In a Stranger's Arms (23 page)

When Manning reached the doorway of his bedroom, he found just what he’d feared.

Caddie sat on the edge of his bed with the wooden box on her lap. Somehow she’d managed to pick the lock, which had never been intended to deter serious prying.

It didn’t look as though she’d read any of the papers inside, but that did nothing to quiet the ferocious alarm that reared and raged within him.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” He swooped in and grabbed the box from her.

He was less furious with Caddie than with himself. Why couldn’t he just burn the damn letter, or tear it into a hundred pieces and scatter them to the four winds? It wasn’t like he was apt to forget his promise without that tangible reminder. The whole business made no sense, and things that made no sense scared Manning—especially when it came to his own behavior.

Nothing fueled anger like a good charge of fear.

“If you don’t quit spying on me, woman, so help me I’ll—” What would he do? What
could
he do?

Not a damned thing. No matter how grave a threat she posed to his one chance at redemption, he’d let the devil take him before he’d harm one flame-kissed hair on her beautiful, dear, dangerous head.

“Just get out and leave me be!”

Caddie rose to her feet, her eyes searching his face as if it was a far more cryptic lock she intended to pick. Her whole body trembled, surely in the grip of emotions as intense and contrary as his own.

Her lips parted. Lips he could never see or think of without remembering the kiss she’d given him and without feeling his whole body burn, like a heretic at the stake.

Of all the words that might discharge from those lips, the last Manning ever expected was, “Del?”

As Caddie reached for his face, Manning found himself frozen to the spot. “Del Marsh, that is you in there, isn’t it? Why are you doing this to me?”

That was what she suspected? As understanding crashed upon Manning, Caddie’s charge seemed both completely inevitable and completely impossible.

For one mad instant, he considered saying yes.

After all, he’d assumed most of Delbert Marsh’s earthly responsibilities. Would it be so much of a stretch to assume his identity? Never again would he bear that hateful title, carpetbagger. Never again would Caddie discourage the children from calling him Papa. Never again would he have to hold back the floodgates of his desire for this woman.

“No!” It was the hardest word he’d ever had to say.

Manning staggered back from Caddie, lest her gentle touch pummel his battle-weary scruples. “I’m not your husband. I mean I am, but not your real husband. That’s craziness!”

“It’s not craziness. It’s the only answer that makes sense. The first time I laid eyes on you again, I knew it had to be you. But I let myself be persuaded otherwise.”

He should have known this might occur to her. Till the day he died, and maybe even after, while he burned in hell, Manning would remember that soul-chilling instant when he’d rolled a mortally wounded rebel officer onto his back and seen a face too much like the one that stared out of his tiny shaving mirror every morning.

“I swear to you, Caddie, I am not Del Marsh. What do I have to do to prove it?”

Thank goodness he hadn’t yielded to the temptation to pretend he was Del. That would have meant a lifetime of lies compounding his other sins.

Caddie’s hard stare bored into him, drilling for the truth. “If you aren’t Del, then who are you, Manning Forbes? And what have you got in that box you don’t want me to see?”

He’d sooner she’d ordered him to strip naked and march through Mercer’s Corner. For a mad instant, he considered showing her Del’s letter and concocting some story about getting it from Del before he died. But Manning knew his guilt would blaze from his face and scream from the tone of his voice. Then Caddie would know... and hate him. His fingers tightened convulsively around the box.

Then it came to him.

Could he offer another secret, a smaller shame to divert her attention from the big one? Knowing Caddie’s proud nature and unblemished pedigree, even this might cause her to rethink their paper marriage, now that Sabbath Hollow was no longer in peril.

It was a risk he had to take.

“Very well.” He lifted the lid and sifted through the papers inside, making certain to leave Caddie’s own letter undisturbed at the bottom.

He handed hear a stiff, yellowed document. “This should provide the answers to both your questions.”

Caddie willed her hand not to tremble as she reached for the paper. But how could she hold it steady when the rest of her body quivered like it had the palsy?

Finally she was about to discover what Manning had been hiding. Perhaps what had been standing between them like a thick, transparent wall of ice. Would the information in this document break that invisible barrier? Or would it destroy the fragile, precious understanding between them?

For a mad instant, she wanted to shove the paper back at him without looking at it. If she did, perhaps Manning might look at her the way he’d looked when she trusted him to take the Marsh silver away for sale. But trust had to run both ways to be worth anything. If Manning had trusted her, he would have shared his secret with her before she forced him to.

She snatched the piece of paper from him and wilted back onto the bed as her quaking knees gave way. After carefully unfolding it, she began to read.

From what she could make out it was a baptismal certificate issued by a church in southern Pennsylvania. For the adopted infant son of a couple named Prudence and Jeremiah Forbes, natural child of an unnamed mother, deceased. The date on the document tallied with her own estimate of Manning’s age, about a year younger than Del would have been.

So Manning Forbes
was
a Yankee, after all. Then Del must really be dead. She would have no magical second chance to mend what had gone wrong between them. No chance to forgive and to beg forgiveness.

“This is what you’ve been hiding?” Compared to her imaginings, it seemed pretty tame. “The fact that you were born on the wrong side of the blanket, as my late mother would so delicately have put it?”

Manning nodded, and Caddie had no doubt he was telling the truth. The man’s face had paled to the color of putty.

“Maybe it was different here in the South when you grew up.” He stared resolutely at the floor as he spoke in a tone as bitter as wild chicory. “Where I come from, that kind of thing’s a stain you carry with you your whole life.”

