by Ellery Adams
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light,
I love thee purely, as men strive for right.
Nora looked away from Rose’s lively script. Where had she seen that sun and candlelight reference before?
The tintype. A ripple of excitement ran through her. “By sun and candle-light” had been written on the back of Rose’s portrait—that hypnotizing image of the self-possessed beauty in the white dress.
If Rose’s journal was from the same year as her photograph, then it was written in 1862. That meant Rose would have used a quill or dip pen and an inkwell filled with black ink.
Nora had no experience removing wax from pages that weren’t typeset. Normally, she’d used an iron and clean brown paper bags to remove chunks of wax, but the diary didn’t belong to her. She couldn’t risk damaging it just because she wanted to read the rest of the entry.
Getting up from the table, Nora decided to have a cup of tea. She put the kettle on and stared at the blue flames licking at the kettle’s base.
In reading Rose Lattimer’s diary, Nora had come to know her. Rose was a strong-willed, generous, and courageous young woman. She was also lonely. Her free time, such as it was, was devoted to reading. By and by, she’d fallen in love. The man was referred to only as C, and Rose wrote about him every night. By flickering candlelight, she dreamed of being with him.
C has to be Chea Sequah, Nora thought.
Rose had only mentioned his name toward the beginning of the diary, but she wrote about his midnight-black hair, his strong hands, and his dark, quiet eyes many times.
As the kettle gurgled, Nora wondered why the entry with the line “Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light” was covered in wax. Had a wounded soldier needed Rose during the night? Or had someone else knocked on her door? Had she risen from her chair, her heart fluttering like a hummingbird, to find Chea standing in the hall? Had she invited him in, despite the risks? Had they made love while Rose’s candle dripped like a leaky faucet onto her diary page?
When the kettle whistled, Nora poured the steaming water into a mug loaded with a bag of chamomile tea. She took the mug into the living room, opened her laptop, and typed the lines from Rose’s entry into the search box.
The first result told her what she wanted to know. The lines were from “How Do I Love Thee?”, a sonnet written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1850. The poem was only vaguely familiar to Nora, so she sipped her tea and read it in its entirety.
It was a poem about a woman deeply in love with a man.
Not your husband, Nora silently spoke to Rose. He wasn’t there. You barely mention him, but C comes up again and again. C is the man you loved by sun and by candle-light.
Nora knew she was jumping to conclusions, but her theory felt right. Rose Lattimer had fallen in love with Chea Sequah while her husband was away. Though the Colonel had died in battle, the Lattimer line had not. Had Rose been pregnant when he left?
Nora thought of the bird carved into the hidden niche.
“I need to know when Rose’s husband died. And when her first child was born,” Nora muttered to herself as she returned to the diary.
Believing she’d find the rest of Browning’s poem under the wax, she decided to move forward. Turning the stiff, heavy page, she kept reading.
As the nights passed, Rose’s prose changed. The dreamy, girlish quality of her descriptions of C matured. They became more intimate. More tender. Her obvious happiness lasted for several weeks. And then, the tone of her entries changed again.
She began to worry about the future in a way she hadn’t before. She hinted at changes. And of the need for deception.
The last page mentioned her leaving Miracle Springs to visit her husband. Though apprehensive about their reunion, she wrote that it was necessary. She believed all would be well upon her return and that she would be able to put her worries aside.
Her diary ended prematurely because someone had ripped out the final entries.
The missing pages raised several questions. Had Rose seen her husband before he died? Had her plans, whatever they were, fallen into place? Or had they failed?
Nora ran her fingertips over the ragged ruffle of paper left from the tearing of the pages and considered the meaning behind Rose’s fatigue and her sudden aversion to certain foods and smells. “Changes. Deception. Necessity. Were you pregnant?”
The book had no more to say.
Nora was about to close the back cover when she noticed that the hinge had come loose. It had probably been damaged when the pages were torn out.
