The Midwife's Dilemma

by Delia Parr

  Ivy shook her head. “You don’t have to worry about any of those things anymore, and you don’t need to even consider yourself a divorced woman.”

  The more the sisters bantered back and forth, almost completely ignoring Martha, the more confused she became. But when they started arguing the difference between a divorced woman’s status and reputation as opposed to a widow’s, she broke her silence. “Since I know almost nothing about your experiences in Philadelphia, this conversation is confusing. I think you’ve drifted into matters that aren’t really relevant,” she suggested.

  Startled into silence, both sisters stared at her, as if they had both just realized that she was sitting there.

  “But it’s entirely relevant,” Fern argued. “God be just and merciful, Mr. Pennington died a little over a year ago.”

  “He’s dead?” Martha blurted, shocked by the one possibility she had not even considered when the sisters had left to find him.

  “Yes, he is,” Ivy replied. “So in my opinion, which is wholly different from Thomas’s legal point of view and my sister’s, she’s earned the right to be called a widow and respected as such,” Ivy argued.

  “Maybe we should slow down a bit and explain to Martha exactly what we learned as we learned it,” Fern offered.

  Ivy shrugged and got to her feet. “It’s mostly your tale. Tell it as you want. I’ll just fill in if you forget something important. But first, I’m going to set some water to boil so we can all have some tea.”

  Still reeling from the news they had just shared with her, Martha decided now would be the right time to sample her piece of cinnamon strudel so that her mouth would be full and she would not be tempted to interrupt either one of them again.

  5

  Ivy had just finished bringing the teakettle to the table when there was a knock at the back door. “I’m up,” she said, waving Martha back to her seat. She headed down the long hall to reach the door that opened to the side alley and returned right after Martha finished filling their cups.

  “That was just Rosalind Andrews. She was hoping to find Dr. McMillan here, but she left in a huff when I told her he hadn’t been here at all today.”

  Martha had no intention of telling any of the women, even if one was his housekeeper, that the doctor was probably out somewhere with Victoria. She preferred to keep that information to herself.

  Ivy sat down, took a sip of tea, and quickly set it down. “Too hot,” she noted and glanced at her sister, who looked like she was growing more and more anxious to tell Martha about their mission. Or was she having second thoughts about divulging anything?

  Martha caught Fern’s gaze and held it. “I don’t want you to feel obligated to tell me anything—”

  “Martha, dear, I want to tell you,” she said, taking Martha’s hand in her own. Speaking slowly, as if deliberately choosing every word, Fern told Martha the tale of their journey that was as incredible as it was sad.

  By the time Fern finished, Martha’s head was spinning, and they were all battling tears. No one had even touched the tea. “Let me be certain that I understand everything,” Martha said. “Several years ago, shortly after he divorced you, Mr. Pennington suffered a very severe stroke that left him completely paralyzed and unable to speak more than gibberish.”

  “Correct.”

  “And later, his lawyer took advantage of the situation to steal Mr. Pennington’s fortune and disappear? Surely there must have been someone who could have seen what was happening and stopped him.”

  “Who would stop him? We didn’t have any children,” Fern reminded her, “and he didn’t have any living relatives, either.”

  Ivy snorted. “That man’s temper always drove away whatever friends he made in short order. When he was too ill to protect his fortune, no one else cared what happened to him or his money, except for that horrid lawyer.”

  Martha had the sense that Fern blamed herself, at least in part, for not being there to prevent what had happened, and she squeezed her hand in silent support. “So over the course of a year or so, as you understand, this Mr. Ashford hired caregivers to care for Mr. Pennington at home while he concocted a nefarious plan, which he was ready to implement once he purchased a remote cottage in the Pennsylvania countryside miles from anything else.”

