Summary: A follow-up to The Crucible.  An unexpected visitor helps Adam Cartwright heal his broken heart before breaking it again.  A story for Valentine’s Day.

Word count: 3296

Rated: G

It surprised him, the depth of his emotions.  After all, wasn’t he known as a man without emotions – cool, calculated?

Cold.

The man in black chuckled under his breath and ran a hand across his face.  It was two in the morning. He had just ridden hell-bent for leather through driving rain to Virginia City.  The look Sport gave him as he dismounted said it all.  Those keen black eyes reflected his own madness and asked in no uncertain terms, ‘What the Hell do you think you’re doing?’

What the Hell did he think he was doing?

It had started out innocently enough – if such a word as ‘innocent’ could be applied to the genesis of such a situation.  He’d known darkness in his life; much of it had been experienced firsthand on the journey to the West.  He’d witnessed actions and participated in events that challenged the most seasoned adult to make sense of them.  Loss, grief, death, anger, terror – betrayal.  All of these and more were a part of the small community of wagons that journeyed together, seeking the Promised Land.  He’d grown from a boy to a man in a few short years, avoiding – or perhaps being denied – the pangs of adolescence his younger brothers were still going through.  God, Joe was only twenty!  Just a babe, really, in the greater scheme of things.

Adam drew a deep breath and straightened up.  He looked at the older man he shared the small cramped room with. That breath drew in all of the scents and smells associated with him.  The first was soap, and then fairly strong cologne.  Second came the underlying smells; ones he associated more with the room than the man.  Some were faint; others pungent.  Comingled, the result was a heady brew of bittersweet blossoms, herbs, and ether.

Paul Martin glanced over his shoulder.  The older man’s face was grave.  He didn’t shake his head, but he sighed before going back to his work.

That was another thing he associated with the doctor.

Optimism amidst despair.

“This will take a bit,” Paul said.  “No offense, Adam, but I will be able to assess the situation better without your doubt breathing down my neck.  Perhaps you should take a walk?”

He knew a dismissal when he heard one.  “Sure.  I can use some air.”

“Give me twenty minutes or so.”

He nodded and turned toward the door.

“Oh, and Adam?”

The man in black turned on his heel.  “Yes?”

“God works in mysterious ways.”

Adam stepped off of the building’s stoop, shoved his hands in his pockets to ward off the chill, and began to walk the icy pavement of Virginia City’s main street. It was three in the morning.  The poker games had ended. Those who drank too much the night before were sleeping it off.  Anyone with illicit intentions was long gone in expectation of sunrise.  The more upstanding citizens of the city were still abed. The laborers – honest hardworking men like Hop Sing’s father – wouldn’t be for long.  They were, perhaps, wiping their eyes and shoving their feet into their slippers in preparation for the start of another day, but it would be hours before they raised their shutters and hung out their shingles.

He was alone.

Other than his thoughts.

Time was an ephemeral thing.  ‘Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.’  That was Henry David Thoreau.  Two months.  It had been almost two months.  Less than sixty days since….

Everything had changed.

Adam sucked in a breath like a drowning man as the memory of what he had been through struck him with the power of a hydraulic mudflow, nearly driving him to his knees. That face – like a grotesque from a medieval cathedral, the palpable insanity; the vitriolic hatred of him and everything he was.  Yes, he had been abused physically, but those scars had begun to heal the moment his family found him.  He shook his head.  Well, at least the moment he recognized that his family had found him.  At first, he was sure the three familiar forms were yet another delusion; a enticing mirage brought on by lack of both food and water and his own desperate need.  It wasn’t until he felt his father’s arms around him, that he knew they were real.

That he was able to acknowledge it was all real.

Blackness followed.  At first it was blessed.  On the way back to the ranch he fell into what Paul Martin called a coma vigil.  The coma was his, but the vigil belonged to his family.  For one solid week he lay as one dead.  Upon waking the blackness deepened into a darkness from which he feared he would never emerge.  It mattered little that the sun rose each day to light the waking world beyond the room he occupied.  He did not see it.  All he could see what that face.

That face and his shame,

The family came to visit his sickroom regularly.  Pa would sit beside the bed and read.  Every now and then he would look up and ask a question – ‘Son, how are you feeling?  Is there anything I can do?’  He knew the older man was hurting, in some ways as deeply as he was, but he had no answers to ease his father’s pain.

Or his own.

Next it was Hoss’ turn.  Hoss asked him nothing.  The big man would sit by the bed or stand by the window and tell him all about his day and the world outside the window.  Then he would come to the bed, pat his hand, and leave.

It was Joe that surprised him; gregarious, dynamic, irrepressible Joe.  He supposed, in the end, he shouldn’t have been surprised.  It was Joseph Francis Cartwright who, among them all, had experienced some of the deepest wounds.  Joe would enter his room and sit by the bed.  He didn’t say anything.  He was just…there

That was the deepest comfort of all.

Adam halted outside the mercantile.  He chuckled again as he took a seat on the bench that butted up against its facade.

Well, perhaps not the deepest.

That would be Serenity.

