Touched by Fire

by Gwyneth Atlee

  “And do what? Turn the other cheek? Let her plead with her demon’s tongue and then forgive her lies?”

  Daniel stepped between his brother and the woman, who sat stock still in the dust. “Go on in, John. Let me handle this the way we planned last night. You’re not yourself this morning. I don’t blame you, but I won’t let you do this to yourself. When a man goes against what he believes, there’s pure hell to pay later.”

  Daniel thought about the face of his last Rebel and his own bloody bayonet. But John didn’t know that story, and he’d be damned if he’d share the secret just to make a point.

  Besides, what he said did the trick. John whirled and stomped back toward the house. The door banged so hard, Daniel wondered if he’d have to rehang it.

  Daniel offered Hannah a hand, but she refused it. Though her left cheek was fiery red and swelling, she neither cried nor complained. He couldn’t decide if bravery or sheer arrogance safeguarded her composure. She stood and brushed her skirts, apparently trying to hide the quick swipe she gave her eyes.

  “I could get you a wet towel,” he offered.

  She shook her head. “No. I want to leave. That’s all.”

  He didn’t help her climb into the gig. She might act like a lady, but he couldn’t forget how she’d hurt John, or the dampness on his own cheek from his daughter’s tears.

  As they began, she asked quietly, “How’s Old Blessing?”

  “He’s fine. Thought he could use the rest, though. He’s twenty years old, if he’s a day.”

  After that, they again fell silent as the gig bumped over half-burnt branches. At one point, they had to get out so Daniel could ease the emptied two-wheeled cart over a fallen tree. Hannah, right beside him, put her shoulder against the gig and pushed.

  “You’re still sick. You don’t have to do that,” he said as the wheels bumped forward.

  “It’s not my way to stand around like some fluff-headed ornament. I’m no stranger to hard work.” Behind her, blackened trees stood leafless, like charred sentries.

  “So what happened?” Unable to restrain the impulse, he faced her. “You’re bright, you’re beautiful. What on earth would make you -- oh, never mind. I don’t even want to hear whatever yarn you’ll spin.”

  “That’s right, Daniel Aldman.” She began to cough, then fought her way back through the spasm. “You don’t want to know. You’d rather judge me harshly, the way people judge you if they don’t understand you’re really grieving for your wife.”

  “Get back in the gig,” he ordered roughly. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know you’ve suffered a great loss, as have I. You disguise it with drink and rowdy friends, so much so you ignore your daughter half the time. Maybe you should face your heartache and move on. After all, the world respects a widower.”

  “I don’t need anyone’s respect, and I don’t need advice from some woman who lies to earn her way. Shut your mouth, and get in like I told you, before I leave you here.”

  Hannah climbed back into the gig without assistance. Within a half hour, they worked their way through the burnt stretch of wood. For the rest of the long ride, she didn’t say a word. Once back at Aunt Lucinda’s, she packed her few bags quickly and met him at the door.

  He started ahead of her, carrying the satchel he’d put together for his aunt and daughter and leaving her to handle her own bags.

  “Wait,” she said abruptly.

  He turned to see her gazing toward the wilted chrysanthemums along the walkway.

  “I’d like to water them.” Hannah put down her bags and went to the backyard pump without waiting for his answer. It took her twenty minutes to complete the task.

  “This won’t buy you one thing,” Daniel told her.

  She faced him squarely. “It’s obvious, Mr. Aldman, you know even less about me than you think.”

  o0o

  The agent at the ticket office shook his head. “They won’t bring in the boats because the smoke’s too thick. It’s so bad out on the bay they’re navigating just by compass, and the river’s even worse. No more steamers ‘til the rains come or the winds pick up and clear the smoke.”

  “If the winds pick up, God help us,” Daniel answered. “It will only fan the flames.”

  o0o

  She had met the man before, though Hannah hadn’t known his name. The father of the tart-mouthed Rosalind, he had wanted her forgiveness when his daughter slandered her. And here she was, proving Rosalind’s words. Hannah felt flame in her cheeks, and she could not lift her gaze from the spit-stained boards of the bald man’s front porch.

