case was even worse: beyond the tall bare poles and furled sails of ships at dock and anchored in the bay was the rolling ocean. With a shudder she turned her gaze to her immediate surroundings.

  All about her was a bustle of activity. Arriving and departing passengers hugged and wept over their loved ones. Sailors exchanged ribald quips and an occasional curse. The chatter was punctuated by loud booms and clattering rattles as barrels were unloaded from a nearby ship. Coarse rope nets loaded down with bales of cotton were hoisted into the air by creaky winches.

  "I'll take Em with me, then, and Mandy can stay here with you," Sarah Jane said, looking worriedly at Susannah's pale face.

  Mandy looked disappointed, but she didn't argue. Of course she was as eager to get a glimpse of Charles Town as Em, and Susannah felt she herself would be better for a few moments in which she could simply rest. With Mandy, or even Em, to keep an eye on, closing her eyes would be sheer folly.

  "All three of you go. I'll be fine right where I am. If I just sit still a minute, maybe my stomach will discover we're back on land."

  Sarah Jane looked from Susannah to Em to Mandy, then nodded with reluctant agreement. "We'll be right back."

  Susannah waved them off. Then she slumped and closed her eyes. If only she could lie down. . . .

  Just what made her open them again she didn't know— a tingle, a prickle of awareness, a magnetic current that shivered down her spine? But open her eyes she did, to focus rather hazily on the motley stream of humanity that passed some few feet beyond her perch at the edge of the dock.

  A woman in a bright scarlet dress and fantastic feathered hat stood chatting with a soldier whose uniform was as vivid a red as her gown. Two boys chased one another, apparently battling over the ball that the first one held. A family of seven, the woman obviously expecting again, walked slowly toward the lowered gangplank of a ship. A tall man in a swirling blue cloak with a three-cornered black hat pulled low over his eyes overtook the family and seemed headed toward the same gangplank.

  Susannah's eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, and she rose from her makeshift seat as if a string run from her feet through her body and out her head
had jerked her upright.

  "Ian," she said hoarsely. Then, louder, "Ian!"

  It couldn't be, of course. But the walk, the way the man carried himself, struck a terrible chord of familiarity. It couldn't be, and yet . . .

  "Ian!" It was a cry now, and several passersby turned to look. Nearing the end of the gangplank, the man glanced back over his shoulder. The hat shaded his eyes, and the upstanding collar of the cloak made it impossible to see the lower third of his face. But still, the very way he moved his head caused her stomach to clench.

  "Ian!" She started after him, moving as if she were in a daze. How could it be—but her heart screamed that it was. The lady in scarlet and her soldier companion stared openly as she passed them. Susannah barely even knew they were there.

  The man seemed to hesitate, then continued on his way. If anything, he quickened his pace. Susannah began to run.

  "Ian!" More people turned to look. The mother of the family Susannah had just observed clutched her youngest closer to her skirts as Susannah rushed past. Susannah never even saw them. She ran as if she were chasing the ghost he must be, ran as if he would vanish in a puff of smoke if she didn't reach him within seconds. She ran until her heart threatened to burst in her chest and her blood pounded in her temples, and she could scarcely draw breath. And yet she was aware of no physical discomfort at all.

  "Ian!" She reached him, caught at his cloak. Her fingers closed over the smooth cool wool and tugged. If it was not he, if she had chased and pulled at the cloak of a stranger, she would be thought insane. Maybe she was insane. Maybe the grief had cost her her reason. But she knew—she knew . . .

  With her hand clutching his cloak, there was nothing he could do but turn. He did, and for a moment, a wonderful, terrible moment, Susannah found herself staring up into eyes as gray as a storm rolling in from the sea. A muscle twitched at the corner of his beautiful mouth. The straight elegant nose, the high cheekbones, the square, almost cleft chin—all were unchanged. His cheeks and chin were shadowed with a faint black stubble. One of her hands rose of its own volition to touch that sandpaper cheek.