The man in black blinked as unanticipated tears flooded his eyes.  The way he met her was, to put it mildly, unexpected.  She had shown up in his room one day without invitation.  It had been a gloomy spring – suited to his mood.  To say that his recovery from the ordeal in the desert was slow bordered on the absurd.  Languid, plodding…crawling, those were the words that fit.  When someone cajoled him to move from his bed, he did so – grudgingly – taking occupancy of a wooden chair by the window where he sat cocooned in blankets, brooding over his fate.  On that particular day Hop Sing entered early bearing a tray with food that he knew would remain untouched, to announce cheerfully that summer had arrived. The Asian man walked past him to the window, pulled the curtains back, and raised the sash.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” he said with a bow.

Then, he was gone.

‘Vexed’ pretty much summed up his reaction.

He could have gotten up and closed the window.  He thought about it, but lacked…well…everything.  What little vigor he’d regained in the month or so since he had dropped the filthy travois that bore Peter Kane’s lifeless form was reserved for the rage that consumed him.  So, when she appeared, he ignored her.

That was when, well, the miracle began.

He’d never forget the first time he saw the little bird perched on the window stool; her petite brown head turning this way and that as though she marveled at what she was seeing.  He’d grunted and made a feeble attempt to shoo her away.  She misinterpreted the action – perhaps, being female, deliberately so – and drew closer, moving from the back edge of the stool to the portion of it closest to him.  Her eyes were dark as if dipped in death’s shadow and wise as Minerva’s.  A band of pale feathers, the same color as her tawny throat, highlighted them.  As was common with her species, they progressed from light brown to yellow and back again before ending in a speckled burst on her chest.  Unbidden, he’d mentally thumbed through the pages of the book on ornithology he’d retained from college and classed her as ‘eremophila’ or a horned lark.

“Shoo,” he’d said as he wiggled his fingers.

A cheerful chirp was his reply.

“Go on.  Go away.”  His voice was rusty; unused.  It groaned like wagon wheels in need of grease.  “Certainly you have something better to do than perch on my window and annoy me.”

Her head cocked first one away and then the other.  Those eyes – so brown, so profound – fastened on him and then she began to do the one thing he thought unforgivable.

The lark began to sing a jaunty tune.

He couldn’t say to this day why that sound ignited in him a rage so immense that it could not be contained within his cocoon of blankets or that hard wood chair.  He burst from both like that mudflow, startling the lark so it flew out the window, which was a good thing because he caught the sash and brought it down so hard behind her that two of the panes of glass cracked.

The next day the window was open again.  When he protested, Hop Sing quietly remarked ‘dripping water can penetrate the hardest stone’ as he exited the room.  It wasn’t five minutes later the lark appeared to take up her perch – after turning her head to regard the crack in the glass.

He could swear he heard her sigh.

This time he was in bed.  Yesterday’s episode had taken from him everything that remained.  He’d stood at that window a long time considering the broken glass.  One push and it would shatter.  One little push would give him everything he needed.  After all, who could question a man accidentally slicing his wrist while he sought to remove the shards from the frame?  The inherent weakness in that thought plunged him into a deep depression.  How had he allowed Peter Kane to take from him the one thing he was sure he would not – could not give?  Who had he been before?  Who was he now?  How could he go on when he didn’t know?  Despairing, despondent, disconsolate, he had fallen to the floor and lain there sobbing until Hop Sing came in with his supper tray and helped him into bed as if he were still a little boy.

“Go away,” he tried again.

Ever a female, the little lark did the exact opposite, pushing off the stool and entering the room.  A short flight brought her to the bed where she alighted delicately on top of the coverlet.  Her small head turned this way and that as she walked up to him and then, she began to sing. The song was a fast, high-pitched sequence of sharp, tinkling notes.  He knew from his studies that larks songs usually lasted no more than a few seconds.  She sang for a full minute and, as she sang, something happened – a spark was lit deep within his soul which only the night before had seemed to be forever extinguished, and an unexpected thing rose up within him that he could only name ‘hope’.

He just as quickly beat it down.

The angry man struck out with his hand, driving her back.  When she did not go, he took hold of his covers and created his own mudflow, the force of which caused the lark to take flight.  She hesitated at the open window for a moment, as if with regret, before winging off into the rising morn.

Again, he asked Hop Sing to close the window and, again, the Asian man refused citing his need for ‘fresh air which is the source of good health’.  After a few days of the ritual being repeated, Adam began to wonder if the lark and their housekeeper were involved in some sort of unspoken conspiracy.

Eventually, between the two of them, they wore him down.  He stopped shooing the bird away and, in time, began to anticipate her arrival.  The little lark always came at dawn – at the break of day – to serenade him.  He’d lay completely still, listening to her song, letting the bright, happy tone of it flow over him.  It was clear, clean, and in time began to wash away the viscous, cloying mud of Kane’s unnatural hatred that had all but buried him.

