Young mid-20s perhaps. Her dress was buckskin worn but well-made and around her neck hung a necklace of small blue stones that caught the fire light. She was beautiful. Clara realized even like this, even with frost on her lashes and death circling close. Clara pressed her palm to the woman's forehead.
Hot, burning hot, despite the cold that had nearly killed her." Fever," Clara said." She's sick." The cold almost finished what the sickness started. She had seen fevers before, had watched them take her husband and son. The memory rose up like bile in her throat, but she forced it down.
This woman was not William. This child was not Thomas. This was a different night. a different story and maybe maybe it could have a different ending." Can you help her?" Eli asked. Clara looked at the woman's face.
Young, beautiful, even now, even with frost on her lashes and death circling close. She looked at the child still pressed into the corner, watching her mother with desperate eyes. She thought about the fever that had swept through her home two years ago, the helplessness she had felt as her world collapsed around her. And something shifted in her chest, something that had been frozen for two years, thawing painfully in the presence of need." I can try." She turned to Eli.
"Help me get her clothes off." We need to get her warm and dry before the fever takes hold. Her clothes, they're soaked through. If we leave them on her, she'll never warm up. Clara was already moving, pulling blankets from the chest at the foot of her bed, heating water in the kettle, gathering the herbs she kept in the cabinet above the stove." The cold is killing her as surely as the sickness.
We have to fight both." Eli hesitated for just a moment. The hesitation of a man raised to respect propriety, then nodded and began removing the woman's frozen moccasins. The night passed in fragments, each one bleeding into the next like watercolors and rain. Clara stripped the wet clothes from the woman, gently, carefully trying not to wake her from the fevered sleep that had claimed her. The buckskin dress came away stiff with ice. beneath it.
The woman's body was too thin, her ribs visible beneath skin the color of autumn earth. She had been starving, Clara realized. Starving and sick and still somehow walking through a blizzard with a child in her arms. There were scars, too. Old ones faded to silver on her shoulders and back. scars that spoke of violence, of survival of a life harder than Clara could imagine.
What drove a person to that? What fear was greater than death itself? Eli worked the fire until it roared, then paced the small cabin like a caged animal, too big for the space too restless to sit still. Clara had known him for three years now, ever since she and William had arrived in Stillwater Valley with dreams of homesteading and raising cattle. He had helped them build the fence around their property, had brought venison when the first winter hit hard, had stood beside her at the graves when she buried her husband and son.