Love's First Bloom

by Delia Parr

  When he was done, when his heart and his soul were completely at peace with God for the first time in many, many years, it was not the image of his brother that flashed through Jake’s mind.

  It was the image of Ruth. The grief she hid behind her smile. The tiny freckles sprinkling the bridge of her nose that crinkled when she laughed. Her small hands holding Lily’s hand as they walked together down the sandy path toward her garden or the planked sidewalk on Main Street. And her eyes. Her beautiful, haunting, soulful eyes, sparkling up at him when she told him he was a prize at the Fourth of July celebration—eyes that simmered with emotion just before she closed them to kiss him.

  And it was not the echo of his brother’s voice that he heard, either. It was Ruth’s voice, echoing the challenge of holding true to principles like truth and honor while reporting the news, and having the strength to resist the public’s thirst for scandal that overwhelmed the rights of innocent people caught on the fringes of that scandal and victimized.

  Principles he had once embraced just as passionately as she did, before his ambition had blinded him.

  Innocent people like Ruth. And Lily, the most innocent victim, and the one who would be hurt the greatest if he chose to write the article Clifford expected him to produce and deliver by week’s end.

  Thirty-Three

  “There’s still hope. She’s no better, but she’s no worse.”

  Ruth sat by Phanaby’s bedside at midmorning on Tuesday, her spirit clinging to Dr. Woodward’s parting words an hour ago and her faith in God resting in endless silent prayers she said for Phanaby’s recovery. Her heart was still heavy with disappointment that she had not been able to respond to Jake’s note to let him know that she would not be able to meet him at her garden at dawn today or any morning until Eldridge Porter left the village, but the tiny blue flower he had picked from her garden and left with his note was pinned to her collar.

  When Phanaby grew restless and stirred awake, she took the woman’s hand very carefully to calm her and tried not to disturb the bandages on her arm that covered the several places where Dr. Woodward had bled her.

  “Elias?”

  “He’s downstairs with Lily in the apothecary. Would you like me to get him for you?”

  Phanaby tried to moisten her cracked lips with her tongue, but shook her head instead of voicing her answer.

  “Drink some more tea. Dr. Woodward seems to think it’s helping you,” she urged. She managed to get the woman to drink nearly half a cup of tea, and she was pleased how little of the dark liquid had trickled out of the corners of her mouth before Phanaby pushed Ruth’s hand away.

  “Please,” she whispered and weakly pointed to the dresser where the wooden chest was sitting next to the oil lamp.

  Ruth furrowed her brow. “Would you like me to light the lamp?” she asked, fearful that Phanaby’s vision had been affected, because the natural light in the room was quite sufficient to see, even with the curtains drawn.

  Phanaby closed her eyes for a moment as if trying to garner the energy she needed to speak. After she opened her eyes again, she managed to say one word: “Chest.”

  “You want me to bring you the chest?” Ruth asked, certain she had misunderstood, since Phanaby had reacted so strongly when she had merely moved the chest to dust the top of the dresser some weeks ago.

  A single nod.

  Still confused, Ruth retrieved the ornately carved wooden chest. It was a bit bulky to carry with one hand, but it was light, and she wondered what type of sentimental keepsakes Phanaby had stored inside.

  Phanaby’s eyes widened, and the fever-bright glaze to her eyes grew brighter still once Ruth placed the chest on the bed. “Would you like me to open it for you?” Ruth asked, but the lid refused to lift, and she barely took note of the keyhole when Phanaby lifted one of her hands, reached out, and flipped the chest over before collapsing back onto her pillows again.

  Ruth separated the key on the bottom of the chest from something that looked like red sealing wax and slid the key into the keyhole. Before she could turn the key, Phanaby placed a hand on top of Ruth’s to stop her. Once again she closed her eyes, and it was a good bit of time before she opened them again. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper and her words were clumped together in phrases, although they were clear and plainly uttered. “I received that chest … from Reverend Livingstone … several days before … you arrived,” she said and paused to rest for a moment. “Open the chest… . His note to me is lying … right on top.”

  Ruth’s fingers trembled as she unlocked the chest. With the key still in the keyhole, she lifted the lid, praying she might also find a letter inside that her father had written to her. With one glance, her hopes soared. A stack of papers was piled neatly inside the chest.

  Once she lifted the small note lying on top, she saw the faded green ribbon that tied the rest of the papers together. With her heart throbbing in her throat, she unfolded the note, which was dated two days before she had left, and read it silently:

  My dearest daughter-in-faith,

  Within days, Capt. Grant will bring to you Widow Malloy and the precious child entrusted to her care, whom she can now claim openly as her own, precisely as planned. Circumstances dictate that I must send this chest to you immediately, and I trust you will guard it well until she arrives and can guard it herself.

  With faith in His wisdom and mercy,

  GL

  Blinking back tears, she ran her fingers over the words her father had written and rested her fingertips on the fancy initials her father used for personal correspondence, as well as the notes he would leave for her if he left the house in the morning before she woke up. She was not certain she understood his message entirely, but the date alone told her that he had sent this wooden chest to her and not to Rosalie Peale, who had already been murdered by the time he had written the note.

