by Delia Parr
“Guess you know what you’re doin’ then,” he said and got up to leave. “I’ll get Fancy to show me the way to the confectionery and set Miss Fern and Miss Ivy straight.”
She bolted out of her seat and held on to his arm to keep him right where he was standing. “You know Fern and Ivy? You talked to them?” she asked, surprised the recluse had talked to anyone in town other than her.
He snorted. “I ain’t been blind forever,” he argued. “Just ’cause I don’t like livin’ close to folks don’t mean I don’t know most of them in Trinity, except for the ones crowdin’ in lately. I weren’t too keen on lettin’ those two women inside when they came callin’ a few days ago askin’ me to convince you to talk to Dillon, but I smelled that bag of sweets they had with ’em and decided it was worth listenin’ to what they had to say.”
Martha was getting annoyed. “Fern and Ivy mean well, but they had no right to involve you in something so . . . so private and personal,” she argued, her heart pounding now.
“Don’t get your skirts all twisted up. Like I said, I’ll set ’em straight. Shudda known they had everythin’ backwards. Women usually do, ’cept for you, of course. Never knew you to wobble about anythin’, ’specially somethin’ you wanted or needed to do. Shudda remembered that. Now, you got that jug of honey wine you promised me?”
“Yes, I do,” she said and made sure the cork was tight before she handed it to him. “You’re a good friend, Samuel. I’m sorry if I didn’t act that way with you just now.”
He shrugged. “You got a whole army of friends ready and waitin’ to help you any time. Family, too. All you gotta do is ask.” He took a few steps and turned around to face her again. “I’m not much of a church-goin’ man. Never have been. Don’t claim to know much Scripture, either, but I know enough ’bout God to believe in Him. And I sure don’t think He filled two people’s hearts with love for each other if He didn’t mean for ’em to hold on to it.”
Martha was too wound up to take a nap after Samuel delivered his faith lecture and left her standing at the back door.
She had a good mind to march back to town, sit Fern and Ivy down, and set them straight herself. Instead, she left that for Samuel to do and paced around the cottage, walking from one room to the next and back again. Over and over again. Until her frustration with those two meddling sisters was under control.
Her visit with Samuel, however, still haunted her, and she knew that until she made some sort of peace with all that he had said, she would pace a hole in the floorboards in every room of that cottage. And while she was at it, she may as well try to make peace with what Victoria had said to her, too. Since that might take a while, she walked around the outside of the cottage for fear that if she walked any farther away and meandered through the woods, she would only end up getting lost.
“I’m living out here in the cottage because I want to be here. I do,” she insisted. When her conscience argued back, she ignored it and spied several curved pinecones lying on the ground, which would make a remedy for congestion. Out of habit, she bent down and selected just one, since the others were damaged, and carried it along with her as she resumed her way.
Unfortunately, her conscience was wholly dissatisfied with her answer. “All right, fine,” she admitted. “I don’t really want to be alone or to live here alone, but that’s the way it is, and I’ll just have to learn to accept it,” she grumbled.
In frustration, she balled her hands into fists, but the edges of the pinecone pricked her flesh, and she tossed it away, “Drat it, Thomas,” she cried, leveling deeper disappointment at the real source of her misery as she rounded the side of the cottage. “You made a mess of everything with your demands, Thomas. You stubborn, stubborn man!”
With her chest heaving and tears blinding her eyes, she stopped in her tracks. It was pointless and futile to point blame at everyone else when she deserved blame for the way things ended between them, just as much as he did. Was she the only one who had thought their love and their future together was a gift from God, or had he felt that way, too? Or had they both been wrong, misled by broken dreams when God had other plans for them?
She brushed away her tears and walked away from the cottage and into the woods. In her heart, she knew there was only one way to end the confusion and the torment that was tearing at her soul.
She kept walking until she finally found a grassy clearing where the tree canopy that surrounded her could not keep the sun from shining down upon her. She dropped to her knees and began to pray that God’s grace and His peace would be able to find her, too.
She humbled herself before Him and truly opened her heart to Him for the first time in many, many weeks. “Heavenly Father, forgive me for turning away from You and for losing my faith in You. I need You now more than ever before because I don’t know what to think or what to do anymore. I’m so confused and . . . and my heart hurts. It really hurts, and I don’t know how to make the hurt go away without You. I know that Victoria and Samuel are right. The ache in my heart doesn’t come from You, because You are a gracious and loving God. You don’t break hearts or fill them with pain. You fill them with hope and with peace and with Your abiding love to comfort them until the pain we find so unbearable goes away.”
She paused and gave her prayer a chance to rise up to the heavens and rest at His throne before she continued. “If the love that Thomas and I have for each other is truly a gift from You—that You want us to share as husband and wife—please fill my heart with hope and give me the wisdom to know what I can do to have him set aside his fears and embrace Your gift, too. But if that’s not what You want for us, if You have other blessings waiting for us to embrace, please fill my heart with peace so I can wait until You reveal them to me, and help Thomas to do the same. Thy blessed will be done.”
