Love on the Mend (7 page)

Mollie blinked at the moisture that had gathered across her eyes. “They sound like lovely people.”

“They are.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, and Mollie felt it again. That connection. Belonging. As if they were kindred spirits, after a fashion. And why not? The new doc had said it himself earlier. They weren’t so different. Both orphans, both rescued, both . . . thieves.

Jacob pushed away from the wall, and Mollie glanced aside, hoping he hadn’t read her thoughts as clearly as he had last time.

“Come on,” he said, trudging off in the direction of the horses. “I’ll see you back to town.”

Mollie followed, though at a slower pace.
Both thieves
. The stubborn idea refused to release its hold on her mind. What if . . . ? She glanced at the man in front of her, then slipped her fingers into her pocket as if pinching a watch. Maybe, if she were exceedingly clever, she’d find a way to steal the new doc’s heart. It’d be risky. She’d have to use her own heart as bait, but the poor thing was half gone already, so she might as well give it a go. The fact that Jacob preferred to keep his emotions firmly locked away simply added another layer to the challenge.

Mollie quirked a grin as she watched Jacob ready their mounts. Guess it was a good thing she’d learned to pick locks as well as pockets during her days on the streets.

Chapter Seven

That night, Jacob lay in his bed and stared at the rafters. She’d worried about him, followed him, had not wanted him to be alone. Even after he’d been daft enough to kiss her. What madness had possessed him? He was her employer, for heaven’s sake. Such an impulse would only serve to impair their working relationship and create awkwardness between them. It had been a stupid move on his part.

Yet he couldn’t dredge up a single ounce of regret over it. Shoot, he could still taste her. Spicy. Sweet. Everything that was Mollie Tate. Jacob let out a groan and rolled over.

But he couldn’t escape the memories of that moment. Sensations so vivid they were nearly real. The compassion in her gaze as she reached out to him, the lightning that passed through him at her touch, the softness of her skin as he palmed her cheek and pulled her to him. The perfect way her lips fit against his. The shiver that coursed through her the instant before she began to kiss him back.

No, he couldn’t regret it. Not when that kiss had filled every abandoned, lonely place inside him that he’d thought impenetrable. Something more than lips had met when he’d kissed Mollie. Something more profound had linked them. Something that urged him to return again and again until the ties running between them were so reinforced that nothing would be able to tear them apart.

But how could he tie himself to a woman whose loyalty lay with his uncle? He hadn’t missed the censorious looks she’d cast his way when he avoided speaking directly to Curtis while they’d been at the farm. She expected him to mend fences, to forgive and forget. Jacob grabbed a fistful of sheet and twisted it into a painful band around his wrist. How did one go about forgiving the man who’d killed his sister?

As he lay there, a new image flashed before him—bloody and dark and full of death. Faces of the soldiers he’d been unable to save. Battle-weary eyes that had pleaded for relief, voices that begged for healing, hands that grabbed at his coat as he’d left them behind
to tend the ones who had a better chance at survival. What would their families say if they knew he had ignored the pleas and let their sons, their husbands, their fathers die? Would they understand the horror of the situation, the impossibility of tending so many with such limited resources? Or would they simply hang on to the pain of their grief and cast their blame and bitterness upon him?

It took a strong man to step out of his own pain to see a situation from another’s perspective. Jacob slowly loosed his arm from the cotton manacle he’d fashioned from the sheet and closed his eyes against the realization he’d fought for so long. He’d believed himself strong because he was a survivor, but in truth he was weak. Too weak to forgive his uncle because the man had the audacity to still be alive. He’d been prepared to face his past as long as it was easy. Deep down, he’d hoped to find a grave, to discover that Curtis Sadler had paid the ultimate price for his crime. That would have made Jacob’s token forgiveness a simple matter of words. Instead he’d found the man very much alive, and worse—changed. Godly. Kind. A good neighbor. A man who saved children from the streets. A man he would respect under other circumstances.

