by Laura Briggs
At last, he sought the doctor’s advice. Mr. Widlow gave him permission, since he was beginning to feel the loss of his son’s strength in tending the crops. His arrival caught the family by surprise, Nell and her mother patching garments, while Mariah conducted inventory of her medicine cabinet.
Both women stayed present for the exam, although Mrs. Darrow’s mouth formed a line of disapproval, and Nell tried in vain to concentrate on the shawl she was repairing for her grandmother.
“This illness has been upon you for some time,” Mariah guessed once the exam had commenced. Her stethoscope tested his chest and lungs as they sat on the bench by the parlor door. She kept her voice low, though not a word escaped the audience seated by the stone hearth.
“Weeks,” he agreed. “More than a month, I believe. I’ve lost track of the time, though it passes so slowly here at home.”
She put her stethoscope aside to make notes in the daybook she always carried. “You compare it to the regiment, I suppose. That is where you wish to be, if not for this affliction?”
“Of course. It is all anyone talks of and all I think about.”
Without glancing up, she told him, “I have not corresponded with anyone from the camps, but heard many letters from those who do. There seems an equally restless spirit among those in the regiment as there is here.”
“They spend much time waiting for their orders,” he admitted. “And there is illness among their quarters far worse than what I suffer now. Still, I can’t help envying their sense of purpose.”
A look of sympathy flitted across the doctor’s face. “To be helpless is unbearable,” she agreed. Raising a hand, she felt his forehead, saying, “You are not feverish at present. Have you suffered any confusion when the chill comes over you?”
“It troubles my dreams,” he admitted.
She rose and went to the medicine cabinet with its collection of glass vials. “I wish to start you on a quinine dosage for the bronchial inflammation,” she told him, selecting a bottle from the upper shelf. “It will help with the cough and the fever both and has proven itself many times for my father’s patients.”
“Then I will take it right away if you will tell me the proper dosage.”
“Such faith.” A smile stirred the doctor’s lips. “You have benefited from a physician’s care before, Mr. Widlow?”
“No—that is, never a qualified one. When I was a boy, a traveling man beseeched the audience members to provide him a lock of their hair. In exchange, he mixed a special elixir to cure their woes.”
“And this worked?” Mariah raised her brows at the story.
“For a time.” He leaned closer. “I suspect the chief ingredient was rum, you see.”
Jealousy rippled through Nell as she witnessed their playful exchange. Never had she seen anyone threaten the doctor’s taciturn demeanor so effortlessly. Every smile, every blush he drew from the other woman’s reserved exterior was like a stab to her own carefully concealed feelings.
With mixed emotions, she listened as they arranged to meet again within the week. “This illness has been allowed to take firm root,” Mariah explained, seeing her patient to the door. “It may be many weeks before the medicine dissolves its hold on you.”
Consultations like this one in the parlor were beginning to cause anxiety among the Darrows for fear of gossip. As a result, Nell was quietly appointed as chaperone. Placed in the background, she performed such household tasks as hanging the wash or scrubbing the plank floor that never came clean while trying to be as unnoticed and unobvious as possible.
How painful this became—watching the boy she loved grow to love another—was not to be thought of in comparison with the relief of seeing his strength return. His spirit improved even before the quinine and other treatments took their miraculous effect on his body. Obviously caught by the doctor’s beauty, he showed even greater admiration for her knowledge.
Their conversations, which spanned everything from politics to science, fell on Nell’s unwilling ears with a sting. She could hear the undertones that laced their voices, the things left unsaid as they traded looks and ideas. Emotions pushed their way to the surface when the doctor’s touch lingered too long, her patient reaching to brush her hand in return.
One day, looking up to dust the mirror above the mantel, she saw the couple reflected past her own plain features, standing in the hall, their heads bent close together, as Arthur pressed a kiss to the doctor’s upturned mouth.
It was not their first, judging by the way it lingered. Mariah’s hand reached to trace his jaw, a smile forming as she told him something in a whisper.
