Yes, it will make you shudder to hear it. Edgar has become reconciled, at least to a degree. Strangely, it is Mother who grieves. Last night, knowing we would not be here much longer, I walked out to visit the grave. The path is narrow and shadowed, and I hung back, somewhat fearful. Otherwise I might have come upon Mother unawares. I heard her voice like a wraith’s in the stillness. She was weeping quietly, and as I drew closer I heard her say, “Poor motherless lass.” I crept away and left her, my eyes blinded by tears—but I suspect not as bitter and lonely as hers. For the first time in a long while I thought of Father and the true meaning behind my promise to him, and how tenderly his spirit must yearn after hers when he sees her suffering so. I do feel at times that he is near us, Verity. Does that seem foolish to you? Perhaps he even understands her purposes in marrying Simon Gardner. I’ve always believed that he understood her more perfectly than she understands herself.
The page ended here, and Millie smiled through her own tears to see that Verity had written the remainder of her letter on the back of a bill of advertisement for Dr. Schiller’s Foot Powder.
I have run out of paper, Millie, so this will have to suffice. I mentioned the fact that we are leaving. Next week we move to Commerce, which sits in a gentle horseshoe bend of the river not far from here. The Prophet Joseph has escaped his terrible prison in Liberty, Missouri, and is here among his people again. He has renamed the Commerce area Nauvoo, a Hebrew word indicating a beautiful place. The people of Illinois have been kind to us and seem to welcome us openly. It is generally hoped and believed that the Saints shall find peace here at last. Mother and Simon have bought a lot on what has been already named Mulholland Street. So when I next write perhaps it shall be from the comfort and security of our own house again. Pray that it may be so, Millie. Pray for all of us, but for Leah especially. I pray daily for you, that all is well with you, that you will find happiness in your own life, dear heart.
Your sister in spirit, with all of my love,
Verity
Millie felt sealed up in her own agony. After all Verity had gone through she could still pray! And she believed that Millie prayed, and that her prayers were efficacious. I am not a minister’s daughter, she protested from the depths of her own turmoil. No one taught me to pray. Your prayers are all I have, Verity. Keep praying for me, please. And pray for Nicholas Todd. Pray for him, lost and lonely somewhere on the streets of Liverpool. Millie buried her face in her hands and dissolved into wrenching sobs that left her light-headed and shaken when she at last blew her nose and dried her red eyes.
Suffering was entrenching Verity more deeply with the Mormons and their cause than any argument or persuasion could do. She was becoming more and more removed from Millie and the life they had known together. And what of Nicholas Todd? The only clue Millie could possibly have was the information old Daniel had brought her, that he had blessed the sick children and been exposed to their illness. It could be very likely indeed that he took ill. It could also happen—she would not give place to that thought, to that possibility. He could not be dead! She would know it, she would somehow feel it. But if not dead, then why these long months of neglect? He had last written to her in December, before Christmas. That was over seven months ago. What other explanation could there be? Had he been forbidden to write to her? Had one of his letters gone missing? Had they sent him to the farthest outposts of Scotland where no one wrote letters and no mail service came?
She must have faith. But she did not know what faith was. She knew the power of blind and patient endurance. But that was not the same thing. Verity had faith. Millie could feel it. Through months of inhuman, almost incomprehensible suffering, Verity had known a peace and strength that was foreign to Millie. How, how did she come by it? What did it mean? With a terrible, fierce need Millie longed for some purpose, some pattern that would breathe dignity and meaning into her days.
Chapter Sixteen
Nicholas stepped off the boat at the Nauvoo dock and looked around him. His legs felt shaky, and the shrill whistle of the steam engine’s valve still throbbed behind his temples. The city had looked a fair place when he gazed on it from a distance, approaching from the river. But now, passing slowly down Parley Street, the enchantment that distance had lent dissolved into the reality of poor houses, even more miserable hovels, and clusters of tents crowded with thin, weary people. Mud and the dank smell of the river was everywhere. If I came home to get well, in mind or spirit, Nicholas thought glumly, this was certainly the wrong place to come.
He inquired of several people on the street before finding one who knew his people and could direct him to them. To his horror he discovered that his family had only a tent of stretched calico to protect and house them. When his mother saw him, standing stooped and hesitant in the low, narrow doorway, she threw herself into his arms, buried her head on his shoulder, and cried like a child.
“I am all right, Mother. Everything is all right now,” he soothed.
She lifted her head, and he was staggered by how much she had aged since he last saw her. Her cheeks were sunken, the skin of her face deeply lined and wrinkled, and her hair had turned gray.
“Where is Father?” he asked. “I’ve been so anxious to see him.”
He read his answer in her eyes, but did not want to accept it. “Where is Father?” he cried.
His sister, Lizbeth, came up and placed her hand on his arm. “He died in Missouri,” she said, “before we left.”
Nicholas broke away from both of them and sat down heavily on the packed earth, all his strength drained from him. “Tell me about it,” he said. He had heard snatches of the story of the events in Missouri from the other passengers on the steamboat. But that the Saints had been forced from their homes was not a new tale. And there had been such excitement and hope for the future in the voices and faces of the passengers as they talked among one another that he had dared to hope, too.
