The Courtship of the Vicar's Daughter

by Lawana Blackwell

  “That’s dangerous to do around doors,” he cautioned.

  “Yes. I’ll be more careful.”

  Then she smiled at him in that sentimental way she’d developed lately. He knew what was coming next.

  “Why did you have to grow up so fast?” she asked, her green eyes staring into his and looking suspiciously close to watering.

  Philip supposed she would still be asking him the same thing when he was a thirty-year-old man. Nevertheless, he forced himself to forget that Ben and Jeremiah were waiting for him at the River Bryce. After all, she was his mother. Reassuringly he said, “I’ll still be home for visits, Mother.”

  “I know,” came out with a sigh. “But won’t you be terribly homesick?”

  Perhaps if he were being sent away to Africa or Siberia, Philip thought, but to Worcester? However, he had the good sense to reply, “Of course I’ll miss you terribly, but I can’t become a doctor without schooling.”

  “I just wish we had a school here in Gresham for you. And for Laurel. You’re both so young.” His soon-to-be stepsister would be attending school in Shrewsbury and allowed to spend every weekend at home. The Josiah Smith Preparatory Academy in Worcester, however, only allowed one visit home per month in addition to a fortnight at Christmas and Easter. But it would be worth that drawback because it was the only preparatory school in Great Britain designed specifically for boys with aspirations toward the medical field.

  “Now just a minute ago you were scolding me for growing up too fast,” he teased. To his relief, she laughed and the sentimental expression faded away.

  “I did at that, didn’t I? Be sure to leave some fish in the river for everyone else.”

  The calls of rooks sweeping the air above with their black wings grew louder as Philip approached the bridge. As he suspected they would, Ben and Jeremiah had already wet their hooks. “Caught one already,” Jeremiah Toft beamed, a flush of pleasure all the way to the roots of his coarse brown hair. “He put up a good fight, too. Look at ’im.”

  Philip raised the string tied off at the bank to admire the fat perch with a flipping tail, then lowered it back into the water. “He’s a fine one, all right.”

  “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Ben Mayhew scolded. Like Philip he had red hair beneath his cap, but Ben’s was more the shade of a carrot, and his face a mass of freckles.

  “Mrs. Dearing and Aleda asked me to listen to a couple of songs on the piano,” Philip explained sheepishly as he baited his hook with one of the fat grubs Mr. Herrick had helped him dig yesterday afternoon. “Then my mother wanted to talk about my going away.”

  “She’s still fretting?”

  In spite of Ben’s casual tone, Philip could recognize the envy in his voice. He felt sorry for his friend, who wanted to become an architect more than anything in the world. Though Ben’s father made an adequate income as the village wheelwright, it did not lend itself to luxuries such as boarding schools. Ben’s lot in life was to become a wheelwright like his father and brother, and most likely the same profession would be handed down to his sons.

  “About my being homesick,” Philip replied. Then for Ben’s benefit he sighed and added, “You know, she may be right. I’ve always said there’s no better place on earth than Gresham.”

  “Then why don’t you tell her you don’t want to go?” asked Jeremiah, who like his perch had fallen for the bait.

  Ben simply smiled knowingly and said, “You know you’re dying to go off to school, Philip Hollis. You don’t have to pretend otherwise for my benefit.”

  “I’m not pretending,” Philip said weakly but then shrugged. “All right—I want to go.” The fact that eighty percent of all Josiah Smith Preparatory Academy graduates were accepted into Oxford or Cambridge—as the headmaster had boasted when Philip toured the school with his mother—was not the only reason he looked forward to going. It seemed a great adventure upon which he was embarking, a rite of passage into manhood. He would be able to bring home all sorts of news about happenings in another part of the country. The way Philip figured it, he would have the best of both worlds.

  “But we’ll still see each other when I’m home,” he told his friends. “I doubt there’s fishing at the school, so we’ll likely have to spend every spare minute here during my monthly visits.”

  “Every minute,” Ben echoed with a smile.