An enormous lump rose in Caddie’s gullet. Where she came from, bastardy was like a dead horse in the middle of your great-aunt’s parlor—folks would choke to death on the stench before they’d speak of it. Up until her marriage to Del had started to sour, the worst moment of her life had been discovering one of the house slaves was her natural half-sister.

She’d never met a white person of illegitimate birth. “I reckon you have a point.”

No wonder Manning had come South after the war—for a chance to escape his tainted birth and enjoy a position of relative power.

“Would you have accepted my offer of marriage if you’d known about this from the start?” He glanced up, pinning her with his gaze.

She could lie, of course, but he’d know it in a minute. She’d come within a hairbreadth of rejecting his proposal, anyhow. If she’d known about his parentage, or the lack of it, she would have refused him for sure.

Before she could speak or shake her head, Manning divined her answer. “I thought not.”

He sounded like a man who had spent his life trying to push a heavy rock up a hill, only to have it roll back over him and all the way down again.

“Those Forbes people, were they good to you?” Caddie wasn’t sure what made her ask. Perhaps she still needed some intangible proof that tied this man to this document and this identity. Once and for all.

“They meant to be, I think.” Manning stared at the pattern of inlay on the top of his wooden box. “At least my pa did. Looking back, I don’t suppose they should have taken me. They’d had a son who died, see? Pru took it hard—pined for him. I didn’t find that out until after she passed on. Pa must’ve figured another child would help her get over it. Maybe it was too soon or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.”

The wistfulness she’d sensed in Manning from the first moment they’d met suddenly took on form and shape. Somehow Caddie felt guiltier about prompting this confession than she had about looking through his papers.

“Pru might have looked on loving another child as disloyal to the memory of her own boy.” Manning shrugged. “When I was small I figured it was because I didn’t behave well enough. Later, when I found out about my real ma not being married, I wondered if that was what kept Pru from caring for me.”

The hurt in his voice was so raw and rough, it rasped on Caddie’s motherly heart. When she tried to tell Manning he needn’t say anything more, her throat was too constricted to speak.

For a moment he fell silent, as though he had read her intention. Then he passed his hand over the lid of the box in a kind of awkward caress.

“Things were a lot better with my pa. The best times I recollect as a boy were working beside him in the wood shop or once in a while going fishing. He was careful not to make too much of me around Pru, though. We both knew she wouldn’t like that. Pa passed on the year I turned fourteen and Pru died a month or so after the war started.”

Suddenly Caddie realized how wealthy her childhood had been. Not just in money and the things it could buy, but in the company of her brothers and sisters, the love of parents so constant she could take it for granted. Even Mammy Dulcie and Uncle William had loved her. Now that she’d begun to realize how much they must have longed to be free all those years, Caddie marveled at their bountiful affection.

Manning sighed. “That’s all there is to tell, really. Pa and Pru saw to it I ate well and had decent clothes and a pretty fair education. Pa gave me a start on learning a trade. I owe them a lot and I never really got the chance to pay them back.”

As she struggled to frame some kind of reply, Caddie heard footsteps pounding up the stairs, accompanied by loud barking.

“Mama!” Varina hollered at the top of her capable young voice. “Come quick!”

She hardly needed to add the latter, since Manning and Caddie came running almost before she got the words out

Manning scooped the child up in his arms. As Caddie shushed the dog, she remembered all too vividly the comfort and protection she’d found in Manning’s embrace. Could he have held her with any more compassion or tenderness if he’d been a lawful heir of the old Southern aristocracy? On the contrary, a lifetime spent on the fringes of polite society had better equipped him to offer a sympathetic hand to anyone who needed it

“What’s the matter, precious?” Caddie checked Varina for blood or obvious bruises. “Are you hurt?”

“Smoke,” Varina gasped “up on the ridge!”

“The mill!” Manning thrust the little girl into Caddie’s arms. Then he barreled down the stairs, his feet striking every third or fourth step. The dog shot after him.

A queer, bottomless feeling lodged in Caddie’s stomach. What if they were to lose in minutes what Manning had spent months working so hard to build? Would he vanish from their lives just as quickly? Or would her shameless prying drive him away?

Setting Varina on her feet, Caddie took the child’s hand and started down the stairs. “Come on, dear. Let’s see what we can do to help. You were a real smart little mite to come find us.”

Drawn by the commotion, Dora came running from the kitchen.

“It looks like there may be a fire up at the mill.” Caddie nudged her daughter toward Dora. “You two go call for Templeton, then you all come back to the house. Don’t stray too close to the ridge, now.”

She headed for the door.

“Where are you going, Mama?”

“To ride around and call the neighbors for help. We’ll have that little spark out in no time—you’ll see.” Caddie could tell by their faces neither the young woman nor the little girl were fooled by her false optimism.

She’d never saddled a horse by herself, but thoughts of Manning battling the fire on his own spurred her. If only she hadn’t relied all her life on strong, able black hands to do such tasks for her, she wouldn’t be losing precious minutes now. Fortunately, the gray gelding was a patient animal, or the whole plantation might have burned before Caddie was ready to ride.

At last she set off cross-country, praying Manning’s horse could jump a fence if necessary. She tried to ignore the plume of dark smoke drifting skyward from the top of the ridge. Her alarm eased a little after she called at Gordon Manor and the Stevens place to find that neither Bobbie nor Alice had returned home yet. Caddie settled for borrowing several tin pails and riding off to the mill with them.

When she arrived, the mill yard was boiling with activity that put her in mind of an anthill kicked open. Alice Gordon and another girl scurried back and forth from the wood shop ferrying containers of varnish and oil to Bobbie Stevens’ wagon, while Jeff Pratt held the skittish horse still.