She remained on her knees, praising Him, worshiping Him, and thanking Him for loving her and showering her with His grace while her soul rested in the comfort of His love.
Hours later, as the sun began to dip low, she felt her heart tremble as every bit of heartache slipped away and made room not for peace, but for hope—precious, empowering, loving, and blessed hope.
Overjoyed, she offered a litany of praise and gratitude, and she held tight to her faith and her hope, with God’s grace showing her the way to win Thomas back.
She hurried back through the woods to the path that led to town. She went to Dr. McMillan’s house first to talk to both of her children, then off to the confectionary before rushing off again to a few other homes. She had a stitch in her side by the time she reached her last stop, which was Samuel’s cabin, and she had to wait a moment to catch her breath before she knocked on the door.
When Fancy opened the door, she charged past him, ignored Will, who was sitting on his hammock practicing knots again, and went straight to Samuel. “I talked to my family first, and they’ve agreed to help me. You told me I had an army of friends who’d be willing to help me, too, if I asked them. I’ve already been to see the others. Now I’m asking you and Fancy, too. Will you help me convince Thomas to give me another chance?”
He grunted. “I told Fancy you’d be here before dark. Tell us what you want us to do.”
Will jumped off of his hammock. “You got somethin’ I can do to help?”
She grinned. “Only if you bring your spyglass.”
36
By seven o’clock the next morning, Martha’s volunteer army was in place, waiting impatiently for her to call them into action and follow the orders she had given to each of them.
As planned, some of her friends were stationed out of view of Thomas’s cabin on the shores of Candle Lake. Will was farthest off so he would have the best vantage point. He was high up in a tree with his spyglass, ready to give one of two prearranged signals. Below him, Fancy was at the base of the tree keeping an eye on Will and standing ready to bring him back with the others when his job was done.
Samuel, however, was waiting with Martha and the rest
of her friends from the confectionery household, including Cassie. They were hidden now behind a thick copse of evergreen bushes, and they filled their time waiting by eating a breakfast they had brought with them and keeping their voices low while they discussed what each of them thought might happen here today. Her family had taken up positions a bit farther away from the property itself, while friends would be arriving a little bit later.
Martha was wearing the fine gown she had worn the day Victoria had gotten married, a visual cue important to her plan. She munched on an apple fritter as she glanced around at her friends and smiled. She was not leaving until Thomas listened to every word she had to say. How long she would stay beyond that depended entirely on how stubborn he would be.
She polished off her fritter, licked the crumbs from her fingertips, and chose another before she walked over to inspect the array of goods piled together on the ground. A couple of rolling pins, a frying pan, a fire poker, and two brooms with dust pans could be dangerous weapons, especially when they were wielded by determined women. She had other uses in mind for them, but she counted on Thomas remembering just how dangerous any one of those household items could be. Ivy had mistakenly taken him for an intruder last winter and had smacked him in the face with a poker, and he still bore a tiny scar that cut through one of his eyebrows to remind him.
Chuckling, she looked a little farther in the woods, where they had left the wagon they had traveled here on. It was laden with baskets of food they had packed for the after-battle feast they would enjoy. Jane was positioned there so none of the animals who called the forest their home discovered the feast.
Martha now fetched one particular covered basket, and Bird started squawking and knocking against the sides. “It’s almost time,” she crooned and carried him deeper into the woods. She found a tiny clearing where the sun was able to break through and she still had sight of the wagon.
She took a deep breath and lifted him out of the basket. Bird hopped on her finger before flying off, higher and higher. When he landed on a high branch, he looked around as if realizing for the first time that he was in a different place with a different landscape he could explore.
Today, Martha’s heart was in a different place, too, and she walked over to the tree where he had perched and looked up at him. “You’ve been well enough to fly away for a while now, but you haven’t done that because I think somehow you knew I needed you, and I wasn’t ready to see you go,” she whispered. “But I’m ready now, Bird. I’m not afraid that you won’t survive on your own anymore, either. I have every hope that you will, because I know God will be watching over you, just as He’ll be watching over me and Thomas. Good-bye, my friend.”
Then she turned and walked away.
And she never looked back.
She did, however, catch a brief glimpse of him through a break in the canopy. He was flying overhead, directly toward a flock of birds. Blinking back a tear, she hoped they had come to welcome him home.
Soon after Martha returned to wait with the others for a signal from Will, Victoria arrived with her husband, as well as Oliver and his family. They had just joined the others when a series of chatters that closely resembled the sound of a pair of squirrels fighting over a nut sent Martha’s heart racing. “That’s Will’s signal that he sees Mr. Dillon walking around inside the cabin. We all need to be quiet now, but we don’t need to move into position just yet,” she whispered, hoping the other folks who were coming were on their way here.
Scarcely five minutes later, her heart skipped a beat when she saw the front door open. When Thomas walked out carrying a travel bag, her heart skipped two more. He was leaving, which thoroughly upended her plans. Desperate to salvage them, even though both Victoria and Oliver were already in position well beyond the property to keep those plans alive, she needed to get everyone in place so she could reach him before he drove off in his buggy.