“I can fix that,” she told the diary.
Nora gathered her book repair supplies from a cabinet built into the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Normally, she’d repair a broken hinge with binder tape. For old or valuable books, however, she kept a small supply of Japanese paper and PVA mix on hand.
It took love and skill to repair a broken book, and Nora prepared her workspace with care. Like Lou and Patty, she’d become attached to Rose after reading her diary. Nora admired the intrepid young woman. Rose had disregarded politics and propriety to help people. Her charitable spirit meant more to her than her reputation. It couldn’t have made her life easy, but she stuck to her guns and assisted soldiers on both sides of the war.
Now, it was Nora’s turn to help.
Her first task was to remove the old adhesive from the spine. As she was about to begin this task, she noticed a thick ripple in the endpaper. Where the endpaper met the hinge was a gap, and something poked out from the gap. Nora leaned closer to the diary. Was it a thread? A piece of twine?
Picking up her tweezers, she withdrew the object. The moment it was freed, Nora let out a gasp of revulsion and dropped it.
Laughing at herself for being spooked by a lock of hair, she grabbed a magnifying glass and studied it. The lock was very small and had been tied with a thin pink ribbon. The hair was short, wisp-fine, and black. It looked too delicate to belong to an adult.
“A baby,” Nora breathed.
She got up from the table. She needed to move. She needed fresh air. She needed to think.
Throwing on a sweatshirt and sneakers, Nora went outside and began to walk. Her thoughts swarmed around her head like gnats.
Danny in the river. Danny’s pottery at the inn. Cherokee Danny. The red bird at Cherokee Rock. The red bird on Danny’s pots. The red bird in the wall at the inn. Rose’s lover was a Cherokee.
Was the bird a love note? An invitation for Rose’s lover to climb the ladder to her bedroom? Had C knocked on her closet door, stepped into her room, and kissed her? Had he and Rose been too caught up in discovering each other to notice the candle burning, to see the wax pooling on the pages? Whose lock of hair had been hidden in Rose’s diary?
For days, Nora had believed that there was a connection between Danny Amo-adawehi and the Inn of Mist and Roses. Rose Lattimer had been trying to tell her as much. She’d sent her sweet, sickly rose perfume into the air, but Nora had failed to translate her message.
She still couldn’t decipher it. She was still missing key elements.
She walked to Miracle Books and looked in the window. The ceiling lights illuminated the empty spaces where the banned books had once sat. The tape covering the hole in the glass shimmered like a mirage.
Turning away, Nora walked on.
She crossed the street and entered the park. Evidence of the day’s events still remained. Barricades and signs. A scattering of trash. But it was quiet. This was unusual on a mild Saturday night in April, but Nora was grateful for the tranquility.
She sat on a bench and wondered how June was doing. She sent her friend a text even though she didn’t expect a reply. Estella and Hester were likely relaxing after the long and tiring day, and Nora didn’t want to bother them with her disordered theories. She would see her friends tomorrow. Everything could wait until then.
Her phone sat in her hand. The screen glowed, as if waiting for her fingers to make contact. She ignore
d it, gazing out at nothing until the screen went dark again. In the distance, she heard the lonesome whistle of a train.
The grass around the bench was wet with dew. A paper cone sat on the ground at the base of a trash can. There were still a few threads of cotton candy stuck to the cone. The spun sugar glittered in the lamplight. Nora heard a rustling overhead. She raised her eyes to see a cloud of bats flying toward the gazebo.
Nora glanced back down at her phone. She pulled up her Safari app and typed “Chea Sequah” into the tiny search box. The first hit was a pronunciation guide. Nora clicked on the link and heard a man’s voice. He said, “Chee-ah-seh-kwah.” She replayed the audio file and spoke the name out loud. It was a good name. A strong and powerful name.
Returning to the search results, she found a link to a Chea Sequah on Facebook. The second hit led to another social media site. The third hit was a site of baby names and meanings. Nora clicked on it.