Nell quickly moved out of sight, hands clutching the rag close to her chest. Her heart beat wildly, her mind reeling from the image in the glass. She had not meant to see it, but soon learned it was hardly being kept a secret.
The couple was seen together in town and sometimes walking by the spring on a Sunday afternoon. Mariah never attended church, else word of their courtship might have spread faster.
As it was, the doctor showed no sign of relinquishing her agnostic beliefs, though Arthur’s staunchly devout family would surely approve less of this practice than of the medical one she ran from the Darrow’s parlor.
But they continued to plan for a future that was uncertain in more ways than one. With Arthur’s improved health came also his chance to enlist. Six weeks after his first visit to the doctor, he came to see her wearing the coat and trousers his mother had dyed a dark gray with the help of walnut oil. He left with his hat in his hands, eyes full of regret as they met with Nell’s ahead on the path.
She had been to the neighboring wood and carried back with her a handful of violets. Her fingers crushed the stems when she saw his uniform, heart aching with the knowledge of where he went.
“I will tell Henry how you get on,” he promised, taking her hand in farewell. “Pray for me Nell—that I will do my duty as the others have and come through it to see you all again.”
“I will,” she said, reluctant to let him go as he moved further down the path. Before he reached the gate, she caught up with him. “Wait. Take one of these. For remembering home.” With a shy smile as she tucked a blossom through his jacket’s buttonhole.
The violet face peeked back at her with a friendlier gaze than that of somber, wistful Arthur when he looked back one last time.
8
November 1, 1862
Dearest Henry,
The rowdy doings of Mischief Night have left their mark on our town once again. Maple syrup was smeared on door handles, and Mr. Cray’s gate was taken off its hinges so that all his cattle escaped. Our house was among those spared, with Granny setting out the broken buckets from the garden to let the children take for burning.
Amidst all the trouble, the Hinkle’s youngest boy, Charley, received a painful wound to his leg. He bears it bravely and says it must be nothing compared with the danger a soldier faces.
“Nell? Are you there, dear?”
The girl stopped writing at the sound of her grandmother calling. The rattle of saucers and spoons told her the older woman was preparing tea for the doctor’s guests. Hastily, she laid her pen on the desk, her plain skirt rustling as she moved towards the family’s kitchen.
Pine planks creaked beneath her boots, the knots in the wood creating a pattern that was almost ornamental. The Darrow farmhouse was a rustic one, fashioned by her grandfather when the family migrated from Scotland years before. His craftsmanship—though not exquisite by any means—was all that Nell could associate with the man, since he died while she was still in the cradle.
“You should have called for me earlier,” Nell scolded the figure that was stooped over the table. “I thought Mama was with you,” she added, wondering what new task had called Mrs. Darrow away.
“She went with your papa into town,” her grandmother explained, shaky hands arranging a pot and tea cups on a metal tray.
Though nearly blind, Clare Darrow was sharp in every
other sense. Her memory of the house’s layout was enough to aid her in this daily task as she insisted on brewing tea from the well water Nell fetched each morning. She preferred it even to water fresh from the spring, and the rest of the family had grown used to drinking it.
“Be a good girl and carry this tray in for the Hinkles,” she said, patting Nell’s hand. “I may be fit to stew it, but I dare not trust myself with the serving.” This was said with a wink. Her voice was still infused with the native accent of her birthplace in the Scottish Highlands. A strange thing, considering Sylvan Spring had been her home for almost thirty years now. Strands of white hair were knotted at the back of her neck, hands gnarled with age and a life of labor on the Darrow’s homestead.
At times, Nell fancied something of her grandmother’s quiet strength in her features—though none of the woman’s famous girlhood beauty had carried over if the reflection in her mirror was anything to judge by. Limp yellow tresses framed eyes that were set close together, her complexion made tan from the sun in her father’s crop field.
She could see the same image distorted in the silverware balanced on the tray she carried now. Glancing quickly away, she formed a smile of welcome for the figures gathered in the family’s parlor. “Morning, Mrs. Hinkle,” she greeted the farm wife, whose homestead lay within walking distance of their own.
