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  He paused, and Victoria turned quickly back to the writing desk, dipped the tip of her pen into the inkpot, and wrote:

  Young woman of nineteen years in search of a husband with experience in legal matters. All others need not apply.

  She thought for a moment and considered adding an age restriction, but really, the more experience the man had, the better. She instead added:

  Must be able-bodied and of sound mind.

  Regards, Victoria Davenport.

  She hesitated for a fraction of a moment before signing her maiden name.

  Young Mr. Hershell was still staring at her. His hulking form was framed in the open doorway. Victoria puffed out her cheeks and blew hurriedly on the ink.

  “Take this to the post office for me, won’t you?” she begged. “Just as quick as you can. I need it to make the next edition.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the boy, and he shot off through the front door, clutching her envelope in his hands.

  Victoria stood there, framed in the sunlight, watching him jog back across the street. She had done it now. There was no taking it back. The incontrovertible truth sank in then. She had just done something irretrievable and highly improper. What a shameful, desperate thing to have done. She couldn’t advertise for a husband!

  Her heartbeat sped, and a sudden terror gripped her. What had she done?! She made to dash outside after Hershell to call him back, but she was on the front step when the entire world began to tremble and shake.

  Horrified, Victoria stood in the blazing sunlight, clutching at the porch railing. The world was convulsing. It was trembling. It was all falling down around her once more.

  With a gasp, she stumbled back inside her house and slammed the door shut, grasping the doorknob tight in both hands.

  As she leaned there against the warm wood, dragging stale air through her mouth and into her lungs, she heard the clattering of a cart passing in the street outside.

  “Just a coach,” she whispered to herself. “Just a coach.”

  The world had righted itself. It was no longer shaking, and Victoria had to wonder briefly— as she spun the lock on the door and tugged her woolen shawl more snuggly around her shoulders— if it had ever trembled at all.

  ∞∞∞

  Much to her dismay, an answer to her advert arrived the following week. Victoria could hardly believe her eyes. What man would be so foolish?

  Dear Miss Davenport,

  I would be delighted to make your acquaintance in the town of Silverpines in approximately one month’s time. I am a practicing attorney in the state of Ohio and can provide references upon request.

  Thirty-seven years of age, experienced, and willing to provide a stable home and safe harbor for one such as yourself.

  Sincerely,

  Virgil Donahue

  Attorney at Law

  Victoria stared at the missive, her heart fluttering against her breastbone like the wings of a trapped dove. It was too good to be true, wasn’t it? It seemed so far-fetched. This was pure lunacy.

  She sent back her response the very next day.

  Chapter Three

  Sunday morning found Victoria perched in her chair near the sitting room window. She had listened, with a vague sense of unreality, to the chiming of the church bells that morning as handfuls of passersby made their way down Main Street, all dressed in their Sunday best. There was an overwhelming amount of women amongst them, with only the occasional trouser pant to break the flow of skirts. So many men had been lost…

  Afterwards, Victoria had dutifully immersed herself in the soft pages of her bible, humming In the Garden beneath her breath at the breaks between chapters. She forced herself to ignore the two embossed names on the front cover. The leather-bound book had been a gift from the townsfolk on her wedding day. It seemed that wherever she looked and whatever she touched in her house reminded her of her husband’s dreadful betrayal. Victoria longed for an escape from the emotions that had settled in her gut like badly mixed porridge.

  Around half-past four o’clock, Victoria laid aside her bible, murmured a brief prayer for strength for herself, for Elena, and for the entire town of Silverpines, and then gazed upwards at the sky.

  Roiling black clouds were flooding the horizon in the distance. There was a storm brewing. Her nerves jangled unpleasantly as Victoria climbed to her feet and stretched. The house had grown rather cool as the day had progressed. She scrutinized the vacant brick fireplace and sighed. Surely, she could manage a quick jaunt onto the back porch to retrieve some fire wood? She could put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea, perhaps a hot bath… her thoughts drifted off as she glanced back out at the dark clouds.