She was redirected to a preview page on Google Books featuring a book on baby names. Nora was thrilled to see Chea Sequah listed in the glossary. Unfortunately, the page with that name wasn’t included in the preview.
Returning to the search results, Nora clicked on another baby name site. This time, she was taken directly to a page listing the name’s origins (Native American) and its gender (male). The last line explained the meaning.
Nora read it again and again, her eyes swimming with tears.
“Chea Sequah,” she whispered into the quiet night. “Red Bird.”
Chapter 17
Memory is the diary that we all carry with us.
—Oscar Wilde
The sun had barely risen over the green hills when June sent a group text asking her friends to meet at her house at noon. Because her morning would be divided between church and a visit to the county jail, lunch would be simple fare.
Nora replied that she’d be there and turned back to the Sunday paper. She’d already circled several yard sale ads and planned to be among the first shoppers at each address. After hitting the yard sales, she’d check out the flea market. She also needed to return Rose’s diary.
Pulling on a semi-clean pair of jeans and a Dr. Pepper T-shirt, she parted her hair down the middle and wove it into two French braids. This hairstyle worked well with her moped helmet.
The first few yard sales were a bust, but the last one was a gold mine. Nora found a seventy-fifth anniversary box set of Nancy Drew books in excellent condition and a handful of vintage Enid Blyton Famous Five novels. Nora had a special affinity for Blyton’s books. As a girl, she’d wanted to be like those fictional children. She’d longed to roam the countryside searching for smuggler hideouts, cook meals over a campfire, and spend the majority of her time without adult supervision.
“I’m downsizing,” the woman told Nora. “It’s hard to let these go, but I have to do it.”
“They’ll be adopted by new readers. I hope that makes it easier to part with them.”
The woman smiled. “I’ve been in your shop, so I know they’re going to a good place. I have more boxes inside. They were too heavy for me to lift, but you’re welcome to look through them.”
Nora ended up making several trips from the woman’s house to Miracle Books. In addition to the Nancy Drew and Enid Blyton novels, Nora bought a Beatrix Potter set in its original shrink wrap, a collection of American Girl books, the Little House series in pristine condition, a handful of Sharon Draper’s clubhouse mysteries, and several unread Erin Hunter Warrior books. The woman was so pleased by her sales that she gave Nora a dozen Golden Books for free.
The successful shopping trip would plump up the bookstore’s diminished inventory, which was good. Even better, Nora had been able to dwell on her favorite subject: books. For two precious hours, she hadn’t thought about Danny, Micah, red birds, or the any of people connected to the Inn of Mist and Roses.
After unloading her moped basket for the final time, Nora drove to the flea market.
She couldn’t enter the big barn without thinking of Danny. Memories of their one and only meeting replayed in Nora’s mind as she walked up the first aisle. Nothing caught her eye and she turned down the second aisle. She stopped short when she saw Marie at the booth she used to share with her husband.
There was no pottery on display, only Marie’s baskets and a selection of loom-woven blankets. Marie sat in a folding chair, her face buried in a book. Nora was happy to see that she was reading one of the titles from her kindness tote.
“Hey, Marie.”
Marie looked up, saw Nora, and became instantly animated.
“I was hoping you’d come today,” she said, dropping her book on a table. “I found something. Can you come around back?”
Nora didn’t have to be asked twice. She hurried around the end table, taking care not to bang into the beautiful baskets or the display of beaded jewelry. “Is all of this yours?”
Marie followed Nora’s gaze. “No. I got in touch with two Cherokee artisans who’ve been looking for a place to sell their stuff. They’re both women around my age with kids. We’re going to try splitting shifts. We’re hoping to earn a little money on the weekends.”
Nora was proud of Marie. It must have taken a gargantuan effort to reach out to those women in the midst of her grief.
“Sounds like a great idea.” Nora gave Marie an encouraging smile.
