Would-Be Wilderness Wife

“Thank you,” Beth said, good humor apparently restored. “And I truly am happy to make your acquaintance. Would you like to see Ma now?”

Before Catherine could answer, Drew stepped forward, gaze all for his sister, his brows drawn down heavily over his deep-set eyes. “How is she?”

Beth’s light dimmed, and she seemed to shrink in on herself. “Still the same. I’m not sure she knows me.”

Catherine felt as if her spine had lengthened, her shoulders strengthened. Her father had always said it was a powerful thing to have a purpose. She felt it now, wiping away her weariness and soothing her frustrations. Thank You, Lord. Help me do what You fitted me to do.

“Take me to her,” she ordered them.

Beth clasped her hands in obvious relief. Drew merely motioned Catherine to where a set of open stairs, half logs driven into the wall, rose to the second story.

Upstairs were two more rooms, divided by the fireplace and the walls that supported it. One room held several straw ticks on the floor, but only one seemed to be in use; the others were piled with rumpled clothing, tools and chunks of wood. The other room contained two wooden beds—a smaller one in the corner with a carved chest beside it and a larger bedstead in the center with a side table holding a brass lamp. Both beds were covered with multicolored quilts that brightened the room.

A woman lay on the wider bed. She had hair that was more red than gold, plastered to her oval face. She’d been handsome once, but now pain had drawn lines about her eyes, nose and mouth. By the way the collar of her flannel nightgown bagged, Catherine guessed she’d lost some weight, as well. Her skin looked like parchment in the candlelight.

Catherine sat in the high-backed chair that had been placed next to the bed and reached for Mrs. Wallin’s hand. Setting her fingers to the woman’s wrist, she counted the heartbeats as her father had taught her. She could feel Drew and his sister watching her. She’d been watched by family members before, some doubting her, some worried. This time felt different somehow. Her shoulders tensed, and she forced them to relax.

“Her pulse is good,” she reported, keeping her voice calm and her face composed. She had to remain objective. It was so much easier to do her job when she viewed the person before her as a patient in need of healing rather than someone’s mother or wife. She leaned closer, listening to the shallow, panting breaths.

“Mrs. Wallin,” she said, “can you hear me?”

The woman’s eyelids fluttered. Drew and Beth leaned closer as well, crowding around Catherine. Their mother’s eyes opened, as clear as her eldest son’s but greener. She blinked as if surprised to find herself in bed, then focused on Catherine.

“Mary?” she asked.

Beth sucked in a breath, drawing back and hugging herself. Drew didn’t move, but Catherine felt as if he also had distanced himself. Who was this Mary his mother had been expecting? Did Drew Wallin have a wife he’d neglected to mention?

* * *

Drew watched as Catherine tended to his mother. Ma had changed so much in the past two weeks that he hardly knew her. As Beth had said, he wasn’t sure she knew them, either. It was as if the fire that had warmed them all their lives was growing dim.

He had feared Catherine might confirm the fact, tell them in her cool manner to prepare for the worst. Instead, she was all confidence. She opened the window beside the bed and ordered the one opposite it opened as well, drawing in the cool evening air and the scent of the Sound. She directed Drew to smother the fire and helped Beth pull off some of the covers they had piled on their mother in an attempt to sweat the fever from her. She even removed Ma’s favorite feather pillow and requested a straw one. It was testimony to how ill their mother was that she protested none of this.

“Do you have a milk cow?” Catherine asked Drew as Beth dug through the chest their father had carved for Ma to find the clean nightgown Catherine had suggested.

Drew shook his head. “Four goats. But they produce enough milk for our purposes.”

Catherine accepted the flannel gown from Beth with a nod of thanks. “What about lemons?”

“Simon brought some back from town last week,” Beth said, tucking her hair behind her ear and hugging herself with her free hand. “I used some for lemonade.”

“Fetch the lemonade,” Catherine advised. “We’ll start with that and see if she can tolerate it. Later, I’ll show you how to make lemon whey. Mrs. Child recommends it for high fevers.”

“Mrs. Child?” Drew asked, but his sister nodded eagerly.

“I know Mrs. Child! Ma has her book on being a good housewife. She’s very clever.”

