Farley gave her a look over one broad shoulder and walked out, calmly closing the door behind him.
Elisabeth cupped her chin in her hands and tried to remember if the Pine River Bugle had said anything about a lynch mob. “Jonathan,” she whispered, “where are you?”
When the door slammed open a few minutes later, however, it wasn’t Jonathan filling the chasm. In fact, it could only have been Big Lil, so tall and broadly built was this woman who strode in, carrying a basket covered with a checked table napkin. She wore trousers, boots, suspenders and a rough-spun shirt. Her gray hair was tied back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck.
It occurred to Elisabeth that Big Lil might begrudge her the calico dress, and she reached back to pull the garment tight with one hand, hoping that effort would disguise it.
Big Lil fetched a ring of keys from the desk, unlocked the door and brought the basket into the cell. Her regard was neither friendly nor condemning, but merely steady. “So, you’re the little lady what roasted the doctor like a trussed turkey,” she said.
Elisabeth’s appetite fled, and she swallowed vile-tasting liquid as she stared at the covered food. She jutted out her chin and glared defiantly at Big Lil, refusing to dignify the remark with an answer.
Big Lil gave a raucous, crowing laugh, then went out of the cell and locked the door again. “Folks around here liked the doc,” she said. “I don’t reckon they’ll take kindly to what you did.”
Still, Elisabeth was silent, keeping her eyes fixed on the wall opposite her cot until she heard the door close behind the obnoxious woman.
Elisabeth was in the worst fix of her life, but in the next few moments, her appetite returned, wooed back by the luscious smells coming from inside the basket. She pushed aside the napkin to find hot buttered biscuits inside, along with two pieces of fried chicken and a wedge of goopy cherry pie.
She consumed the biscuits, then the chicken and half the piece of pie before Farley returned, followed by a hard-looking woman with dark hair, small, mean eyes and a pock-marked complexion.
“This is Mrs. Bernard,” Farley said, cocking his thumb toward the lady. “She’s a Presbyterian.”
At last, Elisabeth thought, the lynch mob.
Mrs. Bernard stood at a judicious distance from the bars and told Elisabeth in on uncertain terms how God dealt harshly with harlots and liars and had no mercy at all for murderers.
Elisabeth’s rage drew her up off the cot and made her stand tall, like a puppet with its strings pulled too tight. “There will certainly be no need to bring in a judge and try me fairly,” she said. “This good woman apparently feels competent to pronounce sentence herself.”
Mrs. Bernard’s face turned an ugly, mottled red. “Jonathan Fortner was a fine man,” she said after a long, bitter silence. She pulled a handkerchief from under her sleeve and dabbed at her beady eyes with it.
“I know that, Mrs. Bernard,” Elisabeth replied evenly. The marshal made something of a clatter as he went about his business at the desk, opening drawers and shuffling papers and books.
“Which is not to say he didn’t make his share of errors in judgment,” the woman went on, as if Elisabeth hadn’t spoken. She snuffled loudly. “In any case, the Ladies’ Aid Society wishes to extend Christian benevolence. For that reason, I’ll be bringing by some decent clothes for you to wear, and some of my companions will drop in to explain the wages of sin.”
Elisabeth let her forehead rest against the cold bars. “And I thought I didn’t have anything but a hanging to look forward to,” she sighed.
If Mrs. Bernard heard, she gave no response. She merely said a stiff goodbye to the marshal and went out.
“If you’ll just bring a doctor in from Seattle,” Elisabeth said, “he’ll testify that human bones can’t be destroyed in an ordinary house fire and you’ll have to let me go.”
“I’m not letting you go until you tell me what you did with the doc and that poor little girl of his,” Farley replied, and although he didn’t look up from his paperwork, Elisabeth saw his fist tighten around his nibbed pen.
“Well, at least send someone out to look for my necklace,” Elisabeth persisted, but the situation was hopeless and she knew it. Farley simply wasn’t listening.