“Hurry up, everyone. The moment he steps a foot inside that stable, where he won’t be able to see any movement at all out here, we have to get into position. You know where to go and what to do. And hurry. We need to be ready when he comes out.”
Her heart pounded harder and harder with every step she took as she walked toward the stable. Her legs were shaking so hard, she had to make a deliberate effort to keep from tripping over her own two feet.
But she soon reached the place she had chosen so that she would be the first thing he saw when he walked out of the stable. A sense of calm she had not expected washed over her.
When she heard his footsteps and the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves, she swallowed hard, lifted one last prayer to the heavens, and tilted up her chin . . . just enough to let him know she had found her way back to being stubborn again. She only hoped he could find his way to seeing that quality of hers as endearing again, too.
Thomas came into view and nearly stole her breath away, but he was not driving his buggy. Dressed in his finest frock coat, he was holding the reins to his horse, which walked behind him. He braced to a halt the instant he saw her standing there. With his eyes wide, he cocked his head and stared at her. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought we should talk, and since you never responded to my note and moved out of town, you didn’t leave me any other choice but to seek you out here, and . . . and I really don’t intend to leave until you agree to talk to me,” she said as gently but as firmly as she could. “And if you do, my children and their spouses are waiting along the roadway to intercept you.”
When he broke his gaze and looked beyond her, he had a twinkle in his eye she had not seen for a long while. He dropped the reins and took a step forward. “And if I refuse, I assume you’ve brought an assembly of your friends, including a blind man and a couple of children, who are armed with nothing more than a few brooms or rolling pins to convince me otherwise.”
She smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous. I have other plans for them today. And for us,” she said and boldly took a step closer to him.
He frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t have time for a long chat with you, which I suspect you had planned down to every word you wanted to say as well as every word you wanted to hear me say. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m dressed for a very important meeting. I was just leaving, and you’ve completely disrupted very important plans that I’ve delayed making for far too long.” He pointed to the travel bag tied to the horse’s saddle.
“Then I’d ask you to change your plans. What we need to talk about is more important than anything else you expect to do today,” she whispered, surprised when he took another step toward her. Drat. Did he have to look so strong and so handsome? And did her lips really have to tingle and beg for his kiss? Really, now? When she had to keep her mind focused on more important things?
That twinkle in his eye got brighter when he closed the distance between them until there was almost no room to put a hand between them. “If I told you where I was planning to go today and what I was hoping to do, you might think differently.”
With his breath fanning her cheeks and his gaze so intense, she could scarcely breathe. “There isn’t anything you could say that would convince me to think any differently at all,” she replied, too mesmerized by being this close to him again to step back, even if she tried.
He really was going to make this hard for her, wasn’t he?
He made it even harder when he took her hand and held it. “What if I told you that I was planning to ride back to Trinity and pound on your cottage door until you let me in and listened to every word I had to say?”
Every word, every thought, every plea she had carefully organized in her mind to use when she talked with Thomas today flew right out of her head, leaving only disbelief behind. “Y-you were?”
He nodded, and his expression softened. “I’ve been a stubborn, overconfident, unreasonable fool. I lost faith in you and I lost faith in myself, but far worse, I almost completely lost my faith in God. Even if I had to beg for your forgiveness until my voice was hoar
se, I would have kept on begging until I had no voice at all. Please tell me that you forgive me, and tell me I’m not too late, that there’s still reason for me to hope that you’ll forgive me and give me the honor of claiming you, one day, as my wife, even though I’ve acted so badly and don’t deserve you.”
Overwhelmed, she could scarcely contain the joy that washed over her heart. But she couldn’t resist asking, “Even if it takes months or even years for me to find another midwife for Trinity before we marry?”
“I’ll be right here, waiting for you. I might be down on my knees praying morning and night for the strength to wait, but that’s exactly where I’ve been for the past few nights, until last night, when I realized that I had made a terrible mistake.”
Moved by the sincerity of his words and the emotion churning in his eyes, she was stunned that God had touched his heart at almost the same time He had touched her own.
Unwilling to tease him any longer, the sound of wagon wheels caught his attention. He looked to the source and pointed beyond the others to a buggy that had just pulled up to join them. “Is that my sister? Y-you even asked Anne and her husband to be here?”
She did not bother to look and shrugged. “Once I told Anne that I was coming to see you today and why I was coming, she insisted on being here. Now that she’s finally arrived, I suspect Eleanor and Micah aren’t too far behind with little Jacob.”
She barely had the words out of her mouth before his eyes opened even wider. “I don’t see another buggy, but . . . but is that Reverend Welsh I see riding down the entrance path now? You actually convinced him to be part of this little plan of yours?” he asked and stared at her.
“Reverend Welsh doesn’t know anything more than what I told him,” she insisted.
He cocked a brow, but there was just a hint of a smile on his lips. “What did you tell him?”