  Philip could still detect the longing in his voice. He touched his friend’s arm. “I’m sorry, Ben. I wish you could come with me.” The irony of it all was that Ben could likely find a way to finance his way through one of the universities, for most had work-study programs for students without means. But one couldn’t leap from sixth standard at a village school to the university.

  Ben shrugged. “Oh well, I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up anyway.”

  “That’s not true,” Philip protested. “You’re very clever.”

  “Perhaps.” Another selfless smile. “But honestly, I’m glad you get to go.”

  A silence followed, broken only by the rustle of willow boughs in the breezes and the lifting and dropping of fishing lines into the water. From downriver drifted the happy sounds of the blond-headed Keegan children, gathering rushes for basket making. After a while Jeremiah obviously mistook the lack of conversation for sadness on Ben’s part, for he said in a cheerful voice, “Wheelwrights are important, y’know. May be some of the most important folk in England. Why, without wheels, how would we get our wagons to go?”

  “Why, that’s a thought,” Ben said, clapping him on the back while sending an amused glance to Philip. “Thank you, Jeremiah.”

  Jeremiah ducked his head modestly at this affirmation. “Carriages, too, don’t forget.”

  Chapter 3

  There’s going to be trouble, Mercy Sanders thought as she watched her father talk with the four men at the gate. Though judging from his upraised and shaking fist, it was more likely he was shouting threats at them. She pressed her forehead against the window glass to get a better view. She recognized Mr. Sykes, Mr. Sway, and Mr. Casper, members of Gresham’s newly formed school board. They were with Vicar Phelps. This obviously had to do with her youngest brothers, Jack and Edgar, ages ten and eleven.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when her father turned on his heel and began stalking up the path toward the cottage. The thunder in his expression was enough to send her flying to where his shotgun sat propped in the narrow space between a cupboard and a wall. Grabbing the stock with both hands, she hurried over and lifted the tablecloth long enough to lay the gun across the seats of two kitchen chairs. She quickly went to the stove and picked up a wooden stirring spoon just as her father burst through the door.

  “Where did you put it, girl!” he bellowed a second later, wheeling around from the empty corner. Rage stained his already ruddy complexion to the color of the bandana around his neck.

  After casually stirring the pot of cabbage that simmered on a back burner, Mercy turned down the knob a notch. The Durwin oil stove was a luxury that had taken her three years to talk her father into buying. By his way of thinking, she should have been content to continue cooking meals for a father and six brothers over the fireplace for the rest of her life. What else did she have to do—besides wash and sew their clothes, tend the garden, and keep the cottage in some semblance of order? “I’m not telling you, Papa,” she said calmly. “You can’t go shooting people.”

  Her father disappeared into the pantry for a second, then returned to the kitchen to glare at her. “I’m just gonter shoot over their heads. A man has a right to protect his property!”

  “And Constable Reed has the right to lock you up.”

  Her words seemed to give him pause for thought, for as Mercy had heard it, her father had developed more than a nodding acquaintance with the damp old sandstone lockup behind the village hall in his earlier years. How would he oversee the operations of his dairy farm and herd of forty-three Friesian cattle if he were incarcerated? He certainly couldn�
�t depend upon his sons, who were so lazy that they had to be bullied into work and would run him into ruin if left in charge. Mercy looked across the room through the door he had left open and was relieved to see no sign of the four men.

  But that wasn’t the end of it, she knew. “You’re just going to have to send them to school, Papa,” Mercy told him. “The whole village looks down on us. It’s not right that none of the boys can even write his own name.”

  “Well, what about me?” he practically whined. “I need help around this place.”

  “They would be home afternoons and weekends. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt the older boys to have to take up the slack. Perhaps if they had a little less idle time, they wouldn’t get into so much trouble.”

  He appeared not to have heard her reply, for his heavy-lidded eyes were still traveling the length of the large room that served as kitchen and parlor in the half-timbered cottage. It was the color of those eyes that one first noticed about him, the restful green of a forest at twilight. Set in a face more disposed to generosity and good will, they would have been considered handsome and thoughtful.

