Chapter 51
fifty-one
For my part I have but one object in view, and that is the success of the cause. God can witness how cheerfully I would lay down my life to secure it!
General Hugh Mercer
“We know little about how he came to be here,” Father Harlow told the doctor. “The wagoner merely said he was well paid at the Alexandria dock to bring him to the valley.”
“Wounded in battle, likely. He may have been alert at first, then worsened on the journey.” Dr. Hardy’s voice continued calm as he examined Rhys, the whiskey they’d dosed him with riding the air.
“My guess is that he came to Alexandria by ship from Boston, given New York and Philadelphia are under British control. Wounded as he is, he cannot fight, nor would he likely survive a winter encampment in such a condition. Whoever sent him south was wise indeed.”
Mae wondered about his companion who’d died of fever. James? Jon? Or Isham?
As if reading her thoughts, Father Harlow continued, “Rhys may have no memory of who accompanied him.”
“Memory is often lacking when one is gravely injured or ill,” the doctor replied. “Perhaps in time . . .”
That night Mae stayed with him, trickling water past his cracked lips as he lay slightly upright on a bank of pillows.
A woolen coverlet was pulled back from his wound, which was now bound in clean linen.
Dr. Hardy had prescribed a poultice to be applied twice daily, charcoal in the morning and comfrey at night.
She’d sensed a reserve about the skilled physician that she feared was hopelessness, though he’d said little other than they must draw the poison out.
Sitting near the head of the bed, she couldn’t keep her hands to herself.
Her need of Rhys whole and hearty again rose up and left her breathless.
It was no small victory he was home. His washed hair felt like corn silk beneath her fingertips.
She traced the sharp line of his cheekbone to his bearded jaw, wondering if he wanted her to shave him, frightened that he hadn’t the voice to ask.
Leaning in, she kissed his rough cheek. “Rhys, you’re home . . . and I’m here.” Her voice broke. “Please keep fighting . . . if not for me, for our child.”
Though he’d come to them almost lifeless, then restless—from pain, she guessed—he was now frightfully still. Smoothing her voice if not her emotions, she sang a low hymn, careful not to wake Bronwyn and Father Harlow upstairs. A Scripture came to mind, then fled her thoughts like mist.
The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing.
When her eyes wouldn’t stay open, she joined him ever so carefully on the pallet, close enough to lay her cheek against his shoulder.
She could barely hear him breathe. The fire’s pumpkin-orange flames gave a pop as the logs shifted and cast light on all the crags and valleys of him, turning him older than his years.
Suffering aged one. Suffering and war and wounds and hovering on the precipice of death.
Would he never get up again? Would she never see him trade his rifle for a plow or scythe in the Harlows’ immense fields?
Would she not sit with him at their new table up the hill?
Show him the cradle or the tiny garments she’d made?
Beg his forgiveness? Doing so seemed a privilege she’d never possess.
Where did the Harlows bury their dead?
Morning came and so did the doctor. There was talk of amputation, but the notion was quickly discarded.
Angry red streaks extended from the wound like spokes on a wheel.
As Bronwyn tended Rhys, Mae finished the candlemaking abandoned the day before.
She could hardly bring herself to look at Rhys’s torn-up flesh.
When she returned from the dyeing shed, his eyes were open and he’d found his voice.
“Where,” he said haltingly, “is she?”
The three words brought the room to a standstill.
Mae froze in the doorway, the cold December day at her back.
Bronwyn motioned to her while the doctor and Father Harlow stood at the foot of the pallet.
Pinched with unease, Mae felt all eyes on her as she stepped nearer and met those eyes that had been ice-gray at Fort Montgomery.
They held hers for a few unfathomable seconds before closing again and shutting her out.
She stood as awkwardly as a scarecrow with everyone watching till Bronwyn pulled up a chair and gestured for her to sit down. The men moved toward the hearth, talking in low, rumbling tones. Mae felt more at sixes and sevens when Bronwyn disappeared.
“Rhys.” Words hung in her throat. It had been easier to whisper to him in the dark of night than in broad daylight. “We’re all waiting for you to get well. Your father is even making you crutches.”
Eyes still closed, hands fisted on the sheets, Rhys gave no indication he heard her. Yet she felt the need to unburden herself and tell him of the time and events that had come between them, even if he couldn’t take them in.
“I’ll start from the beginning.” She hesitated, gathering her thoughts before leaning in and speaking softly. “When you left the fort to go north to Saratoga, it wasn’t long before the British came. Pickets alerted everyone ahead of their arrival, and Lucy and I were able to leave with the horses.”
She still felt the fear and bewilderment of it all, the gnawing hunger and relentless unrest. “It took us days and days to clear the woods. We were lost a time or two. We even came across Indians, and it seems a miracle they didn’t see us.
Your money pouch stood us in good stead, and we never needed the pistols except to kill a panther following us.
When we neared Philadelphia, we realized it was still held by the British, so we went another direction. ”
She stifled the urge to reach out and touch him as she had last night, her hands knotted in her lap.
“We stopped at a tavern a time or two.” How many times blurred in her memory, though she’d never forget the gracious Widow Wistar outside Philadelphia.
“We finally arrived here on an early November morning, Lucy and I—and Petey.”
