Shelter from the Storm

by Patricia Rice

  Cash’s growl of fury sent Laura rocking backward on her heels. She glanced up in time to see Cash crumple the letter and heave it toward the nonexistent fire. Without a word of explanation, he stormed from the room, and a moment later she could hear him screaming for a groom from the front porch. Cash never yelled at the servants like that. Daringly Laura bent to pick up the discarded letter.

  Smoothing the battered linen paper, she deciphered Mrs. Breckinridge’s spidery scrawl. Biting her lip, Laura read the letter once, then returned to the pertinent passages, scanning them again to make certain there wasn’t some mistake. Surely Sallie couldn’t be so foolish . . .

  Shaking her head as she found no error in her interpretation, Laura crumpled the letter again and looked for a flint to light a fire. Cash had every right to go screaming off in haste, but there was no reason anyone else need know of it. She lit the piece of paper and watched it burn in the grate.

  If Sallie wanted to scandalize society by carrying on while six months pregnant, that was nobody’s business but hers and Cash’s. Laura couldn’t imagine what kind of affairs a woman could have in that condition, but Mrs. Breckinridge’s outraged accounts left plenty to the imagination. Even if it all came to nothing, it sounded as if Sallie was doing her best to lose that baby. Sometimes the workings of her cousin’s mind eluded Laura.

  Right now, Laura’s concern was all for Cash. Looking out the window, she could see the horses being readied and the carriage brought around. She didn’t want to be Sallie when Cash found her, but she didn’t want to be in Cash’s shoes right now either.

  If all society scorned him even as Sallie’s husband, what would they do when they thought him Sallie’s cuckold?

  Chapter 25

  The fire reached the barn roof, igniting the newly baled hay in the loft and silhouetting the circle of night riders as they admired what they had wrought. A woman’s hysterical screams escalated to anguished cries of pain, but the men mounting their horses gave no evidence of consternation. The light from the fire illuminated the sway of a human form dangling from a tree limb as they turned their mounts toward the trees.

  The screams died to a whimper as a man rose from the ground and adjusted his baggy trousers. The woman left in the grass had nothing but a torn calico gown to cover her nakedness, and the bright yellow material emphasized the darkness of her exposed breasts and limbs.

  A man with a rifle stepped from the shadows of the trees, and the rapist swung at his approach, reaching for the gun that should have been at his hip, realizing belatedly that it had fallen to the ground. Fear filled his face as he recognized the new arrival.

  “Now, Brown, you’re gonna get yo’sef killed if you report any of this,” the rapist warned, backing off in the direction from which his comrades had departed. “They just uppity darkies that needed teachin’ a lesson. You ain’t got no call to interfere.”

  The newcomer chuckled and shifted his rifle to a less threatening position. “Andy, you don’t think I’d go standing in the way of your fun, do you? I like me a little dark meat on occasion myself. No one’s going to be reporting this little incident to the sheriff, so there won’t be no cause to pull you in. But you’ve got some other problems brewin’ if you don’t heed my advice. You remember that doctor back in town?”

  Losing his need for caution, the other man picked up his weapon, shoved it in his waistband, and strolled arrogantly toward his horse with the new deputy sheriff at his side. “The one that got you the hidin’?” He snickered.

  “That was that white nigger, and that’s another story.” Irritably Brown cut off the chuckles. “I’m talkin’ ’bout that damned Yankee doctor who’s been treatin’ the niggers.”

  The other man gave him a suspicious glance. “I seem to remember your bein’ a Yankee yourself. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Marshall caught the bridle of the man’s horse and placed his finger on the trigger of his rifle. “Don’t believe everything you hear. I got a reason for what I’m doin’. The doctor’s filed a complaint against you, Andy, and the sheriff’s going to have to act on it. You need to hightail it out of here, if you know what’s good for you. Or you can join up with me, and I’ll look after you until we get this damned town straightened out.”

