Sins of a Shaker Summer (3 page)

“We must find ways to cultivate this gift that Patience has shown,” Wilhelm said as they passed the barn and stepped into the first fields east of the village. A narrow path ran through the half-grown rows of sweet corn to allow workers and horses quick access to farther-flung acres. Rose walked behind Wilhelm to keep enough space between them.

“If her gift is true, then surely it will simply emerge,” Rose said.

“Nay, we must encourage it, give it opportunities to grow and mature.”

“Are you suggesting we poison a few more Believers so Patience can practice her technique?” Rose knew at once that keeping such thoughts to herself would be wiser, and she vowed to curb her tongue next time. Or at least to try.

Wilhelm did not turn to glare at her, but she saw the muscles in his neck bunch. “Thy levity, as usual, is ill timed,” he said. “But then, the future of the Society has never been of great concern to thee, has it?” Wilhelm and Elsa were the only North Homage Believers to use the archaic “thee” instead of “you,” and to Rose it seemed the word was always couched in an insult.

“Even if Patience has the gift of healing, the Society's future does not depend on her; it depends on us all and on God,” she said in a clipped voice.

“Yea, it depends on us, on our ability to listen and understand when God speaks. God is speaking through Patience. He has given her healing hands, and maybe other gifts as well. It is up to us to hear the message and welcome the messenger.”

Rose kept silent. His words had meaning for her, though she was unconvinced as yet about the reality of Patience's gift. Wilhelm seemed unconcerned about the girls' survival, because he believed in the healing. Rose required more evidence.

“We shall have Patience lead the dancing at Sunday worship,” Wilhelm said.

“Certainly I have no objections to that,” Rose said, ignoring the fact that Wilhelm had not asked her opinion. “But I wonder how Elsa will react.”

“She will be glad for the Society, naturally,” Wilhelm said.

Rose held her tongue this time, though she suspected that Elsa's prideful nature would balk at letting another sister
gather too much attention during dancing worship. As if reading her thoughts, Wilhelm stopped and faced her.

“Now that I think of it,” he said, an unsettling gleam in his eye, “watching Patience develop her gifts might help Elsa refine her own. Furthermore, I believe we should open the worship service to the world again.”

“Wilhelm, I think that is unwise.”

“It is time,” Wilhelm said. “It is time we showed ourselves again to the world.” He left Rose standing amidst the young corn, an all-too-familiar dread rising in her chest.

By midafternoon the steamy air in the Laundry felt heavy enough to sweep aside. Rose decided to make her visit quick. She found Gretchen, the Laundry Deaconess, pulling wet clothes out of a large washing machine. Her loose sleeves were rolled high above her elbows, and perspiration formed dark patches on her cotton dress.

“Where are the others?” Rose asked. “Surely they aren't upstairs, not in this heat.”

“Nay,” Gretchen said, “I've sent them all to deliver clean laundry and then to their retiring rooms for a rest. We'd had one fainting already, and I didn't want to risk more.”

In the summer, laundry was done as simply as possible, without benefit of the upstairs ironing room, where clothes were hung on steam-pipe drying racks and exposed to pumped-in heat from the downstairs boiler. On sultry days such as this one, temperatures in the ironing room soared to levels neither God nor Wilhelm would expect Believers to endure.

“Let me help you with that,” Rose offered.

“I won't object,” Gretchen said. “This is the last load for today, and the sooner we get these hung up, the sooner I can splash some cold water on my face.”

Together they carried the heavy basket through the back door to the rows of clotheslines.

“I suppose you want to ask about Nora and Betsy?” Gretchen asked.

Rose nodded as she accepted a handful of clothespins and pulled a damp brown work shirt from the basket.

“I found them right between the Center Family house and the Trustees' Office. They were both lying in the grass, and Nora was babbling something about angels and monsters and tea.”

“Could you tell where they'd come from?”

“Nay, but I wondered if they'd been in the Center Family house. With no one there, except in the kitchen, they could have sneaked into the root cellar to play. I'm sure it's lovely and cool down there.” Her clothespin hovered above a blue sleeve, her eyes faraway as if imagining the coolness.

“When we've finished here, go straight to your retiring room and rest with a cool cloth on your forehead,” Rose ordered.

“On any other day, I'd argue with you,” Gretchen said, “but today I'll just say a fervent thank-you.”

“Not too fervent,” Rose said, “or you'll melt.”

The Society's root cellar was a large room under the Center Family Dwelling House. Two stairways led down to it—one from the kitchen and another from a storage area at the north end of the building. Since the kitchen garden surrounded the north and east sides, Rose thought it possible that the children might have picked some herbs and taken them down to the root cellar to play. She couldn't imagine what culinary herb could have made them so ill. Perhaps they had risked sneaking into the nearby medic garden, but surely someone would have seen them.

Rose walked all the way around the large limestone building, looking for telltale bits of discarded plants, but she saw nothing. Of course, anything out of place would be cleared away by passing Believers. She returned to the front of the dwelling house and entered by the sisters' doorway.
Her gaze on the floor, she walked between the separate staircases for sisters and brethren, past the kitchen entrance, all the way to the back of the building. No leaf or clump of dirt marred the neatness of the floor or the stairs down to the root cellar.

The cellar itself would need a more thorough cleaning before the fall, when potatoes and squash would be brought in for storage and winter use. By this time of the year, most of their stores had been used up. Much of what remained had withered or rotted and been tossed out. Despite the earthy air, the coolness tempted Rose to tidy up for a while. But she resisted. She saw no sign that children had used the room as a play area, and Nora's and Betsy's lives might depend on identifying, as quickly as possible, what they might have ingested.

