A Promise to Love Read online

  © 2012 by Serena Miller

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3970-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.

  To my grandmother, Elizabeth Allen Bonzo, who married for love—who endured in that love—and by enduring healed a broken family.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5

  6 7 8 9 10

  11 12 13 14 15

  16 17 18 19 20

  21 22 23 24 25

  26 27 28 29

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books by Serena B. Miller

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to: Frank and Marilyn Markey, for hours of historical research; Joe Stockham, our local Civil War expert, for insight into the famed Michigan Cavalry Brigade; Ron Bloomfield, Bay City Historical Museum curator; Julie Miller, research assistant and proofreader; Heather Gragg, for equine information; Vicki Crumpton, editor, for knowing exactly how to improve my manuscripts; Paul Dillingham, for introducing me to the fascinating study of our country’s past; Dr. Aaron Ellis, family physician, for brainstorming with me on possible causes of a young mother’s death; the entire Revell editorial staff, for giving me an excuse to revisit the 1800s; and special thanks to so many precious readers who have taken the time to encourage and pray for this grateful writer.

  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

  — 1 CORINTHIANS 13:7 NKJV —

  Prologue

  MARCH 31, 1871

  WHITE ROCK, MICHIGAN

  Joshua Hunter had survived four years of war, led men in battle, been honored for his courage under fire, and had turned sixty acres of lumbered-over Michigan land into crop-producing fields . . . but he was helpless in the face of his wife’s agony.

  “Maybe a cup of coffee would help,” his father-in-law suggested. “Coffee sometimes cures my headaches.”

  His wife’s father, Richard Young, was every bit as worried as he. Neither of them had ever seen a woman in such pain. She had not suffered this badly even in the birthing of their five children.

  “Diantha,” Joshua asked, “do you think you could sit up and drink some coffee?”

  She nodded feebly and allowed him to put two pillows behind her back to prop her upright. Her mother went to fetch the coffee.

  “It’s lukewarm, honey.” Virgie hurried back into the bedroom where her daughter lay. “It’ll be easier for you to drink that way. I’m sure this will help. You know what a bad headache your daddy gets when he don’t get his coffee regular.”

  Joshua brushed the damp hair off his wife’s forehead as she reached for the cup. Diantha took after her mother’s side of the family—a handsome people. Her skin was lovely, with an almost olive tint to it, but now it was the color of paste. Her pallor was greater than he had ever seen—even during her worst moments of labor. Beads of sweat clung to her forehead as she tried to hold the cup to her lips and her hands trembled.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  He grabbed the cup before it could spill onto the coverlet.

  “Please try to sip some, sweetheart.” He held the cup to her lips.

  She took two swallows before she fell back against the pillows. “My head hurts so.” She pressed both hands against her temples. “I can’t stand it.”

  “Give the coffee a chance to work, honey,” her father said.

  “I’m so cold.” Her teeth began to chatter, in spite of the fire Richard had built in the fireplace. “Josh, get me another blanket.”

  Virgie whipped a heavy quilt from the foot of the bed. “Here.” She handed it to him, her face pinched with worry.

  He tucked the quilt around his wife, wondering how she could keep from suffocating with so many layers over her.

  Suddenly, she writhed beneath the quilts, grabbed her stomach, and threw up into an empty bucket her mother had placed beside the bed when she had first complained of feeling ill.

  She fell back against the pillows once again, her eyes closed tight against the pain, her face twisted into a grimace. Joshua had seen a great deal of suffering in his lifetime, especially on the battlefield, but he had never seen anything like what his wife was experiencing.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said, as much to himself as to Virgie and Richard. “She was fine this morning at breakfast.”

  “What did she eat?” her mother asked.

  “Cornmeal mush and milk.” He shook his head, unable to think of anything that could have caused this. “She ate from the same bowls as the children and me, then she drank a cup of tea while we planned our day.”

  Virgie poured water into a washbasin on a nearby stand, dipped a washrag in it, wrung it out, and placed it on her daughter’s forehead. “There, honey. Maybe that will help your head feel better.”

  “She went for a short walk in the woods behind the cabin,” Joshua continued. “With that good rain we got yesterday, and with the dogwood tree blossoms the size of a squirrel’s ears—she wanted to hunt for some morel mushrooms she could fry for supper tonight.”

  “Could she have gotten ahold of some kind of poison mushroom?” Virgie asked.

  “The girl has enough sense to know the difference between a good morel and them poison mushrooms some people mistake for ’em—like the ones that killed that poor woman down by Forestville last spring,” Richard said. “I taught Diantha myself. She knows how to be careful. I guarantee it ain’t mushroom poisoning.”

  “I didn’t eat any mushrooms,” Diantha said, pulling the damp cloth from her forehead and dropping it on the floor. “Can I have some water?”

