Read Her Loving Husband's Curse Online
Authors: Meredith Allard
Her Loving Husband's Curse (38 page)
“I love you, James.”
“I love you more.”
He turned, saw the guards closing in on him, and he flashed away. With a deft cat-like leap he grabbed the railing of the train that was already miles away from the station. He knew he was too far, a speck in the distance to Sarah, but he could still see her lean into Jennifer for support, see her hide her face away from the place where he disappeared. He heard the smacking footsteps of the guard behind him.
“Let’s go. You won’t be pulling that again.”
The guard led James back to the compartment where the other vampires sat. “Stay here,” the guard said. James saw Jocelyn, Timothy, Chandresh, and Geoffrey and sighed. This should be interesting, he thought, grateful that for now, at least, they would be together. As much as he ached at the loss of Sarah, he knew he had to stay watchful, aware. He needed to stay strong. Just as he promised his wife. He needed to triumph over this damned curse that sent him away from her. He needed to get out of this so he could go back to his life with the woman he loved and their little girl. He had to. It was their destiny.
Sarah stared at her wooden gabled house as though she had never seen it before, as though she had only known it in her dreams. It was nearly silent outside that spring afternoon, the dusk settling as pink and gold on the break in the horizon, the crooked oak tree bent even closer to the ground, as though it had grown older in the family’s absence. The fresh blooms flittered in the bay breeze, and everywhere Sarah looked was oddly deserted of people, as though everyone stayed away in deference to the old house’s new mournfulness. Usual traffic flows, the earliest tourists of the season, even walking locals were nowhere to be seen. For decades, neighbors saw the wooden gabled house, noticed the phantasmal man in the shadows, and they were convinced the old house was haunted—by memories. Now, with Sarah and Grace back without James, that intuition was more right than ever—the memories would be hard again. The house had a reprieve from the specter-like recollections for a while, nearly a year, but now there was more sadness, more worries, more madness to overcome. For a moment, Sarah thought she saw the long wooden slats of the exterior walls shudder and bend under the weight of the heavy beams of the gables, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if the house bowed in prayer then disintegrated into dust before her eyes. But even as she felt the agitation, the old place called her name—Sarah or Elizabeth, it was all the same to her now. Just as it had when she saw it when she first arrived in Salem, the house spoke to her, she knew it, and it knew her, and James or no James, it was her home. She and that house still shared their secret, and she needed it. She thought of the poem she shared with her dear and loving husband, and it brought her some comfort.
“I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold…”
Sarah sighed. She pulled herself slowly from Olivia’s silver Prius, it still hurt to move, and Olivia helped her unstrap Grace from her seat in the back. Sarah held her daughter to her chest as she walked to her green front door with determination. This would be hard, she knew, but she and Grace would get through it because they had to. James was strong and immortal. He would be all right. It was just as he said. This was a roadblock, a bump in the road, but she would be strong enough for all of them.
“Or all the riches that the East doth hold…”
Inside the great room Olivia took Grace from Sarah’s arms.
“You’re still recovering, Sarah. Let me have her. She’s getting bigger every day.”
Sarah nodded though her arms ached with the emptiness.
Olivia stopped, clutched Grace to her chest, and watched Sarah, her detective seeking clues look on high alert. “You don’t need to stay here by yourself, dear. You can stay with me as long as you need.”
“I want to be home,” Sarah said. “I need to be home.”
“What about Child Services?”
“Mrs. Jackson said as long as I can prove I’m human they won’t take Grace.”
Olivia smiled with the motherly compassion Sarah loved her for, then carried Grace into her bedroom to lay her down for a nap.
Sarah was mesmerized by the old house, looking around as though everything inside were new to her, as though she had awakened from an odd dream and she knew this house from somewhere only she wasn’t sure where or how or why. She looked at the remodeled kitchen, the hearth empty without the black cauldron, the books on the shelves, the diamond-paned casement windows. She looked up at the loft-style attic and the seventeenth century wooden desk.
Then she remembered. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the antique-style key, and wandered to James’s desk. His laptop computer was closed, his lecture notes filed, everything in its place as he always left it. She imagined him sitting at his desk, writing something, reading something, thinking something, and she walked to his chair and imagined that she pressed her hands into his strong shoulders and he smiled at her and brushed her hair from her face. She wanted to talk to him. She wanted him to hold her and she wanted to feel his strong arms clutching her close and she wanted to hear his strong, sweet voice tell her everything was going to be all right. But he wasn’t there.
For now, she reminded herself. For now.