Chapter Fifteen
It was the second week in July before the circuit judge showed up to conduct Elisabeth’s trial, and by that time, she’d lost all hope that Jonathan and Trista would ever return. The townspeople were spoiling for a hanging, and even Elisabeth’s defense attorney, a smarmy little man in an ill-fitting suit, made it clear that he would have preferred working for the prosecution.
If it hadn’t been for the child nature was knitting together beneath her heart, Elisabeth wouldn’t have minded dying so much. After all, she was in a harsh and unfamiliar century, separated from practically everyone who mattered to her, and even if she managed to be acquitted of killing Jonathan and Trista, she would always be an outcast.
And she would probably be convicted.
The thought of the innocent baby dying with her tightened her throat and made her stomach twist as she sat beside her lawyer in the stuffy courtroom—which was really the schoolhouse with the desks all pushed against the walls.
The judge occupied the teacher’s place, and there was nothing about his appearance or manner to reassure Elisabeth. In fact, his eyes were red rimmed, and the skin of his face settled awkwardly over his bones, like a garment that was too large. The thousands of tiny purple-and-red veins in his nose said even more about the state of his character.
“This court will now come to order,” he said in a booming voice, after clearing his throat.
Elisabeth shifted uncomfortably in her chair beside Mr. Rodcliff, her attorney, recalling her reflection in the jailhouse mirror that morning. Her blond hair had fallen loose around her shoulders, her face looked pallid and gaunt, and there were purple smudges under her eyes.
She was the very picture of guilt.
Farley stood over by the wainscotted wall, slicked up for the big day, his hat in his hands. He caught Elisabeth’s eye and gave a slight nod, as if to offer encouragement.
She looked away, knowing Farley’s real feelings. He wanted to see her dangle, because he believed she’d willfully murdered his friend.
The first witness called to the stand was Ellen, Jonathan’s erstwhile housekeeper. Tearfully, the plain woman told how Elisabeth had just appeared one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and somehow managed to bewitch the poor doctor.
Mr. Rodcliff asked a few cursory questions when his turn came, then sat down again.
Elisabeth folded her arms and sat back in her chair, biting down hard on her lower lip. Vera was the next to testify, saying Trista had told her some very strange things about Elisabeth—that she was really an angel come from heaven, and that she had a magic necklace and played queer music on the piano and claimed to know exactly what the world would be like in a hundred years.
Mr. Rodcliff gave Elisabeth an accusing sidelong glance, as if to ask how she expected him to defend her against such charges. When the prosecuting attorney sat down behind his table, Elisabeth’s lawyer rose with a defeated sigh and told the judge he had nothing to say.
Elisabeth watched a fly buzzing doggedly against one of the heavy windows and empathized. She felt hot and ugly in her brown dress, and even though she’d borrowed a needle and thread from Farley and taken tucks in it, it still fit badly.
Hearing Farley’s name called, Elisabeth jerked her attention back to the front of the room. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, though his gaze swept over the jury of six men lined up under the world map. He cleared his throat before repeating the oath, then testified that he’d been summoned to the Fortner farm, along with the volunteer fire department, by one of Efriam Lute’s sons, who’d awakened because the livestock was fretful and seen the flames.
When he’d arrived, Farley said, he immediately tried to get up the main staircase, knowing the members of the household
would be sleeping, it being the middle of the night and all. He allowed as how his way had been blocked by flames and smoke, so he’d tried both the other sets of stairs and met with the same frustration. He had, however, found Miss Lizzie half-conscious in the kitchen and had carried her out.
It was only later, he related, when she began saying odd things, that he started to suspect that something was wrong. When he’d learned she was lying about her identity, he’d filed charges.
While Farley talked, Elisabeth stared at him, and he began to squirm in his chair.
Mr. Rodcliff didn’t even bother to offer a question when he was given the opportunity and, at last, Elisabeth was called to the stand. She was terrified, but she stood and walked with regal grace to the front of the crowded schoolroom and laid her left hand on the offered Bible, raising her right.
Benches had been brought in for the spectators, and the place was packed with them. The smell of sweat made Elisabeth want to gag.
“Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” asked the bailiff, who was really Marvin Hites, the man who ran the general store.
“I do,” Elisabeth said clearly, even though she knew she couldn’t tell the “whole truth” because these relatively primitive minds would never be able to absorb it. She would be committed, and Elisabeth’s limited knowledge of nineteenth-century mental hospitals told her it would be better to hang.
There followed a long inquisition, during which Elisabeth was asked who she was. “Lizzie” was the only answer she would give to that. She was asked where she came from, and she said Seattle, which caused murmurs of skepticism among the lookers-on.
Finally, the prosecutor inquired as to whether Elisabeth had in fact “ignited the blazes that consumed one Dr. Jonathan Fortner and his small daughter, Trista.”
The question, even though Elisabeth had expected it, outraged her. “No,” she said reasonably, but inside she was screaming her anger and her innocence. “I loved Dr. Fortner. He and I were planning to be married.”
The townswomen buzzed behind their fans at this statement, and it occurred to Elisabeth that many of them had probably either hoped to marry Jonathan themselves or had wanted to land him for a son-in-law or a nephew by marriage.
“You loved him,” the prosecutor said in a voice that made Elisabeth want to slap his smug face. “And yet you did murder, Miss—Lizzie. You killed the man and his child as they slept, unwitting, in their beds!”
A shape moved in the open doorway, then a familiar voice rolled over the murmurs of the crowd like a low roll of thunder. “If I’m dead, Walter,” Jonathan said, “I think it’s going to come as a big shock to both of us.”
He stood in the center aisle, his clothes ripped and covered in soot, one arm in a makeshift sling made from one of the silk scarves Elisabeth had collected in her other incarnation. His gray eyes linking with hers, he continued, “I’m alive, obviously, and so is Trista.”
Women were fainting all over the room, and some of the men didn’t look too chipper, either. But Elisabeth’s shock was pure, undiluted joy. She flung herself at Jonathan and embraced him, being careful not to press against his injured arm.
He kissed her, holding her unashamedly close, his good hand pressed to the small of her back. And even after he lifted his mouth from hers, he seemed impervious to the crowd stuffing the schoolhouse.
It was Farley who shouldered his way to Jonathan and demanded, “Damn it, Jon, where the hell have you been?”
Jonathan’s teeth were startlingly white against his soot-smudged face. He slapped the marshal’s shoulder affectionately. “Someday, Farley, when we’re both so old it can’t make a difference, I may just tell you.”
“Order, order!” the judge was yelling, hammering at the desk with his trusty gavel.
The mob paid no attention. They were shouting questions at Jonathan, but he ignored them, ushering a stunned Elisabeth down the aisle and out into the bright July sunshine.
“It seems time has played another of its nasty tricks on us,” he said when he and Elisabeth stood beneath the sheltering leaves of a maple tree. He traced her jawline with the tip of one index finger. “Let’s make a vow, Lizzie, never to be apart again.”
Tears were trickling down Elisabeth’s cheeks, tears of joy and relief. “Jonathan, what happened?”
He held her close, and she rested her head against his shoulder, not minding the acrid, smoky smell of him in the least. “I’m not really sure,” he replied, his breath moving in her hair. “I woke up, Trista was screaming and there was no sign of you. I had the necklace in my hand. All three stairways were closed off, and the roof was burning, too. I grabbed up my daughter, offered a prayer and went over the threshold.”
Elisabeth clung to him, hardly able even then to believe that he’d really come back to her. “How long were you there?” she asked.
He propped his chin on top of her head, and the townspeople kept their distance, though they were streaming out of the schoolhouse, chattering and speculating. “That’s the crazy part, Elisabeth,” he said. “A few hours passed at the most—I waited until I could be fairly sure the fire would be out, then I came over again, this time carrying Trista on my back. Climbing down through the charred ruins took some time.”
“How did you know where to look for me?”
His powerful shoulders moved in a shrug. “There were a lot of horses and wagons going past. I stopped old Cully Reed, and he about spit out his teeth when he saw me. Then he told me what was going on and brought me here in his hay wagon.”
