by Delia Parr
When he shrugged his shoulders, she continued. “Harry has his mother’s smile, doesn’t he? And Eleanor. She might have your smile, but she has her mother’s infallible good humor and grace. I know Harry can’t come home during the school term, but Eleanor’s only living in Clarion now. Have her come home for a visit. Eva Clark certainly wouldn’t object to having a guest to care for.”
Upon hearing his housekeeper’s name, he smiled. “She says the same thing at least twice a week: ‘Invite Eleanor home for a spell.’ And I always give her the same reply: ‘I’ll think it over.’”
Briefly, he turned his gaze from the roadway, captured Martha’s, and held it. “Truth be told, Martha, Eleanor is teeming again. After losing the first two, she’s frightened the same thing will happen again. The doctor confined her to bed for this one. She doesn’t want anyone to know about this,” he added.
“You mean Anne.”
He nodded. “My sister, dear heart that she is, is apt to leave the capital, head straight to Clarion, and park herself in Eleanor’s bedchamber for the next five or six months.”
In spite of herself, Martha groaned. Anne Sweet, ten years older than Thomas, had a heart as pure as the driven snow, but she had a reputation as an incurable chitchat. She could talk nonstop for hours, seemingly without stopping to draw a breath. Well-intentioned, she never stopped long enough to think she might be saying something that could be painful to the very person she was attempting to cheer.
“In her last letter, Eleanor made me promise not to tell anyone, especially Anne. Except for you, of course.”
“I’ll keep this in strictest confidence.”
He smiled. “I trusted you would. Actually . . . when you’re rested from your last trip, I was wondering . . . that is . . . Eleanor asked me if you could go to Clarion and talk to her. Reassure her this time she might carry her babe.”
“I’ll leave once I’m certain Adelaide is mending properly,” she assured him, although traveling such a distance so soon was about as appealing as the dismal weather that surrounded her. Going to Clarion, however, would allow her to replenish her dwindling supply of simples, which she usually purchased from Doc Beyer, at the large apothecary there. She would also have the opportunity to pursue a new remedy for Samuel, one that might fully restore his vision.
Relief flooded Thomas’s features, and he leaned back against the seat.
She withdrew her hand, finding herself in an awkward, thoroughly embarrassed state. The interest she had perceived Thomas felt for her was not a personal one. He was concerned about his daughter and needed Martha’s skills as a healer, a reality she found only deepened her sense of shame at believing he might have wanted more.
While he toyed with the reins to guide the horses around a rather large hole in the road, she quickly dismissed any notion that her foolish perceptions about him earlier had stemmed from her own interest in him. She had loved him once with all her heart, but wisely chose another when she married John Cade.
“Naturally, I’d take care of all your expenses. Micah is still young and struggling with his law practice,” he explained.
She expected Thomas might. Although Eleanor had married equal to her station, Martha also knew a husband with a good family name, excellent education, and a solid future in his father’s law firm did not make the early years free from financial worry. “I’ll keep a record and give it to you when I return.”
He moistened his lips. “I can give you funds before you leave and put my buggy at your disposal, as well.”
She shook her head. “That might prove awkward to explain. For both of us,” she advised, fully aware of the double entendre of her words.
“What will you tell James and Lydia?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I usually just leave a note for them if I have to leave in the middle of the night. I’ll do that and simply write that I’ve gone to Clarion to purchase some of the remedies I used to buy from Doc Beyer. In the meantime, you can write to Eleanor and tell her to expect me.” She chuckled. “With the mail delivery as slow as it is, I’ll probably get there ahead of the letter, but try anyway.”
“First thing in the morning,” he promised. He sat up straighter, then turned toward her. “Now that I’ve got that out of the way, why don’t you tell me what happened after you left New York to see Oliver in Boston?”
By the time they reached the Finch homestead, Martha had shared most of the details of her brief visit with her son, Oliver, who practiced law in Boston. Daniel opened the door before the buggy had rolled to a complete stop. Relief flooded his features. “Thank you for coming,” he called.