She studied him, this husband of hers. He gave no indication he’d heard, yet she sensed he had in some ineffable way—if only the emotion behind her words, this painful recounting of all the hollow, harrowing weeks without him.
And now that he was here, would this be how she would remember him?
On his back, the world shut out, unable to discern the extent of his suffering or summon a smile?
Broken in body, he seemed to be shrinking before her very eyes, unable to eat, unable to even drink without help, withdrawing from the world and her in particular.
This perilous, precarious dance between life and death clawed at her night and day and gave her no rest.
“Where is she?”
Would those be the last words he’d ever speak?
Somehow Mae’s hushed words penetrated the pain and the anguished haze that held him.
He rode the tide of illness, rolling in and out of consciousness, barely able to keep his eyes open.
Everything required herculean strength, even swallowing, but he knew he needed to eat—or die.
This constant dribbling of water and tonics down his throat sustained no man.
“It took us days and days to clear the woods . . . We finally arrived here.”
Mae’s melodic voice tickled his ears and made him want to reach for her.
But his hand seemed a lead weight atop the bedding, keeping him from it.
His parched throat and reeling head still bespoke fever.
Yet another deeper heat burned through him—ire over their unsettled past, their last confrontation needling him and demanding to be settled.
But even this ebbed and flowed like the pain.
Night came. Mae left his side. He was awake now—as wide awake as the hooting owl outside in the trees.
A full moon shone on the floorboards. He rolled over and gritted his teeth as he lifted first one leg then the other to the floor with his hands.
Weak as a newborn foal, he was. Crutches rested at the foot of the bed and seemed a mile distant.
He felt a wild, pulse-pounding resolve to reach them, even if he had to crawl to do it. And crawl he did.
By the time he grabbed hold of them, his shirt was damp with the sweat of sheer exertion. His wound seemed on fire, shards of glass embedded in his thigh where the musket ball had been. Swallowing, throat dry, he took a last look around the moonlit room.
No Mae. Had he dreamed her up, then?
His desperation to see her got him to the front door.
He’d need to navigate the porch next and the now formidable stoop.
Breathe, step, breathe, step. His wound screamed in protest, but he went slowly.
One crutch made it across the worn planks to the stoop, only for the other to collapse, spilling him onto his back across the moonlit, frost-hardened ground.
Had he yelled? Something brought Bronwyn out the door, their father following. In their nightclothes, fright scored across their faces, they rushed to raise him, dispensing with the crutches altogether.
“We must get you back inside.” Bronwyn’s shock and exasperation were plain. “What on earth made you leave the bed?”
“I’m . . . going up . . . the hill,” he replied breathlessly, expecting her next rebuttal. “I don’t care that it’s after midnight. The moon’s full enough to light my way.”
“It’s a long climb for a man in your condition.” His father’s arm undergirded him as Bronwyn supported him from the other side.
“Where’s Mae?” His voice, rusty from disuse, cracked.
“She’s been by your side night and day since you came back to us. I told her to return uphill and rest. It’s not good for her nor the baby to nurse you like she’s doing.”
So he hadn’t dreamed of her, or the baby. And should he make it up this infernal hurdle of a hill, he would wake her.
“You’ve all but risen from the dead,” his father said. “Though I wish you’d have done it in daytime.”
Rhys tried to smile. For now, all he could manage was a wince. “I need to eat. Is there any food?”
“You’ve been unable to eat till now.” Bronwyn eyed him warily. “Mae made a fine soup for supper, and there’s some left.”
Mae cooking? He chuckled. Not the Mae he remembered, who could char anything she set her hand to. He smelled the smoke of a chimney fire, mayhap his own.
Halfway up the hill, his body balked. He collapsed again, fighting pain and dizziness and exhaustion. His father left his side and returned with a wheelbarrow.
“You’re lighter than when you left or I’d not be able to do it,” he said as they helped him off the ground and lowered him inside the contraption.
Up the hill they went, slowly but teeth-rattlingly. His next hurdle was the porch steps he’d crafted with his own hands. The house, though just as he’d left it, looked strange to him, he’d been away so long. Or was it because he’d changed, no longer the man he’d been when he built it?
As the three of them climbed the steps clumsily, the front door swung open.
Mae stood there, her nightgown falling to her bare feet.
Her face lit up like the lantern in her hand.
Their eyes locked and held, making him forget everything and everyone else.
When he looked past her to the broad hall and the seventeen steps he must climb, his resolve shattered.
“Come inside.” Mae stood to one side of the door. “We’ve moved the bed downstairs into the parlor so I won’t have to risk the steps ahead of the baby’s coming. But now I think it was meant for you.”
“She slipped and fell partway down them the other day.” Bronwyn’s words made him forget his own misery. “Thank heavens it did her no harm.”
He looked to Mae again as if to determine the truth of it, but she was studying him with such alarm he sensed she knew he was near collapse again. His ordeal was almost over.
Feeling like a man thrice his age and supported every step, he made it to the parlor, where the outline of a bed he didn’t recognize—his father’s doing?—dominated the room. Soon he was in it, the feather tick sinking with his weight.
“Soup,” he said. But by the time Bronwyn brought it, the tide of pain had returned and the only way he could escape it was to ask for whiskey. Before he fell into a restless slumber he managed two more words. “Fetch Lucy.”