Riverrun by Felicia Andrews Page B

If Mister Eric won’t rehire him, what’s he after?” Sara opened her mouth, clamped it shut again. She took Cass’s waist and pulled her back from the window and to the bed before Cass could protest. “You got to take your rest now, child. I got to tell Mister Eric.” But she would not move until Cass, glowering impotently, had eased herself back under the bedclothes. Then the old woman moistened her fingers and, one by one, snuffed out the candles. The moonlight silvered the room and turned to a shambling black ghost Sara’s figure as she hurried to the door. She stopped only once, her hand on the latch, and looked back at Cass. “Sleep,” she ordered. “You got to walk tomorrow.”
    Then she was gone, and Cass was left alone in the dark, waiting, listening to a rising wind sound through the trees.
    She lay still despite a screaming temptation to cast aside the blankets and return to the window. Her hands clenched tightly. Curiosity was like a gag in her throat, yet she dared not risk the chance of new injury to her leg, not now, not when she was so close to being able to walk again. She decided, reluctantly, that she would do better to wait until morning when she could ask Eric about his former manager and why he insisted on coming around Rivrrun even though he had been fired. The best she could do, then, was to try to stay awake long enough to eavesdrop on whatever conversation or argument might ensue once Sara had gotten hold of Martingale. She listened again to the rising wind that soon lulled her into a dreamless sleep.
    T he following morning the air was electric-bright as Cass woke to Sara’s gentle humming. She rubbed at her eyes, stretched, and fell to eating before the tray had settled on her legs. And while she ate, she tried to elicit information about the confrontation the evening before. Sara, however, would say nothing.
    “But Sara, they must have said something!”
    “I don’t know nothin’,” the old woman said. “You eat. Then I got somethin’ for you to put on yourse’f. Mister Eric, he said you got to come downstairs today.” She grinned and patted Cass’s leg. “You got to walk soon, child. No spendin’ your days abed like some riff-raff from the river bottom.”
    But Cass knew that her grin was hollow, could not avoid seeing the worry in the old woman’s eyes.
    By the time she had finished eating, Sara had returned with a bundle of clothes and, with a laughing flourish, took the wrappings from her leg. Cass had expected it to be ugly, even horrible, but she had to swallow a gasp when she saw the pale, dried skin, and the angry bruise that still marked the area where her shin had collided with the boulder. Gingerly, she touched a finger to it, and it was hard, slightly swollen, but far less tender than she expected.
    “You don’t need these no more,” Sara said, tossing the wrapping aside. “Jes’ a little more careful from now on. Like I tol’ you, child, more the fever than this little thing was what kept you lyin’ there.”
    “Little thing? My God, Sara, it’s a miracle the bone didn’t smash into sawdust. Look at it!”
    “I lookin’, and what I see is a leg you can walk on.”
    The clothes were not much better, she thought. With one woman on the plantation, she had to work her way into a pair of Eric’s dark trousers, one of his fluffed white shirts, threadbare at the elbows, and a pair of battered but sturdy riding boots. After brushing her hair and setting it into a loose bun at her neck, she looked into the mirror Sara held out for her. At first she wanted to cry, then laugh, at the incongruous sight the mirror reflected.
    “Oh my God, if Aggie were here … Lord, I don’t know what she’d say. Lord, will you look at that!”
    “Well, if you ask me, child, you look a sight better’n Mister Eric when he wear ’em.”
    The swell of her breasts against the soft white ruffles, the flare of her hips, prominent even in the loose-fitting trousers—it was, she