Chapter Twenty-four
Emma carefully carried a washbasin of cool water into the bedroom. She set it on the table beside the bed.
“Thank you, Emma,” Papa said as he removed the stopper on the vial he held.
She’d paid very close attention as he’d tended to Eimear the last day and a half.
He would put a few drops from the vial into the water in the basin, then dip a rag in it and lay it across Eimear’s eyes.
He gave Eimear powders every four hours that he said were to help with the fever and achiness.
He had dried ginger for brewing a tea that helped to settle her stomach.
Watching him tend to her, it became clear just how often she had been brought low by this illness. Papa didn’t have to reference a list or look at any reminders. He knew it by heart, and that heart, she suspected, was more worried than he was letting on.
“Her eyes are less swollen today,” Emma said.
“And her fever isn’t quite as high,” Papa said. “She was talking my ear off not five minutes ago.”
“She’ll recover, then?”
Papa nodded. “I think we’re past the worst of it this time. And it wasn’t as bad as the last bout.”
Not as bad. Eimear had never lost consciousness the past few days.
She’d not been so feverish that she’d suffered seizures or delusions.
And while her upset stomach had led to her being sick more than once, she hadn’t grown weak from loss of nutrition.
All in all, it actually had been far better than it might have been.
Emma took up the plate sitting near Papa on the bed. The food she’d brought in for him was crumbs at this point. She was glad he’d eaten. A person focused on caring for an ailing loved one often forgot to look after himself. Emma could make certain he didn’t neglect his own needs.
I’ll be here for a while after all.
Thoughts of staying clenched at her stomach as they always did. But she’d promised Finbarr that she would move ahead for two weeks as if she weren’t leaving, because she needed him to do the same. She needed him to understand how precious his connection to Hope Springs was.
Emma had decided, whilst lying awake late into the night worrying about the agreement she’d made, that she could focus for those two weeks on being of help to Papa and Katie as they cared for Eimear. She could do that. She was eager to.
She’d paid close attention to all that Papa had done and knew that she could repeat it. Were she to stay, Papa could work in his fields when it was that time of year. Katie could look after the other children.
Having no purpose had been part of what had driven her away five years earlier. She’d wandered through every day, unneeded and unnecessary. She at least wouldn’t be facing that again.
Emma had only just finished wiping down the plate and setting it on its shelf when the front door opened with a blast of cold air. Finbarr stepped inside with Madra right at his heels as always.
“I’m over on this side of the room,” she told him.
He gave a quick nod as he pulled off his hat and set it on a peg. “Snow’s deep out there, but at least it’s stopped falling.” He hung his coat on another hook.
“Snow is stuck to Madra all the way up to her neck,” Emma said.
A quick smile across Finbarr’s face, and her heart spun about at the sight. How she’d missed that smile. It had been so rare after the fire.
“We have visitors,” he said.
“We do?” That was entirely unexpected.
Dr. Jones came through the door, and immediately behind him was Katie, holding little Finn in her arms.
“Katie.” So many times in Emma’s life, Katie’s mere presence had brought her peace and a feeling of home. Seeing her now, after all that had happened the past few days, nearly brought her to tears.
“Ivy was certain you were here,” Katie said, crossing to her and giving her a hug. “Your papa arrived, didn’t he?”
“Yes. He’s tending to Eimear. She’s been very sick. Finbarr and I did our best, but Papa knows better what to do.”
Katie shifted from Emma to Finbarr and gave him a hug. “Thank you, Finbarr. Thank you for looking after my children.”
A little bit of a blush touched his cheeks. “Joseph and Eimear are in the bedroom, and I have no doubt he, at least, is hearing this whole thing. So feel free to praise me to the rafters.”
Emma would wager if Papa hadn’t been in the midst of administering medications, he’d have rushed out of the room to greet his wife.
Growing up, seeing how much her Papa and Katie loved each other had kept her world from feeling constantly atilt.
She’d felt so alone so much of the time.
She’d struggled with hopelessness, with feeling lost. But Papa and Katie had been her North Star, her foundation.
Leaving them in search of peace had been excruciating.
Katie moved with purposeful steps to the bedroom.
To Finbarr, Dr. Jones said, “You’ll be pleased to hear Patrick and Eliza’s little one was born on the first day of the snowstorm. I know she’d wanted Maura there as midwife, but she had to settle for me.”
“I suspect you’d not be telling me this in chipper tones if mother and baby weren’t both doing as well as can be.”
“Both are doing very well,” Dr. Jones said. “There were no complications, and not having guests in and out of the inn means the family is resting more than they otherwise would be.”
“Once the O’Connor family hears of the birth,” Finbarr said, “Patrick and Eliza’ll be overrun.”
Dr. Jones smiled as he hung up his coat. “You’re the first O’Connor I’ve seen since the storm, and I’m the first person who’s left the inn, which means you know something the rest of your family doesn’t. Perhaps you ought to go visit the little one before the crowd descends.”
Emma could see that Finbarr was very intrigued with the possibility, and little wonder.
He had said that time with his family was overwhelming with so many voices and movement and chaos.