How quickly things changed. At first, after their wedding, it seemed as if no time had passed since their first marriage in 1691, but now everything was different. Whenever she wondered about what James must be facing on his journey to the camp or the prison or whatever it was, she had to force those thoughts from her mind because she couldn’t go there. She filled herself with happy memories instead.
“My love is such that rivers cannot quench…”
She sat before the old desk and pushed the key into the lock on the bottom right drawer, the same drawer from where he had pulled the newspaper clipping of President Jackson. She saw a manila folder with the words ‘For Sarah’ in her husband’s calligraphy-like handwriting, and she pulled it from the drawer and saw a stack of timeworn papers inside. With trembling fingers, she pulled out the pages, staring at them, reading and rereading them as though to verify they were really there and not a figment of her imagination, something she wanted to see. She read them again, one by one, and saw the proof of James’s everlasting devotion. They were letters to his girlfriend. They were letters to her:
…
But now I am here and you are still gone. I cannot live without you, and yet I cannot die. What do I do? Oh my God, Elizabeth. What do I do?
…
Dear God, Elizabeth. Where should I go?
…
I am writing to you because you are still all I have to live for.
…
I am certain that here, nestled high in this nook in the mountains, that I can kiss the close-looking stars, kiss you, if I stretch hard enough.
…
I want to help them, Lizzie. The fear you can hold in your hands like sharp-edged razors—can you feel it? The wails of the mothers as they’re dragged from their children—can you hear it?
…
They look the way I felt when I watched the constable drag you away. This is torture, Lizzie. No other word will do.
…
I will find water for as many of them as I can, Lizzie. You will be proud of me.
As she read his words of love, words he wrote to her even when he thought she was gone from him forever, words he needed to share with her even when he thought she would never read them, she realized that neither space nor time could keep them apart. Their love was, just as her father-in-law predicted over three hundred years before, eternal. And James knew what she would need when he was gone and, planning for an event such as this, they had lived through something similar after all, he left it behind for her so she would know how he thought of her wherever she was, wherever he was. He knew her so well.
Suddenly, she felt his strength envelop her, as though he slid his strong arms around her from wherever he was, and she knew that, whatever may come, she would be strong. That wisp-like iridescent thread she felt lassoing around them and pulling them together the first time she saw him outside this very house, that invisible connection that held them tight to each other over three hundred years, was still there, spread wider now to cover the miles between them, but it was still there, keeping them close. And just as he wanted her to be proud of how he handled himself while helping the people on the Trail of Tears, now she wanted him to be proud of how she navigated their own difficult path. She would not give up on him, not now, not after everything they had been through to find their way back to each other. They would be all right again. They had to be.
It was their destiny.
Acknowledgments
I had the opportunity to visit the town of Salem, Massachusetts in the summer of 2011, and I loved it so much I wanted to move there. My worst fear was I’d get there to discover I had the town’s landmarks all mixed up. Fortunately, everything was where I thought it would be. For anyone with an interest in the Salem Witch Trials or in the beginning traces of American history, a trip to Salem, and Boston, is mandatory.
Thank you to the readers, writers, and contributors of
The Copperfield Review
. We’ve been going eleven years and still counting. Not too shabby. And, of course, thank you to the editors at Copperfield Press.
When I put
Her Dear & Loving Husband
out into the world, I had no idea what to expect. I hoped I had written a story people would like if they had a chance to read it. I have been overwhelmed with gratitude for the warm reception readers have given James and Sarah. A most hearty thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share their kind words about the book. You are all greatly appreciated. Most authors would argue that their readers are the best, but I know my readers really are the best.
The Cherokee were not the only native tribe forced to walk west. The Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Moscogee-Creek also endured that perilous journey. I hope readers are intrigued enough by the Trail of Tears to seek out nonfiction accounts of that sad episode.
The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears
by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green is a good place to start.
About The Author
Meredith Allard received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from California State University, Northridge. She is the author of
The Loving Husband Trilogy
(Copperfield Press). Her short fiction and articles have appeared in journals such as
The Paumanok Review
,
The Maxwell Digest
,
Wild Mind
,
Muse Apprentice Guild
,
Writer’s Weekly
,
Moondance
, and
CarbLite
. She has taught writing to students aged ten to sixty, and she has taught creative writing and writing historical fiction seminars at Learning Tree University, UNLV, and the Las Vegas Writers Conference. She is the executive editor of
The Copperfield Review
, an award-winning literary journal for readers and writers of historical fiction. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Visit Meredith online at
http://www.meredithallard.com
.
Her Loving Husband’s Curse
is Book Two of
The Loving Husband Trilogy
. Book One,
Her Dear & Loving Husband
, is also available from Copperfield Press. Look for Book Three coming Spring 2013.
Table of Contents