by Lorin Grace
“I’m surprised you are out here at all. I thought you would still be resting.” Tim took a cup of water from Bessie.
Lucy laughed. “I did with Maryanna, but by the time Stella came along I got up and made supper that night. Well, I cut the bread I made the day before and set out some apple preserves. But still, I wasn’t in bed.”
“All the same, I do wish you would take it easy, especially in this heat.”
“I can live with that order. No more hard work today.”
“Really, Mama?” came a chorus of voices.
“Yes, off to the creek with you. James, watch Seth and Bessie, and keep Stella where you can see her. And everyone mind Louisa!” Shouting the last part was necessary as the children were already halfway across the nearest field.
“Where is Mr. Wilson?”
“Samuel and Lettie are down at John’s. I don’t know if it is possible to save the crop, but after last year’s drought, John is desperate. He is talking about slaughtering all but his best two milk cows if he doesn’t get a crop growing. Can’t run a dairy without fodder for the cows.”
“I had no idea things were that bad.” Tim finished the last of his water. “How about I take a look at those two little angels of yours and I’ll be on my way.”
The girls slept in a basket near the door in only their diapers. They reminded him of a drawing he had seen of a sea creature with eight arms. “I hate to wake them. They both look like they have grown, I think.”
“They always sleep like knotted yarn. But I believe they are both more than five pounds now when I weigh them against my flour.”
“I am not sure if babies experience as many problems with the heat as the elderly, but do watch them.”
Lucy smiled the smile of a mother who knew more than the doctor, which, in this case, Tim willingly admitted she did. “Don’t worry, Doc, I got them this far. I am not going to let a hot day defeat us.”
Tim took his leave. Unfortunately, the visit only made him think of Sarah, the only girl on the north side of the river who seemed to be avoiding him.
Half the women in Miss Webb’s boardinghouse had come to the office in the past two weeks complaining of some fictitious ailment, then again to bring food to thank him. Miss Page hadn’t overstated her cooking abilities.
Sarah, on the other hand, managed to be “out” all but twice during his daily visits to Amity. He was tempted to see just how long he could keep her hiding in the privy today. But in this heat, that would be cruel.
The sweltering heat in her bedroom nearly drove Sarah downstairs, but she lay on her bed and waited for Tim to leave. She had been coming downstairs after adding the latest note to her collection when he rode up. At least her bedroom smelled better than the privy.
Amity’s laughter drifted up the stairway. Sarah wiped the perspiration from her brow. Why was she hiding, anyway? Dr. Dawes was visiting in a professional capacity. Anyone who saw her in her last-summer’s dress could see that.
She wiped her damp handkerchief over her face again before heading down the stairs and to the porch.
“S-sarah. Doc-c.” Amity beamed. Next to her father, who came nightly to visit, they had become her favorite people. Mrs. Morton continued to be tolerated, though somewhat less since Emma’s passing, having been replaced by Dorcas.
Tim stood from the chair he occupied, studying Sarah long enough to have her questioning her choice to come down.
“Miss Marden, do you not own a dress of a material more suited to the weather?”
“Of course she doesn’t. At least she isn’t wearing the dress made of bombazine.” Dorcas fanned herself as if she were wearing the wool-and-silk hanging in Sarah’s room. “At least the crepe is somewhat lighter.”
“Could you not dye a lighter fabric, like the dress Amity is wearing, black?”
Sarah shook her head. “At best, it comes out a deep gray, or the die rubs off on everything and the wearer ends up with hands as dirty as a chimney sweep’s.”
“And I suppose wearing half mourning would not be appropriate. However, your sister was not in black when I saw her earlier today, so there must be some room for common sense.”
“I suspect Lucy was not expecting company. One of the advantages of living so far out is that one can dress practically unless coming into town. To dress the children in black all the time would be expensive as well. When Emma’s husband died, she declared anyone under sixteen need only wear mourning to church or school. She couldn’t stand having them sit around stiffly for months, afraid to ruin their clothing. Living here, I cannot step out of my house without observation, so I will wear my black dress.”
