by Delia Parr
Stung by her attack on the very profession he was fighting so hard to reclaim as his own, he countered her argument without stopping to choose his words more carefully. “Reporters and their editors are motivated by a thirst for the truth that can’t be quenched by anything less, regardless of how the truth might impact the people involved. Truth also sells newspapers. That’s why people read them. They know they can rely on the newspapers to tell them the truth,” he asserted. Surprisingly, he found she was using the very same argument he had used in the past when arguing with his brother about the very same issues.
“Unfortunately, that’s not always true. In fact, I think it’s usually not true at all,” she insisted and glanced over at the toddler. “It’s a rare event when any of the newspapers or the reporters who work for them are called to task for the lies they perpetuate in the name of truth. Even then, it’s too late, especially for the people who’ve been falsely maligned, their reputations destroyed, their families devastated, and their fortunes gone.”
He squared his shoulders, captured her gaze, and held it. Surprised by the depth of emotion staring back at him, he pressed her, hoping to make her refer directly to Reverend Livingstone’s recent acquittal without bringing it up himself. “You obviously feel very strongly about the matter, yet I wonder if there’s a single example you might care to offer to prove—”
“I have any number of examples I could give you,” she quipped, then paused, as if sorting them in her mind. “Several years ago, there was a reporter for the Galaxy. I can’t say I quite remember his name, but he wrote a series of articles that inspired half the city to donate to a poor elderly widow who had been duped out of her inheritance by a passel of cunning thieves.”
Jake’s pulse thudded hard as he searched her gaze, but he saw no hint of guile or any sign she knew that he was the reporter she was talking about.
“Do you remember that?”
He shrugged. “Vaguely,” he replied, even though every word he had ever written about Victoria Carlington was indelibly printed on his conscience.
“By the time a more competent reporter for another newspaper had investigated the woman’s background,” she offered after taking another peek over at her daughter, “it was too late. The woman had left the city and disappeared with thousands of dollars, along with the alleged thieves who turned out to be her own nephews.”
He had to swallow twice to get rid of the rock of emotion lodged in his throat. “You seem to have quite a remarkable ability to recall something that happened so long ago.”
“I remember it well because I was one of the readers who had been moved to send a sizable contribution to her and encouraged others to do the same, although I’ve learned my lesson and won’t ever do something so foolish again. The only positive thing to come out of the entire affair is that the reporter ran off to a place where I can only hope he’s not trusted again to report on anything that ends up in print.” She then turned and ran after her daughter, who was toddling straight toward the river.
He gripped the side of his chair and forced himself to stay seated, until he saw the woman trip and fall to her knees. When he saw that Lily had already reached the water’s edge and showed no intention of stopping, he bolted from the chair and ran past Ruth into the river. By the time he got to the toddler, waves of cold river water were lapping at the middle of her tummy, and she was laughing and smacking the water with her hands.
When he swooped her up from behind and planted her safely on his shoulders, she squealed in protest and yanked on his hair. “Bath! Lily bath!”
Gritting his teeth, he clomped back to the shoreline and saw the expression of disbelief on Ruth’s face. He realized then he had moved far too quickly for a man recuperating from a broken back. Waves broke over the tops of his boots when he stopped abruptly and grimaced, hoping he conveyed a look of extreme pain.
Ruth rushed into the water and tried to get her daughter, but dropped her hands. “I can’t reach her. Could you please take her to shore and lift her down for me?”
He shook his head, which made Lily squeal again and tug another lock of his hair. “I can’t. My back … just locked up again. I can’t take another step or even lift my arms over my head. Try again.”
She glared at him and charged away, mumbling under her breath. “You didn’t seem to have any trouble walking back and forth into the village for the past few days, and you didn’t have any trouble making repairs for any number of other women, and now you can’t carry a little child a few more simple steps or lift her down from your shoulders?” She hoisted up the chair he had been sitting on, carried it back with her, and sat it into the water next to him.
“Th-that’s my only chair,” he argued.
“And that’s my only daughter,” she snapped and put her hand on his shoulder to keep her balance while she climbed onto the seat.
Lily let go of his hair and reached for Ruth, and he had to fight to keep his balance. “Bath?” Lily asked.
Ruth lifted her into her arms, leaned on him again to get down, and cuddled the little girl close. “Yes, you can have a bath, but not in the river. You can have a bath when we get home,” she crooned as she carried Lily back to shore. When she kept walking without so much as a backward glance, he saw the current slide the chair into the water and called, “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “I’m quite sure you can get another chair. Now that I think of it, I’ve heard you’re probably talented enough to make one, but I can’t stop to help you because I have more important things to worry about than your chair.”
“What about me?” he argued.
When she turned about, he could see she was shivering just as much as Lily and even more than he was. He felt a tug of guilt he tried hard to ignore.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Don’t you have a bit of concern that you’re leaving me here, unable to move or reach my cane?”
She sighed. “Tell me why I should, and I’ll consider it.”