  “Hank, this is Miss Hannah Shelton. She’s proved herself a fraud and a liar, and we don’t intend to keep her at the house. I’d put her on a boat today if they were running. What I want to know is would you and your missus keep her at your place ‘til then. I know you take in a few boarders, time to time. We’ll pay in cash until she can be gone.”

  “Could always use the money, I suppose. And Faye won’t mind a bit. We’ll put her back in Rosalind’s old room.”

  “Just watch her close,” said Daniel. “I’d hate to have her rob you blind.”

  That was enough! She’d been cursed and assaulted, and she imagined she deserved both, but she was no thief! She curled her hands into tight fists and glared at Daniel. “I’ve never stolen a crust in all my life, you sanctimonious drunkard! And I’m tired of you speaking about me as though I’m not even here. I am here and I’m —”

  She never finished because she took to coughing so hard that she couldn’t catch her breath.

  The old man laughed. “Yep, sounds like our Rosalind all over. Don’t worry, Daniel. We’ll take good care of her.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hank Barlow’s withered wife, Faye, did all she could to supplement his meager pension from the mill. She took in a few boarders when the opportunity arose, but their unpainted, wooden house was too small and shabby to attract much notice. With his right arm cut off by a saw, Hank spent far too many hours sitting on front porches and gabbing with other idled men, but Faye was rarely still. Her days were often spent in mending or laundering single loggers’ and mill workers’ clothes, or in baking simple meat pies for saloons.

  “There’s more to do around here than sit and feel sorry for yourself,” she chastised Hannah when she saw her staring blankly from the one chair in the plain, gray room. “I see enough o’ that in my old man and that Ros’lind to choke on, so here. Do something, I say.”

  She thrust a pile of shirts at Hannah, along with a needle and coarse thread. Numbly, Hannah took them and began to sew, replacing buttons, mending tears, sometimes restitching seams. Her hands, at first, were clumsy, but as the hours passed, they remembered their old skill.

  Mrs. Barlow didn’t mention money, and Hannah never asked. She was too grateful for the work, for the simple satisfaction of completing needed tasks. The silver needle darted in and out through coarse brown wool and faded cottons, mesmerizing, numbing, reminding her of other stitches in a white dress long ago.

  “There I stand on Buttermilk Hill,

  Who can blame me cry my fill,

  And every tear could turn a mill,

  Johnny has gone for a soldier.

  “Sell my spinning, sell my wheel,

  Buy my love a sword of steel,

  So it in battle he may wield,

  Johnny has gone for a soldier.”

  Hearing her own voice, sweet and somber, Hannah paused, the needle frozen like a stinger at mid-strike. She had nearly forgotten that old tune, those verses she had sung so many times, with such feeling long ago. Fears rushed back with every word, and images now ten years dead and gone. The sight of Robert’s back as he proudly marched away, the desperation in her voice as she begged God for his survival. That year, her eighteenth, she had learned what love was, and two later, she had found that God could turn a deaf ear to even the most heartfelt pleas. Twenty year-old Robert died near Gettysburg, not of Rebel b
ullets, nor of cannonfire. He had died of typhus in his camp.

  The last verse of the old song came to her.

  “I’ll dye my dress all over red,

  And o’er the world I’ll beg my bread,

  So all my friends may think me dead.

  Oh, Johnny has gone for a soldier.”

  A tear broke like a wave across the gleaming needle. Hannah wondered, after eight years, did she weep for her first love or herself?

  In the aftermath, she’d married Malcolm quickly. After all, he had returned from the War alive. With his dashing captain’s uniform, he cut a handsome figure. His genteel manners swept her off her feet. The two of them shared a love of horses, and together, they planned the business that would make them prosperous. In a month’s time, they were married. Hannah wore the white dress her sweet Robert had never lived to see.

  She remembered her father, leaning forward, to kiss her on the cheek. “I only wish your mother had lived to see this day.”

