Greeted by the scent of rich, buttery biscuits fresh out of the oven, she crossed to the kitchen table and the pile of fluffy biscuits stacked on a blue-and-white plate. She had eaten only half of her mother’s biscuits and brown gravy this morning, knowing if she saved room, there would be better waiting. “Mrs. Fritz,” she called out.
“In the back, baby. Go on and have yourself a bite. I know you’re hungry.”
“Appreciate it.”
Mrs. Fritz showed in the doorway, drying her large hands with a red-and-white-checkered towel. “You’re about the only one in this house that enjoys my cooking. The doctor is always gone, and Miss Olivia eats like an itty-bitty bird. I might start to feel down about my cooking if it weren’t for you.”
Sadie bit into a biscuit. “Don’t ever fret about your cooking, Mrs. Fritz.”
The older woman laughed. “I hear you two girls are going to Lynchburg today?”
“I never quite know where we’re going until we start out.”
“You two seem to be getting along well enough. You’re even wearing her clothes.”
“She said they didn’t fit her anymore.”
“Well, they look nice on you. Just you remember not to get too well acquainted. You might clean up nice, but you’re help, just like me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Fritz set a wicker picnic basket on the table and carefully began wrapping up most of the biscuits and placing them gently inside. “She’s taking lunch to Dr. Carter today.”
“To the hospital where he works?”
“That’s right. It’s a surprise.” Mrs. Fritz shook her head. “That poor boy works so hard they never see each other.”
Sadie had not seen Dr. Carter since the first day he had warned her to be careful, and that suited her just fine.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and Sadie quickly finished her biscuit as Miss Olivia appeared. Her naturally pale skin had a pink glow to it, and her dark hair, loose around her shoulders, looked vibrant. She wore a royal-blue jacket that matched a fitted skirt that brushed below her knees.
She tugged on pale-gray leather gloves. “Good morning, Sadie.”
“Morning, Miss Olivia.”
Miss Olivia’s eyes sparked with excitement. “We better get going. By the time we arrive, Edward will be starving. He performed surgery today, so he left before breakfast.”
Sadie grabbed the basket. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll bring the car around.”
“Excellent.”
Sadie hurried out to the barn, opened the door, and grabbed the key from the hook on the wall. In the car, she always noticed the softness of the leather seats first thing in the morning. But by afternoon and after hours of driving, she found herself irritated by the way the seat hit her lower back due to her small size.
She backed out of the barn and pulled the car around to the back entrance. Miss Olivia hurried down the stairs and let herself into the back seat. There had been no more discussion about Miss Olivia learning to drive. Sometimes she still sat in the front seat, but that was only when they were sure no one would see.
“You look mighty happy. Excited about visiting the big city?” Sadie asked.
Miss Olivia smiled. “Lynchburg is more like a charming small town.”
“Pretty big to me.” Sadie shifted gears, and the car rumbled down the driveway.
“There are cities that are a hundred times bigger.”
Sadie tried to picture a bigger city. The idea of a place packed full of people, buildings, and things scared her.
“Like London?”
“That’s right.”
She adjusted her grip on the wheel. It troubled her she had lied to her mother about Johnny being safe. She wanted to believe it was true but knew he would never worry her. “Johnny is headed to England.”
Olivia looked up and caught her gaze in the rearview mirror. “Where in England?”
“He doesn’t know yet.”
“Be sure to let me know when you do. Perhaps I can suggest a few places for him to visit if he gets a pass.”
“The bombs are still dropping over there?”
Olivia nodded slowly. “They haven’t stopped, and I’ve not received word from my family.”
“Was it pretty bad?” Sadie wasn’t asking in a nosy kind of way, but she wanted to be able to picture where Johnny was staying.
“It was quite bad when I left,” she said softly.
“How did you meet Dr. Carter?”
She was silent for a moment. “I was volunteering in the hospital. It was taking every man or woman on deck to take care of the wounded. A bomb hit the hospital, and I ended up trapped in the rubble. Edward was finishing up his fellowship at Oxford and working that same night. He dug me out.”
“You were buried alive?” Her chest tightened at the thought, and she drew in a deep breath, trying to process the terror Olivia must have felt. “How long were you trapped?”
“They tell me it was close to nine hours. Edward visited me at my bedside, and several days later when I was up and about, he invited me to tea. The rest moved along fairly swiftly.”
“Is that the way love is supposed to be? I mean that quick.”
“It was for us. One look at him, and I knew. So did he. We were married within a month.”
“Does it still bother you? I mean being trapped like that.”
Miss Olivia raised her chin. “No, of course not. Many others had it far worse.”
Sadie felt trapped by the confines of the county and her life. But as bad as it got sometimes, it could not have been nearly as bad as having bricks and stones pinning you in the darkness.
The two rode in silence for the remainder of the trip, and when Sadie drove into Lynchburg, she stopped to ask directions several times. Quizzical looks aside, the folks she spoke to seemed friendly and helpful.
The hospital was not what she had expected at all. It was a gray, stark place, with not a tree or blade of grass on its grounds. Only two stories high, it had no shutters on its dozen windows, and the curtains were drawn closed. Not very inviting. Sadie parked and came around to meet Miss Olivia as she stepped out.