One day she was late in her arrival.  The fact disturbed him more than he cared to admit.  Her absence roused him from his bed and drove him to the window so he could look out.  Summer had indeed arrived.  The yard was bustling and bursting with men going about their ordinary business, including his brothers who were standing near the stable, talking.  Still, that was not what took his attention – or his breath away.  Outside was…beautiful.  A brilliant light washed over everything; the rosy tint of dawn turning the mundane magical.  There was a scent on the breeze beyond that of horse-flesh and field.  He felt it strike him, ruffle his hair – felt it stir something new in him.  He couldn’t place it for the longest time; he only knew it was the one thing that had been denied him for so long.

He cried again that day, even as his little friend appeared to serenade him.  He cried as a river of relief cleansed him, taking him away from the dry desert and the darkness and the grief and the unrelenting shame – and Peter Kane.  It was on the day he found it, that he found her name.

Serenity.

Adam stood outside the doctor’s office, gazing in the window.  He’d walked not for twenty minutes, but for an hour, knowing even as his footsteps brought him back what he would find upon his return. Two hours earlier he’d arrived at this place; cage in hand and his heart in his throat.  He’d banged on the door of the surgery with such frantic energy he feared it might break.

The doctor was seated at his desk.  Beside him, with a linen cloth draped over it, was the cage he had taken from among Hop Sing’s things to carry Serenity into town.  It had been quite some time since he’d seen her.  As his recovery progressed, her visits became less frequent, so he had not been too worried at first.  The family chided him, of course – Hop Sing chief among them – for leaving his window open as autumn turned to winter but he did, anxious for her return.  Finally, when she did appear, he knew instantly that something was wrong.  Her feathers had lost their luster as had her wise, brown eyes, which were dull and narrowed with pain. The first thing he did was take her to Hop Sing.  He carried the precious cargo in his hands, feeling her small heart hammer out a staccato beat against his flesh all the way to the kitchen.  In the time he had been with them, Hop Sing had kept canaries.  Their bright song often floated through the ranch house when he was a boy.  The Asian man’s prognosis was not good.  Hop Sing explained that most birds, even in captivity, lived only a few years.  His face must have given away his feelings.  In a rare moment, this man who had helped to raise him, reached out and placed a hand on his chest.

“It is good Mistah Adam can feel again.”

To this day he had no idea what possessed him to take Serenity to Paul Martin – and especially at two in the morning!  He knew the doctor would think he was mad.  To his amazement, after explaining just who his patient would be, the older man had taken the cage with its little inhabitant into the surgery to examine her.

“She’s still with us,” the doctor remarked upon Adam’s entry.  He spoke gently, as if to the father of a gravely ill child.  “But not for long.”

“What happened?’

“She’s worn out.  If I didn’t know better, I would say she’s been on a long journey and, now that the journey is at an end, she’s chosen to move on.”  He paused.  “Have you, Adam?”

“Have I what?’

Paul pinned him with eyes nearly as wise as Serenity’s.

“Chosen to move on?”

He had no words.  The doctor had seen his tears before, so he did nothing to hide them.  He nodded, picked up the cage, and headed out the door.

Adam rode for a few hours with the draped cage balanced on his saddle.  There was a place where he was going.  Joe and Hoss had their ‘happy’ place.  He had one where he retreated that, due to his own melancholy nature, he called his place of ‘repose’.  He’d found it shortly after Marie passed.  During the long months when his father was away, it was here he came to escape from everything – from the sympathetic faces of neighbors who dropped by, from disgruntled ranch hands who resented a teenager telling them what to do, and from an inconsolable baby brother whose tears he did not have the power to stop.  It was about a third of the way out from the ranch.  The foreman knew the location – just in case – but he also knew there had better be a very good reason to disturb him.  It was a green hill, and on that green hill was a brace of Aspens.  As he dismounted he noted their whispery branches still held a hint of the color of their golden leaves.  Between them was a kind of natural seat comprised of two boulders that leaned one on the other. He sat down and took a deep breath before removing the linen cover from the cage.

Serenity was still breathing.  He could see her little chest rising and falling, ruffling the speckled feathers that covered it.  He placed the cage on the ground, opened it, and lifted her petite body from its confines.  As she gathered warmth in his hands, the little lark opened her eyes and looked at him.

“Yeah, I know,” he said as he stroked her breast, “you can’t sing for me today.  You’re tired and spent and I know why.”  A single tear trailed down his cheek.  “You gave everything you had for me.”

Serenity had literally sung her heart out.

“Thank you,” he breathed.  “Thank you for everything; for your friendship, for your refusal to give up on me…for your song.  It’s mine now.”

And then he sang to her, a song both cheerful and tearful.  It had no words, just notes, and as they fell upon her quiescent form Serenity passed.

Breaking his.

Later that night, Adam sat by his window staring out at the risen moon.  The book on ornithology lay open on his lap.  He’d finally remembered to retrieve it from the library so he could read the page about the horned lark, particularly the female of the species.  What he found there humbled him.  It was the male of the species that was known for its song.  The female only sang under certain circumstances, namely during breeding season and when attempting to attract a mate.  The singing would begin at dawn and sometimes continue long into the night, driven not by need but by love.

Just like Serenity’s song.