“In the first place,” he argued, “I was the one who saved your daughter. And in the second place, since you seem completely insensitive to the fact that I’m still recuperating and still suffering from back spasms that render me a cripple more days than not, perhaps you might want to talk to Mr. Garner when you get home. He’ll tell you it’s true. You might also ask him to send over another remedy since the one he gave me two days ago isn’t working anymore, although the fact that I just charged into the water before your daughter drowned because you were too busy spouting off about something you regret doing a number of years ago—”
“I’m coming. I’m coming,” she grumbled, “but don’t think for a moment that I won’t ask him, because I will.”
She was still mumbling something about how inconvenient it was to help him as she picked up his cane and made her way back to him. But he was so interested in how fascinating she was and how attractive she looked, despite the fact that her gown was soaked, her hair was windblown, and she had a whining toddler in her arms, he scarcely heard a word she said.
Thirteen
After her restlessness woke Lily up for the second time, Ruth rubbed the child’s back to help her fall back to sleep and gazed out the bedroom window at the moonlit sky. Instead of counting the stars to help her fall asleep, too, she tallied up the full cost of her rash decision to visit her garden this afternoon while hoping to catch Jake Spencer off guard: One basket filled with damp, sandy clothing that needed to be laundered; a forgotten shawl; two pairs of soggy boots that would need several days of nonstop sunshine to dry out completely; and some tears to be mended. But these inconveniences were nothing compared to the possible loss of Lily.
She moved her hand in a lazy arc around the small of Lily’s back while the little one sucked on her two fingers. Knowing how much Lily loved her bath, she should never have assumed it would be safe to take Lily anywhere close to the river’s edge. She should not have assumed that
an eighteen-month-old child would be content to sit indefinitely, playing with nothing more than a few blades of grass, either.
After whispering a prayer of gratitude that Lily had survived her traipse into the river with nothing more than a few chills that a mug of warm, sweetened milk had chased away, she added a promise that she would be more vigilant when it came to watching the child who was under her protection.
When she heard Lily’s breathing gentle, she stopped rubbing her back, glanced down at her, and shook her head. Less than two months ago, she would never have imagined how difficult or all-consuming it would be to care for a child this age. If she had her way, she would grow an extra pair of arms and legs to keep pace with Lily, along with pairs of eyes on the sides and in the back of her head, just to keep watch over her.
Chuckling at how ridiculous she would look, she rolled to her side. After she fluffed up her pillow, she curled up and closed her eyes, but visions of the poor man she had left standing in the river, scarcely able to hold onto his cane, reminded her that she was guilty of making assumptions about him, too.
After Mr. Garner confirmed that he had indeed given Jake Spencer a remedy to help ease the spasms in his back, he also explained that these spasms would come and go, intermittently, for some time. They would ease as his back healed, but he would likely be plagued by problems with his back for the rest of his life.
She groaned and rolled to her other side. She wished she had known that before she had spoken to the Jones cousins and assumed the man had deliberately misled her when they first met because he’d had some sort of ulterior motive. “It’s the pressure of the trial,” she murmured, although she knew she was partly to blame, too.
Because of the scandal and notoriety about her father’s trial—which the newspapers had inflamed and had only worsened with his acquittal—she could not and did not completely trust anyone here in the village. As fond as she had become of the Garners, she dared not tell them she had been lying to them from the day they met and admit that she was not a former prostitute but the daughter of the minister they secretly helped with his ministry to the city’s fallen angels.
She had not come to know the members of the small congregation here very well, but she respected and admired Rev. Haines. Yet she had lied to all of them, too, because it was just too dangerous to trust them with the truth—for Lily’s sake as well as her own.
The only one she could really trust was her father, but the longer it took for him to send any word to her, the easier it was for doubts to creep into her heart that she would ever see him again.
Loneliness and disappointment overwhelmed her spirit. “Oh, Father, help me … help me to trust in you,” she prayed.
In the midst of her prayer, Lily crawled up from her bed onto Ruth’s. Snuggling close, she lay her head against Ruth’s chest and wrapped her little arms around Ruth’s waist. “Lily home,” she murmured before falling back to sleep.
Battling tears, Ruth held the little one tight within her embrace and knew Lily had not been asking for Ruth to take her home again. She was telling Ruth, with every flutter of her little heart that was beating next to Ruth’s, that she was home when she was right here, safe and secure in Ruth’s arms.
Ruth rose the next morning with a renewed sense of hope, even joy.
When Phanaby left right after breakfast to take a pot of soup to a woman who had just given birth to her fourth child, taking Lily along with her to play with the older children, Ruth used her free time and Phanaby’s generosity to good advantage. After she made two butter cakes, she used up the scraps of bread in the larder to make a huge bowl of bread pudding thick with cinnamon and plump raisins before she filled six thick slices of bread with ham left from yesterday’s supper.
Humming softly, she went downstairs while the cakes were cooling, noted the disorder in the storeroom as she walked through, and entered the apothecary.
“You’re especially happy today,” Mr. Garner noted, without losing his rhythm as he worked a large pestle against the bottom of the mortar.
