fingers taloned on his knuckles. Donovan could feel the strain in her, feel the excruciating effort as she struggled to give birth. Her face was a contorted mask in the yellow lamplight. The cords along her neck stood out like ropes.
“That’s it!” Donovan urged as if he were prodding a faltering horse. “Come on, you can do it!”
“No—” Varina fell back on the pillow with an exhausted sob. “I can’t,” she whimpered softly, her head rolling from side to side. “Something’s…wrong.”
“What—?”
“I don’t know—my other babies were easy—” She gasped as the next pain ripped through her tired body. Again she arched and struggled, battling vainly to push her child into the world.
Sick with fear, Donovan stroked her hands. Women died this way, he reminded himself. If he didn’t do the right thing, and do it quickly, he would lose both Varina and her child.
But what was the right thing? He’d had no experience in birthing, not even with the animals on the plantation. An old slave named Abner had taken care of such matters. What he wouldn’t give now for Abner’s capable, dark hands, or for the quiet presence of Abner’s wife, Vashti, who’d attended the slave women. Donovan felt as helpless as a child. And he was the only hope Varina had.
Damnation, where was that midwife?
Donovan bent over his sister and brushed the wet hair back from her care-lined forehead. He remembered how close they’d been in their growing-up years—he and Varina and their younger brother, Virgil. Virgil had died in Donovan’s arms at Antietam. By all that was holy, he could not lose Varina, too!
“Tell me what to do,” he pleaded, his throat so raw he could barely speak.
“Check for the head….” Her voice was a whisper, frighteningly weak. “If you don’t find it…if the baby’s lying wrong…you’ll have to turn it.”
“All right. Lie still.” Donovan’s stomach clenched into a cold ball as he imagined what he was about to do—the awful pain his fumbling hands would inflict on Varina, the risk to her fragile, unborn infant. Steeling himself, he reached for the hem of her flannel nightdress.
His quaking fingers could not even grasp the cloth.
“Donovan—?” She was waiting, her fists balled against the pain. But Donovan was paralyzed by his own dread. He could not move.
Racked with self-disgust, he wrenched himself away from the bedside. “I’ll be right back,” he growled. “Rest a minute if you can—and try not to push.” Donovan shoved past the quilt and strode across the cabin. He groped for the door, then stumbled out onto the porch. His ribs heaved as he gulped the fresh, cold air.
He had to go back in there and help Varina. If he didn’t, she and her child would die. But he was so afraid of hurting her, afraid of doing some terrible harm to the baby-Snowflakes danced around him, diamond white against the darkness. They swirled down in infinite spirals from the murky sky as Donovan raised his eyes to heaven.
“Lord,” he murmured, “I’ve tried not to trouble you much over the years. But right now I need your help. I have two lives to save, and I can’t do the job alone.” He paused self-consciously, cleared his throat and forced himself to continue. “You understand, it’s not for myself I’m asking. I don’t deserve any favors, least of all from you. But Varina, she’s a good woman who’s never done a lick of harm in her life. And she’s got three fatherless little ones to raise—four, counting the baby—”
Donovan broke off in frustration. God could count, he reminded himself. As for the rest, he’d be better off inside, helping Varina, than standing out here stalling like a coward.
He cast one final, desperate glance into the snow-specked heavens. “Please,” he muttered. “Just—”
The sound of hoofbeats riveted his thoughts. He could hear them pounding up the gulch trail, moving rapidly closer. As Donovan’s eyes probed the snowy darkness, a big dun mule burst out of the aspens and into the clearing.
Two dark shapes, one of them very small, clung to the mule’s back. As the animal wheeled to a stop, Annie sprang to the ground and dashed toward the cabin. “Uncle Donovan, I brought Miss Sarah! Is Ma all right?”
“She’s fine,” Donovan lied. “Go on in and take care of Katy and Samuel. I’ll see to the mule.”
He loped off the porch and across the yard, to where Miss Sarah Parker was climbing down from the saddle, a canvas satchel clutched beneath her dark wool cloak. Relief jellied Donovan’s knees. At that instant, he could have swept the spinsterly Miss Sarah into his arms, plucked off her pince-nez glasses, and kissed her full on her prim mouth.
“It’s about time!” was all he could say.
“Sorry.” She tossed him the reins. “I just finished delivering Minnie Hawkins down on Panner Creek. I couldn’t get here any sooner. How is Varina?”
“Bad. The baby’s not coming the way it should. I hope to heaven you haven’t gotten here too late.”
Miss Sarah swung resolutely toward the porch, her boots crunching the new-fallen snow. Her plain, dark skirt swished against her legs as she turned with one foot on the rickety bottom step.
“Put Nebuchadnezzar in the shed and give him some oats,” she ordered crisply. “Then wash up and come inside. I expect I’ll be needing your help.”
She strode into the cabin. As he led the mule toward the shed, Donovan heard her instructing Annie to take the younger children to the cabin of old Ike Ordway, their nearest neighbor down the gulch. By the time he’d stabled the stubborn beast, they were on their way, trooping past him in the sad little coats Varina had pieced from old blanket scraps.
Donovan dipped water from the porch bucket and used a sliver of lye soap to lather his hands. He worked the suds carefully around his fingers, shivering as the wind penetrated his worn flannel shirt. Everything was going to be all right, he tried to reassure himself. The midwife was here. She would know what to do.
All the same, he’d have felt better if the woman had been older—say, a stalwart matron of forty who looked as if she’d borne a half-dozen children of her own.
Washing done, he entered the cabin to find Sarah Parker standing by the stove with her back to the door, rolling up the sleeves of her gray shirtwaist. Strangely, the first thought that flashed through his mind was how attractive she appeared from behind. The lamplight melted on the coil of her glossy brown hair where it lay low on the nape of her neck. And even her drab clothes could not hide the elegant set of her shoulders or the grace of a slender torso that curved from hand-span waist to sensually rounded haunches.
Donovan stared at her, galvanized once more by that feeling he could not even name—as if the sight of her had forged a dark link to some secret memory buried in the depths of his mind. What was it…?
A frenzied moan from Varina burst the unfinished thought like a bubble. Sarah Parker turned and frowned at Donovan, as if she’d known all along that he was there.
“I just finished checking her. It looks like a breech birth.”
Donovan nodded his understanding, mouth grimly set to hide