  The man called Andy hesitated. The new deputy sheriff didn’t come from these parts, and Andy was suspicious of strangers. But Brown was married to a local woman from all reports, and he had good reason to loathe the doctor and the breed of men he represented. Speculation raised its ugly head.

  “Maybe you and me and the boys got a thing or two to talk about after all . . . Sheriff.” Andy put his boot in the stirrup and mounted the horse, then waited patiently for the other man to join him.

  ***

  The silence of the house was almost funereal with Cash gone. Turning out the few downstairs lamps before retiring to bed, Laura glanced around uneasily. She had never stayed in this house alone before. It was an eerie experience.

  She shivered and rubbed her hands over her bare arms. She was being ridiculous. Jettie and her children slept in the back bedroom. Jemima had the room next to the kitchen, and several of the maids had beds in the basement. The house wasn’t empty. It was just her imagination

  Carrying a candle, Laura slowly traversed the stairs to the upper story, listening for the creaking of the roof and the old elm outside. Perhaps she could go into the sewing room and experiment with some scraps of lace and ribbon to see how well the machine stitching held on different kinds of fabric. She had already discovered there were a number of tasks she would still have to do by hand to make gowns look right. She would hate to have to sew all that lace by hand if the machine couldn’t do it.

  Deciding she was only postponing the inevitable, Laura reluctantly turned into her own room. In another day or two Cash would be back with Sallie, and the fantasy world she had created for herself would come tumbling down again.

  Cash had already been gone two nights, and it felt like years. She knew she was spinning impossible dreams, but she didn’t seem able to stop it. The bed seemed cold and lonely, but it was the same bed she had slept in the better part of her life—the same bed she would sleep in for the rest of her life if things continued as they were.

  She had to leave, that was all there was to it. No, that wasn’t all there was to it. Lifting the candle again, Laura turned toward the nursery door. Entering, she let the flicker of light glow over the sleeping infant in the cradle. He hadn’t lost his full head of dark hair, and as he lay there so peacefully, she could see the image of Cash as a youngster.

  Life had cruelly taken a beautiful child and twisted and beaten at him until he was the hard, cold man he was today. Perhaps not exactly cold. She had seen Cash with the children, knew he had the capability to love. He stayed aloof, turning his energies to the farm and the animals and ignoring the people around him, as they had ignored him all these years. She couldn’t take his son away, deny him that chance of love.

  Sighing at the complexity of people, Laura blew out the candle and padded back to her own bed. At least Mark was sleeping through the night now. He was eating enough solid food to begin weaning him, but she fought at the notion of losing that one small bit of intimacy. Weaned, Mark would be independent and on his own. She wouldn’t be needed anymore.

  Not wanting to face where that thought led, Laura wandered to the window and looked blindly out. Once Sallie returned, she would have to leave. Perhaps she would stay to help during the latter stages of pregnancy and the birth. Sallie would be totally impossible until then. But then Laura would have to go.

  Perhaps with another infant to dandle on his shoulder, Cash wouldn’t object so mightily to parting with Mark. And perhaps having a baby would change Sallie into the loving wife she ought to be. Perhaps the moon would fall into the sea too, but that was another thought that didn’t bear close examination.

  A gleam of light where there usually wasn’t one caught her eye before she turned away from t
he pane. With a wry twist of her lips, Laura wondered if perhaps that was the moon falling into the sea. But there was no sea and no moon, and the flicker developed a companion, and another, and another.

  A sudden bolt of fear shot through her. The night the Raiders had visited wasn’t that far removed from her memory to be forgotten. She remembered torches, big flaring torches, and she remembered the way they scorched the summer-dry grass and ate toward the house, and panic twisted at her insides.

  She stared a little longer, making certain she wasn’t observing some natural phenomenon that her earlier fear had conjured. But the flares were moving purposefully, and their goal seemed very specific. She couldn’t see the tobacco field through the branches of the elm, but she knew their direction. With a quiet scream of outrage she raced into the hall.

