In a Stranger's Arms (10 page)

Taking Varina’s hand in a firm grip, Caddie motioned for Tem to join them. “I declare, you two. The poor man has his hands full enough at that mill without playing mammy to both of you for the afternoon. You’ll come with me and you’ll behave nicely, or we will have words. Is that understood?”

The dispirited tone of Tem and Varina’s “Yes, Mama” chorus tugged at Manning.

“Ah... ma’am?”

Caddie lifted a finely arched brow to inquire what he wanted.

“I... well, the fact is, I could use the boy’s help up at the mill for a few hours, if you’d oblige me by letting him stay.”

The transparent mixture of happiness and gratitude on Templeton’s face gladdened Manning more than anything in a long time. Caddie’s look of horror cast him back down again in the space of a heartbeat. My, but that woman had a talent for putting a worm in a fellow’s apple!

“I’m sorry to disoblige you, sir. The mill’s too dangerous a place for my son. If anything should happen to him—”

Manning cut her off. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to him. I’m talking about simple jobs like holding a board steady for me to nail so as I don’t hammer any more of my fingers.”

“I could do that, Mama. Please.”

Varina yanked on her mother’s arm. “Me, too, Mama!”

Now look what you’ve done.
Caddie’s glare said it plainer than words.

A quick stride took Manning to the little girl. He dropped to his haunches before her. “Your mama needs you with her even more than I do, Varina. I tell you what, though. If you go along and behave yourself real well, I promise I’ll take you fishing tomorrow. Tem, too, if your mama needs him to go.”

“Fishing—yahoo!” Varina jumped up and down in most unladylike excitement.

Tem hung his head.

As Caddie’s eyes rested on her son for an instant, Manning sensed her struggle between a mother’s natural protectiveness and an intense desire to make the boy happy.

“I suppose Templeton can lend you a hand for the afternoon, if you both promise me you’ll be very careful.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Manning and Templeton replied together, exchanging a look of triumphant allies.

When Manning rose to his feet, he caught Caddie regarding him with a very different expression. He’d seen one like it on the face of a Union general whose battlefield blunder had been remedied by the quick thinking of a junior officer.

The look had not been one of gratitude.

She should be grateful to the man, a feeble voice of prewar gentility protested in Caddie’s mind as she and Varina drove off to pay their calls around the neighborhood.

Thanks to his providence, she and her children were eating better than they had in years. She didn’t have to endure the humiliation of staying at Sabbath Hollow as guests of Lon and Lydene. In large measure, she’d been able to shift the heavy burden of reviving the plantation onto Manning’s broad shoulders. But didn’t the Yankees owe her at least that much for all they’d stolen? The caustic bile of bitterness stung in Caddie’s throat. If not for Manning Forbes and hundreds of thousands like him, her family’s fortunes wouldn’t need restoring. Sabbath Hollow would still be gracious and prosperous. Her children would never have known a moment’s hunger or fear. And they wouldn’t need a stepfather, kind or otherwise, for their own pa would still be living.

A shiver ran up Caddie’s back and the contents of her stomach curdled to think what her married life would be like if the war had not intervened. Not for an instant would she credit Del’s death as a favor on the part of the Yankees. Though the tensions and ill will in their marriage had festered as acutely as those between North and South on the eve of Fort Sumter, Caddie had never wished her husband dead.

Had she?

“Where are we going, Mama?”

Her daughter’s question rescued Caddie from having to face the impossibly painful inquisition of her conscience.

“Several places, dear. Willowvale, Gordon Manor, Oak Hill.”

Just saying the names lightened her mood, bringing back fond memories of parties, hunts and racing meets. Dressing up pretty and dancing, gossiping with the women and flirting innocently with the men.

“Which one first?” Below the hem of Varina’s skirts, two sturdy pantalet-clad legs swung back and forth in time to the jingle of the horse’s harness.

“The Pratt place, Willowvale.” Caddie tugged on the reins to urge their old mare off the road and down the Pratts’ long lane. “They’re a fine old family. Mrs. Pratt was your grandma Marsh’s dearest friend and her husband once sat in the General Assembly.”