  She peered down at the front of her dress. It was in desperate need of a good washing. She could occupy herself with that as well.

  Before the accidents, Jaxsom had hired a young woman named Arrabella that came by the manor once a week to do the washing and aide Victoria in planning the weeks’ meals. Afterwards, however, Arrabella had been needed elsewhere. From what Victoria had come to understand, the girl’s husband had been killed in the mudslides in Timber Town.

  On a sorrowful sigh, Victoria shuffled to the back door and peered anxiously through the net curtains. Only the wisteria blooms in the back garden stirred in the breeze. There wasn’t another soul in sight. For the briefest, most terrifying moment, Victoria fancied that they had all abandoned Silverpines. They had given up on rebuilding the town… and forgotten all about her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she chastised herself. She straightened her shoulders and reached boldly for the doorknob.

  A heavy clap of thunder split the sleepy Sunday silence. Victoria leapt back from the door as though she had been burned and stared at the knob in high dudgeon.

  “I simply cannot stay in here forever,” she whispered. “I mustn’t.”

  Another crack of thunder rolled over the sky, this time followed by a brief fork of lightning that shattered over the black clouds as though a lit fuse had met its target.

  Victoria withdrew the hand she had outstretched once more and turned away from the door.

  Rain began to pound atop the roof as darkness drifted over the town. Great, thick drops splattered against the windows. Victoria pulled the curtains, lit her lamps, and went in search of a thick blanket to fight off the sudden chill of the coming night.

  The walls of the house seemed to speak out in protest against the wind, and the shadows grew bolder, dancing in the flicker of the oil lamps.

  Victoria curled herself into Jaxsom’s old arm chair, a copy of Moby Dick clutched in her increasingly numb fingers.

  She was still sitting there hours later, pondering the many absurdities of Captain Ahab, when a loud noise exploded over the sounds of the raging storm outside.

  BANG!

  Her blood seemed to vibrate in her veins at the sound. She jerked upright, staring around the sitting room. What was that? Had a tree fallen on the roof?

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  It took Victoria several moments to realize that the sound was the hammering of fists upon her back door. Heavy, mismatched footsteps thudded over the porch, making the china in the dining room quake.

  Swallowing past the fear, Victoria leapt to her feet and skittered into the kitchen.

  “Who—” she coughed beside the back door. “Who is it?”

  There was no answer. Instead, a sudden clatter and a resounding thud reached her. Victoria pulled back the curtains. She could hardly hear the pattering of the rain over the sound of her heart thrumming in her ears, but there was no one there.

  She stood up onto the tips of her toes to peer all around the back porch. Nothing.

  Puzzled, her chest tight with trepidation, Victoria flew over to the large kitchen window to look out into the back garden.

  She had to clap her hand to her lips to keep herself from crying out. There, at the foot of the stairs, writhing in the mud, was a horrendous creature. Bathed in shadows, the thing—whatever i
t was—convulsed, and an inhuman sound of terrible pain echoed through the kitchen walls. Victoria seized the broom lying against the window frame and gripped it so tightly that she might have been hoping to meld it to her hands. What should she do?

  An abrupt flash of forked lightning illuminated the sky outside, and Victoria saw suddenly, by its light… not a monster, but a man. His leather duster was so caked with mud that it looked black. His dark hair and beard were nothing but a thick, matted tangle, and something red was leaking from a gaping wound in his back. He was shifting about on the ground in the pouring rain. Water was drizzling from his shoulders. As she watched, the man made to climb to his feet, but his legs shook. He collapsed back onto the earth in a splatter of mud.

  “Good heavens!”

  Victoria ran to the back door and jerked it open. She stumbled and slid as she leapt out onto the blood-splattered porch, and then tumbled down the short set of steps into the rain and sludge beside the man.

  “Can you stand?!” she shouted, scrambling on her hands and knees towards him in the downpour.

  There was no response.