A few mumbled words wouldn’t be sufficient. He’d have to live out his forgiveness day after day. Anything but simple. It would require strength of character, a strength he feared he might lack. Holding on to his pain, his anger, would be easier, but if he wished for the parents of the soldiers he’d been unable to save to forgive him, he needed to find the strength within his soul to forgive the one who had wronged him.

Help me,
Lord. I can’t do this on my own.

How had Jesus been able to forgive his crucifiers as he hung dying on the cross? Jacob draped his arm over his eyes and pressed away the dampness. If he could find even a fraction of that nobility, perhaps he could—

A pounding from the front of the house interrupted his thoughts.

“Doc Sadler!” The pounding intensified. “Doc, come quick! Somethin’s awful wrong with Amy and the babe. Please, Doc. You gotta come.”

Jacob jumped from the bed, his own difficulties forgotten. He turned up the lamp and tugged on the pair of trousers he always kept on the chair by his bedside, a trick he’d learned during the war. Since he slept in a regular shirt, he could be dressed in under a minute.

He did up the buttons at his neck as he made his way to the front of the house, where the pounding continued. New fathers tended to be nervous, but Trent Walters already had three youngsters at home, and when Jacob had spoken to Mrs. Walters at church last Sunday, she’d assured him that she had no need of an examination. All her births had been straightforward, and she preferred to have the midwife attend her. Many women were more comfortable with other women at such a delicate time. Besides, Mrs. Horeb had delivered each of her other children. The woman was quite capable.

Something must have gone wrong for Walters to be banging on his door.

Jacob grabbed the knob and swung the door inward. “Come in,” he said, narrowly dodging the man’s fist as it descended for another pound. “I just need to collect my boots and bag.”

“Hurry, Doc.” Walters lunged across the threshold and immediately started pacing the length of the parlor. “She’s been laboring for hours. Mrs. Horeb’s done all she can, but the babe won’t turn.”

A breech. Jacob hid his concern from the worried father. If the babe was trapped high in the pelvis, two lives could be in jeopardy, not just one.

“Amy’s slipping away, Doc.” The anguish in the man’s voice tore at Jacob’s heart as he stamped his feet into his boots. “She ain’t got nothin’ left to give.” Walters’s hand latched on to Jacob’s arm. “You got to save her, Doc. Please. Even if it means sacrificing the baby.”

Jacob straightened, meeting Trent Walters’s red-rimmed eyes.

The man swallowed and grimaced as if something sour had just been poured down his throat. “The midwife . . . she took me aside and told me that doctors have ways of taking the babe out. It . . . kills the child, but sometimes the mother is spared.”

A craniotomy. A vile procedure. One of the few that succeeded in turning his stomach when he’d studied it in school. Though it would only work if the babe presented head first and was simply too large to pass through the birth canal. With a breech . . . Well, that was even more gruesome.

Jacob clapped a hand to the man’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I haven’t even examined her yet.”

Walters nodded, his jaw stiffening.

Jacob ducked into the surgery to collect his bag. He always kept it stocked for any emergency, but he took an extra moment to retrieve a small spool of fine silver wire from the locked medical cabinet. Something told him he’d be needing it.

A light tapping tugged Mollie into wakefulness. Frowning into the darkness, she tilted her head. The tapping came again, a little louder this time. The back door?

She pushed the covers aside and hurriedly donned her wrapper. Only bad news came calling in the dark of night. Lighting a candle, she left the tiny room that served as her chamber and wove her way through the kitchen, past the stove and cabinets, to the back door. She unlatched it and opened it a crack, just enough to peer out.

“Mrs. Horeb? What are you doing here?”

The older woman’s haggard features sent a pang through Mollie’s chest. “Doc Sadler needs you at the Walters place. He sent me to fetch you.”

“The babe?”