  Sighing, Mercy told him, “Those men are gone, so you might as well give up looking for that gun.”

  Her father hurried to the door and peered outside. When he turned back to her, disappointment had deepened the lines in his perpetually dour face. “I should strap you for thet, Mercy,” he muttered.

  Ten years ago Mercy would have quailed and perhaps even surrendered the shotgun now that the callers appeared to be on their way. But the thirteen-year-old girl she was back then had not yet reconciled herself to the fact that her father was the most selfish man upon the face of the earth. As long as his sons did their share of work, he had no concern that each was almost completely devoid of good character.

  Of late Mercy had begun to wonder if the pneumonia was not what had killed her mother five years ago, but rather the years of living a life with very little appreciation to soften the drudgery. As a believer, Mercy was aware of the obligation upon her to honor her father. But she would leave the house before surrendering to a strapping at the age of twenty-three. Calmly, she told him after peeking at the joint of beef in the oven, “You do, and I’ll go live with Mrs. Brent, and who would cook and clean up after you then?”

  “It’s thet sharp tongue thet keeps men from courting, girl.”

  “It’s our family’s reputation,” she shot back, hiding the effect of his hurtful words behind a bustle of cooking activity. There was one once, she thought. Orville Trumble, the owner of Gresham’s general shop, had been interested in her when she was nineteen. But having to brave a gauntlet of surly brothers and a hostile father every time he paid a call had finally gotten the best of him. Now she had heard that the shopkeeper was courting Miss Hillock, the beginners’ schoolmistress. It was not that Mercy had lost her one true love those four years ago, for their courtship had not had the chance to blossom that far. It was the thought of what might have been that was difficult to swallow.

  Don’t think about that, she told herself. It became quite easy to keep her mind occupied some minutes later when her brothers bustled into the house for their lunch. Dale and Harold were the oldest, at twenty-six and twenty-nine years of age. Oram and Fernie, fourteen and fifteen, were next in ages, then Jack and Edgar. Except for Mercy and Edgar, who had inherited their mother’s hazel eyes, the Sanders siblings were all cast from the same mold as their father, with green eyes, ruddy complexions, and strapping physiques.

  “After we eat, I want you to scrub the water trough,” her father was saying to Jack from the head of the table between bites of roast beef, boiled potatoes, and cabbage. Clicks of pewter cutlery against crockery plates provided background noises against the usual mixture of banter and complaint, sprinkled with occasional profanity.

  “Aw, Papa—” the ten-year-old started but then clamped his mouth shut after receiving a look of warning. While Willet Sanders had taught his sons by example that authority in general was to be scorned, his own rule was supreme—and correction came swiftly in the form of a blow with the back of a hand or a strapping.

  “I seen those school men out front,” Oram said while managing to chew at the same time. “You ran ’em off, didn’t you, Papa?”

  Busy with the meal in front of him, Mercy’s father grunted something in the affirmative.

  “You should ha’ called me,” Fernie said. With one deft movement he transferred cabbage juice from his chin to his sleeve. “I would’ve took the shotgun after ’em.”

  “Tried to.” He flung Mercy a wounded glance. “Now they’ll only be comin’ back to pester us.”

  “They were just trying to help Jack and Edgar,” Mercy argued, grimacing inwardly as Dale plunged a food-grimed fork into the butter crock. Long ago she’d given up trying to get her family to use a butter knife. And about the same time she’d stopped putting butter on her own bread.

  “They don’t care nothin’ about Jack and Edgar,” Harold, the oldest, declared. “They just want that spinnin’ jenny for the school yard.”

  “It’s a merry-go-round, not a spinning jenny,” Mercy corrected. “And they do care about Jack and Edgar. Why would they risk coming out here for the sake of something they’re too old to enjoy?”

  “Well, what’s the difference anyhow?”

  After the meaning of his question became clear to her, Mercy replied, “A spinning jenny is for weaving, a merry-go-round is for playing. It twirls around in a circle as children ride upon it.” At least that was what she had read in a book.

  “It does?” asked Edgar, perking up considerably. “Can it go fast?”