What a gift it would be to visit with one brother and his family and to meet a brand-new niece or nephew when it was quiet and he could focus without exhausting himself.
“You should go,” Emma insisted.
His interest gave way to discouragement. “It’s too far to walk in this much snow.”
“You’re welcome to use my sleigh,” Dr. Jones said. “I’ll be here with Eimear for a few hours. Let me know.” He stepped out of the room and into Finbarr’s bedroom where Eimear was.
“You should go see your new niece or nephew,” Emma said again.
But Finbarr shook his head. “I don’t walk all over Hope Springs because I prefer it to driving or riding. A person has to be able to see to do either.” It wasn’t the anger or self-pity that had so punctuated his declarations in the early years after the fire. It was resignation.
“How fortunate for you,” Emma said, “that I know how to drive a sleigh.”
“I don’t want to take you away from your family.” But there was a tiny hint of hope there.
“And I want you to be able to go see yours. Besides, Katie is here to help Papa. Dr. Jones is lending his expertise. I think they might appreciate having fewer people about while they assess the situation.”
“We’d be doing them a favor.” A little humor tugged at his expression.
“And I do love babies,” she said.
His smile returned fully. “So do I.”
“Sounds to me like it’s settled. I am almost certain I remember how to hitch a horse, but you might have to remind me.”
“I can hitch a horse,” he said. “I decided a few years ago that even if I couldn’t drive a wagon, I could help my brothers and Joseph prepare for journeys.”
“You hitch the horse. I’ll fetch blankets and such. I am determined that you’ll be the first of your family to reach the inn.”
They were tooling down the road along the river, the air biting at Emma’s face.
“I can’t hear well enough over the sound of the horse and sleigh, but I’m trying to decide if the river’s frozen,” Finbarr said.
“There’s a lot of ice,” she said. “But it’s still flowing in the middle.”
“Last winter was particularly brutal, but we didn’t have such an intense blizzard this early.
The ranches on either end of the valley all lost a lot of cattle over the winter.
The ground was so frozen, crops didn’t get planted quite as early as they ought, but we were very fortunate to still have a good yield. ”
The people in Baltimore whom she’d spent every day with didn’t give a moment’s thought to any of this, yet it impacted every aspect of life for the people in Hope Springs.
Part of her preferred the ease of what she had on the East Coast. But another very large part of her had missed being so connected to the land.
“The sky is very clear today, so I do think the snow has passed.”
“It’s quite a bit brighter,” he said, “but that’s not the reason I suspected there weren’t any clouds.”
“What’s the reason?” she asked.
“It’s so much colder. The clouds must be like a blanket of some kind. Cloudy days are, in the winter at least, noticeably warmer.”
They reached the meeting point of the river road and the road that would lead them into town. It was at that crossroads that the barn that had burned once stood.
Emma held her breath, doing her utmost not to hold the reins more tensely.
Horses sensed such things, and she didn’t want the animal to grow agitated.
She took a slow breath and set her gaze directly ahead on the road, shutting out remembered images of a barn, the remembered smell of smoke, the heat of fire.
“We’re passing the barn, aren’t we?” Finbarr asked the question posed not in tones of curiosity but understanding.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I wish I knew how to ease some of the pain of that, Emma. I’m not entirely sure what has helped ease it for me. It isn’t that I don’t remember the fire, but it isn’t still a weight and a grief to the extent it is for you.”
“I used to think it was because I was so young when it happened, but Ivy was even younger than I was, and it doesn’t haunt her in the same way.”.
“All of us grieve things differently. Perhaps it’s simply that.”
But Emma was fairly certain it wasn’t. She didn’t want to say it out loud, but she’d known for quite a while why it was she couldn’t escape the agony of that day when it seemed most everyone else had healed in significant ways.
Even Marianne’s parents, despite clearly still grieving and missing their daughter, weren’t as crushed by it.
Everyone else had lost something that day and had found ways to come to terms with it. But she wasn’t merely a victim of all that had happened; it was her fault. Grief was a heavy burden to carry. But when that grief was entangled with guilt, it was an impossible trap to escape.
They drove on without saying much. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, though. For so long she and Finbarr had been ill-at-ease with each other. It was a nice change.
“I don’t think Dr. Jones is the one who sent me the telegram,” she said.
“Why is that?” He didn’t sound the least bit offended that she was rejecting his theory.
“Just now, when he was talking with us, he was so direct about things. I don’t think he would have sent a telegram that was, in so many ways, a riddle. It’s not his way. Perhaps if I were incredibly well known to him or we were very close. But even then, I just don’t think he would.”
“I suspect you’re right. Which, while it would seem discouraging, is actually helpful. You can eliminate him from your list.”
“But who is even left?”
“I don’t think most of the town would have thought it their place,” Finbarr admitted. “The O’Connors can be a nosy bunch, so we can’t entirely eliminate them.”
“Which narrows our list of possibilities to approximately five thousand.”
He laughed. Her heart fluttered in perfect unison with the sound.
She needed to watch herself. She had two weeks of imagining both of them remaining in Hope Springs; that was a dangerous thing. He had broken her heart once. It wouldn’t be difficult for him to do so again.