“David, it’s me, Miss Hagen!” Without hesitation, she gathered him into her arms and gently shook him. “You’re having a bad dream—David, wake up!”
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he went rigid and tried to pull away from her, but she held him fast.
“It’s all right, I’m not upset with you, I promise. Shh, I promise…” Whispering soothing words, she rocked him just as her mother had done when Ingrid had a nightmare, until gradually, David relaxed against her.
“Does your leg hurt? Do you want me to call for Dr. Davis?”
When the boy didn’t answer her, she feared he must be in pain even though Charles surely had given him laudanum to help him sleep. Something truly traumatic had cut through the sedative, David crying out for his mother. Her heart aching for him, Ingrid gathered him closer even as the boy started to sob.
“Oh, David, I’m so sorry about your mama. If I’d known—if you’d only told me what was troubling you at school, I would never have punished you. I’m so sorry if I made things worse for you—”
“Mama didn’t love us! She wanted to leave Papa, but she fell in the stable and hit her head on a shovel. I saw it! He tried to help her, but it was too late. Mama died.”
Horrified, Ingrid tried to calm him by rocking him again, but he only sobbed harder.
“She didn’t want us! She didn’t want Papa. She said so, I heard her! Papa, where are you?Papa!”
David’s anguished cry cutting her to the quick, Ingrid began to shout, too, for Charles, for Molly. It seemed within a moment the door between the house and the infirmary flew open and they came running in their nightclothes.
“He had a nightmare! I can’t get him to stop crying. He wants his father—oh, dear, what are we to do?”
“I’ll take him, Ingrid. Everything’s going to be all right. Molly, help her back to bed.”
Ingrid sobbed now, too, overcome by what David had revealed as Charles eased the boy from her arms. How could Joshua’s wife not want him? Not want her own children?
As Molly supported her around the waist and guided her back to bed, Ingrid glanced over her shoulder to see Charles had tucked David under the covers and was administering a spoonful of medicine.
“He’ll be fine, Ingrid,” Molly sought to soothe her, helping her into bed. “Try to get some sleep. We’ll stay here for a while in case he has another bad dream.”
Curling on her side, Ingrid nodded as she silently wept, her nightgown damp from David’s tears and her pillow growing wet from her own.
Chapter 4
“Oh, Ingrid, you gave us such a fright!” With the back of her hand pressed dramatically to her forehead, Anita spun in a pirouette and sank onto the settee. If she had intended to feign a faint, she failed miserably when she erupted into giggles, which made Ingrid smile and shake her head at her irrepressible younger sister.
It felt good to be home, good to feel like herself again. Good to be sitting in the drawing room instead of lying abed in the infirmary.
Yet Ingrid’s smile faded when she thought again about what David Logan had revealed last night when she had tried to console him. In spite of Anita’s best efforts to entertain her, she just couldn’t get his words out of her mind.
She wanted to leave Papa, but she fell in the stable and hit her head on a shovel.
What tragic sequence of events could have brought Joshua’s wife to such a terrible end? She had assumed that Mary Logan had died in childbirth or from some sudden illness.
Ingrid had wanted to ask Dr. Davis about it earlier that morning, but she could never quite work up the courage—and then Kari and Anita had arrived in a carriage to take her home. David had still been sleeping soundly from the moment Ingrid awoke to her departure, everyone taking great care not to disturb him. Nor had Joshua come to visit his son by the time Ingrid left the infirmary, her keen sense of disappointment unsettling her.
Why should she care if she had missed him? He probably would have ignored her like he had last evening, walking out without a good night or even a gentlemanly tipping of his hat.
She had mulled over what she and Kari had said to each other that he might have overheard, but there was nothing that would have upset or offended him. It didn’t make sense, one moment Joshua calling her intimately by her first name and then becoming so stiff and distant. She had little social experience with men, her shyness precluding most interaction when she had lived in Faribault, so she had nothing with which to compare such puzzling masculine behavior.
Ingrid had hoped Seth would accompany Kari to take her home this morning, and she could have asked him if it was true that Joshua’s wife had struck her head on a shovel—oh, it was too dreadful to even think about! Kari had left in such a hurry after dropping them off, having forgotten about an appointment to choose drapery fabrics for the new house, that Ingrid hadn’t been able to visit with her about it, either.
“Ingrid, I’ve been trying to make you laugh, but now you just look troubled again. I don’t know what else to do!”
She glanced at her crestfallen sister and was about to offer an apology when Miguel, the cook’s teenaged son, appeared suddenly in the doorway.
“Miss Ingrid, Miss Anita, my mother said to come and find you right away! Your brother, Andreas, is in jail!”
Ingrid jumped up from her chair while Anita gasped, glancing with confusion at Ingrid.