The Hinkles were better off when it came to farmhands than some of their neighbors, having so many helping hands in the form of their children. Though, of course, that meant having more mouths to feed, giving everyone reason enough to pity them.
“Nell has brought us some tea,” her grandmother told them, settling into the rocking chair beside the unlit fireplace. Her hand grasped the shawl she kept there for fending off the morning chill, wrapping it tightly around her thin shoulders.
Mrs. Hinkle merely nodded in reply, her attention demanded by the infant fussing in her arms. Gathered round her on the sofa were children in various stages of growth. They all had the same shade of straw-colored hair and a complexion as tan and uncared for as Nell’s.
The patient, a boy of roughly ten years, was seated on a wooden chair, a deep gash visible below his left knee. Beside him, the doctor knelt to gently clean the wound, squeezing the sides together to bind it with a needle and thread
“I hope it leaves a scar,” Charley announced, fingers gripping the chair as the needle pierced his flesh. Like his siblings, he was lanky and rail thin. He was paler, though, his eyes a shade of pastel gray that reminded Nell of storm clouds.
At the sound of his voice, a dog’s bark had echoed from the farmhouse porch. Nails scraped against the front door, followed by a low whining sound, as the faithful pet begged for entrance.
“Go home, Rufus,” Mrs. Hinkle ordered sternly from the sofa. She shifted the complaining baby in her arms. “There won’t be any scar for showing off. Will there, Miss Moore?”
“There will be a mark,” the doctor confessed, securing the bandage. “No doubt it shall fade in time. You must be more careful in the future, Charley,” she added. Her gaze softened as she studied the boy’s gaunt frame, smaller than that of even his younger siblings.
“Boys collect scars and scrapes the way girls collect butterfly wings,” Nell’s grandmother chuckled, cradling her tea cup between knotted fingers. “It is their nature. Your papa can attest to that,” she confided to Nell, who seated herself in a nearby chair. “Once he fell down a drinking well, poor lad.”
“Ah, but this one is always finding trouble,” Mrs. Hinkle insisted, casting a glare in her son’s direction. “Guess how he came by this scrape? I’ll tell you how,” she said, not giving them time to answer. “By climbing over the Roans’ gate, that’s how.”
Sneaking onto the Roan property was practically a rite of passage for the children of Sylvan Spring and had been since Nell was a child. Ellis Roan, the heir to the family property, was a hermit of sorts, never seen in the town shops, or the church. He preferred his privacy for whatever reason and survived off the hares and other wildlife he trapped in the woods around the spring.
“That old fence had sharp edges,” Charley boasted. “Rufus got his fur caught in it, great big tufts coming out.”
At the sound of its name, the dog began barking again, the woofs deep and insistent with its growing desperation. Wishing to spare the animal another scolding, Nell told them, “My brother once had a dog with that same devoted temperament. I remember it slept outside his window at night, and sometimes he would sneak it inside and let it sleep on his bed.”
“Don’t go filling his head with ideas,” Mrs. Hinkle said, as Charley’s eyes lit up with the story. “That dog’s so big and clumsy he’d soon break every bit of furniture in the cabin.”
“He’s not so big,” the dog’s owner protested. “Not compared with the dog Billy Cray saw t’other night. The size of a mare and all shaggy with black fur—”
Laughter greeted the wild statement, everyone but the doctor joining in the mirth.
Her expression was one of confusion and mild concern.
Charley’s mother demanded, “What nonsense are you talking now, child?”
“The plat-eye,” he insisted. “Billy and his pa saw it twice down by the Crooked Wood spring. It had eyes like fire.”
Plat-eyes were the spirits conjured by the dead in the form of menacing, oversized animals, according to old folk tales. Nell had heard plenty of tales of it, and shivered through them, as a girl.
