by Delia Parr
“Tomorrow would probably be better,” she suggested, without letting him know that tonight she had something very difficult to do. She had to say good-bye to Aunt Hilda.
The next morning, while the rest of the household was still fast asleep and darkness blanketed the entire town, Martha slipped out of the confectionery carrying a lantern to light her way. Even though they had said their farewells the night before, Martha could not let Aunt Hilda leave today without one last hug.
She reached Aunt Hilda’s home just in time to help pack the last few boxes into the small covered wagon that was now a traveling home for the elderly couple. The interior of the wagon was as homey as Aunt Hilda could make it. Crates loaded with supplies and the few personal belongings Aunt Hilda had wanted to take with them had been tied into place on either side of a makeshift bed that was covered with one of the quilts made by Martha’s late mother. A thick pad protected by a layer of oilcloth on top covered the front seat, and Martha hoped her idea to add the pad might help to cushion the ride for the two septuagenarians who were both beaming with anticipation and anxious to depart.
Martha could not imagine setting off for the unknown at any age, but she could not deny Aunt Hilda the right to follow her heart and join her husband on a grand adventure that would surely unleash a storm of gossip once everyone in town discovered what they had done.
Finally, when a glorious sunrise blessed the earth with both warmth and light, they shared one last hug. “Be safe,” Martha murmured, unable to say more because she had a lump in her throat and was struggling to keep tears at bay.
“I love you, sweet girl. And remember. There are only three things you need to do in this life: Follow God, follow your heart, and follow your dreams. And if you ever have any doubt about what to do, just trust that He’ll guide you to the life He means for you to have,” Hilda whispered and squeezed Martha tight before she joined her husband on the wagon seat, where he was waiting for her with reins in hand.
“We both thank you for your help,” Uncle Richard said and nodded toward the house. “Since we didn’t expect to see you this morning, Hilda left a little note for you on the kitchen table, and we finally found the key to the house,” he added with a chuckle. “We never used it, but we sure don’t have any need for it now. We left that on the table, too,” he offered, then tipped his hat in a final farewell and clicked the reins.
Martha watched through tear-filled eyes until the wagon disappeared from sight. With a heavy heart and spirit, she returned to the little cottage and took some solace from the fact that if they ever wanted to return, their home would be right here waiting for them. To that end, she vowed to keep the cottage locked up safe for them.
She walked into the kitchen and straight to the note that had been left for her on the table next to the key, which was strung on a rather long length of jute with the ends tied together. Martha smiled. Apparently, Aunt Hilda had written her note on the back of a piece of brown wrapping paper she had rescued from something she had purchased at the general store.
She left the key lying on the table and carried the note over to the window for a bit more light so she could see it more clearly and read aloud: “‘Dearest Martha, With all of our children gone before us to Glory, we’ve decided to transfer ownership of our home and property to you. Since Thomas was away, we relied on his son-in-law, Micah, to help us. We’ve already signed the necessary document, and he assures us that it merely awaits your signature before he files it with the proper authorities. Please don’t find fault with us for not telling you about our plans in person. We were afraid you’d try to make us change our minds. We pray you’ll accept our gift as a token of our love and gratitude for all you have done for us and for so many others in Trinity, and we trust that you’ll know how best to use our gift. With love and affection, Aunt Hilda.’”
Overwhelmed, Martha leaned against the window and pressed the note to her heart. Tears flowed and flowed, as much for the idea that Aunt Hilda had no intention of ever returning to the home she had called her own for over fifty years as for her aunt’s generosity.
She glanced around the kitchen and shook her head. This cottage was a gift that reached straight to her heart and wrapped around the dream that she had had for the past ten years—the dream of having a home of her own—that she had given up as impossible to achieve.
Only Aunt Hilda knew how much Martha had cherished this dream and longed for the day when she would not have to depend on anyone else to provide a place for her to live. And now this gift, this very generous and unexpected gift, fulfilled that dream.
Most unexpectedly, this gift gave Martha the opportunity to live in her own home instead of remaining at the confectionery. Realistically, however, there were a host of reasons why she was in no position to claim a home of her own right now, whether here or anywhere else. She began pacing around the cottage, walking from the kitchen to the parlor to each of the two bedrooms and back again, note in hand, as she sorted through a host of conflicting ideas that troubled her.
Martha received the rewards she earned sporadically, and they were scarcely enough to maintain a separate household. Despite Aunt Hilda’s good intentions, even if they did move into the cottage, Victoria could not be left alone here for days at a time. It would not be proper, especially now that she was betrothed, and it probably was not safe, given the number of unattached men who had come to Trinity to work on the new canal.
She paused in front of the bedroom Aunt Hilda had shared with her husband and sighed. Within a year or so, Victoria would be married, which would leave Martha living here alone, unless she married Thomas in the meantime, which meant she really had no need for this cottage since he had already prepared a home for them in the countryside.
It suddenly occurred to her that they might use this cottage when they returned to Trinity on weekends, but she could scarcely make that decision without discussing the possibility with him.
As long-buried emotions washed over her, Martha realized that the gift she had received required deep consideration, and it would take far longer than a few moments of prayer before she would know what to do with the cottage.