“That is the stupidest reason to overheat one’s self I’ve ever heard!” Tim picked up the half-full bucket of water sitting on the porch and dumped it over Sarah’s head.
Sarah sputtered as Amity and Dorcas burst into laughter. “Why did you do that?”
“Because you’ve dampened your face three times since you’ve been out here, compared to Miss Smith’s one. Your face is a color of red that comes from being too hot, not embarrassment, and being drenched will force you to go put on one of those hideous gray dresses you wear all the time.”
Sarah balled her fists and stood up straight. How she wished she had Lucy’s height, so her glare would have more power. But her hair fell in her face, and words failed her. She stormed into the house.
Tim caught up with her as she reached the stairs. He caught her elbow. “Sarah, I’m sorry.”
She climbed onto the first step and turned to face him. Rather than put distance between them as she supposed, it brought her closer to eye level. “How dare you pour water on my head where everyone can see? What must people think now?”
“I don’t care what they think as long as you don’t make yourself heat sick because you are wearing that black dress.”
She had never before noticed the little flecks of gold flashing in his eyes or how they danced. “And why do you care about that?” The words came out funny.
Tim suddenly leaned forward and brushed his lips across hers. Fire danced through her. She blinked, and he stepped closer, his fingers smoothing her wet hair off her cheek. The second kiss started just as soft, but the fire it kindled forced her to respond. Too soon, he broke the kiss, then rested his forehead against her wet one. “Now, go change. And if you come down in anything made of wool or silk, I will take you to the river and drop you in. So help me, Sarah Marden, I will.”
Sarah ran up the stairs before he could kiss her a third time. For a man who worried about her overheating, he had a funny way of showing it.
Sarah kept on her damp petticoat and corset as they were wonderfully cool, and pulled on a deep-gray muslin—the experiment gone bad from her mourning for Mark.
Mark.
Sarah pressed her hand to her mouth. She had just kissed another man and enjoyed it. A man Mark would thrash if he knew.
Holding the dress to her chest, she sat down on the bed and cried.
Miss Smith claimed Sarah had fallen asleep. The odd look she gave Tim caused him to wonder at the truthfulness of the statement. He began the walk back to his office, pondering his actions. He’d looked forward to kissing Sarah for twenty years. The moment had eclipsed his expectations. She’d returned it, but still, he’d managed to scare her away.
He didn’t notice Miss Brooks and Miss Page until he ran into them.
He apologized and walked on. A block later, he realized he’d left his doctor bag on the porch. He took the long way back, keeping an eye out for any of Miss Webb’s boarders.
Twenty-seven
A chaperone is not enough. She isn’t with you all the time.
Sarah touched her lips. How could anyone possibly know about Monday’s kiss? Dorcas might have deduced something, but the notes had started long before she’d arrived.
Sarah had stood at the bottom of the stairs a half dozen times. No one outside of the house could have seen the kiss. And if Amity had
seen it, she would have said something.
Someone was very good at guessing.
Sarah pretended to be sick for the next three days, telling Dorcas it was her woman’s complaint.
Tim sat next to his mother in the family pew and waited for the last bell to chime before the meeting started. Sarah sat with Samuel and the children. And Lucy was keeping the babies away for another week, though no illness circulated in the community.
Sarah was the only congregant who had been in bed with any type of illness this week. And the only single female who refused to see a doctor, it seemed.
Seth made a run for the door. Sarah hurried after the little boy, easily catching him before he exited the building.
Amazing recovery.
Perhaps Mother was right. He needed to enlarge his social circle.
Reverend Palmer started off with the announcements—two weddings, one death, one birth. He hadn’t heard about the death. Must have been one of Dr. Norris’s patients.
During the hymn, he leaned over to his mother. “I’ll come to your musical night. When is it?”
“Wednesday the third.”
As little Emma yawned, Sarah closed her eyes and breathed in the baby smell. This was her favorite part of being an aunt. She had discovered this over seventeen years ago with Maryanna. For years she had dreamed of holding her own baby. She could be content to live the life Dorcas did, being passed from family to family to care for children, as long as there was an infant at hand. But it would not be an easy life.