  Victoria stared around through the rain to the few houses close by, at the vacant street and the dark shopfronts. “Help!” she screamed. But the storm around them carried her voice away on the wind.

  Aghast, Victoria bent forward and gripped the man beneath his armpits.

  “Oh! Come! ON!” she bellowed, heaving with all her might. “Get up! You will surely bleed to death out here in the rain!”

  The man grunted and woke with another howl of pain.

  “Get up!!” Victoria tugged harder still, and the man crooked his arm beneath his huge body and began to push himself up with one arm. “That’s it! Come on!”

  Together, the two maneuvered their way clumsily back onto the stairs; the man lay panting at the top, his eyes glazed.

  “Doctor?” he queried, looking at her with hazy eyes. “You ain’t no doctor.”

  “Of course not!” gasped Victoria, trying with all her might to heave him over the threshold into the kitchen.

  In a few moments she had managed it, and as she released the man’s arms, he slumped to the floor in a dead faint.

  His face, beneath his ruddy brown beard, was starkly white.

  Victoria slammed the door against the gale outside and flew into the kitchen, seizing a pair of shears and as many towels as she could carry. She hefted these over to the man and rolled him carefully onto his stomach. The gas light above the table flickered as Victoria’s eyes fixed on the gaping hole in the back of his coat. Congealing blood was oozing darkly from it.

  She gagged once, covered her mouth, and then set to work.

  Victoria knew little about doctoring, but she knew enough to understand that if she didn’t stop the flow of blood, this man would die. She cut open his coat and then split the back of his shirt. As she peeled the cloth away from his body, the wound spurted. Victoria gagged again.

  What should she do? Apply pressure? She hesitated, and the man grunted.

  “Get it…out of… me,” he moaned.

  “What?!”

  “I’ve… been… shot…”

  “Clearly!” Victoria doubled over, heaving.

  “Woman… I am dying… over here…” he gasped against the kitchen floor.

  Victoria steeled herself. “What can I do? Tell me what to do.”

  “Make a cut,” he groaned. “Two across. Like an X.”

  Victoria let out a little moan.

  Twenty minutes later, the man was shaking as Victoria dropped an entire bullet onto the kitchen floor with a pair of tweezers. It was strange that so small a thing could cause so much damage.

  “Whiskey,” the man spat through gritted teeth.

  “I hardly think—”

  “For the wound!” he gasped. “Whiskey.”

  Victoria ran through the kitchen and back down the hall. She didn’t even hesitate as she barreled through the door in the foyer that led to Jaxsom’s office. On the sideboard, gleaming in the light from the doorway, was a crystal decanter full of amber liquid.

  She snatched it and flew back to the kitchen. The man hadn’t moved.

  Victoria uncorked the decanter and poured a small amount into the open wound.

  “There,” she breathed, and she pressed a clean cloth to the bullet hole. It was soaked through in minutes. Tears began sliding down her cheeks. This man was going to die here. Right here on her kitchen floor. There was nothing more she could do.

  She swapped out the cloth for another, pressing her hand tightly against his blood-splattered skin and praying aloud, not moving, feeling the labored rise and fall of his chest.

  Luther was gasping. It was all that he could do to keep drawing air into lungs that felt flattened. He gulped. He was lying on something very cold. His head was swimming, and there was a soft, musical voice above him, murmuring words that he could not hear.

  He wanted to turn around and see the woman that was speaking softly over his shoulder, but his limbs were so heavy. All that he could see was the blur of a blank paneled wall before him… and then suddenly, there was a pair of black boots in front of his eyes.

  “Not yet,” whispered a woman’s voice. Much clearer and closer to him than the sweet musical angel that hovered over his shoulder.

  “Isabel. He is dying,” a man’s voice this time. It was dispassionate and vaguely annoyed.

  “But look at her,” the woman’s voice whispered. “She needs him to live.”

  The man groaned, “Not again.”

  “Help him,” the woman’s voice insisted.

  Luther saw the man’s boots shift, heard him curse under his breath, and then everything went black.