Still shaken by saying farewell to Aunt Hilda and overwhelmed by her gift, Martha was too distraught to be thinking clearly about her future, but she had enough wits about her to realize that the safest place to keep this note was right here in the cottage.
She refolded the note and walked straight to the kitchen pantry, where she found an empty tin. Once she stored the note inside the tin, she put it back on the shelf and shut the pantry door. She found the key lying on the table, then took it with her as she locked the door from the outside. She slipped the circle of jute holding the key over her head like a necklace and started back to the confectionery.
For now, she decided, the gift of this cottage would remain a very deep secret from everyone, even Victoria, and it would remain a secret until she was able to sign the document Micah was holding for her and discuss the matter with him, as well.
The sun was warm and the breeze was soft as she walked along the narrow path through the woods toward home. Her heart was just a little bit lighter, and her steps were much surer as she made her way back, prepared to celebrate her aunt’s generosity by devouring a rather generous piece of strudel.
Or maybe even two!
20
Martha was steps away from the back door of the confectionery when Will charged out and nearly ran straight into her.
Reacting purely out of instinct, she caught him by his shoulders and stopped his forward movement by locking her elbows and planting her feet. With her heart pounding, she held him in place. “Hold it right where you are, young man.”
“I’ve been waitin’ and waitin’ for you for more than an hour. You gotta come out to the cabin. Right now!” he demanded as he wriggled free and tugged on her hands to make her turn around.
Annoyed that he would demand so rudely that she go with him, she tugged her hands free. “I’m not
going anywhere right now—especially not so you can reclaim that spyglass—except to go inside for a bit of breakfast.”
When he glared at her, she noted that his gaze was darker than she had ever seen before. “I ain’t here for a dumb spyglass. Mr. Samuel’s got himself hurt. He needs you.”
Hurt? She had seen Samuel just the day before, when he had eased all of her concerns about Fancy’s interest in protecting Cassie, telling her that Fancy had once had a daughter who had been accosted by a couple of rowdy youths and subsequently died. Samuel had been fine when they spoke then, yet now, somehow, he’d been hurt.
“Wait right here. I need to get my bag of simples,” she said. It wasn’t until they were on their way to the cabin that she gathered more information from him. “Can you give me some idea of how badly Samuel’s been hurt?”
“Don’t know for sure, but I think it’s pretty bad. Mr. Fancy fixed him up a bit, but his arm still don’t hang right,” he offered as they followed the path behind the cemetery and into the woods. “You can fix his arm, right?”
“You should have gone straight to Dr. McMillan.” She worried that Samuel’s stubborn refusal to see a doctor under any circumstances in the past—even as he was going blind—might end up causing more trouble. She hurried her pace.
Will kept up with her, wearing a scowl. “He won’t go to no doctor. Maybe you might wanna try forcing him to do something he don’t wanna do, but I ain’t gonna do that, and I don’t think Mr. Fancy would wanna try, either.”
“You’re right,” Martha admitted, grateful for the canopy of trees that blocked the sun. “Maybe you should just tell me what happened to Samuel, if you know.”
“All I know is we found him layin’ in the woods and dragged him back home. ’Course, if I had my spyglass, I cudda climbed a tree to scout the woods, and we cudda found him faster. He said he musta lost his way to the lake and run into a tree,” he replied as they approached the isolated cabin.
Guilt about the spyglass lodged in her throat, and her hand tightened around the handle on her bag of simples. Will was just a boy, and Samuel was a good three times the size of Fancy, which made their rescue even more heroic.
There was no use arguing the point that she had warned Samuel that attempting to follow a path from the cabin to the lake to go fishing alone was entirely unsafe. Instead, she followed Will into the cabin with the intention of convincing Samuel to send for the doctor—especially if the salty old recluse was hurt as badly as Will thought he was.
She entered the sleeping room that had been added after Fancy joined them, but Will stayed just within the doorway. She found Fancy sitting on his cot. He offered her a look of relief and nodded toward Samuel, who was sitting rather calmly on his cot with his back against the opposite wall, one arm cradling the other.
The injured man’s face was quite puffy, distorting the scarred tattoo on his cheek. Above his bloodied beard, both of his lips had cracked open. His nose was badly swollen, and the darkening flesh around his eyes had reduced them to mere slits. Matted with dried blood, his gray hair lay plastered against his scalp.
Some of the blood on his head and body appeared to have been washed away, but the front of his shirt and coveralls were so stiff with dried blood that she doubted either could be salvaged. Worried that Will had been right about the extent of his adopted father’s injuries, she approached Samuel with a frown she was glad he could not see.
Before she took more than two steps, he grunted. “Widow Cade. I trust you weren’t terribly inconvenienced when William summoned you all the way out here.”
“Will you let me take a closer look at your face?”
He scowled and winced when he did. “Might as well, considerin’ you probably won’t leave till you do.”
After setting her bag on the floor, she put one hand on the wall to brace herself and leaned forward to study his head and face. She raised her brow when she saw that Fancy had apparently closed a gaping wound in Samuel’s scalp with a number of crude stitches. “You cleaned this head wound first before you stitched it closed, didn’t you, Fancy?” she asked, impressed that he had gotten Samuel to let him stitch it at all.