  When both women nodded to confirm her understanding, she continued. “Jane answered the advertisement Mr. Ashford placed in a Philadelphia newspaper for a caregiver for Mr. Pennington, and she got the position, as well as permission to bring Cassie with her. He gave her wages in advance and left barely enough for them to survive on for the coming year, claiming the doctors assured him that the sick man would probably not even survive that long. After reassuring her that she was free to keep the year’s wages and leave once Mr. Pennington did die, even if that turned out to be only a matter of months, he simply disappeared, taking Mr. Pennington’s fortune with him. Do I have that right?” Martha was surprised in part that Mr. Ashford had gone to so much trouble and not just abandoned poor Mr. Pennington. She also wondered why Jane would want such a remote position when there must have been ones in the city.

  “Exactly right,” Fern said. “At least that’s what we were able to piece together. That’s only half the story, I suppose, but I’d rather not bore you with endless tales of how difficult it was or how long it took to find enough information just to locate Mr. Pennington. All I want to add is that I think we traipsed over most of the roads crisscrossing the eastern half of Pennsylvania and back in our search, only to discover that he had died a few months before. He’d lasted nearly twice as long as the doctors predicted.”

  Ivy finally added a comment of her own. “As far as Jane knows, the man she had been caring for was our distant relative. We didn’t see any reason to tell her any more than that.”

  Fern nodded. “What a blessing that I never did return the jewelry. If I had, that thief of a lawyer would have gotten that, too,” Fern noted. “The other blessing is Jane. We both took to her right away, didn’t we, Ivy?” she asked, adding a bit of cream to her tea and pronouncing it just the right temperature to drink.

  While Martha added two dollops of honey to her tea, Ivy took a sip of her own, which prompted Fern to continue her tale. “The poor woman didn’t have much by way of references to give us, but the very fact that she’d stayed with that very sick man long after her wages had run out provided all the reference we needed. In point of fact, when we found her, she was desperate to leave. She just didn’t have the funds.”

  Yet another knock came at the back door, harsher this time, and made Ivy scowl. “If that’s Rosalind again, I have a mind to tell her that it’s not our business to keep track of the doctor,” she grumbled and hurried to answer the door when the knock echoed again.

  She returned moments later, her expression worried. “There’s a Mr. Crowder at the door. He’s come to fetch you. Apparently his daughter is ill. I tried to tell him you were too exhausted to go with him right now, but when he said he would get Dr. McMillan instead, I had a mind to tell him the doctor wasn’t around but thought I’d better let you talk to him.”

  “I know who he is,” Martha said and got to her feet. “Just after you left, he moved his family here from somewhere near Sunrise to the old Bradford farm. If you’ll tell him I’ll be right there, I’ll go upstairs and grab my bag. And ask him to wait for me. Otherwise, I don’t have any way to get all the way out to his farm.”

  Accustomed to the futility of arguing with Martha when it came to answering a call to duty, Ivy simply nodded and left to deliver Martha’s message. Fern shrugged her shoulders and started to package up another piece of strudel for her, along with a biscuit she slit open and stuffed with cheese, a habit the sisters had developed whenever Martha was called away from a meal.

  For her part, Martha snatched a bit of crust from the strudel and hurried upstairs by way of the back staircase to retrieve her bag of simples, adding a few different remedies to take with her. After giving the crust to Bi
rd, she returned to the kitchen, where she found Ivy holding her bonnet and cape ready for her.

  “You’ll need these if Mr. Crowder brings you back after the sun goes down. Why aren’t you riding out there with Grace? Is your horse ill?”

  Martha took a deep breath. “Grace died very suddenly two weeks ago,” she managed and tied her bonnet into place. She accepted the sack of foodstuffs from Fern in one hand and her cape with the other before leaving without saying anything more.

  She hurried to the back door as fast as she could. At the moment, however, her weary body did not move as fast as she liked, and a twinge in the small of her back reminded her that it was time to let someone else answer the call to tend to the women and children of Trinity.

  Hopefully that meant someone other than Dr. McMillan, who was likely paying far too much attention at the moment to one young woman in particular—her daughter.