Dorcas had little money or anything else to call her own. Even servants received some recompense for their work. The woman she called friend had little love for children and hinted she would be needed back in Billerica by the end of the month. Sarah suspected her departure had more to do with not wanting to be present when Amity delivered. Dorcas had mentioned spending the rest of the month at Thomas Jr.’s home, although she had rarely stayed there.
Coaxing her to stay became a daily conversation. Sarah needed Dorcas as a buffer between her and Tim. There couldn’t be another kiss. Dr. Morton had the splints removed, but according to his wife, he continued to complain of pain and asked Tim to stay through the first of August. Thirty-one days, give or take. She could avoid him that long if Dorcas stayed.
The kiss had either been a terrible mistake or a gift. Either way, she wanted to repeat it. Mark’s kisses had been warm and comfortable, like reading next to a fire on a winter’s night. She touched her lips. Tim’s had been more like what a moth must feel like near a flame—the need to draw close regardless of the risk.
A risk she could never take. Not with Tim, not with John, not with any man. The price was more than she could ever pay.
The role of spinster aunt suited her. Little Emma fussed for Lucy, so Sarah reluctantly gave up her charge to go join in the Sunday-afternoon chaos in the parlor. Even surrounded by her nieces and nephews, her empty arms magnified the hole in her heart. She let out a deep sigh. Maryanna snuggled next to her new husband on the couch, reading a book to Stella. They had been married for three months now. There would be another baby next year.
Maybe a grand-nephew could soothe her soul better than twin nieces.
The Misses Garretts both played rather well, and Miss Brooks’s voice was unexpectedly sweet. Mother had pulled together a fair amount of people, including a few other bachelors, and the sweltering heat from a week ago had reverted to unseasonably cool weather. Halfway through the evening and it was not as disastrous as he thought it would be. A half hour of mingling over refreshments, another hour of music, and everyone would go home.
As the last notes of the pianoforte faded, Tim started his circuit of the room. Both of Miss Webb’s boarders were seventeen and were much more interested in Ichabod.
Dr. Norris and his wife were there, but as Tim approached, the other doctor turned his back. Tim made a quick turn—right into Miss Page and Miss Brooks.
“Oh! Dr. Dawes, your mother is so gracious to start the holiday off this way. I can’t wait for the reverend to read Defense of Fort McHenry. It is such a stirring poem.” She would find it stirring. The first stanza started with her favorite word.
“I am sure it will be. Miss Brooks, I enjoyed your selection.” Tim’s nod was met with a blush. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe my mother needs me.” A little white lie. His mother tried to communicate something else with her fan, but he chose to ignore it and joined her anyway.
She frowned at him. “I thought you were going to make an effort.”
“I’m mingling with all the guests.”
“That is not what I meant, and you know it. Go sit. The second half is about to start.” His mother started for the front of the room. Already people were taking their seats, choosing places different from their previous locations. Only a few spots remained. Widow Webb must be giving her boarders advice on how to sit by prospective suitors. There were obvious seats and four bachelors still standing, each empty seat flanked by young women desperately seeking spouses.
A straight-backed chair from the dining room had been moved into a corner. Ichabod made a beeline for it, narrowly beating a young man Tim had not met before tonight, from New Hampshire. Soon the only seat left lay between Miss Brooks and Miss Page.
It was hard to tell who smiled more when he took it—his mother or Miss Page. Miss Brooks wore a funny little smirk as well.
A fiddler and a couple of older men stood. One was missing an arm, curtesy of a musket ball fired by a redcoat at Bunker Hill. The first notes of the “Massachusetts Liberty Song” began to play, and it wasn’t long before many in the room joined them in singing:
We led fair Freedom hither, and lo! the desert smiled;
A paradise of pleasure now opened in the wild:
Your harvest, bold Americans, no power shall snatch away;
Preserve, preserve, preserve your rights in free America …
Lift up your hearts, my heroes, and swear, with proud disdain,
The wretch that would ensnare you shall spread his net in vain:
Should Europe empty all her force, we’d meet them in array,
And shout huzza! Huzza! Huzza! Huzza for brave America!