“Tell me about it,” he repeated.
His mother sunk into her old, scarred rocker. Lizbeth settled on the ground beside Nicholas, hugging her knees to her chest.
“We were some of the last to leave,” she began, “because Mother had been ill and Father refused to let her attempt such a journey in her condition. Finally the mobs forced us from our home at bayonet point, at first refusing to let us take the bundles and goods we had secured on a little cart Father had made out of parts of an old wagon. At last they relented, after much cruel taunting, and we started off. But after a few rods Father stopped and began digging through our belongings to find an old shawl to put around Mother’s shoulders. It was bitterly cold.”
Lizbeth shivered, as though remembering too vividly. Her eyes had taken on a glazed look, shaded and impenetrable.
“The mobbers must have thought he was looking for a gun, or some other weapon. One of them sprang on him and struck his knife into Father’s shoulder, slashing cruelly. They laughed to see his pain and Mother’s terror. ‘That’ll teach you,’ the one with the knife said. ‘Now get out of here while we’ve still a mind to let you go.’
“We joined the hundreds of Saints heading east. We were on the road over two weeks, though some made the journey in eight or nine days. But Mother’s health did not improve, and Father’s wound festered and made him suffer greatly.”
She looked up to see Nicholas gazing fixedly at her with such naked pain in his eyes that she attempted a smile.
“ ’Twas not as bad as it could have been. Thanks to Brother Brigham and the Committee for Removal, there were relief stations scattered along the way which provided camp poles and wood for fires, and sometimes food. But the weather was raw, and we were always cold. When we reached the river bottom of the Mississippi it took us four days to cross it through water and mud sometimes up to our knees. We didn’t know how bad Father was. But the infection had spread in red streaks down his arm. When we reached the banks of the river he collapsed. We made a bed for h
im there, and he never rose from it again.”
She paused, but the silence was more painful than her words had been. Nicholas could picture his father struggling to get his family to safety before he would let himself die.
He rose and stumbled out of the dim tent. But there was nothing to hide him. Instinctively he found himself heading down to the river. There, in a stand of old cottonwoods, thick with dead brush and mosquitoes, he dropped to his knees. He cried, cried with the abandon of a child, cried for all the anguish he had felt and seen and experienced—and not been there to prevent.
Six to eight weeks’ effort, the brethren said, would erect a small cottage. Nicholas wondered. When he surveyed his handiwork, after working three weeks with hardly a stop, the structure did not seem anywhere near halfway complete. There was no one save his mother and sister to help him, for all else were in like condition. And he had noticed from the beginning that his mother’s strength seemed broken—or maybe it was her spirit that was broken, and little was left after that. They were a pathetic trio, Nicholas thought. But he kept his thoughts to himself and tried to count the ways in which they were fortunate. They had been able to purchase land at a greatly reduced price, being counted as one of the families who had suffered the most during the Missouri persecutions, losing husband and provider. The discount was a blessing indeed. Despite their precarious health, not one of them had yet taken sick with the ague that was confining hundreds to their beds and claiming lives by the score. Lizbeth, though but fourteen, was an excellent seamstress and had obtained work that would bring in a small income, enough to live on until the cabin was completed and Nicholas, too, could find work.
There were many other reasons to give thanks. They had their lives and they had a future, God willing, here in this place. The prophet was alive and among them, and their enemies were over the river, separated by the broad brown expanse of the Mississippi. And for Nicholas there was another blessing. He had noticed from the first that his mother needed him, turning to him continually for comfort, strength, and advice. This had never happened before. After losing a whole family of daughters, she had sorely wanted another when she had decided to try for a family again. But he had come first, and when his sister was born her gratitude had known no bounds. She had a loving husband to care for her, and an infant daughter to fuss over. Though Nicholas knew she loved him well, she had not needed him as she had the others.
Now all that was changed. Nicholas was the first one his mother turned to, and he could see the joy that he brought her increase and soften her careworn features with each passing day. It was obvious to him that his life had been preserved for this purpose. And he was willing to serve, to give of himself to his family and to the kingdom. But in the back of his mind, after all this was done—the building, the planting, the growing, the settling in—surely there would be a place in his life for his own cherished dreams. The letter he wrote before he left England should have reached Miss Cooper by now. She would at least know he was alive and safe and that he had not forgotten her. Pray heaven she would understand and soften her heart toward him. If he were to recount the history of the Mormons for the past several months, she would not be pleased. She would not understand, and she would be frightened. He must move with care. As soon as this house was up and standing on its own feet, he would write her again, give her the Nauvoo address, and try to make her see the progress and promise this city offered. Nor would he be feeding her tales. There was something here in the very air of the place. Perhaps heaven had sanctified this spot for the Saints. Certainly the essence of brotherhood and compassion abounded here; he could observe it in practice on every side.