Elisabeth stiffened, looking up into Jonathan’s face, searching for any sign of a secret. “And Trista wasn’t hurt?”
He shook his head. “She’s already convinced the whole thing was a nightmare, brought on by swallowing so much smoke. Maybe when she’s older, we can tell her what really happened, but I think it would only confuse her now. God knows, it confuses me.”
The judge, who had been ready to send Elisabeth to the gallows only minutes before, dared to impinge upon the invisible circle that had kept the townspeople back. He laid a hand to Jonathan’s shoulder and smiled. “Looks like you need some medical attention for that arm, son.”
“The first thing I need,” Jonathan answered quietly, his eyes never leaving Elisabeth’s face, “is a wife. Think you could perform the ceremony, Judge? Say in an hour, out by the covered bridge?”
The judge agreed with a nod, and Elisabeth thought how full of small ironies life is, not to mention mysteries.
“Will you marry me, Lizzie?” Jonathan asked, a little belatedly. “Will you throw away the necklace and live with me forever?”
Elisabeth thought only briefly of that other life, in that other, faraway place. She might have dreamed it, for all the reality it had, though she knew she would miss Rue and her friends. “Yes, Jon.”
He kissed her again, lifting her onto her toes to do it, and the spectators cheered. Elisabeth forgave them for their fickleness because a lifetime of love and happiness lay before her, because Jonathan was back and she was carrying his baby, and because Trista would grow up to raise a family of her own.
As Elisabeth caught a glimpse of the half-burned house, what in her mind had been the very symbol of shattered hopes now, miraculously, became a place where children would laugh and run and work, a place where music would play.
“Oh, Jonathan, I love you,” Elisabeth said, her arm linked with his as Cully Reed’s hay wagon came to a stop in the side yard. They’d been sitting in the back, their feet dangling.
Jonathan kissed her smartly, jumped to the ground and lifted her after him with one arm. “I love you, too,” he answered huskily, and his eyes brushed over her, making her flesh tingle with the anticipation of his lovemaking. He waved at the driver. “Thanks, Cully. See you at the wedding.”
Practical concerns closed around Elisabeth like barking dogs as she and Jonathan went up the front steps and into the house. “What am I going to wear?” she
fretted, holding wide the skirts of Big Lil’s brown calico dress. “I can’t be married in this!”
Jonathan assessed the outfit and laughed. “Why not, Lizzie? This certainly isn’t going to be a conventional wedding day anyhow.”
Elisabeth sighed. There was no denying that. Nonetheless, she diligently searched the upstairs and was heartbroken to find nothing that wasn’t in even worse condition than what she was wearing.
In his bedroom, Jonathan sank into a chair and unwrapped his wounded arm. Elisabeth winced when she saw the angry burn.
“Oh, Jon,” she whispered, chagrined. She fell to her knees beside his chair. “Here I am, worrying about a stupid dress, when you’re hurt….”
He bent to kiss her forehead. “I’ll be all right,” he assured her gruffly. “But after the wedding, I’d like to go first to Seattle and then San Francisco. There’s a doctor in Seattle who might be able to help me keep full use of the muscles in my hand and wrist.”
Elisabeth’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ll go anywhere, as long as I can be with you. You know that. But who will look after your patients here?” Even as she voiced the question, she thought of the young, red-haired physician who had been summoned from Seattle after Jonathan’s disappearance.
“Whoever’s been doing it in my absence,” Jonathan replied, and there was pain in his eyes, and distance. “I won’t be of use to anybody if I can’t use my right hand, Lizzie.”
Elisabeth watched unflinchingly as he began treating the burns with a smelly ointment. “That’s not true. You’re so important to me that I can’t even imagine what I’d have done without you.”
Before Jonathan could respond to that, Trista bolted into the room and hurled herself into Elisabeth’s waiting arms.
“Vera said there was a trial and that she testified,” the child chattered. Her brow was crimped into a frown when she drew back to search Elisabeth’s face. “How could so much have happened while I was sleeping?”
There and Now Page 21