  Thank God she had not, thought Hannah now, for that day had been her ruination. That day, and that white dress, had led her inexorably to where — and what — she had become.

  A divorcée and an accused adulteress. A liar and a fraud. Her mother’s early death of apoplexy had spared her the disgrace the Barstows knew. Hannah wondered if her father had died in time as well, of if he’d somehow guessed the hell that Malcolm’s lies would set ablaze.

  o0o

  Daniel nearly stopped off at the saloon for a quick drink, except that’s what she would have expected. Calling him a sanctimonious drunkard, after what she’d done! If that didn’t take some brass.

  All the way home he fumed, imagining the words he should have told her. He might enjoy a spree now and again, but at least folks knew his real name. And he looked after his little girl just fine. Didn’t he see to it she was cared for?

  Smoke wafted through the interwoven trunks of saplings and across a dried-up bog. Amelia wouldn’t go to school this week, not until he felt sure it was safer. The dryness of the air, the crumbling fallen leaves, and the eerie smoke-thick sky made him uneasy. What if everyone was wrong? What if this fall’s rain came too late? He pushed aside his uneasy questions like a bad dream.

  Or like an unpleasant memory from his past.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Plumes of dark smoke billowed across the water, and Malcolm could see distant firelight.

  “Damnation!” he swore. That cowardly ship’s captain would never take him to Marinette. If he could even get that close, he would buy a horse and ride to Peshtigo. Then he’d have the heartless bitch he had once married. And she would return with him, even if he had to drag her by her hair.

  He thought about that hair, rich brown with its auburn highlights in the summer. He thought about the way it had felt slipping through his fingers long ago. She’d been so beautiful at twenty, so broken-hearted when he’d come bearing the news that her fiancé died at war. He’d been injured, too, lucky his wounded leg had not needed amputation. That bullet had kept him nearby in their hometown, but it had not staked him for the business he felt sure he deserved.

  Hannah’s father financed him when they became engaged, and with the old man’s death not long after they married, his only daughter inherited his farm. He and Hannah continued raising horses, and he’d been glad to learn she knew her way around a barn.

  It went so well for many years, but children never came. At first, he tried not to think about it, but every prying question had needled him. As his own late father often insisted, a man needed sons, or else why bother to amass a fortune? Though his business thrived, he grew dissatisfied.

  Malcolm Shelton, with his dark eyes and coal-black hair and beard, still had certain charms. For a while, a long string of women eased his melancholy, until Marcelia bore his bastard. Then he knew for certain the fault lay in Hannah. He took to staying more often with Marcelia, eagerly marking his son’s progress, hoping beyond hope his wife would offer him this joy.

  She did not, and all his blame did nothing to make her womb receptive. She railed against his anger and finally turned hard.

  Divorce her, said his best friend, Jacob. Put her aside and marry Marcelia, if she makes you happy, or some other young girl if she doesn’t. But how could he get rid of his wife and still keep his business? If he lost her family’s land, he would lose everything.

  His plan was simple. Fool-proof. No one would take a woman’s word.

  No one had. He’d paid Tom Saunders to look shame-faced when accused of sleeping with his Hannah. He’d even struck the man in public, on the street. After that, the word spread quickly. The beautiful Mrs. Shelton had committed the most grievous sin. When he divorced her, the ladies from her Bible study — Hannah’s own friends — delivered casseroles and other, far less Christian, offers. The judge gave her nothing but the scantiest support.

  She’d stayed quiet for a long while, too humiliated to fight back. No one would listen to her protestations. No one dared anger her wealthy former husband by giving her a job. Finally, after he left Marcelia and married rich old Morgan’s daughter, she had done this awful thing to wreck him.

  Hannah Shelton faked her death — and turned the pack of gossips against him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Here’s the ticket,” Daniel told her. “It’ll be good whenever they start running boats again.”

  She had bruised where John had struck her, but she looked no less proud. It didn’t matter she was sitting amid a pile of mending in a shabby rented room. It wouldn’t matter if she were mucking out a filthy stall. He would always remember her as beautiful and proud.