“Oh, hush now,” his mother said, embarrassed by the smiles of amusement the story was drawing. “Billy Cray is not to be trusted anyhow. Were it not his fingers left such an ugly mark on our door the other night?” She spoke of a recent prank the children had played in the Mischief Night tradition, the scrawling of a mysterious symbol on various doors in the community.
Nell’s family had been spared this indignity, but the Hinkles, among several others, had woken the next day to find their homes marked with a blood-red dye, streaks of it trailing down the wood from the painted symbol above.
A death symbol some claimed, though Nell wasn’t sure why. When she went to borrow a volume from her former instructor’s shelves, Nell had seen the one left on the schoolhouse door. A half-moon with an arrow bent through it. The teacher, Miss Mitchell, had studied it with pursed lips and a cold eye, muttering something about “heathen youngins” under her breath.
“Mr. Roan’s door has the same mark,” Charley insisted, revealing his reason for braving the hermit’s fence. “That makes eight I’ve heard of, besides ours. Reckon I will have to see them all to be sure.”
“Not until your wound is healed,” the doctor cautioned. “You must take care not to loosen these stitches. I will be extremely disappointed if I hear otherwise.” She had begun to repack her bag, a battered leather one said to belong to her father in his early days of practice. She rarely mentioned her family, or anything of a personal nature, but Nell had seen text books on her shelves that bore the former physician’s name.
“Billy says the plat-eye’s the spirit of a convict,” a shy voice offered, the only Hinkle girl, her hair twisted in a long braid that she toyed with nervously. “Hung back in granddaddy’s day. That is why no one’s seen it outside the woods—’cause its spirit is trapped there.”
Nell squirmed to hear such talk. The story of the convict had inspired more than one nightmare for her as a child. Suspected of thieving from his neighbors, he was said to have hanged for his crimes on the big, twisted oak from which Crooked Wood took its name. No burial for the body, only a rope to slowly fray, and birds to pick the bones.
The doctor snapped her case shut, her expression unreadable. What must she think of their superstitious talk? A woman of science and education, her love for reason excluded even the possibility of a higher power, something Nell’s family had learned the first Sunday she refused their invitation to church.
“Could be that’s what marked up the doors,” Charley said, an idea coming to him. “Vengeance in bl
ood for the hanging—”
“Enough of such talk,” his mother said, waving away the boy’s excitement. “You will be scaring the young ones,” she added, with a glance at the other Hinkle children. None of them looked remotely frightened as they sat forward, eager gazes trained on their brother for more of this wondrous knowledge.
Relief flooded through Nell as the subject changed to the crops and eventually to Henry’s last letter. She read part of it aloud, as their neighbor made tsking sounds at the regiment’s shortage on food and supplies.
“We expect to move camp at any moment,” she read, fumbling the words as she thought of delayed communication and her brother and the other soldiers trudging through the autumn weather. “Some of the fellows’ boots have been pulled apart in the mud along these banks we now occupy. Mine have held true, as have Arthur’s, though his feet swell so, he can hardly get them on…” She trailed off, her gaze drawn to where the doctor slipped from the parlor, her skirts rustling quietly down the hall. Guessing the reason for her withdrawal was not hard, though Nell couldn’t help feeling a pang of discomfort. Miss Moore’s letters from the battlefield were not ones to be read aloud, or so she suspected.
Envy flickered through her, a faint spark that threatened quickly to grow to a flame. Part of her longed to know what lay inside those envelopes which disappeared to the doctor’s desk and bedside table. The other part prayed to overcome this weakness that haunted her since childhood, an infatuation for a man who would never return her affection.
“There now,” Mrs. Hinkle said, pressing her hand with a look of sympathy. “How you must miss your brother, dear.”
“Yes, ma’am” she replied, a flush creeping over her face at the woman’s misunderstanding. For as much as she missed Henry, this other burden weighed on her heart with a force equally stunning and far more hopeless.
Tucking the letter away, she offered a grateful smile to the older woman. “Henry is in our prayers and thoughts at all times. He and—and all our friends who face this difficulty.”