“You want me to stay with the car?” Sadie said.
Miss Olivia looked up at the heavy front door. “You can carry the basket for me.”
Sadie followed, but she had trepidation about the building. It had a presence about it that made her stomach knot and her palms sweat. Olivia rang the bell, and both waited. Finally, footsteps approached, and the door opened to an older woman wearing a dark dress. Her hair was pulled back, and her face had a sour expression.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m Dr. Carter’s wife,” Miss Olivia said. “I’ve come to pay him a visit.”
“He’s in surgery and won’t be out for a half hour, but you’re welcome to wait.”
Olivia raised her chin. “Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.”
The two moved to a pair of wooden chairs aligned against the wall. From somewhere deep in the building, they heard what sounded like wailing.
Miss Olivia shifted in her seat and settled her purse on her lap. “Edward volunteers here one day a week. He’s very civic minded.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The wailing eased, but Sadie’s sense of fear did not. They sat in silence watching doctors scurry about. On the upper floor, another woman’s scream echoed in the building.
She was not sure how long they sat before Dr. Carter appeared. He looked rushed and slightly annoyed as he approached the pair.
“Darling, what are you doing here?”
Olivia stood and allowed him to kiss her on the cheek. “I thought I would bring you lunch, and we could share it. I don’t see much of you these days.”
“I know, and I’m very sorry. Building a practice is harder than I ever imagined.”
Sadie rose and was somewhat confused about the place. “What do you do here?”
“We take care of the poor women who don’t have th
e means to pay for a doctor.”
“You deliver babies,” she said.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes we do other surgeries to help them.”
Sadie wanted to ask about the other times but did not dare.
“Why don’t we go outside?” he said to Olivia.
“Yes, that would be nice,” Miss Olivia said. “Sadie, would you wait for me in the car?”
“Is there a blanket in the trunk?” Dr. Carter asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fetch it for us,” he said, smiling at his wife. “We will make a picnic of this fine lunch.”
“Yes, sir.” She retrieved the plaid wool blanket with thick fringe and handed it to Miss Olivia. As they walked along the sidewalk, Sadie was glad to retreat to the car.
Inside the car, she pulled the folds of her jacket closed and watched the Carters stroll hand in hand toward a single bench stationed at almost the edge of the property.
Dr. Carter fluffed out the picnic blanket over the bench and then held out his hand for his wife. She accepted it and sat.
Sunshine warmed the car, and Sadie found some of the tension had faded from her body. Her eyelids grew heavy and soon drifted shut. She glided just below consciousness, thinking she was aware of her surroundings but not realizing they were meandering further away like a log on a slow-moving river.
A hard smack against the glass snapped her back to consciousness, and when she looked at the driver’s-side window, she saw the face of a young woman. She appeared young, but her features looked drawn and weathered, as if she had already lived a lifetime. Her eyes were bright blue and filled with terror and tears.
Two men came up beside the girl and wrapped their arms around her. She recognized one of them as Sheriff Boyd right off, but the other was a stranger to her.
It took both men to pry the girl’s fingers from the car’s side mirror. She screamed and tried to bite their hands, but the men were too strong. Finally, her frantic fingers slipped from the mirror.
The woman dug her heels into the hard dirt as she tried to twist her body and flee. But she was no match for the strong arms that pushed and shoved her up the steps to the door. The sheriff smacked his palm against the bell, and seconds later it snapped open, with the sourpuss nurse on the other side. The trio dragged the girl inside the building.
Sadie’s mouth was so dry, and her heart was beating so fast she thought it would break through her ribs.
“Dr. Carter,” she shouted as she ran toward the couple. “Is that girl all right?”
Dr. Carter helped his wife stand. “She’s fine.”
“But she looked so afraid,” Sadie said. “Like she thinks they are going to do something terrible to her.”
“The girl is feebleminded like her mother was,” he said, more to his wife. “She’s confused and easily terrified. I promise you that we’re only going to help her.”
“That scream,” Olivia said. “It was pure terror.”
“We get girls in from the country who’ve never seen a doctor. They don’t understand that we’re here to help.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Sadie asked.
“Nothing that I can’t fix.” His gaze remained on Olivia. “You trust me, don’t you?”
Olivia stared into his eyes. “Yes, of course I do.”
They kissed on the lips, and Sadie, feeling like she wasn’t supposed to see, dropped her gaze to Dr. Carter’s polished brown shoes. As she studied the tied leather laces, she noticed several dull-red spots that looked like dried blood.
Two days later neither Sadie nor Miss Olivia mentioned their visit to the hospital when they drove into Charlottesville to pick up an order of plants. Dr. Carter had ordered them special and had warned Sadie not to let the plants sit out long at the railroad loading dock before she loaded them in Woodmont’s farm truck.
Sadie had not been to the rail station in Charlottesville since she took Danny there, and she was excited to see the trains. There was something thrilling about seeing people coming and going to different places in the world. One day, she would be on one of those trains.