  She reached for the ticket. “Thank you for bringing this. I wish you would tell John something. I want to pay him back for all the money he spent on my behalf. I don’t know when, but I will pay him, if ever I can find some sort of job.”

  “Looks like you can sew, at least,” he told her. Not that it would matter. She would never pay John back. Then he remembered how she’d watered Aunt Lucinda’s wilting flowers. He remembered the way she’d hugged his little girl. Maybe there was something to her after all, something more than her appearance. Maybe there was substance to justify the way his arms ached to hold her once again, the way he longed to taste the sweetness of her kiss.

  “It’s a hard thing to make a living at, with no man to fall back on.”

  “I imagine you could find someone. Just be sure to tell him your real name.” He couldn’t imagine why he was advising her as if she were some sort of friend. What difference could it make what became of her? One stolen kiss meant nothing, less than nothing, in her case.

  Hannah’s needle never stopped, but her battered face looked peaceful as she spoke. “No man would marry Hannah Shelton. I’ve given up that thought.”

  “You talk like your life’s over. It’s too soon to give up.”

  Her blue eyes looked so sad as she glanced up. “I might say the same to you.”

  On impulse, he knelt beside her bed and laid his hand atop her knee. “Tell me, Hannah. You have to tell me why you lied.”

  “You said before it didn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me now.” He felt like an idiot, kneeling there beside this woman, but he couldn’t help himself. With her, he could never force himself to stop, even when he certainly knew better.

  She shrugged, as if nothing could touch her anymore. “Don’t fall in love with a lost woman, Daniel Aldman. I can never give a man a child, and because of that, my husband divorced me. But just because I was barren, he saw no need to part with my inheritance. So that faithless philanderer accused me; he called me an adulteress. That was the day Hannah Shelton really died.”

  He stared at her, shocked by the emptiness of her voice almost as much as the revelation of her past. This must be the truth, he thought, for there was nothing she could gain with such a lie. Though he knew he shouldn’t, he wrapped his arms around her.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her.

  “
Let go of me, or I shall jab you with this needle,” Hannah told him. “I don’t want your pity, and I remind you, I am not one of your loose women, even if I am divorced.”

  He pulled away from her slowly, unwilling to let the moment pass. “Don’t get so high and mighty with me, Hannah. I’m not trying what you think.”

  “Oh? Then I suppose that whole scene in the barn was just well-wishing and that your hand has not crept up my thigh.”

  He jerked it away from her as if he had been burnt. “I’ve never met another woman like you.”

  “No, I don’t suppose Peshtigo has many divorcées, and I’m sure the harlots fall all over you. Please leave now. I believe I’ve already thanked you for delivering the ticket. I’ll leave this town as soon as possible.”

  Defeated, Daniel stomped out of the house, his big feet raising dust along the porch.

  “Damned proud, stubborn woman!” he muttered to himself.

  “Just like my Rosalind used to be,” said Hank from his perch on a warped, split-log bench. “Just don’t let her suffer too long, or all that pride’ll dry up. And when it blows away, you’ll have nothing left at all.”

  o0o

  Hannah sat frozen, still savoring the feel of Daniel’s powerful arms around her. She didn’t want to move, or even breathe, lest the memory begin to fade. How long would it be before anyone held her close again? Why must she be so tempted? Couldn’t she accept her lot and give up hope?

  Although she had never been unfaithful, she had often, in those declining years of her marriage, longed to have someone to hold her. Someone to offer sympathy. Someone to offer love.

  Had Daniel offered that, for at least a moment? Or had he merely wanted the same thing as the noble gentlemen of Hannah’s town?

  “Come now,” one had whispered. “It’s not as if you’re some young virgin.”

  She shuddered at the memory of Malcolm’s best friend, Jacob, a deacon in their church. His hands, much smaller than Daniel Aldman’s, but more active, were all over her at once. She slapped him and ran back to her room, his cries of “Evil temptress!” still ringing in her ears.