Beth might have gone on as she often did, but Catherine directed her toward the stairs, then turned to Drew. “I’ll need warm water, as well.”

Drew frowned. “To drink?”

Pink crept across her cheekbones, as delicate as the porcelain cups his mother had safeguarded over the Rockies on their way West. “No,” she said, gaze darting away from his. “To bathe your mother. Can you see that it’s warmed properly? Not too hot.”

“Coming right up,” Drew promised, and left to find some help.

He managed to locate the rest of his family at Simon’s cabin, which was a little ways into the woods. His brothers were cleaning up before dinner, but they all stopped what they were doing to listen to his explanation of what had happened in town. He thought at least one of them might agree with him that Levi’s actions were rash. But to a man they were too concerned about Ma to consider how Catherine Stanway must feel.

“So this nurse,” Simon said, draping the cloth he’d been using to dry his freshly shaven face over the porcelain basin in a corner of his cabin. “What do we know about her? What are her credentials?”

Figure on Simon, his next closest brother in age at about two years behind Drew’s twenty-nine, to ask. He was the only one tall enough to look him in the eye, for all they rarely saw eye to eye. With his pale blond hair and angled features, Simon was too cool. Even looked different from Drew. Every movement of his lean body, word from his lips and look from his light green eyes seemed calculated.

The middle brother, James, leaned back where he sat near the fire, effortlessly balancing the stool on one of its three legs. “Does it really matter, Simon? She’s here, and she’s helping. Be grateful.” He turned to Drew. His long face was a close match for Simon’s in its seriousness, his short blond hair a shade darker, but there was a twinkle in his dark blue eyes. “Now, I have a more pressing question. Is she pretty?”

“That’s not important,” Drew started, but his second-youngest brother, John, slapped his hands down on his knees where he sat at a bench by the table.

“She must be! He’s blushing!” He shook his head, red-gold hair straighter than his mother’s like a flame in the light.

Drew took a deep breath to hold back a retort. Of all his brothers, John was the most sensible, the most studious. If he’d seen a change in Drew, it must be there.

But he wasn’t about to admit it.

He started for the door. “Pretty or not, she has work for us to do. She wants lots of water warmed. You bring it in. I’ll heat it up.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “And John, find Levi. He should have finished in the barn by now. I don’t want him wandering off.”

“Where would he go?” James teased, letting the stool clatter back to the floor as he climbed to his feet. “It’s not as if he has tickets to the theatre.”

“Or one to attend within a hundred miles,” John agreed, but he headed for the barn as Drew had requested.

For the next couple of hours everyone was too busy to joke. His brothers took turns bringing in the water to Drew, who heated it in his mother’s largest pot on the step stove. Then they formed a line up the stairs and passed the warm water in buckets up to Beth and Miss Stanway.

“She washed Ma with a soft cloth, then rubbed her down with another,” Beth marveled to Drew at the head of the stairs when he ventured up to check on them after he and his brothers had eaten. “And she changed the sheets on the bed without even making Ma get up. She’s amazing!”

Drew had to agree, for when Catherine beckoned him closer, he found his mother much improved. No longer did she look like a wax figure on the bed, and she smiled at each of her sons as they clustered around to speak with her.

“I think it’s time to rest,” Catherine said to them all after a while. “I’ll come talk to you after I’ve settled her.”

Drew herded everyone down the stairs. They all found seats in the front room, Simon and James on opposite ends of the table, John on a bench alongside, Beth in Ma’s rocking chair and Levi sprawled on the braided rug with Drew standing behind him leaning against the stairs. He caught himself counting heads, even though he knew everyone was present. Habit. He’d been watching over them for the past ten years, ever since the day his father had died.

It had been a widow-maker that had claimed their father. Drew had been eighteen then, and only Simon at sixteen and James at fourteen had been old enough and strong enough to help clear the timber for their family’s original claim. None of them had seen the broken limb high on the massive fir before it came crashing down.

“Take care of them,” his father had said when his brothers had pulled the limb off him and Drew had cradled him in his arms. Already his father’s voice had started wheezing from punctured lungs, and blood had tinged his lips. “Take care of them all, Andrew. This family is your responsibility.”