  Once in a month of Sundays, if that often, Martha answered a call to duty only to discover a complaint that only time and nature itself would be able to cure.

  Today turned out to be one of those days, which meant Martha could do little for sixteen-year-old, unmarried Missy Crowder, who did not even realize she was carrying a babe until Martha told her. Missy and her parents, naturally, were shocked. Poor Missy and her mother wailed together, but her father announced that after he delivered Martha back home, he was heading straight back to Sunrise to fetch the young father-to-be and their minister to marry them at once.

  As they started back to Trinity, the chill in the air matched the mood of the man who sat next to Martha on the wagon seat. The ride back to town with him was bound to be terribly awkward, and she missed Grace more than ever, wishing she could have returned to Trinity on her own. If she was totally honest with herself, however, she would have to admit that she was so tired right now that she might have fallen asleep in the saddle.

  Not that she would have had to worry. Grace had been a wretched-looking horse, but her spirit and her devotion to Martha had been amazing. She sensed Martha’s moods better than most humans did, and if Martha had fallen asleep in the saddle, which had happened once or twice, Grace would have stopped and gently jostled her awake.

  With a very sullen and silent man at the reins and no hope of conversation to keep her awake, she had to force herself to keep her eyes open. But when she spied an all-too-familiar buggy pull out from behind a stand of trees up ahead, her heartbeat slowed to a dull thud.

  Looking as bedraggled and exhausted as she knew she was, meeting anyone at the moment was the very last thing she wanted to do, but she absolutely, positively had no desire to see the man at the reins of that buggy.

  “Not now,” she whispered. “Please not now.”

  Mr. Crowder lifted the reins and used them to point ahead. “Do you know who that is that’s heading toward us?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  His expression hardened. “There’s no time for idle conversation.”

  “I know,” she replied, quite certain that Mr. Crowder would be pleased when he learned in a few minutes that he would be well on his way without her. She shook the dust from her skirts and slipped off her bonnet just enough to smooth her hair before tying her bonnet back into place again. But she was helpless to keep her heart from racing and pounding against the wall of her chest when he slowed the wagon to a halt, waiting for the buggy to close the last few yards between them.

  Yes, she very definitely knew the man who was drawing ever closer to her.

  He was the only man who had managed to steal her heart, not once but twice. He also had the very annoying ability to know what she was thinking, even before she did, and he could charm a blush to her cheeks with a simple glance.

  6

  Thomas.”

  Martha whispered his name as he stopped his buggy alongside the wagon. The moment he locked his determined eyes with hers, she immediately knew that their meeting like this was definitely not a coincidence.

  His soft gray eyes simmered with such deep want and affection that her heart beat even faster. When he set the brake and removed his hat, she noted with some dismay that he had yet to sport a single gray hair. With patrician features and ebony hair, he was more handsome in her eyes than any man had a right to be. A full head taller than she was, he was nearly as trim and fit as he had been when he first proposed to her twenty-five years ago, and now he was twice as charming as he had been then. His smile made her so weak in the knees she was glad she was sitting down.

  “I suspected you’d be heading back on this road,” he said before he climbed down from his seat in the buggy. After quickly introducing himself to Mr. Crowder, Thomas easily convinced the man to let him take her home. Given the man’s urgent mission, Martha could hardly argue against the idea.

  With her fate decided, Martha resigned herself to the inevitable. The only saving grace to her situation, if she could find any at all, was that she and Thomas would have time alone together to discuss a number of issues that had awaited his return to be resolved. Unfortunately, she had not yet resolved those issues in her own mind and knew he would not be pleased.

  While Thomas quickly transferred her things from the wagon to the buggy, Mr. Crowder helped her down from her seat to the ground. “We expect your discretion,” he said, and his words were very firm despite how quietly he voiced them.

  She stiffened at being reminded of any of her duties. “Understood.”

