The Hunger(60)

A murmur went through the crowd. Mary turned and saw a momentary disturbance in the knot of people before she saw Margaret Reed shove her way into the clearing.

She spoke directly to Donner, as though the others didn’t matter. “Don’t kill my James, I beg you.” She was a small woman, and sick, apparently. But there was still something fierce about her, something hard-edged as a blade. “He’s done a terrible thing, I don’t disagree. He’s killed a man and he deserves to be punished. But I ask you to consider the circumstances, and all the good he’s done for the wagon train.”

“Good—what good has he done? He nearly got us killed in the desert,” Keseberg said.

“We would’ve had to face that godforsaken miserable desert no matter who was leading us,” Lavinah Murphy chimed in, with a determined air about her. She had pushed her way toward the front as well and stood just behind Margaret now and slightly to the right, like a soldier behind a captain. As a mother of thirteen, the lone woman in the wagon train leading a family, Lavinah was well respected in the group, though there were some who whispered about her Mormon beliefs.

Keseberg looked taken aback. Mary wasn’t sure she’d ever heard anyone stand up to Keseberg, and perhaps the man himself hadn’t, either.

“James got us through, didn’t he?” Margaret demanded. “No one died, even though we all thought we might.”

No one objected. What she said was true.

“Killing him isn’t going to bring the man back,” Margaret went on. “Listen to me, every one of you, before you make your decision. I don’t know why James did what he did, but I beg you to consider the whole man and see if you can’t find it in your heart to be merciful. I was a new widow, sick, with four mouths to feed. James Reed married me when no one else would. He’s provided a home for my children, put a roof over their heads and food on the table. He’s treated those children as though they were his own. Only a man of remarkable generosity and kindness would do such a thing, don’t you think?”

Mary felt tears welling in her eyes as she listened.

“He worked his fingers to the bone for the children of a man he never knew,” Margaret said, her body shaking visibly, but her jaw and stance firm. “What kind of man does this? I beg you”—she walked the perimeter, looking each man in the eye—“find some other way to punish him, yes, but don’t take his life. Spare my husband.”

There was a long silence. Reed had been hanging his head during this speech, perhaps rightly aware that a wrong word would be the end of him, but now Mary saw him wipe his face against the shoulder of his jacket, and she wondered if he was trying to swipe away tears of his own.

Mary could hear the wind hissing in the distance. She could hear her heart drum a beat in her throat, in her head. The sun seemed to glare down on them like a lidless eye.

Donner finally asserted himself. “He goes with nothing—no horse, no food.”

It was as if all Margaret’s strength deserted her at once. With a small noise of shock, she collapsed beside her husband. It was impossible to tell whether she was relieved or upset, but she cried over him as though something in her had been split open.

Meanwhile, Keseberg gave Tamsen another hard stare before spitting on the ground at her feet. “Get him out of here before I kill him myself,” he said, pushing his way curtly through the crowd and causing Lavinah Murphy to stumble as he did.

Mary rushed toward them then, knowing that if she waited a moment longer, her chance would be gone. As Tamsen lifted Reed to his feet—miserable, stunned, still bleeding—Mary came around and wrapped an arm under his weeping wife, helping to lift her to standing. Tamsen caught her eye, and Mary felt something pass between them, something like understanding. She suspected that Stanton, should he ever make it back to them, would disapprove of any sort of bond between her and Tamsen. For some reason, though, this thought pleased Mary very much. She wasn’t sure what she wanted from Stanton, but it wasn’t his approval.

After that night—James Reed folding away into its darkness forever, without a single protest, which unnerved her more than anything else had—Mary moved in with the Reed family to give them help. She pitied Margaret—now twice a widow—and it felt good to be of use.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX




Springfield, Illinois

May 1840


James Reed had made it all the way to the livery stable to fetch his saddle horse before he realized he’d forgotten his new hat. Walking back to his office, he could picture it hanging from a peg on the wall: broad-brimmed like a Quaker’s, made of black brushed felt with a narrow band of plain brown leather. He could wait until tomorrow and ride home bareheaded—having left the old one, rotted from sweat, at the haberdasher’s—but the lapse of concentration bothered him. It wasn’t like him to be forgetful. It wasn’t like him to ride through town hatless, either, and he dabbed his brow with his handkerchief self-consciously at the thought, then twice more.

When he swung open the door to his office, however, he was surprised to see the new junior clerk, Edward McGee, sitting behind his desk, an open ledger in front of him. McGee looked up.

It was he who should have been startled, but instead Reed felt like the one who had been caught where he shouldn’t be.

McGee’s wavy hair was a light gold, his eyes were dark and uncommonly beautiful. At the time, those eyes had not looked guilty but full of a kind of knowing that made the boy seem older than he was. He had the same long, sharp nose, the sculpted cheeks and jaw of the young Irish lords Reed had seen from a distance as a child.