  “He meant this wooden chest for me,” she murmured. Although she was highly anxious to read the other letters her father had stored inside, she wondered even more why Phanaby had not followed her father’s wishes and given the chest to Ruth months ago when she first arrived. She looked to Phanaby for the answer, but found the woman was weeping silently, with her hands steepled at her waist, lying on top of the sheets that covered her.

  “Forgive me,” Phanaby whispered. “Please … forgive me.”

  Ruth swallowed the lump in her throat. “I forgive you. Just tell me why you waited so long to give this to me. Please tell me why.”

  She had to wait a good while until Phanaby stopped crying, then waited even longer before the woman found either the courage or the energy to answer. When she finally did begin to speak, Ruth leaned closer to capture every softly spoken word.

  “Please don’t blame Elias. He … he thinks it’s mine … He doesn’t know the chest belongs … to you.”

  “I’m not fixing blame on anyone,” Ruth insisted. “Just tell me why you never did what my fa … Reverend Livingstone asked you to do until now.”

  Phanaby’s bottom lip trembled. “Those first few days were so hectic … you seemed so … overwhelmed, and Lily was so fussy… .” She stopped to draw in several shallow breaths of air. “Once we all … settled in together … I kept putting it off because … because I was afraid … so afraid,” she whispered and closed her eyes.

  When she appeared to be drifting off to sleep again, Ruth took her hand. “What made you so afraid?” she whispered.

  Phanaby sighed, and she did not open her eyes when she started to speak again. “I was afraid you’d read something inside … take Lily and leave us … We’d both come to … love the two of you so much … I didn’t want you to go.”

  Ruth understood now why Phanaby had been so upset when she had found Ruth holding the chest while she had been dusting. “Then why give me the chest now?” she asked, although she had a good idea of the answer she would receive.

  “I’m afraid … I’m not going to get well … and you’d never know …
the secret I’d been keeping from you.”

  Ruth smoothed the woman’s troubled brow, alarmed by how warm she was, and wiped away her tears. “Shhh. Rest now. Just rest,” she said.

  Ruth stayed by Phanaby’s side until the poor woman finally drifted off to sleep, without telling her that as soon as she recovered, the fear that had driven her to keep her secret would become real. As much as Ruth wanted to stay, she knew she had no choice but to take Lily and leave. Even if by some miracle the reporter from the Transcript left empty-handed, another reporter would appear in the village sooner or later and threaten the life and the love they had found here. That reporter would pose a threat to the life Elias and Phanaby enjoyed here, too.

  Unless by some miracle there was something within the wooden chest that would allow them both to stay.

  Thirty-Four

  Ruth had to wait until early afternoon to find out if the wooden chest contained a miracle of any kind. Although she doubted it contained anything of value to anyone else, she was incredibly curious to find out exactly what her father had sent to her.

  After dinner, Elias closed the apothecary again in order to spend the rest of the afternoon with his wife. Lily actually crawled into her bed for her afternoon nap and fell asleep almost as soon as her little head hit the pillow, leaving Ruth the free time, and the privacy, to investigate the contents of the chest.

  Ruth sat on the bed next to Lily. While she waited to make absolutely certain the child was asleep before she moved an inch, she repeated the most plaintive words that Phanaby had spoken that morning. “We’d both come to love the two of you so much,” she whispered and wrapped one of Lily’s curls around her baby finger.

  The truth was that during the course of the past three months, Ruth had come to love the Garners, too. And she could scarcely remember life before she had Lily, and she could not imagine life without her now. “I love you, baby girl,” she whispered. “I love you, and I won’t ever let you go. Never. God will find a way for us to be together, if only I trust in Him.” She leaned down to kiss her sweet cheeks.

  While checking to be sure the door to her bedroom was securely closed, Ruth paused to listen. When she heard Elias softly singing a hymn to his wife in the bedroom across the hall, she knew she had more than enough time to read the letters, so she sat on the upper bed and opened the chest. She set Phanaby’s note on top of her pillow and removed the letter below, breaking the sealing wax with the tip of the scissors she had slipped into her apron pocket earlier.

  Her eyes opened wide when she saw that beneath the stain of the wax, her name was scrawled on the letter lying on top. Before she opened the letter, she closed her eyes for a moment to pray that her father had either sent her some funds or would tell her if he had made other arrangements for them.

  Although she realized the letter itself was extremely long, the sight of so many words he had written with his own hand rekindled the deep grief lying just below the surface of her sorrow. She wept until her vision was clear once again before starting the letter. The date was the very same date as the note he had written to Phanaby, erasing any doubt that he had meant for Ruth, not Rosalie Peale, to receive the wooden chest.

  Next, she started reading the entire letter, but with each word she read, her heart began to race a little bit faster. By the time she finished the letter, her head was spinning and her heart was beating erratically. She took a deep breath and began to read the letter again, taking the time to read each paragraph very slowly in order to absorb what her father had written.