Marie touched her belly. “I need to earn a living. The money in the bank won’t last forever. I have to try. I have to be what this baby needs me to be. I’m eating. I started reading the books you gave me. And I looked through Danny’s memory boxes. That’s what he called his two old suitcases stuffed with papers and pictures.”
She moved around the booth, searching for something. When she looked under the table in the center of the booth, she found her purse sitting on top of a cardboard box. Next to her purse was a padded envelope.
“Lots of things in Danny’s memory box were from before we were married. I never saw them. Like this old poetry book. It was in a leather bag. I think it’s a saddlebag. Along with this.” She opened the envelope and took out a lump of stone. It was gray with veins of white. When Marie flattened her palm, Nora realized that it wasn’t just a stone, but a carved animal effigy. Of a bird. A bird made of stone.
Nora’s fingers stretched out. She yearned to touch the stone. “What is it?”
“An old Cherokee pipe,” Marie said, handing it to Nora. “Made of soapstone. I thought it might be tied to the red bird name, so I asked Danny’s mom about it. This pipe was her grandmother’s, and it’s been passed down from generation to generation, just like the Red Bird nickname. Always to a girl. Danny didn’t have a sister, so his mom gave him the saddlebag. I guess he put it in his memory box and forgot about it.”
Nora turned the pipe over. The sculpture, though primitive, was undeniably charming. From the proud jut of the bird’s breast to the curve of its beak, it was full of personality.
“Sweet and strong,” Marie said. “Like the red bird from the Cherokee story.”
Nora had been thinking the same thing. She looked at the stone pipe and thought of the red bird’s kindness, of how he’d come to the wolf’s aid when no other animal would.
“It feels good to hold,” she said, reluctantly giving the pipe back.
Marie proffered the poetry book next. The small, delicate volume in crimson leather and gilt had patterned boards and endpapers. Brown spots marred some of the pages, but most were clean. The book was beautiful and quite rare. All this time, Danny had been in possession of a very old, very valuable copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
“This is in incredible shape.”
Marie shrugged. “I think it was wrapped in a baby’s gown. One of those fancy white christening gowns. It’s mostly yellow now, especially the lacy parts. I think it’s as old as the saddlebag.” She stared at Nora. “Can you tell me what these things mean?”
It felt surreal to Nora to be in the middle of
the flea market, surrounded by the din of shoppers and the aromas of buttered popcorn and candied nuts, knowing that the most valuable treasure in the building was in her hands.
“I believe Rose Lattimer fell in love with one of Danny’s relatives. A Cherokee man living near Miracle Springs during the Civil War.” Nora tapped on the book’s cover. “I also believe that a poem from this book was their poem. Couples have their song, but Rose and Chea Sequah had this poem. Chea Sequah means ‘red bird.’ ”
Marie smiled a small, sad smile. “That’s romantic. And impossible. A white woman couldn’t fall in love with a Cherokee, and a Cherokee wouldn’t dare look twice at a white woman. Today’s Cherokee deal with discrimination all the time, but nothing like they faced back then.”
“Theirs was a secret relationship for many reasons. Rose was also married. Her husband, who was almost twenty years her senior, left Miracle Springs to fight in the war. I can’t say this for sure because I don’t know the genealogy of the Lattimer family, but I believe Rose had a baby after her husband left.”
Marie’s eyes widened. “Red Bird’s baby?”
“These are just theories. I’m going to spend the rest of the day researching the family and the house. I’ll let you know what I find. In the meantime, I can tell you this. That poetry book is worth some money. I’ll look up its value and give you an estimate but handle it with care.”
“Okay.” Marie put the book back into the envelope. As for the pipe, she curled her fingers around it and held it close to her chest.
Nora hated to leave her alone in the booth, but she had to finish her shopping if she wanted to be at June’s by noon. She thanked Marie for looking through Danny’s memory box and suggested that she share their conversation with Sheriff McCabe.
