Choices of the Heart (15 page)

The people of Seabourne had come to think ill of Esther for going out at night too. No matter that her mother had done so for forty years, had apprenticed at sixteen—two years before she began Esther’s training—and then gone out on nighttime calls alone from the time she was eighteen. For no logical reason, Esther was supposed to go only to those women who entered their confinement during the day. But Momma was still at a confinement and had been there for the better part of a day, and Mrs. Oglevie, whose husband owned half the fishing boats and three-quarters of the businesses on the eastern shore—or seemed to—claimed she was having her pains a month early.

Esther didn’t want to go. Mr. Oglevie had tried to court her once. She had believed she wanted him to, as he was good-looking and educated, but once he did begin to court her, she discovered he was no gentleman despite his money.

He married another young woman, but as soon as her condition became known and he called in the midwives to assist her, he began to flirt with Esther. More than flirt. When she had occasion to talk with him, he touched her hair, her face, her hand, despite her efforts to deter him. He offered her carte blanche.

“I can’t go there again,” she told Papa. “He looks at me like I’m not wearing anything. Like I’m his mistress.”

Papa’s face had whitened, and his eyes blazed. She feared he would do something foolish like assault the man. He didn’t. He simply spoke with him. Oglevie accused Esther of leading him into temptation beyond endurance. Momma and Papa didn’t believe him.

People in Seabourne did. They had seen her casting a few glances his way from beneath her eyelashes, once or twice peeking at him from over the edge of her fan, or completely ignoring him at village fetes before he married. Harmless flirtations—or so she thought, until she got his attention and realized he was not the sort of man whose attentions she wanted.

But he owned the livelihoods of many in Seabourne. He employed more men than anyone else in the county, and several women too. No one would believe anything against Alfred Oglevie.

But they believed ill of the female whose looks were too fine, who sang too well, who could draw and recite poetry and Scripture, and who had learned the art of midwifery in her own right. Too many females had lost beaux to Esther Cherrett’s looks, charm, and endless hunt for someone good enough to suit her.

So she’d stayed away. That night, however, someone had to go to Mrs. Oglevie. Against Papa’s wishes, Esther went.

And learned that Mrs. Oglevie slept peacefully upstairs, while her husband—

Esther lost the fight with the bile. She doubled over the sill, coughing and gasping and thanking God this house faced the rear of the compound, away from the main house. She wouldn’t wake anyone up.

She wouldn’t sleep again. Sleep, as it had for the past four and a half months, brought dreams—bright canvas images of the Oglevie house, the kitchen, reflections in the night-dark windows. Always a face glowed in that window on the other side of the glass, watching, witnessing, waiting to spread lies calculated to ruin Esther Cherrett’s life.

She ran from it, and someone knew. Someone told her to keep running.

“What comes in my next week here?” she asked the moving shadows, whether living creatures or shifting branches she couldn’t quite tell now. “A note that says my sins will find me out?”

But they had. Someone on the mountain knew more than they should and wanted her to know it. Only Zach and Hannah had been in Seabourne. Hannah might have gleaned some gossip and be willing to spread it abroad. Zach wouldn’t. Zach believed her pure and innocent, an idyllic female.

“I wish I were.”

She wanted to be the female Zach saw. She felt like the female he saw when she was with him. Earlier she’d believed if that continued, she might be in a good place. Now, in the dead of night, with the dream reverberating through her mind and images flashing past like a magic lantern show against a wall, she knew she was wrong. Zach was fooled by her looks, attracted to them more than her character.

If she made herself unattractive . . .

She’d been trying for months, wanting to slip into the background in the hopes people of Seabourne would forget her and the great scandal she had caused, the least of the disasters that cold winter night. In Seabourne, though, she had parents and brothers to stop her. If she didn’t brush her hair until it shone, Momma or Papa would tell her to make repairs. They expected her to dress neatly, and the only soaps in the house smelled sweet or fresh, pleasant and apparently alluring to some people’s senses. Her clothes must always be neat, washed, pressed, free of obvious repairs. In the habit of a midwife, she kept her nails short and her hands scrubbed clean at all times.

She couldn’t compromise on her hands. But as for the rest . . .