The words of the late Dr. Warren filled the room. Tim closed his eyes. Images of men lost in the battles of the Second War of Independence filled his mind. Would that his children never need fight. It had been such a useless war. Men died, property was destroyed, and all because of the British blockade. More than fifteen thousand men could be building their lives, homes, and country, but now they lay buried for the cause of Mr. Madison’s war.
Only the threat of what his mother would say kept him in his seat. Reverend Palmer stood next and recited Mr. Key’s poem, penned after the battle at Fort McHenry. If Tim’s thoughts hadn’t been so poignant, he might have laughed at Miss Page’s quick intake of breath at the first line: “O say can you see …”
Tim had only read the poem once in a well-worn newspaper. The words of the last stanza flowed over him, erasing the melancholy embracing him.
O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
A rousing applause filled the room. Next to him Miss Page predictably commented, “Oh! That was glorious! Oh! Have you ever heard such a recitation?”
Tim bit back a smile lest she think he meant it for her. People swarmed around his mother. She had put on the most triumphant of evenings for the night before Independence Day.
Instead of joining the throng as Miss Page and Miss Brooks had, Tim moved to the back o
f the room and counted down the moments until he could escape.
Twenty-eight
“Independence Day should not remind one of the crossing of Valley Forge.” Dorcas added a log to the fire. “Do you think your sister will still come into town with the weather like this?”
“She has been looking forward to it, so unless one of them is ill, I am sure she will. Don’t worry. When Samuel and Lucy arrive with the family, this house will warm up fast. I am glad that Amity could spend the day with her father. I worried that a dozen extra people would upset her.”
Dorcas ground coffee beans for her preferred morning beverage. “Did I tell you one of the women I sat with at church has invited me over for the day? They are going to host a little dinner and play a quiet game of cards. I think I shall enjoy my time much better there.”
“I hope you don’t feel like I am chasing you off.” Sarah set two bowls on the table.
“No, nothing like that, but with Amity at her father’s, I would feel like a green apple in the bushel. If my sister was coming I might stay, but …”
“But there are far too many little children for your taste?” Sarah hoped her smile conveyed her teasing.
Dorcas poured the beans into her coffee pot, one of her few possessions. “Only a few weeks and you understand me well. It is not so much the older ones as it is the little ones. I just don’t think I can be in the same house as month-old twins. I am sure they are adorable, but I …” The sentence faded off.
“Was facing spinsterhood easier when you were my age, or has it grown more difficult over time?”
“Why would you ask that? You haven’t reached your twenty-fifth year. And the doctor looks at you as if he would skip courtship and go straight to marriage if you would allow it. I realize you are in mourning, but you were not really related to Mrs. Wilson.”
Sarah shook her head. “Emma would have been my mother-in-law had Mark not died. My own mother died shortly after my fifth birthday, and Lucy raised me, but Emma filled the gap when I needed a mother. But I decided I couldn’t marry long before she died. It has nothing to do with mourning.”
Dorcas sat at the table and motioned for Sarah to do the same. “Dead men don’t come back. It took me years to learn that. I gave more than a quarter of a century to loving a man who could never love me back, caring for my siblings’ children as my heart yearned for my own. When he died, another man wanted to court me. He waited for my time of mourning to pass. He wrote me letters as I chose to spend much of it in seclusion at my aunt’s home in Brattleboro, Vermont. When I returned, I still could not betray my beloved, and eventually the other man married another. For the first few years, I didn’t mind being a spinster so much, but then my parents died. I never learned to write well, nor was I educated beyond the dame school. My sewing skills are mediocre at best. At first, taking care of my sister’s and brother’s children was the perfect answer to my problem. But as each child grew and never thought of me more than they did the household cook, a new emptiness filled me. I am useful, and my sister’s families treat me well enough, but I don’t belong to anyone, and no one belongs to me. If I had it all to do over again, I would accept the suit offered me. I may not have loved him as much as my first, but I could have loved him more in time, as good marriages seem to grow in love. Instead, I walk around feeling like there is always something I miss.”