“Wasted good whiskey when he did,” Samuel growled.
“Perhaps you might have taken a bit of whiskey, too, just to soften your disposition,” she quipped as she studied the injuries to his face. They were far less angry-looking than the serpentine scar on his cheek, and she held back a sigh of relief that they were not severe enough to be life-threatening. “Your face is going to be awfully sore for a while. You can also expect to suffer from headaches for a few days, but I have some remedies that I can leave with Fancy to help ease the pain.” She turned her attention to his torso, where he was still cradling his left arm with his right one.
“Can you move that injured arm of yours at all?” she asked, determined to send for Dr. McMillan to set it if it was broken.
“I can move it fine. Just need to let it rest a few days is all,” he grumbled.
Fancy walked over to join her and gave her a skeptical look. “Show her.”
Samuel pursed his lips, which unleashed a trickle of blood he licked away. “I can move it,” he insisted. “I just can’t bend it.”
“Which means you’ve either broken your elbow or sprained it, which also tells me that Dr. McMillan needs to take a look at it,” Martha suggested.
Samuel responded with a deep growl. “No doctor. If the elbow needs tendin’, then you do what needs to be done.”
She drew a long breath and held it for a moment before letting it go. She had only helped to set a broken arm once before when Dr. McMillan had been indisposed with a severe case of chicken pox. He had been there to give her the guidance she needed then, and she needed it now, especially since it involved Samuel’s elbow and not the forearm, where that break had been.
“I’ll do it on one condition,” she cautioned. “I need to speak to Dr. McMillan first, and before you argue the matter, let me remind you that I’m not trained to set broken bones properly, while he is. Of course, that’s assuming you’d like to regain full use of your arm. If not, I can just go ahead, put some sort of splint on your arm, and hope for the best. It’s your arm. You decide what you want me to do.”
When Samuel furrowed his brow, Fancy offered her a grin, something he would never dare to do if Samuel had still had his vision. She waited for several heartbeats until Samuel finally waved her off. “He knows better than to think I’d ever be his patient, and if you talk him into coming back here anyway, he won’t get in.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she stated and carried her bag out of the room, with Fancy and Will following on her heels. She took a small bottle of honey wine out of her bag and grinned. “I wouldn’t tell Samuel, but a strong cup of tea laced with Aunt Hilda’s honey wine helps ease the pain after bringing a new babe into this world. I suspect it’ll work just as well for his pain, too,” she whispered before handing it over to Fancy.
He grinned back at her, and Will shoved his hand against his lips to hold back his laughter.
“While I’m gone, try to get him to take some. When I get back, I can show you how to make a poultice for his face before I tackle taking care of that arm of his,” she suggested, then hurried off to see Dr. McMillan. She could only pray he was at home and not off tending to a patient too indisposed to come to his office.
God answered her first prayer just as she had hoped, and Rosalind showed her into Dr. McMillan’s office. As usual, the doctor’s desk was covered with piles of books and medical journals, the leather box where he stored all the notes she had made for him about traditional remedies, and a stack of correspondence that threatened to topple over the moment anyone touched it. Surprisingly, Thomas was there, too.
She urged both men to keep to their seats and paused for a moment to catch her breath. “I’m sorry to interrupt you both, but I need some medical advice rather quickly.”
Blushing, the doctor waved his hand over the
top of his desk. “As you can see, Victoria hasn’t been here recently to help make some order out of this mess. I finally read your notes this morning on using a poultice with burdock leaves, like you did for Mrs. Reed a few weeks back. Oddly impressive,” he noted. “Mr. Dillon and I were just discussing business and a few matters of mutual interest, which can wait.”
Thomas got to his feet. “In truth, I believe we’re quite finished. I should leave the two of you to your work, but before I go, Martha, I want to let you know that I found Bella and brought her back.”
She frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk about Bella right now, but you needn’t rush off on my account. Samuel’s gotten hurt, and I just need to talk to Dr. McMillan to know what to do for him,” she replied and quickly described the injury to his arm.
She left moments later with the advice she needed, several splints, some thin cloth to wrap the splints into place, and a piece of heavy canvas cloth. She also made a quick stop at the confectionery to get a larger bottle of honey wine from the larder and ran up to her room to get one more thing. While she was there, she also took the key hanging around her neck and stored it in the trunk at the foot of her cot. She tossed a few more seeds into Bird’s food bowl, then she headed back downstairs to explain where she would be for the next hour or so.
On her way to the back door, Jane handed her a hunk of buttered bread, which she had doused with a bit of honey, and Martha gobbled it down as she made her way back to the cabin. With her hunger abated and her courage strengthened by the time she reached the cabin again, she followed Fancy into the sleeping room, where she found Samuel resting exactly where she had left him. Will was sitting on the cot alongside of him, but he got to his feet the moment she entered the room.
She addressed Will first. “I need you to go outside and find a good strong walking stick for Samuel because he’s going to be walking a bit off-balance until his arm heals, which may take several months. You’ll need a branch that’s thick enough not to break and long enough that he won’t have to stoop to use it.”
