The Grass Widow Read Online Free PDF Page B

uneasy thought as he went out the door: his dearth of knowledge had already grievously depleted the Bodett brood. He wondered how much of her father’s expertise she would be able to recall without a specific example before her to jog her memory—and if this jog of her memory would be enough to save Joss Bodett.
    The smell of frying chicken brought Aidan awake. She sat up in the chair by the bed, scrubbing her hands over her face and hair; how good a bath would feel! A steaming tub of water, the soothing scent of lilac soap...
    Joss’s face was hot and dry. She rinsed a cloth in the pail by the bed and smoothed it across her cousin’s skin, pushing her hair back from her forehead. Joss moaned under her touch, shivering with the fever. “The horses,” she rasped. “They have to take you in. Ma, don’t they have to? Ma? Wouldn’t they—?”
    “Yes, Joss,” Aidan said softly. “They would. They have to. Rest, now. Rest.”
    “Would you care for tea, Dr. Pickett?” He had waked her from her doze by Joss’s bed, and when she was awake enough to teach him he watched while she applied steaming fomentations to her cousin; he held Joss while she coughed, racking the fever
     
    from her lungs; he held her while she fought weak protest of her helplessness, soothing her while Aidan, nearly unknown to Joss and more accepted for that anonymity, did baser nursing things involving nightclothes and bed linens. Now Joss slept; Doc washed his hands, and Aidan, as good a nurse as any he had known in all his years of medicine, offered him tea, for she had found Jocelyn’s battered old pot in the china closet.
    “Tea would be glorious. I’ve not tasted it for a week.” He hung his towel on the wire over the stove and limped to the table. When he was weary—and he was, desperately—his stump ached and itched, and the leg he had left at Manassas ached and itched with it. “Thom and Effie Richland see tea-drinkers as free-staters; they won’t stock it. That leaves Leavenworth, and the post road isn’t one in which Stationers take pleasure, as you may imagine from your recent experience.”
    “I daresay calling it a road is giving it a bit of a compliment. Please, Doctor, sit down.” She lifted the lid of the teapot, checking the progress of the brew. “Might you tell the ice man to put this household on his route? I’m afraid I don’t know how to keep food without an icebox.”
    He sat, stretching his wooden leg under the table out of the way. “Our ice man met an untimely end a few years back, and none has taken up the job. Others miss him more than the Bodetts, I imagine; they have a spring that serves as well as an icebox, if not as conveniently. I’ll show you where it is.” He accepted the tea she offered, adding sugar as he wondered how to make his suggestion; it felt strange to be hesitant in this house he had known so well for so long. “May I keep the night watch, Miss Blackstone? It seems sleep might ease some edges from your life.”
    She looked at him across the rim of her cup; it seemed to him that the mistrust in her eyes was more instinctive than immediate.
    “I lost more than a leg in Virginia,” he said quietly. “You’re most lovely, but I couldn’t harm you if I cared to.” The lie served him well in the Station, where his devout lack of interest in women would have been noticed and cruelly commented upon without
     
    its protection; he took his urges to the waterfronts of Kansas City, where a one-legged man could be anonymous in his search for physical companionship. “Not to mention that mistreating a guest in Joss’s home would betray our friendship. She’d not take such betrayal lightly, and her temper has a lighter trigger than her daddy’s Peacemaker.” And no threat; she’s likely dead by morning. Oh, Josie—
    Reluctantly, she returned his strained smile. “I’ll admit I’d feel her better cared for if you stayed. When it comes down to the night, sir, you are the