  ∞∞∞

  Victoria had no idea how long she sat there, clutching blood-soaked rags to the man’s back and shoulder. She only knew that, as an orange light began creeping across the white paneled walls, the man’s breathing suddenly eased. It terrified her for a moment. Was he dying? But then she heard him exhale, and she realized that somehow… his lungs had cleared. She peered hesitantly beneath the rags on his back. The bleeding had stopped.

  Astounded, Victoria replaced the old towels with new. Should she go for help? What if he died while she was away?

  She shifted, and the man’s boot twitched. He let out a soft exclamation of pain.

  “Hello?” Victoria murmured.

  He did not respond.

  Victoria sighed and got to her feet. The man was so pale, and judging by the sticky pools around them, he had lost at least a pint of blood on her kitchen floor.

  Where had he come from? How had he been shot?

  Victoria shook her head. He seemed stable for the first time in hours. She had to go for help.

  As she moved, the man’s hand shot out and grabbed her ankle.

  “Tell… no… one,” he gasped.

  Victoria halted. What did he mean?

  “No one must… know… that I am… here.” His grip on her ankle was very weak, but insistent.

  “Why?” she whispered, dropping to her knees beside his head. “Who are you?”

  “No…one…” he murmured again, releasing her, and his voice trailed off in mumbles.

  Victoria wrapped a tight bandage around the man’s injury. It encompassed the whole of his right shoulder. He neither woke nor moved while she worked, and when she’d finished, a thin sheen of perspiration was beading on her forehead.

  He was an abnormally large man. His shoulders were broad and muscular, and she could tell that when he stood, he would be at least a foot and a half taller than she. He looked as though he would be quite comfortable hefting Victoria’s entire body and tossing it over his shoulder. He might have done too, if he wasn’t injured.

  His face, though pale, was ruddy and chapped, as though he was accustomed to working beneath the hot sun. His hair and beard were both dark and scraggly, and his jaw was wide, angling sharply at the edges.

  As Victoria maneuvered carefu
lly around him, cleaning up as much of the blood as she could, she couldn’t help but notice that beneath the beard, the man could only be five or six years her senior. This shocked her for a moment. She had assumed him much older. Curious, she took a damp cloth to the side of his sleeping face and began siphoning off the mud.

  He grunted, but otherwise slept on.

  Victoria left him there, too scared that moving him would aggravate his injury. She found a thick, dark blanket and threw it over him, careful not to disturb the bandages. He would not be, perhaps, very comfortable lying on the kitchen floor, but at least he might be warm. She paced the house for most of the morning, visiting the kitchen regularly to check on the stranger’s wound.

  Why hadn’t he wanted her to go for help? Was he a criminal? A convict? Who was he?

  Her head buzzed with questions, and she was very relieved that no one came to the door. What would she say?

  The sun was sinking low into the sky before the man moved at all.

  It was the sound of a low groan from the kitchen that shot Victoria out of her chair. She raced down the hall and froze on the threshold, her hand gripping the door frame.

  The stranger was pushing himself onto his knees with one hand.

  “I would move very slowly if I were you,” she whispered quietly, eyeing his hulking form with apprehension.

  The man cast her a bleary-eyed glare, his coat hanging from his back in tatters. “Who the devil are you?”

  Victoria lifted her chin defiantly. “My name is Victoria Rhyan, and I’d thank you to leave the devil out of it.”

  The man snorted. “Get me the doctor. The man who was here.”

  Victoria raised her eyebrow at him. “You begged me to tell no one of your presence in my house,” she growled. “There is no one here but you and I.” As she said it, Victoria wondered at the advisability of informing this man of the fact that there was no one in this house to defend her, but she could not take the words back, and in any case, he didn’t look quite capable of attacking her at the moment.

  He grunted again. Using his uninjured arm, he braced himself on the kitchen table and heaved his enormous body into a standing position. “There was a man here,” he said, still gripping the edge of the table for support. His movements were shaky. “Saw his boots, I did.”