  My beloved daughter, Ruth,

  If you are reading this letter, then you have arrived in Toms River with Lily. I pray that I will be able to send for you both in a matter of days, but I could not risk putting this letter or the wooden chest into your hands before you sailed, for fear that you would not leave my side, as charges against me seem imminent.

  She moistened her lips, recalled how hard she had fought against leaving him, and shook her head before she continued:

  I have never kept a diary or journal, so I have now written down an account of my life before I married your mother. The rest of the contents of the chest I only discovered myself several hours ago when Rosalie Peale gave it to me some moments before she died. Once you read my account, I pray you will forgive me for what I’ve done and what I’ve failed to do over the course of my life … and that you’ll love me as completely as you always have and as I have always loved you.

  Pausing, she found his words confusing and continued again:

  I also ask that you keep all that you learn from being used to exploit or destroy an innocent child, and while we are both waiting for God’s plans for each of our lives to unfold, I ask you to trust in Him. Always.

  Your loving father,

  GL

  Blinking back tears, Ruth refolded the letter and laid it alongside the note he had written to Phanaby. Perplexed by the notion that her father could have possibly done anything that would require her forgiveness or that could be used to hurt Lily, she was convinced that her father must have exaggerated some unusual situation to prepare her for some sort of upsetting news.

  She spent the next hour reading a detailed account of the time he spent in western Massachusetts as a newly ordained minister, as well as the rest of the letters in the chest, most of which turned out to have been written by her father many years ago to Liza Adams, the young woman who had claimed and broken his heart while he had been living there. All carried the signature she knew so well: GL

  But only by reading a number of other letters, written by Liza herself, did she learn that Liza’s family had objected so strenuously to the match that they had forced Liza into hiding with distant relatives in Connecticut. From her father’s poignant account, Ruth further discovered that he had spent two years searching for his beloved Liza before giving up, moving to New York City and eventually marrying Ruth’s mother. He had been completely unaware that Liza had borne him a daughter, Rosalie, who carried her cousin’s surname, Peale, or that Liza had died nearly eighteen years later, still single and still very much in love with him.

  And it was only then that Ruth knew that her father had not exaggerated at all. The painful, even shameful events he had described were indeed difficult to believe of the faithful man she had known her father to be. But she also knew that he would have turned to his Father for forgiveness for the sin that had set the tragedy of his life, as well as Liza’s and Rosalie’s, into motion. She could not deny him her forgiveness as well.

  Ruth set all the letters aside, along with any judgment of the star-crossed lovers or their illegitimate daughter. She placed the delicate miniature she had found wrapped in faded cloth at the bottom of the wooden chest into the palm of her hand— the very miniature her father had had made of Liza and given to her so many years ago. The resemblance between Liza and Lily was undeniable, and she also knew that this miniature held sentimental value now to the one person who was far too young to understand the implications it held: precious Lily.

  She closed her hand and wrapped her fingers around the miniature. She found it hard to believe that her father’s ministry working with the city’s fallen angels had coincidentally led him to his own daughter, Rosalie Peale. A woman who had run away from home at age seventeen, after her mother’s death, to search for the father she had never known, and then been forced to turn to prostitution to survive.

  When her father had helped Rosalie reclaim her faith, she had become a Prodigal Daughter, his daughter-in-faith like Phanaby and so many others. But she had died before she was able to share the secret she had kept from him in life for reasons that would never be known. Like Ruth, she was his very own daughter.

  To say Ruth was stunned would be entirely fair, because she felt too many emotions all at once to be able to sort through them. To say she was outraged or disappointed by what she had learned would be entirely within reason, but it would not be fair at all. She was simply overwhelmed to learn that despite her father’s passi
ng, she was not alone, without any family in this world.

  Rosalie Peale’s child, Lily, was not simply an orphan who needed protection and a home. Lily was Ruth’s blood relative, her niece and her father’s granddaughter, and she had all the proof she needed right at her fingertips.

  She doubted anyone would challenge her father’s relationship to Lily, as well as her own, but she was absolutely certain that any number of reporters, including Eldridge Porter, would exploit it for one reason: profit.

  Her fingers tightened around the miniature so hard that the edges bit into her palm. She no longer had any personal concerns about protecting her own identity, but she had even more reason now to leave the village as soon as Phanaby was well again. Otherwise she had little hope of protecting the innocent one sleeping so peacefully next to her, a child who was too young to protect herself, a child who was her very own niece.

  Sighing, she carefully folded the cloth around the miniature and placed it back into the chest. Her fingers lingered on the gift her father had given to Liza, a woman who had trusted him with her heart and had never given it to another because she loved him so completely.

  If Ruth dared to do the same, if she trusted Jake with her heart and loved him as completely, then she knew she would also have to trust him with the truth and take the risk that if he walked away, she would never be able to give her heart to another man.

  But she had more to worry about than her own future if he betrayed her trust. She had Lily’s future to consider, too. Lily was far too vulnerable as it was. Ruth would not complicate her life any further by putting her own needs ahead of her niece’s.