He had never forgotten. He hadn’t lost another member of the family, though his brothers had made the job challenging. They’d broken arms and legs, cut themselves on saws and knives, fought off diseases he was afraid to name. Even sweet Beth had given him a scare a few months ago when she’d nearly succumbed to a fever much like their mother’s.

He’d kept them safe, nursed them through any illness or injury. His had been the shoulders they’d cried on, the arms that had held them through the night. He’d been the one to ride for medicine, to cut cloths into bandages. He’d been the one to sit up with them night after night. Having someone help felt odd, as if he’d put on the wrong pair of boots.

That odd feeling didn’t ease as Catherine came down the stairs to join them. As if she were a schoolmarm prepared to instruct, she took up her place by the fire. The crackling flames set her figure in silhouette.

“I thought you would all want to hear what I believe about your mother’s condition,” she said, and Drew knew he wasn’t the only Wallin leaning forward to catch every word.

“Two culprits cause this type of fever,” she continued, gaze moving from one brother to another until it met Drew’s. “Typhus and typhoid fever.”

Neither sounded good, and his stomach knotted.

“Aren’t they the same thing?” John asked.

She shook her head. “Many people think so, and some doctors treat them the same, but they are very different beasts. With typhus, the fever never leaves, and the patient simply burns up.”

Beth shivered and rubbed a hand up her arm.

“Typhoid fever, on the other hand,” Catherine said as if she hadn’t noticed, “is generally worse for the first two or three weeks and then starts to subside. Given how long you said she’s suffered, I’m leaning toward typhoid fever, but we should know for sure within the week.”

Simon seized on the word. “A week. Then, you’ll stay with us for that long.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I promised to return Miss Stanway to Seattle tomorrow,” Drew said.

Simon scowled at him.

“We need her more than Seattle does,” Levi complained.

His other brothers murmured their agreement.

“That isn’t our decision to make,” Drew argued.

“No,” Catherine put in. “It’s mine.”

That silenced them. She clasped her hands in front of her blue gown. “Doctors take an oath to care for their patients. My father believed that nurses should take one, as well. It is my duty to care for your mother and for you, should you sicken.”

A duty she took seriously, he could see. Her color was high, her face set with determination as she glanced around at them all. “I will stay until your mother is out of danger.”

Simon stood. “It’s settled, then. Drew, clear out your cabin and let her have it. You can bunk with me. I snore less than Levi or James.”

John rolled his eyes. “That’s what you think.”

“Oh, I couldn’t take anyone’s cabin,” Catherine started.

Drew held up his hand. “No, Simon’s right. Not about his snoring. He’s louder than Yesler’s sawmill.” As his other brothers laughed and Simon shook his head, Drew continued, “You need a place of your own. I’ll clear out my cabin tonight so you can sleep when you finish with Ma.”

“I intend to stay up with her tonight,” Catherine warned him.

“Then the cabin will be waiting for you in the morning,” Drew assured her.

She smiled at them. “Well, then, gentlemen, I will leave you for the night. I understand the youngest Mr. Wallin sleeps upstairs. I’ll send him if we need anything.”

Again Levi looked as if he were going to protest, but one glance at Drew and he shrugged and settled back on the rug. Drew watched her climb the stairs, Beth right behind her.

“That’s quite a woman,” Simon mused, stretching his feet over Levi’s prone form toward the fire.

“Never met one so determined,” James mused.

“You never met one with that kind of education, either,” John reminded him. “I like the fact that she isn’t afraid to speak her mind.”

“Bit on the bossy side,” Levi said with a yawn. “But she’ll do.”

“That she will,” Simon agreed. “The only question is, which one of us is going to marry her?”

Just what he’d feared. Drew stiffened. “No one said anything about marriage.”

Simon glanced around at his brothers. “I believe I just did.”

John nodded, brightening. “Inspired. She’s smart, and she has a skill we sorely need.”

“And she’s not bad to look at,” James added.

“You could do a lot worse, Drew,” Levi agreed.

Drew shook his head. “You’re mad, the lot of you. I’m not getting married.”