  He tipped his hat when Thomas reached Martha’s side. “Much obliged to you both,” he said, then climbed back aboard his wagon and pulled away.

  Thomas took Martha’s hand and turned her about until they were facing one another with mere inches between them. When he tilted up her chin, his simmering gaze darkened with concern. “I was hoping Fern and Ivy had exaggerated, but I can see for myself they didn’t describe by half how exhausted you are. They told me about Grace, too, which is why I decided to fetch you home myself. I’m sorry. I know how much you relied on her. We can talk about replacing her later, but you can borrow one of my horses in the meantime.” Without missing a beat, he swooped her up and into his arms.

  “Thomas Dillon! Whatever do you think you’re doing?”

  He chuckled, carried her a few steps, and lifted her into the buggy. “I’m taking care of my future wife.”

  “I’m not so exhausted that I can’t walk on my own two feet, and I’m not your future wife. If you’ll recall, I never fully accepted your proposal, and we both agreed to keep our relationship secret until and if I did. And replacing Grace is my problem, not yours.”

  He ignored her words as he tucked a thick blanket around her shoulders and offered her another smile that left her exasperated. “And as I recall, you said yes to my proposal, assuming I’d agree to any number of conditions you were going to think about while I was away.”

  She huffed and readjusted the blanket so it was a bit less snug. “Well, you certainly allowed ample time to do that, considering you were gone four months longer than you originally said you would be.”

  He leaned forward, held on to the side of the buggy with both hands, and cocked his head. “I wrote and told you that we’d all been delayed.”

  “You did, but that was early in February. I hadn’t heard from any of you since then, and I didn’t know what to think. All I could do was pray that nothing awful happened to keep you all from returning.”

  He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. “I’m sorry if we caused you any worry, but if you had any doubt about my intentions, then I’ll make them very clear right now.” He lowered his face so close to hers she could feel his breath on her face.

  She almost forgot to breathe.

  “I love you, Martha Cade. I want you to be my wife, and I promise to agree, unequivocally, to any and all conditions you might have,” he whispered before he pressed a gentle, soul-stirring kiss to her lips.

  Stunned by his words and too exhausted to protest, she instinctively kissed him back—and carefully not
ed this moment as one to cherish. Later, after she rested, she would need to discuss all the concerns she had about marrying him, and when she did, she would make very certain to remind him of the promise he had just made to her.

  He broke their kiss with a chuckle and climbed aboard, claimed his seat close to her, and clicked the reins. “Now that we have properly settled that issue, I should warn you that I have several other very important matters I need to disclose and discuss with you. I doubt you’ll find them very problematic, but it’s probably best if we save discussing them until you’ve gotten a solid night’s rest.”

  She fought to catch her breath and moistened her lips. “I’m not certain that kiss was proper at all, but your assumption that I wouldn’t find any of your matters to be problematic borders on arrogance, if not conceit.”

  “Then I apologize for my assumption, but I’ll make no apology for kissing you, especially in light of the very pleasant manner in which you kissed me back. We’re betrothed. It’s highly proper for us to share a kiss now and again, especially when there’s no one about to observe us,” he teased, then wrapped his arm around her. “Before you fall asleep and topple out of the buggy, lean on me and rest. I’ll make certain you keep to your seat.”

  Rather than argue with the man, she did exactly what he suggested and was nearly asleep before she even felt the buggy roll forward.

  When Martha woke up, the clouds had lifted and the sun was making a valiant effort to warm the earth before slipping below the horizon. She had to blink her eyes several times and shake her head to rid herself of the last remnants of sleep before she became fully aware of her surroundings.

  She eased away from Thomas and sat up straight, but it took a moment before she realized they were no longer in the buggy. Instead, they were sitting on the ground atop a blanket, and the buggy was parked several feet away. Resting next to her was a well-worn basket she recognized from the confectionery, and the aromas coming out of the basket were intoxicating.