  Richard left and came back with a tin cup. He held it to his daughter’s lips. “Here, honey. I just now drew it up from the well so it would be nice and cool.”

  Diantha took one sip and began retching.

  Joshua grabbed the bucket and held it while his wife emptied what little remained in her stomach. “My head hurts so bad!” Diantha pressed her hands against her temples again and rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “Make it stop, Mama, make it stop. Please make it stop!”

  “We need Dr. Allard,” Joshua said. “We need him right now.”

  “I’ll go,” Richard said.

  “No.” Joshua looked up from where he was sitting on the side of her bed. “My horse is faster, and I’m a better rider. I’ll go.” He realized how arrogant that sounded. “I’m sorry, Richard, I meant no offense.”

  “It’s true, though,” Rich
ard said. “After four years in the cavalry, you’re a much better rider than me. You should be the one to go.”

  Diantha grappled at his shirt. “Don’t leave me, Josh!”

  Joshua had never been so torn in his life. He wanted to get Doc Allard as fast as possible, but how could he leave his wife when she was begging him to stay?

  At that moment, her body began writhing in pain and then she started convulsing and tearing at her hair. A moan escaped her lips, her body arched, went limp, and she was suddenly and completely . . . still.

  Joshua and his in-laws looked at each other, all three of them wild-eyed. Virgie began to shake her roughly. “Diantha! Wake up!”

  Joshua reached for her wrist and felt for a pulse, but there was none.

  “Don’t you do this to me, Diantha Mae,” Virgie cried. “Don’t you lay there playing possum, a-trying to scare me like you did when you was a girl!” Virgie slapped her daughter in the face, over and over. “You wake up now. You wake up right this minute!”

  “Stop it!” Richard grabbed Virgie and pulled her away from the bed.

  Virgie shook him off, ran for the smelling salts, and waved them frantically beneath Diantha’s nose. When there was no response, Virgie’s shoulders slumped in defeat. She sat down on the floor beside the bed and began to wail, holding on to her daughter’s hand, rocking back and forth in her great grief.

  Virgie’s cries sounded as raw and primal as those of a wounded animal. In some far-off place of Joshua’s mind, he wondered if his mother-in-law could live through this after already having buried six other children.

  “Not her too, Lord,” she sobbed. “Not the only baby I got left.”

  “I’ll go for the doctor now.” Richard’s voice was tired and resigned. He had endured this agony six times before, and the weariness of grief was already etched deeply into every line of his body.

  Joshua was paralyzed with shock. They had four little girls and a three-month-old baby boy. The girls were upstairs in the loft playing. The oldest, twelve-year-old Agnes, was keeping an eye on her three younger sisters and baby brother.

  He should go to them, but he couldn’t seem to stop sitting there, staring at his wife, trying to pull his mind together, trying to absorb the fact that she was . . . gone. How could Diantha just up and . . . die?

  The rhythmic hoofbeats of Richard riding off to fetch the now-useless doctor filled the room. Virgie lay sobbing on the floor. Joshua steeled himself against giving in to an outpouring of grief. He could not allow himself the luxury of falling apart. Not yet. He needed to go to his children.

  Drawing upon every bit of willpower he had, he closed his wife’s lovely green eyes, took one last look at her perfect face, ran his hand over her dark brown hair, placed a kiss on her forehead, and then pulled the sheet up over her body and face. She had never been a large woman, barely coming to his shoulder. Now, in death, beneath the sheet, she looked so very small.

  1

  MAY 19, 1871

  “You stupid cow!” Mrs. Millicent Bowers leaped to her feet and swished her rose-colored silk skirt away from the broken tea set lying on the floor. “Why my husband ever hired you, I’ll never know! The cost of that steamboat ticket to bring you here from Detroit was a complete waste!”

  Millicent was furious; her glossy brown ringlets—which took Ingrid forever to curl each morning—trembled.

  Ingrid ducked her head, avoiding her mistress’s blazing eyes, and fell to her knees, gathering the broken pieces back on to the heavily laden tea tray she had dropped.

  “That set was imported from England and it cost the earth! What’s wrong with you!” At that point, Millicent burst into tears, fell facedown upon the sofa, and began to beat the cushions like a child throwing a temper tantrum. In Ingrid’s opinion, this was ridiculous behavior for a grown woman, but it wasn’t the first time she had witnessed it. Millicent—an aging belle from Virginia who had not yet reconciled herself to living in the “wilds” of Michigan—was, in Ingrid’s eyes, a spoiled brat.

  She seldom understood why her mistress acted the way she did, but it wasn’t her place to understand. She only had to work for the woman, a job that was getting more tedious every day.

  Still, she was aghast at the breakage. The tea set had been lovely, with hand-painted cabbage roses on a creamy white background, and it was not easy to come by nice things in this “godforsaken, backwoods hole in the ground.” At least that’s what Millicent told everyone within earshot on a daily basis.