“Anybody there to play with?” Varina didn’t sound much impressed by the Pratt family pedigree.

“I don’t reckon so. Mrs. Pratt’s family are all grown. Some of them might be married and have young’uns, though.”

Varina craned her neck and raised a hand to shade her eyes as she peered toward the plantation house. “I see somebody!”

The child’s eagerness made Caddie wonder if bringing Varina along had been such a wise idea.

She cast her daughter a sidelong glance. “You recollect what you were told about behaving yourself, young lady. Mrs. Pratt always was most particular about good children being seen and not heard. If you want to go fishing tomorrow, you’ll have to make sure you only speak when you’re spoken to and then give a nice, respectful answer. Is that understood?”

Heaving a dramatic sigh, Varina clasped her hands primly in her lap. “Yes, ma’am.”

Thank goodness for Manning’s blatant bribe. An impulse of unforced gratitude gripped Caddie’s heart.

Reining the buckboard to a halt, she glanced at the Pratts’ sprawling plantation house of cream-colored brick. The place looked to be in worse shape than Sabbath Hollow. The whole roof of the east wing had collapsed and most of the windows had been clumsily boarded up. When the Yankees had first marched through this part of Virginia, had the Pratts refugeed elsewhere, never to return?

As if to dispel Caddie’s doubts, the front door flew open and a young woman in a black dress rushed out. Sleeves that should have fit snugly on slender arms hung painfully loose on hers.

She called back to an older woman who had stepped onto the porch. “Visitors, Mother. Isn’t this a treat? We’ve had more company the past week than we got all winter. I reckon the worst of hard times are behind us.”

“I hope they are, Ann.” Caddie climbed down from the buckboard and greeted the young woman with a smile. “It’s good to see you again.”

Ann Pratt jerked to a halt, like a greyhound curbed hard by an invisible leash. Her half-eager, half-anxious smile vanished. “Caddie? What are you doing here?”

Turning to the buckboard, Caddie lifted Varina down. She forced herself to overlook Ann’s uncivil greeting. Folks weren’t accustomed to receiving visitors like they’d once been—Ann had said as much, herself. No doubt Mrs. Pratt would correct her daughter’s manners as Caddie would have corrected Varina.

“I apologize for taking so long to get around and call on everyone, ladies.” She raised her voice to include Mrs. Pratt in the conversation. “The children and I came home from Richmond a little over a fortnight ago, but we’ve been busy getting settled back in at Sabbath Hollow. I can’t stay long. I just wanted to give everyone our regards and catch up on all the news.”

From the porch, Mrs. Pratt spoke. “We heard you were back.” Her tone left Caddie no doubt that those tidings hadn’t cheered Willowvale. “We also heard you’d remarried in some haste.”

Tilting her chin defiantly, Caddie clutched Varina’s hand a little tighter. “I have remarried.”

“I’m surprised you had the face to call on folks,” said the older woman, as her daughter continued to stare at Caddie in mild horror. “If you’re brazen enough to come, I reckon I’m curious enough to let you sit a spell. Though no further than the porch, mind. The devil take it if I’ll entertain a Yankee carpetbagger’s wh—” she broke off, then amended “—wife in my home. Ann, fetch us some chairs.”

Ann backed toward the house as though she didn’t dare risk turning away from their less-than-welcome guests.

For a moment Caddie toyed with the notion of telling Mrs. Pratt the devil could take her, then driving away with her nose in the air.

But reason prevailed.

What had she expected?
it asked Caddie in a wry voice strangely reminiscent of Manning’s. Had she entertained some impossibly optimistic notion that the neighbors, isolated on their plantations, struggling to put food on the table, hadn’t heard about her remarriage? She should have known better. This kind of gossip spread faster than measles in an army camp.

Towing Varina by the hand, Caddie picked her way over rutted ground and past overgrown shrubs to the Pratts’ front porch. Alienating the neighbors wouldn’t get the sawmill operating. And it sure wouldn’t put any logs in the millpond.

Ann reappeared with a rocking chair for her mother to sit on. Caddie pretended not to notice the gaping hole in its cane seat. The footstool Ann offered her had seen better days, too.