  She woke Jettie first, warning her to gather the children and find safety. Then she ran down the back stairs to Jemima, sending her after the maids in the basement. She didn’t know where any of them would go, but they ought to at least be alert if the Raiders started for the house.

  She knew little of the men in the old slave cabins out back. Cash had always dealt with them. But she knew the grooms and the stablehands in the barns, and she ran to them next. Maybe if she could rouse enough people, they could chase the intruders away. She quelled the growing fear that it would be too late.

  Half-dressed grooms and stablehands staggered out of the loft and back rooms as Laura screamed for help. At the shout of “Raiders!” they awoke more fully and reached for pitchforks and scythes. It was scarcely the arsenal needed, and frustrated, Laura ordered them to wake the others in the cabins while she opened the gun cabinet.

  She could smell the smoke as she left the barn, and a glance over her shoulder revealed flames licking at the night sky. It was too late. She knew it was too late. The fire would roar through the ripened tobacco like dry tinder. She didn’t stop to test the wind. It almost always blew from the west, and the tobacco field was to the west of the house. She ran harder.

  Jettie had already ordered the hysterical maids to begin unloading the guns from the cabinet. The cabinet had been locked and no one had known where Cash kept the keys, so they had broken the glass, and it crunched underfoot as they grabbed rifles and pistols and ran to the men gathering outside.

  Laura knew a sense of futility as the field hands grabbed the rifles, then stared helplessly from them to the burning tobacco. Cash had hired ex-slaves as well as white soldiers returned from the war. The slaves had no knowledge of firearms and were terrified of retaliation by the murderous Raiders. The soldiers knew how to handle guns, some of them even knew how to ride the horses being led from the barn, but their willingness to fight swung on which army they had fought with.

  Had Cash been here, he could have whipped them into a fighting force of some sort, but there was little chance that they would take orders from a woman. Watching the flames leap higher and wider and roar toward the house, Laura nearly wept in frustration. After all their hard work, everything that had been sacrificed, they couldn’t lose it all now.

  Stoically accepting the loss of the main cash crop, Laura ordered the men unfamiliar with firearms to start organizing a bucket brigade to protect the house and outbuildings. Jake Conner grasped this opportunity to take charge, and Laura gratefully left him to browbeating the frightened men and maids into taking up buckets and shovels and forming a line of protection. Then, turning to the head groom, she ordered him to horse any man willing to ride, and before anyone could guess her intention, she took the first mount saddled.

  Put to shame by the sight of a woman bearing a rifle and riding defiantly toward the fields, the others followed suit, whatever their personal opinions might be. Those sympathetic to the complaints of the Raiders now faced the prospect of both losing their jobs and losing face by allowing a woman to fight for them.

  Whereas their stubborn, narrow-minded opinions might allow them to lose their jobs for a cause, their stiff Kentucky pride wouldn’t allow them to face the scorn of a woman. And in the company of a group of men eager for a fight of any sort, they easily fell into the mood of their fellow workers.

  It wasn’t much of a fight. At the sight of the armed band of men riding toward them, the Raiders melted back into the darkness from whence they came. They specialized in picking on the helpless, issuing their warnings in the form of raping defenseless women and lynching unarmed men, succeeding in their cause through terrorism, not open battle.

  Laura watched in disgust as the torches were pitched into the field and their tormentors rode off without a single shot fired. “Worms,” she spat out loud.

  The field was too far from the creek to save. There was nothing she could do to recoup Cash’s hard work, but the house and the people in it were of more importance. Giving a signal to the head groom, Laura directed the men back to the valiant efforts at the mansion.

  The wind was picking up, the precursor of a storm, and Laura cast the darkened sky a hopeless glance, unable to determine the distance or the speed of unseen clouds. Very likely the wind would blow the flames to destroy everything before the rain arrived, but she could always hope.

