Chapter Thirteen

He shouldn't have left her alone. Tired, complaining of an ache in her belly that she attributed to an injury with the horses, she shrugged off his concerns. Her shoulder hurt, too, and there was a massive bruise on her thigh, so it was plausible that her symptoms were related to trying to train a half-wild colt. There was nothing to worry about, and Robert needed to close a deal on some copper for a phone line into Tennessee. He would be gone a few days, but that was nothing new. So he left under a blazing sun and deep blue sky, with birds mocking his misgivings from the trees.

The deal hadn't gone well and he stayed away longer than he intended trying to get the project back on track. Sometimes, while caught up in negotiations or in deep technical conversations with Sam, Robert could forget his vague worries about home, but late at night and at odd solitary moments in the day, the world turned dark and an urge washed over him to saddle his horse and head home.

"Go," Sam said one morning over cheap bitter coffee. "Take a doctor with you. Get her checked out good, and then when you come back you won't spend half your time worrying."

Robert should've taken his advice, but a merchant came through that day with a deal too good to pass up, and it had taken all his best persuasion and a few calls to important contacts to get the Tennessee phone line back on track. He was having a congratulatory drink with Sam when the messenger from Northwind arrived.

He left at once, even though night was falling and the pike road was dark enough for a horse to trip and throw a man. The miles had seemed endless under malignant, moody stars. At Northwind, their cottage looked wrong, the roses menacing. He opened the door and startled Sophie, making tea. The fear in her eyes spoke volumes as she set the kettle on the stove and ran to him.

He tried to reassure her. He stroked her hair and mumbled platitudes, but in truth he had no time for the fears of a healthy girl. He disentangled himself and ran up the stairs. Diana lay in bed, pale, her hair wet with sweat. He took her hand, touched her face, and found he skin so hot he doubted she would know him.

But she did. Eyes bright with fever, she forced a smile in spite of her obvious pain. "I knew you'd come."

Now Robert cursed himself for having not heeded Sam's advice to bring a physician. There was only the local herbalist, and this was clearly a situation beyond her capabilities. "You need a doctor. Have you sent for one?"

She shook her head. "It wasn't so bad this morning."

Sophie was standing wide-eyed at the bedside. "She went to work. The pain got bad at lunchtime. Maybe it was something she ate?"

Robert leaned over the bed. "Any chance it's just food poisoning?" He put a hand on her forehead and frowned.

"Go wake up Johnny,” he told Sophie. “Tell him to prepare the yellow cart - make sure he doesn't give us a different one. Your mother needs the one with shock absorbers. Have him get it ready for us to go to Lexington right away."

In spite of the good cart with the old-fashioned shock absorbers, it was a grueling journey. Fortunately for Diana, she was in and out of consciousness for much of the trip, immune to the bouncing of the cart over the dirt road.

They went straight to the hospital, and although she was triaged immediately, Robert could tell the doctors weren't optimistic.

"She appears to be septic. There could be any number of reasons, but atypical appendicitis or a ruptured ectopic pregnancy are the most likely."

They did what they could. Robert told himself that if they could just find the source of the problem, they could fix it. Diana was strong and could fight off the infection, just as he himself had done so many years ago when he was shot during the civil war. This was the United States, after all, and the country was at peace. Although the pharmaceutical companies didn't manufacture drugs in turn-of-the-century quantities, antibiotics were still easy enough to come by.

After a grueling operation that she barely survived, Robert sat by her bedside, waiting for her to wake up. He had found a copy of The Little Prince in the patient library, and sometimes he read it aloud, just in case she was able to hear but not move.

Finally she opened her eyes. "I'm sorry."

Robert stopped reading and took her hand. "Sorry for what, dear?"

"I waited too long. Didn't want you to worry."

"You didn't know you were so sick."

"I'll get better."

"Of course you will."

The doctor's prognosis was less sanguine. He used a lot of words that Robert knew intellectually but couldn't attach to the image in his mind of the strong, confident young woman who could jump horses, travel thousands of miles alone on horseback and defend both herself and him from enemies in the civil war. Ruptures, scar tissue, infections...these were mundane, clinical matters; not the sorts of things that could bring down a woman whose bravery and resourcefulness were once the subject of a popular song.

She lingered for a few days, in and out of consciousness. They gave her blood, they gave her antibiotics, and they gave her morphine for the pain, but a monstrous infection had taken hold, leaving her belly swollen and distorted, while the rest of her body turned gaunt and ashen.

Robert was glad he had left Sophie at the farm. She didn't need to see her mother like this. He held Diana's hand and talked to her, not always sure what he was saying, just hoping that somewhere in the morphine fog she heard him.

Finally there came a day when she opened her eyes and looked at him frankly. "I'm dying, aren't I?"

He knew with a chill in his heart that she was right and he had known it since the day the messenger came to Sam's house in Lexington. "No faster than the rest of us, dear."

"Why does it feel like I am?"

"It's just the drugs. I'm holding your hand. Can you feel it?"

She slipped back into unconsciousness shortly after, and died a few hours later without waking up again.

The rest of the day passed in a haze, the only clear memory being when a hospital official asked if he wanted an autopsy performed.

"It won’t bring her back, so what’s the point?”

Somehow Sam had figured out what was going on and came to get him. Robert hadn't even realized that he hadn't cried until the gentle old man put a hand on his shoulder, then pulled him close.

It was from Sam's house that he sent the terse but necessary message to Amalia. Sam followed it up with something longer, but Robert didn't bother to find out what he said. It didn't matter. Nothing did. Nothing except that Sophie needed him, and he had nothing to give.