Martha disembarked and followed him into the cabin while Thomas secured the horse. Any curiosity she had about the difference between the man she had loved twenty-five years ago and the man Thomas had become took a back seat to duty the moment she entered the bedchamber.
Adelaide lay abed, her face pale as she slept. Aunt Hilda rose and greeted Martha with a relieved look before shutting the door to keep the menfolk out. “I’m mighty glad you came so quickly. I wasn’t sure Daniel would find you at home.”
Martha removed her cape and tossed it onto the chair at the side of the bed where Aunt Hilda had been sitting. “I was at the market, actually, but I’ll save that tale for later,” she murmured while peeking into the cradle at the foot of the bed. Glory was fast asleep, too, with her cheeks still plump and rosy. Satisfied all was well with the babe, she approached Adelaide and laid a hand on her brow.
“No fever. What’s wrong that’s got you so worried?”
“She’s bleeding heavily. Too heavily, I think. I didn’t want to alarm Daniel or Adelaide, for that matter, but I . . . well, I’ll feel better if you took a look.” She led Martha to the table in the corner of the room where she had stored the cloths Adelaide had been using.
Martha counted them and inspected all four. “The blood is bright and clear, and I don’t see any sign of infection. There certainly appears to be more than normal, though.”
“And those are just from this morning. I already washed yesterday’s.”
Concerned, but not yet alarmed, Martha cocked her head. “How many did she use all told since the birth?”
“Seven or eight, not counting what’s on the table, but they weren’t anywhere as saturated as those. Poor darlin’. She’s getting paler by the hour and getting weaker.”
“Well, let’s see if we can’t get this mama feeling better. It was a difficult birth, so I’m not too concerned. I have some sawbrier root in my bag. We’ll let her rest while we brew some tea. I’ll stay to make sure this is all she needs and show you how to make more. It won’t hurt to let her use the tea for a few more days.”
Aunt Hilda let out a sigh. “I knew you’d have something to help.”
Martha gave her a reassuring hug. “We need to get the water good and hot,” she suggested, but kept her own counsel about what might need to happen if the herbal tea did not stem the bleeding. She usually reserved the sawbrier root to help dispel the afterbirth, but she had used it once before to stem a heavy flow.
At the moment, she was also worried about what Aunt Hilda would say when she found Thomas Dillon waiting for them with Daniel.
17
When Martha opened the bedchamber door, Daniel was standing there with his eyes glazed. He looked like he had been staring at the door, willing it to open.
He took one look at her and his eyes simmered with worry and hope. “Is Adelaide going to—”
“Sh-h-h,” she whispered, noting that Thomas stood by the hearth warming his hands. “She’ll be fine in no time.”
Daniel backed up as she inched forward until Aunt Hilda closed the door behind them. “Why don’t you add some wood to the cookstove? We need to heat some water for tea as quickly as we can.”
His gaze darted back and forth from the bedchamber door to the kitchen and back again. “Wood for the stove,” he murmured. “Anything else? There must be something else I can do. I
can’t just stand idly by—”
“Maybe you should sit with Adelaide and call us if she wakes up,” Aunt Hilda suggested as she stepped around them. Her eyes widened when she saw Thomas, who acknowledged her with a broad smile. “I see Thomas is here. He’ll take care of loading the wood, won’t you, Thomas?”
Her voice reflected no surprise or wonder, as if finding Thomas there was not unusual.
“Certainly.” He looked around and walked directly to the wood stacked in the front corner of the cabin.
“Go on, Daniel,” Martha urged. “Be sure to let us know the moment she wakes up.”
Without further prompting, Daniel slipped past both women and into the room, and Martha averted her gaze from Aunt Hilda’s as she went directly to the table and opened her bag.
Aunt Hilda busied herself by pumping water into a large kettle. “What brings you all the way out here, Thomas?”