As the night slipped into dawn, she began to ready herself for the day. She washed with the lye soap the Tollivers had given her for her bath the first night at their house. It irritated her skin, stung her nostrils, and made her feel nauseated to smell it. A good first step.

She bundled her hair into a knot and skewered it with hairpins without the benefit of a mirror or brush. To the touch, the texture felt rough. Her cheeks burned from using the caustic soap on her face.

She could do nothing about her dress. She had only brought a few of her plainest dresses. She chose the plainest, a gray one she had worn to more than one lying-in. Near the bottom, if anyone looked, a bloodstain that had resisted her efforts with warm salt water made a minutely darker splotch on the slate-colored fabric.

Still without looking at a mirror, she declared herself ready for the day. Everyone else seemed to be ready, awake and going about their morning chores. Brenna and Liza milked the cows. The boys fed the chickens and gathered eggs. Griff passed the school cabin with a bucket in either hand, empty from the way he swung them. He returned moments later with them weighed down. Water, perhaps. Once he departed again, empty-handed this time, his stride long and purposeful, Esther crossed the yard and arrived in the kitchen in time to assist Mrs. Tolliver in preparing breakfast.

The older woman glanced at Esther. Her eyes widened, but she said nothing other than, “If you insist on helping, you can stir that porridge.”

Esther stirred. Steam rose from the pot of corn mush. Her face grew damp and hopefully red.

“What gets you up so early?” Mrs. Tolliver asked. “The children are barely up doing their chores.”

“I think it was a cat chasing some poor creature that woke me early.”

Bless the creature for dragging her out of the dream before the end, the pain of her head hitting the floor, the screaming wife that had too often been Esther crying out in her sleep.

“I didn’t mind it, though,” she added.

“You look a fright.” Mrs. Tolliver took the spoon from Esther. “Go scrape those potatoes for frying. It’s cooler at the table.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Esther crossed the room in two strides. “Should I slice them too?”

“Yep, knife’s in that jar and pan’s hanging overhead.”

Esther scraped, carried the peels to a bucket on the back stoop presumably full of slops for pigs, and set to slicing the potatoes paper-thin like Papa preferred them. She caught a glimpse of herself in the gleaming blade of the knife, a tiny image of a female with a ruddy face and wildly frizzing hair. Distorted by the beveled edge of the knife, or did she truly look that bad? She wanted a mirror.

The kitchen didn’t possess one, but the pots had been scrubbed to a coppery sheen. Not as good as a silvered bit of glass, but close enough.

Esther took one down suitable for the potatoes. Before she filled it, she gazed into the bottom.

“That, my dear,” Mrs. Tolliver said from across the room, apparently without turning around and looking, “is pure vanity to gaze upon your reflection in a mirror. Not the kind of example we want for our young’uns.”

“You misunderstand, ma’am.” Cheeks hotter than they were when she stirred the porridge, Esther dropped the pot onto the table with a clang. “I’m ensuring that I don’t look like anything vain.”

Mrs. Tolliver dropped her spoon and spun, her full skirt coming dangerously close to the hot stove in the breeze of her motion. “What are you talking about, gal? You don’t look as neat as you did yesterday, but you couldn’t be unattractive if you wore a flour sack and tied your hair up in twine.”

“Don’t say that.” Esther pressed her potato starch–covered hands against her cheeks and added a belated, “Please.”

“Odd. Never met a body who didn’t like to be told she’s pretty. You don’t want to be pretty?” Mrs. Tolliver’s eyes seemed to grow even wider. “Never heard the like.”

“I don’t want the young men to be attracted to me. That is . . .” Esther concentrated on laying the potatoes in the pan just right. “I know you and Mrs. Brooks had thoughts about your sons finding a finer female now—now that you have the lead mine, but I don’t think I’m ready to be a wife.”

She didn’t know how she could ever be ready, despite dreaming to the contrary at times.

Mrs. Tolliver’s face softened. “My dear child, even if you don’t want to take one of our sons as a husband, you can’t go around looking frumpy. You need to be an example of neatness and cleanliness to our boys and girls.”

“Oh no, I didn’t think.” Esther’s hands flew to her hair this time, feeling a knot she hadn’t brushed out, a straggling strand creeping down her neck. “But I have to hide it.”

“No you don’t. Beauty is a gift.”