  “Now, don’t you go getting ideas.” His father waved a fork at him. “You’ve enough to do here without takin’ fancy notions about school.”

  “Mebbe they should put a spinnin’ jenny in the school yard instead,” Harold snickered. “Give ’em somethin’ useful to do instead of recitin’ poems.” This caused several more snickers, for Harold was considered the family wit.

  “Give ’em something useful to do,” Jack echoed.

  “Shut up and eat,” their father ordered.

  Until she began attending the Wesleyan Chapel two years ago, Mercy had not known that there were families who actually prayed before meals and carried on pleasant conversation as they ate. Did those families know how blessed they were?

  She cleaned up the kitchen, put a pot of soup on the stove for supper, then went upstairs into her room. At the mirror over her chest of drawers, she stood untying the blue ribbon so she could comb her hair. She knew she was too old, at twenty-three, to tie her light brown hair at the nape of her neck, but it was so thick and curly that it tended to shed pins all day when she attempted a chignon. Nobody cares how I look anyway, she thought. Mother had been the only person to tell her she was pretty, but then, Mercy supposed all mothers told their daughters that. At least she hoped they did, for it had been nice to hear.

  After retying the ribbon, she stared at the mirror in a rare moment of self-scrutiny. The heavy-lidded eyes of her father and brothers had somehow bypassed her. While her own hazel eyes were not disproportionately small, they were fringed with short, wispy brown lashes that certainly did nothing to call attention to them. Two straight, fawn-colored slashes formed her eyebrows, and her nose turned slightly upward at the tip. Underneath curved a nondescript mouth with lips neither too heavy nor too thin. At least her complexion and teeth were good, for she was meticulous in her grooming, if only to prove to herself that being a Sanders did not mean a total lack of pride in one’s appearance.

  She went downstairs to the pantry next, where dozens of quart jars stood in neat rows on the shelves. Most were filled with the bounty of her well-tended vegetable garden, along with jams of sloeberry and crab apple, preserved pears and apples, and honey from the beehives behind the barn. Taking a basket from the bottom shelf, she set a jar of pickled beets at one end, some crab apple jam at the other, and wedged a loaf of raisin bread between
them to keep the jars from knocking against each other.

  “Where you goin’, Mercy?” Edgar asked, coming into the kitchen for a dipper of water just as she turned the corner from the pantry.

  Mercy smiled. She loved her brothers, all of them, but felt particularly responsible for Jack and Edgar. If only she had come to know the Lord when they were much younger and still very pliable! For now, try as she might, she could not persuade them to accompany her to chapel. A contempt for religion was another legacy passed on to them by their father. Any conversations she attempted with them about her newfound faith were met with blank stares and much fidgeting. Their need for spiritual training was another reason Mercy had to persuade her father to allow the two youngest to go to school. At least there, they would have no choice but to sit through Vicar Phelps’s chapel services every Monday.

  “I’m going to Mrs. Brent’s,” she replied. “Would you ask Papa to let you come inside and stir the soup every now and then?”

  “All right,” he shrugged. “Why do you spend so much time with that old woman?”

  “Because she’s my friend.”

  But her friend was dying. Mrs. Brent, who lived at the end of Nettle Lane, was instrumental in getting Mercy to attend the Wesleyan Chapel. Every Sunday for years the elderly woman had passed by in a wagon pulled by two black dray horses driven by her caretaker, Elliott. If Mercy or one of her family happened to be outside, Mrs. Brent would have Elliott stop. “We’ve lots of room back here,” she would call, her wrinkled face bearing a sunny smile. Even Mercy’s father couldn’t bring himself to be rude, though he never accepted the invitation. But one day over two years ago, Mercy found herself sitting between the white-haired woman and her housemaid, Janet, in the bed of the wagon.

  Mercy’s friendship with Mrs. Brent opened up a whole new world to her. Besides introducing her to the Gospel, the former schoolmistress taught Mercy to speak correctly, to read and cipher numbers, to use proper table manners, to embroider, and other little niceties that her mother had never had the opportunity to learn.