for a rematch," came a strong voice from behind him.
Sage quickly stepped away, straightened her riding skirt and tried to smooth her hair.
"Uncle William, I didn't hear you come up." She stood on tiptoe and greeted him with a kiss on his cheek. "Uncle William, I'd like you to meet Zachary Brown. He's been staying with us. Zachary, this is my father's brother-in-law, William Barker."
Fletcher noted William Barker's scrutinizing look as they exchanged hands. He wondered wryly if indeed he passed the critical test obvious in William Barker's eyes.
"I've noticed my niece has been spending less time behind the front desk lately," he observed tersely, "and now I see why."
Fletcher wanted to say something in Sage's behalf but stopped himself when her uncle's face broke into a grin.
"Good," the older man said with obvious sincerity. "I'm happy to see her enjoying herself."
William Barker's smile was friendly, and Fletcher liked him straight away. He was pleased to see his fatherly concern for Sage. In one of her many life tales, Sage had told him her uncle had moved into the hotel after her father's death to help run the place and keep up with the never-ending repairs.
"Sir," offered Fletcher, "I noticed several shutters and floorboards are badly in need of repair. I'm somewhat handy with tools. I'd be quite willing to help replace them while I'm here."
William Barker smiled and said, "Thanks, I'd appreciate the assistance."
* * *
Fletcher enjoyed the physical labor working with Sage's cheerful uncle. He even shinned up to repair the roof in order to keep the older man from possibly breaking his neck. While it taxed his muscles, it soothed and eased his anguished and tortured mind.
Enjoying the unexpected relief, he kept finding more and more reasons to delay his leaving. The town was becoming no longer nameless. He met many of Sage's friends, and they were warm and kind. They laughed easily, and he with them.
He hadn't known he had any laughter left in him after the years of frustration and horror in that nightmarish place. The guards at the asylum had taunted him with stories about himself. They'd given him a past that had no reference for him. Because of the pain in his head and occasional flashbacks, he felt somehow the stories weren't truthful. Even after he recovered physically they kept him there, imprisoned, shut away all those years in that horrible pen, haunted by faces and places he couldn't name.
"Yer dimwitted, Brown, and y' haven't any family," the guards repeated on several occasions. "Y' can't be wanderin' around by yerself. Animals like y' have t' be caged."
That statement plagued him constantly. He kept asking himself, If I have no family, who's paying to keep me here? Certainly these brutes are not doing it out of a sense of Christian charity.
Dimwitted! The word itself had induced fits of violence lending truth to their jeers. Maybe it was true, but it was not sufficient cause to strip, chain and beat him for the slightest infraction of the rules and poison him into submission and blackness.
In rare moments of clarity he knew he couldn't endure the brutal humiliating treatment any longer. In a daring move, with the inadvertent help of the guard who started the fire, with more luck than finesse, he had outwitted the guards. They thought him dead, and he had escaped.
For over three years he had lived and worked as Zachary Brown, the only identity he knew. But the grueling headaches and confusing flashbacks continued until the explosion of anger when bits and pieces of his memory finally began to return. With the dizziness still plaguing him, the emotional upheaval had driven him near to true madness.
He became a man possessed. As President Buchanan was trying to hold together a nation dividing against itself, Fletcher was attempting to piece together the fragments of his battered life. He was slow and methodical about it because he, like the nation that bred him, was preparing for war.
Yes. Sage, this town and these people were an unexpected oasis in his desert of revenge. Knowing full well what might become of him when he reached his ultimate goal, he was loath to leave.
CHAPTER THREE
˜
Kyndee was deep in her thoughts. A knock on the door startled her.
"Katharine? Empress Katharine, may I come in?" It was her father's voice.
"Go away. I don't want to talk to anyone," she called from her bed.
Katharine. She wasn't fond of the name. Her young godson stumbled on it every time he spoke to her. It seemed to come out more as Kytee every time he had spoken it. He settled on Kyndee one day and after being teased about it all afternoon the name stuck with her, within the family of course. To any other than intimates, she was Katharine.
She was named after the sixteenth century queen of England, Katharine of Aragon, who had courage, integrity, and dignity, and who withstood her misfortunes with Henry VIII.
Her father loved history and had told her tales of faraway countries as bedtime stories. She had closed her eyes and given her imagination free rein to see in her mind's eye the princes and dragons of his stories. Tales of knights in shining armor, of battles won and lost, of hearts in love and broken, had delighted her and created a special bond between the two of them.
He called her his princess when he hugged her, his queen when she knew he was proud of her, the duchess when she pouted, and the empress when she acted like a spoiled, willful child which is how he obviously thought she was acting now.
"Katharine. I need an audience with the queen." His voice was urgent, and it broke her heart to refuse him. She adored him and would have done anything for him, would do anything for him.
Anything but this.
"Kyndee—open the door," he said quietly. It was simple, direct, and it wounded her. She rose and turned the key.
He entered the room and hugged her. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. I know the announcement must have come as a shock to you. May we talk—you and I—without your mother and Great Aunt Hetty interrupting and chattering about frivolous things which don't matter anyway? Hmmm? May I have my audience with the queen?"
Kyndee pulled away and walked to the window. She seated herself on the cushion of the deep window seat. "Papa, I'm not a little girl anymore. You can't win me to your side by your talk of queens, princes and knights in shining armor."
Her father rubbed his hands together and sighed. He clicked his tongue as he picked up a straight-back chair and set it down beside her.
"No, Kyndee, my girl, you're not," he said, his expression somber. "You're a woman grown with a quick intelligent mind and a warm loving heart. I've been proud of you everyday of your life. You're the picture of your mother as she was in the first years of our marriage. But over the last years I've had to sit by and watch you fade into yourself; watch you wither like a flower that stayed too long and is now caught by the first frost of winter. You stay in your room reading or sewing. If you never sew another sampler, you have enough to fill the walls of twenty rooms. You've enough petit point pillows to cover a hundred beds and chairs. You've refused every invitation that's come until they've stopped coming."
Kyndee worked one hand against the other. In the end, she clasped them in