Each day as his strength increased and his house progressed Nicholas felt invigorated, and his spirits rose along with the rough-hewn log walls. His days were consumed with labor. At night he fell into a deep and restful sleep, free of anxiety and devoid of dreams.
Chapter Seventeen
It was a ceremony as old as the sea itself. Yearly, on a Sunday in late August, the folk of Gloucester gathered at the old church. With the minister leading the way they repaired to the water’s edge, a more fitting place than within the four walls of a building, to pay tribute to those men who had been claimed forever by the sea.
This day the salt winds blew in over a green sea flecked with white. Millie stood with the others, listening to the grand words and solemn prayers. Her thoughts were with the maids of story and legend who watched and waited for vanished boats until they grew withered and gray and were buried at last with their wedding gowns for their funeral shrouds. Able seamen, she knew, know no fear and consider death not a great mystery but an ordinary part of life. Yet Gloucestermen, the oldest of all New England seafarers, sought their living upon the world’s most dangerous waters: the Grand Banks, often shrouded with mist or sown with jagged icebergs; the Georges Banks, and closer coastal ledges, all treacherous, crowded with the ghosts of cold, drowned men, sightless eyes fixed in a stare, lips set in a thin, resolute line. There was no fanfare, no sense of heroics to the work these seafarers did, only a skill passed down through the ages and a heroism quiet and unremarked upon. Millie’s father was one who had been taken by the sea and was now among those ghosts who haunted the dreams of the living, whose spirits forever hovered over their watery graves. Would there ever be peace for men such as her father?
Millicent shivered as a cloud, thick and black, rode across the sun’s path and darkened the sky. What was the minister saying?
“. . . Over two thousand Gloucestermen have gone down to the sea and never returned, and in our midst are their widows and children—two hundred and fifty-nine women and over five hundred orphans . . .”
I am one of them, Millie realized with a shudder. Voices all around her began singing the old hymn,
A mighty fortress is our God,
A tower of strength ne’er failing.
A helper mighty is our God,
O’er ills of life prevailing . . .
She looked about her at the faces, all turned seaward. How many of them sang from habit and how many from faith? How many truly believed in the words they were singing?
When the hymns were ended the minister offered a long prayer. The salt winds blew noisily and nearly drowned out his words. Then the children of Gloucester stepped forward, the young girls dressed in white, the boys in their Sabbath-day best. Their arms were laden with all the loveliest flowers of the woods and gardens and wayside fields of New England. Slowly they bent, graceful as young sea birds, and laid their fragrant offerings on the breast of the waves, and the receding tide carried them out—far out to the nameless graves that God alone knows.
Millie’s eyes stung, and not from the salt spray. The tender, guileless faces of the young children haunted her. Nameless fears played across her cold senses like phantoms. She walked homeward against an east wind, which the old children’s rhyme says blows good for neither man nor beast. The ancient rites were completed, but the ancient sorrows still shadowed her soul.
In September Nicholas’s last letter written from Liverpool reached Gloucester. Almira Fenn disposed of it with hardly a second thought; her self-imposed calling had moved into the realm of everyday habit. Her mind was not given to reflection, and she spared no consideration for the girl whose course she had taken upon herself to manipulate and direct. Life was simple and straightforward to her way of thinking; one did what one must and let fate or chance or heaven take care of the rest.
Near the end of September Millie came back one morning from a walk by the sea to find Thomas Erwin sitting on her doorstep. “You have one of the finest gardens in all Gloucester,” he hailed her.
She removed the hat she was wearing to shade her fair skin. “Thank you. I work very hard at it,” she confessed.
“Since the season is nearly over, could you be cajoled into working very hard at another task which you once appeared to enjoy?”
Millie hel
d her breath. She scarcely dared hope.
“I do not intend to give up my school to you,” Mr. Erwin hastened to clarify, seeing the expression that came over her face. “But I am in need of assistance with the lower grades. Might you be interested?” He paused only a moment. “Good.” He did not need a reply when her whole face revealed her pleasure. “Good,” he repeated. “I was hoping you would say that. The children miss you. They had grown most fond of you, you know.”
Millie did not know, really, but she loved being told. She loved the children, she loved the teaching, she loved the mere association with books and learning, with slates and paper, with words and sums. But more than all that, this work would be her salvation. She faced a long winter alone. She had wondered until this moment if she would be able to bear it.
She sent the schoolteacher home with jars of her preserved jellies and a fresh apple pie. He was profuse in his thanks, but she kindly brushed them aside. He had brought her hope and a reason to keep going day after day; it was little enough she gave in return.
In October Millie carved jack-o-lanterns with the children and knit warm scarves and mittens to protect their tender skin from the biting cold that would soon blow in. She put her garden to bed and harvested her seeds, herbs, and spices, and dried racks of fruit to put aside for winter treats. She baked apple, pumpkin, and squash pies, and cranberry bread. She continued to borrow books from Mr. Erwin. She wrote long letters and read far into the night. Her days were full, and they had some meaning to them. And time slipped through her hands.
The Heart that Truly Loves Page 15