“I’ll be even happier if you let me straighten up your storeroom while Lily is napping this afternoon.”
He chuckled. “In point of fact, I think that’s an excellent idea.”
Her eyes widened. “You do?”
“Unless you’d rather work out here while I tackle the storeroom. My customers seem to like you, especially the Jones cousins. I expect them to stop by this afternoon to pick up the remedy I discussed with them the other day.”
She grinned. “No, thank you. I think I prefer the storeroom. Did you have an opportunity to make another remedy for Mr. Spencer yet? I could take it out to him sometime this morning before Mrs. Garner comes back with Lily.”
“It’s over there,” he said, nodding toward the shelves on the far wall. “Dark blue bottle. Right between the two brown ones … That’s the one,” he said when she lifted a narrow blue bottle from the shelf. “Tell him to mix a teaspoonful with a tumblerful of weak tea and drink it straight down each morning, but warn him that it can make him very sleepy. And while you’re there, you might as well tell him that I’ll probably need another week or so before I’m ready for him to start the work I discussed with him the other day.”
She furrowed her brow. “Work?”
Mr. Garner set the pestle down to wipe his brow. “He’s going to replace some of those rickety shelves in the storeroom with new ones he’s also going to paint.”
“Which is why you need the room straightened up a bit,” she offered.
“True enough,” he said and resumed his work. “Is that the smell of butter cake you brought in with you?”
“You’ll find out at dinner,” she teased and started to retrace her steps.
“Ruth?”
She stopped and looked over at him expectantly. “Yes?”
He rested the pestle against the side of the mortar and toyed with one end of his mustache before he locked his gaze with hers. “Mrs. Garner and I have been talking, and well … you haven’t been here but a matter of weeks and we, that is … we wanted you to know that we think you’re becoming a fine young woman, and we feel blessed that Reverend Livingstone sent you and Lily here to live with us.”
Her throat constricted. “I-I feel blessed, too,” she said. Although she was looking forward to being reunited with her father, she would never forget the many kindnesses she had received from this humble man and his wife. “And I’m quite sure that Lily would agree with me, if she knew how to say the words,” she said with a smile. “Not everyone would be as patient with her as you and your wife have been, and I thank you for that.”
He waved off her compliment and resumed his work. “If you don’t leave soon, Lily will be back, and you won’t find it easy to leave her behind if she finds out you’re going back to her ‘big bath,’ ” he teased.
“Then I’ll hurry along. You’ll tell Phanaby that I’ll be back before dinner?”
When he nodded, she slipped through the curtain and hurried back up the staircase. Fifteen minutes later, she was humming her way up Water Street with a basket containing one of the butter cakes, half of the bread pudding, and all of the ham-stuffed bread in one hand and the remedy from the apothecary in the other.
She soon rounded the bend and passed by her garden, then walked through the copse of trees and approached the cabin itself for the first time since he had moved into it. Since she had not seen any smoke curling up from the chimney, she assumed he was not in any condition to start a fire, but she was surprised to see that inside shutters on both of the windows facing the river were tightly closed.
She was but a few steps away from the door when a large brown bird of some sort came flying low to the ground from around the corner of the cabin. The bird landed right in front of her, looked at her, and made several sounds she could only describe as similar to a kitten purring. With her heart pounding, she took a few steps back, but the bird simply closed the distance between them.
She swooshed
her basket in front of her. “Shoo, bird. Shoo!” she cried, grateful the bird was more scared than she was and flew off. She was still trembling a bit when she knocked on the cabin door. When he did not answer, she knocked again. After her third attempt, she cocked her head. He had not been able to walk himself out of the water yesterday afternoon, which meant he simply had to be at home. Unless he was still too angry with her to answer the door, he was either feeling too poorly to get out of bed or feeling embarrassed by his weakened state.
In any case, he would hardly be able to resist the food she had brought. She knocked on the door one last time. “I’ve brought your medicine from the apothecary,” she called and gave him the instructions that Mr. Garner had given to her. She paused and set the basket down in front of the door. “I’m also leaving a few things I made for you to eat because … because I’m sorry I left you the way I did. Very sorry,” she murmured, then turned and walked away.
It was not until she had walked back to her garden that she realized she may have erred and he was not home at all. She had made a mistake to leave the basket of food sitting outside. With all the wildlife around, including the bird that had nearly attacked her, the food she had made for him might not be there by the time he got home.
Sighing, she retraced her steps, only to find the bird strutting in front of the cabin door, clucking like a mad hen; the basket she had left had disappeared. She backed away cautiously, one quick step at a time, until she was out of the bird’s view. Once she reached her garden, she never looked back and hurried home. Although she was disappointed not to have been able to give Jake her apology face-to-face, she was hopeful that the treats she had left would convince him she was sincere.
With time to spare before Phanaby would be home with Lily, she hurried down to the general store to see if more recent copies of the city newspapers had arrived. When she saw that no one was sitting on the stools in front of the warming stove, reading newspapers or gossiping, she sighed with relief and went directly to the counter, where Mrs. Sloan greeted her with a scowl.