He stopped in his tracks, adjusted the logs in his arms, and nodded toward Martha. “Just trying to protect Martha from herself. It’s been quite a downpour, so when Daniel showed up at the market looking for her, I insisted we use my buggy. We can’t have her taking sick now that she’s finally home, can we?”
The older woman chuckled. “Martha’s got the constitution of a plow horse. It’s going to take more than a little rain to put her in a sickbed.”
Martha cringed. A plow horse? She might be middle-aged, but she was still a woman! The image of a plow horse was not exactly the one she might have picked for herself. She much preferred the image of a sturdy chestnut tree, with firm roots and graceful limbs, that came to mind, along with a self-conscious awareness she was being vain. “Thank you for the compliment. I think,” she grumbled.
“I meant it as one,” Aunt Hilda insisted as she set the kettle on the cookstove. “Did you say you were at the market? Today?” she asked as Thomas finished loading wood into the cookstove and closed the door.
While Thomas explained all about the prank she had missed seeing while tending to Adelaide, his visit to the academy, and the public confessions and punishment that continued even as they spoke, Martha retrieved the sawbrier root and proceeded to snap it into smaller pieces.
“There are still places in the fence to be mended,” he commented as he stood up and brushed his hands against his trousers, “but I think the boys handled themselves very well. Reverend Hampton really won most people over. He’s quite a preacher, for a man who hasn’t taken to the pulpit for most of his ministry.”
Aunt Hilda cocked her head. “What kind of minister doesn’t use the pulpit?”
“He worked with inmates at several prisons. Lemon Hill in New York was his last one, I believe,” Martha interjected, annoyed by the thin layer of skepticism that laced Thomas’s opinion of the minister. The moment she blurted out her words, she realized what she had done. When she looked directly at Aunt Hilda and Thomas, a blush warmed her cheeks. She really had no intention of telling anyone about her visit to the academy last night, but she had no choice now. Not with both of them looking at her with quizzical expressions on their faces.
Aunt Hilda broke the awkward silence first. “He worked as a chaplain in a prison? How’d you learn about that? The man’s been rather mum about his former life, at least on his few visits to town when folks had a chance to talk with him.”
Thomas narrowed his gaze and spoke up before Martha had a chance to say a word. “You went out there. To the academy, didn’t you? I thought I detected an unusual sense of familiarity when you were talking with his wife.”
She nodded, but once again, before she could fashion an accounting of her visit that would not betray any confidences, especially where Will was concerned, Thomas’s face lit up. He paused as if he were mentally replaying the morning’s event in his mind. “There were seven boys at the market, not six. The missing boy! You found him and took him home.”
Drat. The man really could read her mind! “Well . . . I . . . yes, as a matter of fact, I did find the boy. To be more precise, Leech did, when the boy decided to hide in the stable loft. The other boys had left him behind after he fell and hurt his knee. I managed to patch him up, but I didn’t take him home. I followed him. More or less. He’s only eight or so, but he wears the armor of a knight who’s seen a lifetime of misery that’s been squashed into a few years. If the other boys are like him, Reverend Hampton has a plate that’s overflowing. He needs all of us to help,” she suggested.
A seasoned realist, Thomas approached the fire in the hearth and leaned his shoulder against the mantel.
“Notwithstanding yesterday’s prank and today’s events at the market, the academy makes people . . . They’re uncomfortable, even uneasy. Most of them, except for Dr. McMillan, would have accepted that prank as uncommonly clever, had a hearty laugh, and dismissed it. Unfortunately, since Reverend Hampton arrived with his charges in tow, people have been quick to set blame on those boys’ shoulders for ’most anything that goes wrong. Just last week, George Rottham up on Candle Creek summoned the sheriff because his hens stopped laying eggs.”
Aunt Hilda snorted. “The sheriff can’t do much about that.”