“It’s a curse if it leads men astray.”

Mrs. Tolliver snorted. “Men lead themselves astray. If they’re wanting to stray, they don’t need no pretty female to make them do it. Now go back to your room and fix—”

An unpleasant noise from upstairs brought her up short. She tilted her head back, and her face twisted as though she tried not to weep. “Speaking of not needing beauty to have a man stray—that’s my Bethann. We raised her on the gospel, but she went her way anyhow, and now . . .” She shook her head, and a tear slid down her surprisingly smooth cheek. “She won’t tell me and she won’t let me help her. But I shouldn’t even hint at this to an unmarried girl.”

“My mother—” Esther stopped. “Mrs. Tolliver, I’m a fully qualified midwife. I learned it from my mother.”

“And you never mentioned a word of it when you wrote?” Mrs. Tolliver’s pale blue eyes narrowed, grew a bit cold as her eldest son’s could. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I—I’ve left that behind. A few months ago—” Esther’s stomach cramped. “We don’t talk about patients to others unless the court demands it, but I decided I shouldn’t practice anymore.”

“Did you have someone die on you?”

Esther started at the bluntness, but nodded. “One mother. Babies, yes, a few . . . Sometimes they are just too small. Sometimes they are born too early and never breathe. That’s happened to me a few times.”

“Once too often?” The blue eyes warmed a fraction.

Esther hesitated over the absolute truth. “I decided I’d rather teach those children who survive than risk working with those who don’t.”

“I lost a few early on.” Mrs. Tolliver returned to stirring the porridge. “Makes me love those who live all the more.”

She’d lost a few infants. The poor woman.

A groan and a thud sounded from above. Mrs. Tolliver jumped and headed for the door. “Not that she’ll let me do anything for her.”

“May I?” Esther whipped off her apron and strode toward the back door. “I have some ginger. If you can get her to drink tea, it should help.”

She wasn’t still practicing midwifery if she gave the other woman a ginger tea to settle her stomach. If Bethann lost more weight, she would die. It happened.

“I’ll get her to drink it and tell me who the father is too.” Lips pressed together so hard they all but disappeared, Mrs. Tolliver stalked from the room.

Esther raced for her cabin and her precious store of ginger. She didn’t know how she would replenish her supplies. But the mountains surely yielded many herbs she could use. And she had brought her copy of
Gerard’s Herbal
. It might help, even if it was written by a British man who didn’t know about many plants growing in North America. Surely some were the same, or local women would know what worked on what.

But what was she thinking? Those were a healer’s thoughts. She. Was. Not. A. Healer. God had taken that from her as certainly as Alfred Oglevie had taken her innocence from her because no one said no to him and got away with it.

Feeling as sick as Bethann seemed to be, Esther collected the ginger and carried it back to the house. She shaved a minute amount off the root and set it in a cup of boiling water to steep. The sweet, pungent aroma filled the kitchen, clean and refreshing compared to the greasiness of lard and the blandness of corn mush and potatoes. Corn mush that needed to be stirred and removed from the heat. Potatoes that needed to be set on the stove and fried along with slices of ham.

First she carried the ginger tea upstairs. She could guess where Bethann’s room lay—along the back wall and in the corner—to be above the kitchen. The chamber formed the bottom edge of an L-shaped hallway with rooms opening on both sides—not an imaginative design, but large and growing more comfortable as work progressed. The doors stood open along with the windows, so a pleasant breeze swept along the corridor. No curtains hung at the windows, and the walls shone a uniform white. But every bed bore a neatly spread quilt in bright colors and intricate designs.

Esther reached Bethann’s room, the only one with a closed door, and knocked. Mrs. Tolliver opened it.

“Tell her to go away,” Bethann called from inside. “I don’t need no witch doctoring.”

“She’ll drink it.” Mrs. Tolliver took the pewter mug. “You fetch Liza to help with the breakfast as soon as she’s done scrubbing out the milk pails.”

“Whatever it is I can do.” Esther nodded and turned away.

Again she caught the neatness of each room—plain and swept floorboards with handmade rugs pounded free of dust.

Her hands flew to her hair. She explored the tangles, the frizz, more slipping pins. She would get Liza, all right—get her to take over for ten minutes while Esther returned to her mirror and brush.