Free Riverrun by Felicia Andrews Page B

was dead after all.”
    A sudden flood of questions and exclamations flooded Cass’s mind and blocked her tongue, and she could only return the smile weakly. Her mouth watered as she smelled the hot aroma of the food that had been set before her. The black woman nodded once, sharply, and with one hand massaging her hip she moved to the window and flung back the drapes. Instantly, golden sunlight exploded into the room and Cass blinked and lifted a hand to shade her eyes. The woman pushed and the windows swung outward, permitting a light, cool breeze to set dancing the motes of dust that hung lazily in the air.
    “Y’know,” the woman said as she shuffled to the second window, farthest from the bed, “you slep’ so much, we was wonderin’ if you was ever gone wake yourse’f up. You gots a bad chill from that water, too. You had a fever that was hard to do away wif, that’s for sure.” She stopped, then, a frail and graying figure spotlighted by a sunbeam. “You gots a name, child?”
    Cass gnawed at her lower lip, her eyes moving constantly to the food just out of reach. The old woman made her way to the foot of the bed, still smiling.
    “Come on, now, child, I ain’t gonna bite you.” She parted her lips, and Cass saw that she was toothless, her gums black. “Come on, now, what’s your name?”
    “Cass,” she said finally, her smile renewed. “Cassandra Bowsmith.”
    “Man alive,” the black woman muttered. “Jes’ what I need, ’nother foreigner.”
    Cass frowned her puzzlement and the woman laughed, tossing her head back to bounce her delight off the high, slightly vaulted ceiling. “I ’pologize,” she said, “but you don’t know how funny that there is. Mister Eric, see, he’s a foreigner, too.”
    “Mister Eric?”
    The woman tugged at her earring and cocked her head like an aged bird: “You kin call me Sara if you want. Ev’body does. Don’t know what my rightful name is for real. Mister Eric, he decided on Sara ’cause it’s from the Bible and she was a good woman, so he tells me.”
    “Sara,” Cass said, as though testing the name, and finding it good. She tried to sit up, then, but a wave of nausea and dizziness dropped her suddenly back onto her pillows. Immediately, Sara hurried to her side and perched on the mattress, mopping her brow with a soft cloth and pushing the tray up to her waist.
    “Too much excitement,” she muttered as she lifted tarnished silver lids off three large plates. “I tol’ that man a thousand times—Well, no matter,” she said. “You better, and that’s what counts.” She lifted the coverlet and checked the wrappings of Cass’s leg, nodding as she did so, her thick, dark lips pursed in silent whistling. When she had done, after perfunctorily tucking in one loose corner, she picked up a spoon and held it to Cass’s mouth. Cass thought to object, then quickly decided against it. Though she thought herself quite able to take care of her own meals, she could see no profit in antagonizing such an obviously valuable woman. Besides, she decided as she swallowed the first sip of a wonderfully warm broth, this being waited on isn’t all that hard to take.
    “Yep, thought you was dead,” Sara said as she deftly kept Cass’s mouth filled so she had no chance to reply. “Mister Eric, he comes back wif you hisse’f in the buckboard. Martin—of course, that was ’fore he run off, ’bout two, t’ree days ago—Martin, he helped the Mister bring you up here. Ain’t nobody been here in a long, long time. Y’know, you was so cold, child, I had to lis’en a mighty long time afore I heard you breathin’. Your leg was swollen—how come you had no clothes on, child?—and they was blood all over the place. Lord A’mighty, what in heaven’s name happened to you, child? Why is you so far from home?”
    Cass tried to answer, choked on a piece of meat from the soup, and began to laugh, softly at first, and then uncontrollably. It was relief, the sudden