Mrs. Horeb nodded. “It don’t look good for neither of ’em. I didn’t want to bother you with this, told the doc it weren’t fitting for an unmarried woman to attend a birthin’. But he insisted he needed you for the surgery.” Her head wagged slowly as her shoulders drooped. “Amy and that babe of hers are as good as dead. It’s cruel for the doc to offer false hope, if you ask me.”

Mollie curled her arms around her middle. “I’ve seen Doc Sadler accomplish the impossible before,” she said, thinking of Adam’s leg and the lack of infection. “Perhaps the hope is not as false as you fear.” She swung the door wide and gestured for Mrs. Horeb to enter the kitchen. “Come in and sit. I’ll just need a minute to change.”

After rushing back to her room, Mollie grabbed the first dress she laid hands on. Not bothering to take the time with undergarments, she pulled it on over her nightdress and fastened the buttons. She left her hair in the long braid that hung down past her waist and slipped her feet into her shoes. At the last minute, she remembered Mrs. Peabody and scribbled her landlady a quick note explaining where she’d gone and why. Then she dashed back out to the kitchen, collected Mrs. Horeb, and left the note on the table.

As she climbed into the midwife’s small cart, prayers for Amy Walters and her babe spun through her mind along with one other significant thought—Jacob needed her.

Chapter Eight

Mrs. Horeb pointed Mollie toward the front of a small farmhouse. “Go on in. He’s waitin’ on ya.”

Mollie climbed down then glanced back at the midwife. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No. Doc Sadler’s in charge now. He don’t need me gettin’ in the way.” She tightened her grip on the reins and glanced up at the nearly full moon that offered just enough light to make slow travel safe. “Amy’s young’uns are over at her sister’s place,” she said, still not looking at Mollie. “Think I’ll go offer to tend them so Alice can come back here in case Amy don’t make it through. Poor gal has no idea how serious it is.”

When the older woman finally turned toward Mollie, moonlight glistened on the wetness that had gathered in her eyes. She gave a little sniff, then jerked her chin a final time toward the house. “Quit dallyin’, missy. Whichever way things go, they’re gonna need your help.”

Galvanized, Mollie spun around and hurried to the house as the cart behind her pulled away. A lamp glowing in the parlor window guided her to the door. She raised her hand to knock but then realized how foolish that would be and simply let herself in. A trail of quiet moans led her to a bedroom at the back of the house.

Amy Walters lay on the bed, her blond hair matted to her head with sweat. Skin pale. Eyes closed. Little lines scrunched her forehead each time she moaned, but even they looked dangerously lifeless. Trent sat in a chair by her side, holding her hand, smoothing her hair from her brow, whispering words of love that sounded suspiciously like good-byes. Tears rose to Mollie’s eyes, but she ruthlessly blinked them back. Tears wouldn’t help Amy and her babe. This room had enough sorrow already. What it needed was someone who knew how to fight the odds and survive.

Lifting her chin, Mollie marched over to where Jacob stood with his back to her, his head bent over the instruments he’d arranged on the dresser top. She recognized the scalpel as well as the atomizer filled
with carbolic acid solution. A little shiver traveled through her at the thought of him cutting Amy open, but she trusted his judgment.

“I’m here, Doc,” she whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder as she approached from behind.

His head jerked up, his eyes flying open. Had he been praying?

Mollie retracted her hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“I’m glad you did.” Jacob’s voice was quiet, his face grim. “Mrs. Walters doesn’t have much time.” He grabbed a cloth and a small bottle. “Come.” He signaled her to follow with a flick of his chin as he strode to the bedside.

Trent Walters’s gaze lifted to follow his approach. “Is it time, then?”

“Yes.” Jacob gave a single, curt nod.

“And you swear she won’t feel anything?”

Jacob met the man’s eyes without wavering. “She’ll be unconscious. She won’t feel a thing.”

Trent nodded and lifted his wife’s hand to his lips. “I love you, Amy. I always will.”