“Suit yourself.” Simon rose and went to the fireplace to scoop up a handful of kindling. “We’ll draw straws. Short straw proposes.”

Drew stared as his other brothers, except Levi, rose to their feet. “Don’t be ridiculous. She wouldn’t have any of you.”

James shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to try.”

Simon squared up the sticks and hid all but the tops in his hand, then held them out to his brothers. “Who wants to go first?”

Drew strode into their group. “Enough, I said. No one is proposing to Miss Stanway, and that’s final.”

His brothers exchanged glances. Simon lowered the sticks. “Very well, Drew. For now. But you have to marry someday if you want kin to inherit your land. You’ll never build that town for Pa unless you do. I think you better ask yourself why you’re so dead set against her.”

“And why you’re even more set against us courting her,” John added.

Chapter Four

So one of the Wallin brothers was going to marry her. Catherine shook her head as she crossed the floor to the big bed. Either they didn’t know voices carried in the log cabin or they didn’t care that she realized their intentions. It truly didn’t matter which was the truth. She wasn’t getting married.

“Do you think bonnets or hats are more fetching on a lady?” Beth asked, following her. “I’m of a mind for bonnets. They cover more of your face from the sun, and they have extra room for decorations. Feathers are ever so flattering.”

She was chattering again, voice quick and forceful, but it seemed a bit more strained than usual, and Catherine couldn’t help noticing that Beth’s color was high as she joined Catherine. Was she trying to pretend she wasn’t aware of her brothers’ intentions?

Her patient was awake, green eyes watchful. “You mustn’t mind Simon,” Mrs. Wallin murmured, proving that she, too, had heard at least part of the conversation downstairs. The ribbon ties on her nightcap brushed the skin of her cheek. “Being the second son after Drew has never been easy. He tends to assert himself even when there’s no need.”

As Beth tidied up the room, Catherine raised her patient’s wrist to check her pulse. It seemed just a little stronger, but perhaps that was because Mrs. Wallin was embarrassed by her sons’ behavior.

“And there is no need to assert himself in this situation,” Catherine told her as she lowered Mrs. Wallin’s hand. “I’m here to help you. Nothing more.”

Mrs. Wallin shivered, and Catherine touched the woman’s forehead. Still too hot, but did she perhaps feel a little cooler than earlier? Was Catherine so desperate to see hope that she had lost her ability to be objective?

“Am I going to die?” Mrs. Wallin whispered.

Beth gasped. Catherine pulled back her hand. “Not if I can help it.”

As Beth hurried closer, Mrs. Wallin reached out and took Catherine’s hand, for all the world as if Catherine was the one needing comfort. “I’m not afraid.” Her eyes were bright, and Catherine told herself it was the fever. “I know in Whom I’ve put my trust. But my boys and Beth, oh, I hate the idea of leaving them!”

Beth threw herself onto the bed, wrapping her mother in a fierce hug. “You’re not leaving us, Ma. I won’t let you!”

The room seemed to be growing smaller, the air thinner. Catherine pulled out of the woman’s grip.

“Now, then,” she made herself say with brisk efficiency. “I see nothing to indicate your mother must leave you anytime soon. The best thing now would be for her to rest. I’ll be right here if she needs me.”

Beth straightened and wiped a tear from her face. “Yes, of course. I’ll just go help Drew.” She hurried from the loft.

“She’s a dear child,” her mother murmured, settling in the bed. “She’ll need someone besides me, another lady, to help guide her.”

Someone besides Catherine. “Rest now,” she urged, and Mrs. Wallin nodded and dutifully closed her eyes, head sinking deeper into the pillow, face at peace.

A shame Catherine couldn’t find such peace. She perched on the chair beside the bed and tried to steady her breathing. Still, the woman’s fears and Beth’s reaction clung to her like cobwebs. Who was Catherine to promise Mrs. Wallin’s return to health? Only the Lord knew what the future held. Her earthly father had drummed that into her.

We may be His hands for healing, he’d say as he washed his hands after surgery. But He will determine the outcome of our work.

And the outcome of a life.

Did he have to go, Lord? Did You need another physician in heaven? But why take Nathan, too? Did You have to leave me alone?