  Terrified of sending the children out into the night while the Raiders were abroad, Laura had Jettie and some of the younger maids round them up and keep them on the front lawn, some distance from the house, assigning a few young boys shotguns to protect the younger ones and to signal if anything went wrong. Then, turning back to the bucket brigade, she fell into line with a kitchen pot and began the tedious task of hauling water toward the creeping line of flames.

  The stench became unbearable as the wind carried the thick tarry smoke into their faces. They coughed and continued to carry water. Jemima’s cousin Jake had the strongest men digging trenches across the back lawn, trying to stop the fire that way. Laura had no idea of the efficacy of such measures, but it was increasingly obvious that their puny efforts with buckets had little chance of saving anything.

  She worked until she thought her arms would fall off. One of the maids swooned and had to be carried away. The smoke billowed around them until white became black and they could barely see each other through the gloom. The wind whistled through the trees, thrashing the branches violently, raising the leaping flames.

  A maid screamed as sparks ignited her cotton clothing. A splash of water doused the flame, but fear and caution slowed the efforts of the water brigade after that.

  Carriages and wagons arrived from neighboring farms. Laura could only wearily think the fire must be worse than she imagined for the flames to be seen that far away. Someone grabbed her shoulders and tried to drag her away, but she shrugged him off and followed the rut she surely must have worn in the grass by now. She had to save Stone Creek. It was all she had.

  A collective gasp went up as a gust of wind blew flames into the dry mock oranges circling the lawn. The green leaves took a moment to ignite, but already dried by summer heat and the scorch of fire, they soon turned into torches that soared ten and twelve feet into the air. The old bushes with their hundreds of dead branches were no major loss, but the danger of the leaping flames came that much closer to the house.

  Thank God that Cash had had the sense to keep all the truly combustible materials away from the house. The stables were the biggest danger, but they were on the other side of the house, still out of reach. By the time the fire got there, everything else would be gone, and the stables would be meaningless.

  She wept as the flames swept from the bushes into the overhanging branches of a young birch. She had kept that tree watered all summer so it would survive, but there were too many dead branches from previous neglected summers. The wind whipped the flames right through it. She heard the crowd cry out as the birch fell into the leaves of the stately old elm, but she couldn’t bear to watch any more. There was no way humanly possible to reach flames that high. Only heaven could save them now.

  This time when someone caught her shoulders and tried to lead her
away, Laura stumbled after him. She hadn’t realized she was sobbing until a handkerchief appeared in her hand. Useless fragment that it was, it couldn’t possibly hold all the tears and memories that poured from her now. Gone, all of it, soon now. Her wonderful sewing machine would be a heap of scrap. Mark’s hand-carved wooden cradle would be ashes. The lovely rose-pink silk would never become more than kindling.

  But it wasn’t just the material things that would be lost; she would lose all that had connected her to this land, to these people. She would be the same homeless five-year-old she had been when she had first arrived.

  The rain began as a patter of large splashes. Laura was aware of the heartfelt prayers rising around her as people turned their faces to the sky. But it was already too late; she could feel it. The flames were licking at the roof now, not steadily, but with increasing intensity.

  Cries could still be heard from the direction of the field where the men beat off the dying flames in the tobacco crop. Most of the action had turned toward the house. People still poured water on outbuildings in hopes of keeping them wet enough to hold out until the rain came, but the roof of the towering mansion was beyond their help. It hadn’t been built for easy access.

  The rain, when it finally came, poured in a great deluge. Screams of joy split the air, and children danced through the water in hysterical reaction to their elders’ relief. As it became obvious that the rain would do more in a single minute than hours of human effort, the bucket brigade subsided, falling back to watch the guttering flames eat along the roof and shrubbery.

  They pulled together in little groups, the white neighbors gathering about their wagons and murmuring among themselves, some already breaking away to head for home and dry clothes. Several attempted to take Laura with them, but she shook her head and asked them to take Jettie and the children. None refused her request, although she obviously meant Jettie’s children and those of the servants as well as her own.