Off in one of the fields, Caddie could see a man and a boy walking hand in hand. Why was Jeff Pratt strolling around his acres instead of planting them? Why hadn’t he or Josh or Willie thought to take unbroken panes of glass from some windows to repair the most important ones, as Manning had done at Sabbath Hollow? Why couldn’t he have spared a few minutes to tack a slab of cut lumber on the seat of his old mother’s rocking chair? The place even smelled of wood rot and mildew.

Had decades of owning slaves made Southern folks too shiftless to look after themselves decently? Hard as Caddie tried to stifle that treasonous thought, it would not go away.

The creak of Mrs. Pratt’s rocking chair filled the awkward silence as she stared off in the same direction as Caddie.

“Well, well,” she said at last, shaking her head. “What do you reckon poor Delbert Marsh would say about his widow bringing a Yankee carpetbagger to live under his roof?”

What indeed? And what would Del say if he caught her watching that carpetbagger with a strange hunger in her eyes? Or caressing his stubbled cheek while he slept?

Though shame burned in her belly like a white-hot coal, Caddie did her best to answer Mrs. Pratt with calm civility... as Manning would have done. “I reckon Del might say he’s glad his children are getting plenty to eat.”

Mrs. Pratt gave a sniff of derision. “You’re mortgaging your children’s birthright for a mess of Yankee pottage, missy. And stabbing their kinfolk in the back, while you’re about it. Mark my words, this carpetbagger of yours will hang around just long enough to wring every dime out of Sabbath Hollow, then he’ll skedaddle back up North where he belongs. When that happens, don’t think you’ll be able to turn to your neighbors for help.”

The word kinfolk echoed in Caddie’s ears. “You’ve been listening to Lon, haven’t you? Well, let me tell you something, Mrs. Pratt. I’d trust Mr. Forbes with my children and my property any day ahead of a no-account schemer like Alonzo Marsh. Likely Del would have, too. Mr. Forbes can’t help where he was born. He may be a Yankee, but he’s decent and kind and trustworthy.”

Even as she spoke the words, Caddie couldn’t figure where all her praise for Manning was coming from. She’d thought things about him every bit as bad as Mrs. Pratt had said. Yet Caddie found she could no more let the woman run him down than she could have sat silent while someone insulted Tem or Varina. In some strange way, whether Caddie wanted him or not, Manning now belonged to her, and she would defend him to outsiders with her last breath.

She cast a pointed look around at the boarded windows of Willowvale’s once-imposing facade and at several broken floorboards on the porch. “My husband works harder than most menfolk around these parts, I reckon. He’s fixing up the old sawmill on Sabbath Creek and looking for a crew to work it. He’ll bargain wood contracts with anyone industrious enough to float a boom of logs down the creek. Might your boys be interested in undertaking either of those?”

Mrs. Pratt’s tiny mouth stretched into a thin, taut line and her face blanched to the same gray-white shade as her hair.

“No, I don’t reckon they would.” She spoke the words in a tight, vicious whisper. “Now clear off my porch and off my property, missy. You’re no better than that vile carpetbagger husband of yours.”

During this conversation with Mrs. Pratt, Varina had remained so unnaturally quiet Caddie had almost forgotten the child was there. Rising from the footstool, she reached for her daughter’s hand. Whatever had possessed her to bring the child? Some cowardly assurance that folks would keep civil tongues in their heads in front of a four-year-old?

Another coal of shame took fire in Caddie’s belly. Varina liked Manning. Only the powerful inducement of a fishing trip could have made her listen to so many ugly slanders against him without rebuttal.

Shaking off her mother’s grip, Varina marched over to Mrs. Pratt’s rocking chair. The old lady seemed to relent for a moment. Perhaps in her bitterness, she had forgotten that little pitchers had big ears.

“What’s your name, precious?”

“Varina Virginia Marsh.”

“After your grandmother, of course.” Mrs. Pratt looked the child over with a fond, sad smile. “Varina, you seem like a real smart little mite. For the sake of your grandma’s dearest friend, will you tell your mother what you think of her betraying your blessed papa’s memory by marrying a Yankee carpetbagger?”