The tears were starting again, and she blinked them fiercely away. She’d had her fill of them months ago. She couldn’t look at the sunny yellow rooms of their home in Sudbury without seeing the book her father had left before going to war, the galoshes her brother had forgotten to pack. The polished wood pew in their community church had felt empty even though another family had joined her in it. Every time she’d walked down the street, she’d seem nothing but stares of pity from her neighbors.

Still, her father had taught her well.

You cannot let sorrow touch you, Catherine, he’d admonished. You are here to tend to their bodies. Let the Lord heal other hurts. Remember your calling.

That was what she’d done in those dark days after her father and brother had died. None of the other physicians in the area had wanted to attach themselves professionally to an unmarried nurse. Even the big cities like Boston and New York had been loath to let an unmarried woman practice. Widowed men who had known her father well offered marriage, the opportunity to mother their motherless children. Even her minister had counseled her to find a good man to wed.

When she’d seen the notice advertising Asa Mercer’s expedition to help settle Washington Territory, she’d known what to do. She’d put the house up for sale and donated their things to those in need. Then she’d packed her bags and sailed to the opposite side of the country.

All her experiences had taught her how to wall off her emotions. It did no good to question her past. She must look to her future, to the health of the community she could improve, the lives she could save. She had no intention of entering into marriage, with anyone.

For once she opened the door to feeling, she was very much afraid she’d never be able to close it again.

* * *

At the far edge of the clearing in his own cabin, Drew yanked a pair of suspenders off the ladder to the loft. As he tidied the place so Catherine could sleep there that night, all he could think about was Simon’s ridiculous demand that one of them must marry the pretty nurse.

He ought to be immune to such antics by now. But after years of proximity, his brothers knew just how to get under his skin like a tick digging for blood.

Oh, he’d heard ministers preach on the subject. A man had a duty to marry, to raise children that would help him subdue the wilderness, make a home in this far land. Children were one way a man left a legacy. To him, the fact that his brothers had reached their manhood alive and ready to take on the world was enough of a legacy.

He knew the general course of things was for a man to find his own land, build a house, start a profession and marry. He had this house and was top in his profession, but he couldn’t simply leave his mother, Beth or his brothers to fend for themselves. They were his responsibility, his to protect. That was what any man did who was worthy of the name. That was what his father had done.

How could he call himself a man and leave his family to tend to a wife? In his mind, a wife took time, attention. She’d have requirements, needs and expectations. He already felt stretched to the breaking point. How could he add more?

Oh, he had no doubt Simon and James were looking to marry one day, and John and Levi would eventually follow. But to stake a claim on a lady after a few hours of acquaintance? That was the stuff of madness.

Or legend.

He snorted as he gathered up the dishes he hadn’t bothered to return to the main house. Their father had claimed he’d fallen in love with their mother at first sight when he’d met her at a barn raising. Her hair was like a fire on a winter’s night, calling me home, he’d told his sons more than once.

Before his father had died, Drew had dreamed it would happen that way for him. Though there were few unmarried ladies in Seattle, he’d thought someday he might turn a corner, walk into church and there she’d be. But at twenty-nine, he knew better. Love was a choice built from prolonged presence. And with six lives already depending on him, he had chosen not to participate in adding more.

“Hello, brother Drew!” Beth sang out as she opened the door of his cabin, basket under one arm. She stepped inside, glanced around and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, you haven’t gotten far, have you?”

Drew looked around as well, trying to see the place through Beth’s eyes. He’d built the cabin himself, his brothers lending a hand with planing and notching the logs and chinking them with dried moss and rock. He’d crafted the fireplace in the center of one wall from rounded stones gathered along the lake. As his father had taught him from what he’d learned in his homeland of Sweden, Drew had built a cabinet for his bed tick, setting it next to the hearth for warmth. A table and chairs of lumber cut from trees he’d felled rested on the rag rug his mother had woven for him. A plain wood chest sat against the far wall, waiting for him to start carving. All in all, his cabin was a solid, practical place to sleep between long hours of working. Very likely, Beth considered it far too plain.

But it didn’t matter what his sister thought. It mattered what Catherine Stanway thought, and he had no doubt she’d find it lacking.