Read Online Riverbreeze: Part 1 by Ellen E. Johnson - Free Book Online

a
little.”
    “Let me look at your leg.” Abigail went to
kneel in front of Robert but he quickly stopped her. She knew that
if she wrapped his ankle with a poultice of comfrey root, it would
reduce the swelling and hasten his recovery time.
    “No, I’m fine. Really. But it would be
helpful if you would ready Robin for the trip and pack some food
while I change. Will you do that for me, Abby?”
    “By all means.” She said, backing down.
    While Jamie helped Robert upstairs, she did
all that without complaint despite the fact that she wasn’t feeling
her best. A week ago there had been a tragic accident at the home
of her dearest friend, Beatrice Warren. The poor woman had burned
to death in a house fire, a not uncommon event; and Abigail was
grief-stricken. But that didn’t prevent her from providing the care
that she willingly gave to Robert, Jamie and Robin.
    Over the past two years since she had moved
in with the brothers, she and they had developed a comfortable
relationship with mutual respect and sibling affection. At their
first meeting, a mere two days after Robert’s wife’s death, Abigail
had been a shy, subdued young woman, grieving over the sudden loss
of her husband and three-month-old baby; and Robert had also been
grieving but desperate to find a woman who could nurse his newborn
son.
    It had been Jamie who had found her after
exhaustive visits to most of the parishes up and down the river.
And despite the fact that Abigail had never met Robert before—the
Chilcotts had lived on the south side of the James River while
Robert and Jamie lived on the north side—at the first sight of
little Robin, she couldn’t refuse him.
    And while Abigail would have preferred to
continue to live in her own home and stay close to her neighbor and
dear friend, who had been a skilled midwife and healer, she knew in
her heart that she wasn’t strong enough to live alone and she also
knew she did not want another relationship, so she had sold the
small farm she had inherited and had moved in with the two brothers
with the intention of staying only as long as it took to receive a
response to her letter that she had written to her sister and
brother-in-law in England, asking if she could come home. But a
response never came; Abigail didn’t know if her letter had gotten
lost or if her sister had moved, but the result was the same. She
was still here in Virginia because she had no other prospects.
    In actuality, though, she had a good life
here with the Bassett brothers. It suited her for the time being,
this quiet, reclusive life, living unmolested with Robert and Jamie
on their plantation. From the beginning she had made it perfectly
clear that she did not want another relationship and Robert was
more than happy to leave her alone. Jamie was just too young and
his mind was filled with visions of stables full of lovely horses,
not visions of old widows. For at that time, that is how Jamie saw
Mrs. Chilcott, even though she had only been five and twenty years
old.
    The arrangement allowed her to remain a
single woman. In England it was proper for a widow to be in
mourning for a full year, but in the colony, for mostly practical
reasons, men and women remarried within months, even weeks in some
instances after burying their spouses. Abigail had her share of
invitations and advances from the numerous single men in the
colony, all of them unwanted, so she was more than grateful for the
brothers’ protection. They escorted her to church every Sunday and
she even accompanied them to the muster once a month, and every
week or so Robert or Jamie would accompany her on a visit to her
special friend across the river.
    Days had turned into weeks, weeks into months
and now two years had passed.
    Robert was finally entering the social scene
again. Jamie too, but Abigail, more than ever now, wanted to shut
herself away and mourn her friend. She had no idea what she would
do now; Robin was almost weaned, she and Robert had never