“No,” he countered, “but it turned out George finally realized the hens were fine. He caught sight of someone, a boy, hightailing it off the property with the eggs. He only saw the boy from behind, but he laid the blame on one of Reverend Hampton’s charges.”
He raised his hand to silence Martha when she started to protest. “Before that, Amos Wilkes found two sacks of grain missing from his barn. One day, Simeon Brooks’s sow had eight piglets ready to be weaned; the next day, she had four.”
Martha sighed. “And they all blame the academy boys.”
“Exactly. No one has any proof, of course, but word is starting to spread back to town, and suspicions can take on a life of their own.”
Martha lowered her gaze and toyed with several pieces of the root.
She wanted to argue that neither Reverend Hampton nor his wife would condone pilfering eggs or grain or even piglets. The boys themselves had learned to steal to survive when they lived on the streets, but their basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing were being met now, albeit with conditions.
Pulling a prank on Dr. McMillan to even a slight fit these boys’ natures. Stealing unnecessarily did not, but Martha knew better than to proffer any argument against what Thomas said without proof of her own. People would not stop to think the issue through. They would react instinctively, and the academy boys would become scapegoats because the root of the question was more painful: Who, in their own community, had become a thief?
She shuddered and refused to even contemplate the answer for fear of unjustly putting someone’s name on the list—a list she might be able to compile better than anyone else in the community. No one, not the mayor or the sheriff or Wesley Sweet at the general store, knew the faults or needs of the people in Trinity better than Martha. As a midwife and healer, she had visited or lived in their homes when they were the most vulnerable, unable to conceal the depths of their characters, for good or for bad, or the state of their worldly existence, whether bountiful or desperate.
She had earned their trust and goodwill, if not their rewards, by keeping her own counsel about all she saw and heard and refraining from gossip, even when she might have used the knowledge she had about people for their benefit. It was no easy task to be always on guard or to stay neutral, but with Grandmother Poore’s example as her guidepost, she knew it was the only path she could follow—if she wanted to use her skills to serve her friends and neighbors.
A troubling notion that Thomas might ask her to help narrow the search for the real culprit or culprits made her hands tremble, and she tried to focus only on the work she needed to do now. She dropped a small piece of root into a mug and carried it with her to the kettle on the stove.
Thomas took her silence as an opportunity to continue. “People live and work and raise their families here in Trinity because they choose to. They’re go
od, honest folks. Most of them, anyway. They don’t like change, and they surely don’t want the sins of the city staining their community. Frankly speaking, bringing those boys here, however well-intentioned, invites a kind of self-righteousness and even snobbery. Now, it’s all well and good for Reverend Hampton to speak in platitudes and to tweak people’s consciences, but the truth of the matter is this: If we don’t find out who’s responsible for the thefts, and they continue, I don’t think there’s much of a future here for the academy.”
Aunt Hilda let out a long sigh. “That would be sinful and downright wrong, but you shouldn’t be too quick to think the worst of folks, Thomas. Show a little faith. We may not live in Paradise yet, but we’ve got ourselves a good place here in Trinity, with good people who have good values based on faith and trust in God as well as one another. From what you’ve told me, most of the townspeople at the market today seemed to accept the boys’ confessions and apologies.”
Thomas pulled away from the mantel and flexed his shoulders. “For the most part, they did,” he agreed, although he appeared to be less convinced than Martha.
“That’s precisely my point,” the older woman countered. “When it comes to being fair, folks just need a good opportunity, and it sounds like you and Reverend Hampton gave them that opportunity today.”
Thomas shook his head. “That was all his idea. I only spread the word so folks might come.”
“Which they did. You did well today, Thomas.”
He nodded and looked directly toward Martha. “Actually, there’s something the others asked me to talk to you about. In strictest confidence, of course.”
She stiffened, and the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach warned her she might have been right to suspect Thomas would ask her to help identify possible suspects. Disappointment in Thomas, as well as the others, laced her spirit. Resolve to be true to her calling as a woman of trust stiffened her spine.