  Perhaps the state of Virginia had been next door to heaven before Mr. Lincoln’s war. Ingrid didn’t know and she didn’t care. In her opinion, a woman with a roof over her head, money to spend, and a husband who doted on her did not have any reason to complain. However, if there was ever a woman determined to make a career out of being unhappy, it was Millicent Bowers.

  “I am sorry.” Ingrid struggled to speak the words correctly. Millicent hated it when she spoke in broken English. “It was a—accident.”

  As she mopped up the mess with a dishcloth, saddened by the waste of the good pastry over which she had labored, she felt a stinging sensation across her shoulders. She jerked around and, to her astonishment, saw Millicent leaning over her, a look of flushed triumph on her face and a riding crop in her hand. Before Ingrid could recover from her surprise, the crop came down upon her again and again, slashing across her face and ripping a tear in her dress before she could put a hand out to stop it.

  “I’ll teach you to destroy my things,” Millicent crowed.

  Ingrid fell onto her bottom and scooted backward, shocked speechless.

  Her mistress was a fretful, thoughtless woman with no responsibilities and countless imagined illnesses. She frequently gave in to small, verbal cruelties to relieve her boredom, but she had never before physically attacked her.

  As the blows rained down upon Ingrid’s head and shoulders, she saw that Millicent’s face had changed from complete despair to unabashed glee.

  Fortunately, her mistress was not in the best of shape. Her indolent half-invalid state had robbed her of stamina. Her corset made it impossible for her to draw a full breath.

  Millicent stopped, pressed her hand against her stomach, and tried to recover by breathing in short, shallow, dog-like pants. This gave Ingrid enough time to scramble to her feet.

  For the first time since her decision to come to America, Ingrid felt real anger. Dropping a tea set was unfortunate, but being beaten for it was not acceptable. After working for Millicent this past month, she felt bottomless sympathy for the woman’s former slaves.

  She stepped over the broken china and snatched the riding crop away. Millicent raised her hand to slap her—just as a male voice sliced through the air.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Millicent’s hand dropped. In an instant, she arranged her face into a picture of simpering, sweet womanhood. Ingrid watched, amazed, as Millicent deliberately exchanged one facial expression for another, as quickly and efficiently as changing a hat. Ingrid had never learned the art of pretending to be anyone except exactly who she was, a twenty-four-year-old Swedish woman who could outwork anybody she knew.

  “Oh—it’s you.” Surprisingly, once Millicent turned and saw the man, her voice did not drip honey.

  “Is your husband here, ma’am?” the man asked.

  “No.”

  She turned her back on him.

  The rudeness of her attitude came as another shock. Ingrid had yet to see the man whom Millicent did not try to captivate.

  “I came to the mercantile to pay my bill,” the man said. “Your husband wasn’t there.”

  “Leave the money on the table.” Millicent nodded toward one of many useless decorative pieces of furniture crowding the sitting room. “Then, I’ll thank you to leave, Mr. Hunter.”

  Hunter? Ingrid searched her memory. Why was Millicent, who loved the attention of a male—any male—being so dismissive? It was especially surprising because Mr. Hunter was an exceptional
ly handsome man. He was over six feet tall, broad of shoulder, and perfect in form.

  He pulled some worn-looking bills from his pocket and laid them on the table. Something about the way he unfolded and smoothed them out made Ingrid think that the money had not come easily.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  To Ingrid’s surprise, he appeared to be speaking to her.

  He was dressed in a farmer’s work clothes, had the bluest eyes she had ever seen, and yes, they were most definitely looking straight at her. She noticed that his chestnut-brown hair, which curled over his shirt collar, was in bad need of a trim.

  “You’re bleeding,” he pointed out.

  Ingrid’s hand flew to her face, where there was a trickle of blood. She wondered how much he had seen through the open door before he interrupted. Heat suffused her neck and face at the realization that he had seen her being treated like a disobedient dog.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Millicent said. “This clumsy girl cut herself when she broke my tea set.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Get back to work, Ingrid.”

  To Ingrid’s astonishment, Mr. Hunter did not allow himself to be dismissed. “Shouldn’t she have those cuts tended to first?” His voice held real concern.

  Ingrid blinked. Her wounds meant nothing to her at the moment. She was too busy studying this man who was taking up for her.

  Mr. Hunter was worried about her—an overworked, badly treated housemaid.

  It was the first real kindness she had received since arriving in White Rock, Michigan. At that moment, in the blink of an eye, Ingrid fell head over heels in love with a perfect stranger.

  Millicent had a different opinion of Mr. Hunter. She slowly turned back around to face the man. “When I want the advice of a wife killer, I’ll ask for it.”

  The man looked as though he had been punched in the stomach, but he quickly recovered.

  “I’d take it kindly if you wouldn’t go spreading that rumor around, Mrs. Bowers. I have little children to raise.” He politely tipped his hat to them and left.