She loaded the plants quickly into the truck bed while Miss Olivia signed for the delivery, and when Olivia smiled at the railroad man, he seemed to melt at the sight of her. She was dressed in a soft brown dress that skimmed her calves and was cinched with a slim polka-dot brown belt. Her brown shoes were polished and had just enough of a heel to make them pretty but useless for work.
As much as Sadie wanted to linger in the city, she feared the plants would be damaged by the cooler weather, and Dr. Carter would be annoyed.
Sadie drove them back to Woodmont and then backed the truck down to the greenhouse. It took Sadie a good half hour to unload and carry all the plants inside the warm, moist air of the greenhouse.
As she carried the last spiky green plant into the greenhouse and set it in the corner, she was grateful to be out of the cold. She looked up at the greenhouse’s domed roof, marveling at the way it caught the afternoon light. As pretty as this place was, it felt confining.
Miss Olivia regarded her plants as if they were precious children. “Can you move that last one a little to the right?”
Sadie dragged the pot five inches toward her and stood back. It was going to take more than a few inches to help this plant.
“It’s really very stunning,” Miss Olivia said.
“Yes, ma’am, if you say so.”
Miss Olivia frowned. “You don’t like the plants?”
“No offense, Miss Olivia, but I don’t see the point of these plants. They don’t look like you’d eat them.”
“No, of course not. They’re all Leucospermums.”
“What?”
“Shrubs that remain green all year, and then for a brief time they flower.”
“These things are going to make a flower?”
“They will indeed. They’re designed to be lovely and interesting.” Miss Olivia walked up and inspected a flat spiny leaf. “Edward had them brought in from Richmond. A friend of his has an English garden. He’s not one to sell his plants, and Edward said he had to be very persuasive to convince him to sell him these.”
“If you say so, miss.”
“The plant comes with its own story, you know,” Miss Olivia said. “Do you want to hear it?”
Sadie shrugged, doubting a story would help the look of this plant. “Sure, I could use a good story.”
Miss Olivia walked around the plant. “The man who gifted them to Edward is of British descent. He had a great-great-great-grandfather who sailed the seas as a young man for the British navy. In the 1780s his ship came upon a Dutch vessel that was sailing out of Cape Town, South Africa. They of course boarded the ship and took the cargo from the crew.”
The idea of traveling far caught her attention. “Why would they do something like that?”
“Britain was at war with the Dutch.”
“Why?”
“Because the Dutch were helping the American colonists with their little war of independence.”
Sadie placed her hand on her hip, feeling like she needed to stick up for her country. “Couldn’t have been so little. We won, and now we’re back in Europe helping you out of a scrap.”
Miss Olivia’s lips curled into a slight smile. “You are right about that.”
Sadie studied the plants again, trying to find something pretty about them but still unable to see much beyond spikes and hard angles. “Was this plant on the ship?”
“No. One of the Dutch crewmen had collected seeds near Cape Town. And when the British took control of the ship, they took all the Dutch sailors’ belongings, including these seeds. When one of the Brits returned home, he planted them. This plant is a descendant of those seeds.”
“Figures a handful of seeds would have traveled farther than me.”
“You are young; you will travel one day, Sadie.”
“That is my plan. I want to see California and New York City.”
“
You are a bright girl. I have no doubt you will see both.”
Sadie squared back her shoulders a fraction. “Seems to me if you are going to go to all the trouble of growing an old seed, then you should at least be able to eat it. What’s the good of a plant that doesn’t do anything of real importance?”
“It has a role. It’s lovely.”
Sadie shook her head as she looked outside at the still-bare trees. “Yes, ma’am, if you say so.”
“You don’t approve,” Miss Olivia said.
“Not my place, ma’am. I do love looking at the starlets in the magazines, because they are pretty. But I wouldn’t go so far as to think I could ever wear anything so beautiful. Just isn’t practical.”
“Does something always have to be practical?”
“For me, it does. Everything in our life, including the plants in Mama’s garden, are of use. All we have are carrots, potatoes, snap peas, and squash. It’s all got to fill our belly.”
“Don’t you have any flowers?”
“Well, we do have the honeysuckle bushes around the house, and they do smell nice. But as soon as they bloom, I pick the flowers so I can make them into the syrup to flavor the moonshine. The honeysuckle flavor is our most popular.”
“Edward enjoys it, but I’ve never tried it.”
“Well then, I’ll caution you to be careful. It’s mighty strong.”
Miss Olivia raised her chin. “You don’t think I can handle it?”
“I’m sure you could. I’m just saying it’ll take getting used to. Don’t go guzzling it like one of those fancy lady drinks.”
“You’ve drunk it?”
“Well, no. I taste the honeysuckle syrup, and then when it’s mixed, Ma does the final tasting. But it’s a matter of time before I’ll be doing the final tasting.”
“Aren’t you worried about the law?”
“I suppose. But I know all the back roads and old Indian trails, so I’ll be fine as long as I stay out of the sheriff’s way.”
“Why do you take the risk?”
“Money’s got to come from somewhere. Kind of like when you were trapped in that building. The only choice you had was to figure a way out. That’s what I’m doing with the moonshine. Figuring a way out of a tight spot.”
Honeysuckle Season Page 15