On her way to the stairs, Rose peeked into a side room lined with shelves. Two areas held canning jars. One section contained dwindling rows of string beans, beets, and pickles in dusty glass jars. The other area, on the opposite side of the room, was beginning to fill with jellies in pale hues. Rose went closer to read the labels: rose-petal, violet, and peppermint jellies. Just reading the names made her tongue tingle. Was this more experimentation? She had certainly lost contact with work assignments since leaving the trustee position in Andrew's hands.

Rose emerged from the staircase leading back to the kitchen, startling the kitchen sisters hard at work beginning preparations for the evening meal. The huge cast-iron stove was unlit; given the heat, the meal was to be cold and light—a large salad, iced potato soup, pickles, and bread.

“Sorry, Gertrude, I didn't mean to pop out at you so suddenly,” Rose said, as the Kitchen Deaconess squeaked and hopped backward at seeing her.

“Goodness,” Gertrude said, fanning her flushed face with a large hand. “Goodness, goodness. What were you doing down in the root cellar? There's almost nothing down there now but blessedly cool air. Honestly, I've been wanting
to move the kitchen downstairs before we all melt into puddles on the floor.” Before the last words were out of her mouth, Gertrude had spun back to the large worktable and begun ripping chunks of greens into a bowl. The lettuce had bolted in the heat, so she was using mustard greens and young cabbage. Rose selected a cabbage and began to help.

“I wondered if Nora and Betsy had by any chance been playing downstairs, perhaps with some herbs from the medic garden or something else that might have made them sick.”

“Nay, I don't think so,” Gertrude said. “At least, we've never seen or heard them. Someone would have told me.”

“Will you ask the others for me?”

“Certainly.”

Rose gathered a handful of curly mustard greens and ripped them into bite-sized pieces. “I noticed some interesting new jellies downstairs,” she said.

“Aren't they lovely?” Gertrude said.

“Andrew's idea?”

“Certainly not! Andrew has no interest in culinary herbs. He's even using more of the herb crop for medicines and leaving us less for cooking than we used to have, and I, for one, am quite disappointed. We Believers are known for our cooking, and we've always sold wonderfully flavorful herbs to hotels all over, haven't we? Well, I just thought I'd show him a thing or two about our cooking herbs. Those new jellies came from us, the kitchen sisters. We all put our heads together and came up with some very tasty ideas, if you'll forgive us our pride.” The last was said with a quick glance at Rose, who smiled to show there was nothing to forgive.

“Has Patience shown any interest in culinary herbs?”

“That one? Not likely. She isn't interested in anything but her precious experiments. And those so-called gifts of hers, of course.” Again she darted an uncertain glance at Rose, who was in a quandary. She wanted all the information
she could get about the Medicinal Herb Shop workers, but she would be condoning gossip. With reluctance and a stinging conscience, she decided that information, just now, was more important than living as the angels.

“You think her gifts are false?” she asked.

Gertrude sniffed. “I shouldn't judge, I know, but it just doesn't seem right to me. She isn't the sort of person Holy Mother Wisdom would endow with gifts, that's my opinion. She's . . . she's mean-spirited.”

“Why do you say that?”

Gertrude's lips hardened into a straight line, and she ripped away at her cabbage as if it had to be killed before it could be eaten. To Rose's surprise and dismay, a row of tears gathered along her bottom eyelids. “I'm very proud of this kitchen, and my kitchen sisters, and all the work we do. Why, without our work, this Society wouldn't even survive, would it?”

“Nay, it would not.”

“Well, I was so proud of the inventive new recipes the sisters and me came up with, and I was telling Patience about them, and you know what she said? She said we were using up too many of the herbs, and we had to stop! Well, I said, ‘The herbs are ours, too, you know, and they were ours before they were yours, and where would you be without the kitchen sisters, anyway?' And she said she could live on plain water and bread, which she could easily make herself. She said herbs are wasted on cooking and that . . . that we were just a bunch of gossipy old hens.” The tears had spilled over, and Gertrude was trying to mop them up with her sleeve without letting go of her cabbage.

Rose put an arm around her shoulders. Dealing with tears was not her strength, but she had learned from Agatha that sometimes a touch is better than any words, so she said none. As Gertrude settled down, Rose considered the hints she was gathering about Patience. An unpredictable woman—blunt, judgmental, harsh, arrogant, perhaps gifted. But was she anything else? Was she unthinking enough to
leave a colorful, poisonous compound lying around to tempt children? Could she even have enticed them into drinking or eating something, as part of one of her “precious experiments”? It was time to get to know this woman better.

R
OSE HAD NOT ENTERED THE
T
RUSTEES
' O
FFICE FOR WEEKS
. It had been her home and her workplace for ten years. Leaving it, moving to the Ministry House to live and work as eldress, had been a wrenching change. She had thought it best to throw herself into her new role and to cut her ties as fully as possible with her old one.

She sat in a ladder-back chair in the office that used to be hers, facing Brother Andrew, the new trustee. Everything looked the same, yet strange somehow, like her retiring room seemed after she'd returned from visiting another Shaker village. The strip of pegs encircling the wall held a man's blue Sabbathday surcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. The aged pine of the double desk had the same orange glow, but was perhaps not quite as tidy as when she— Rose stopped herself before her thoughts went beyond uncharitable to prideful.

Andrew Clark watched her in silence as she drew herself back to her mission. He seemed to know when she had returned.

“Have you brought news of the children?” he asked.

“Nay, there is little news. I was hoping that you could shed some light on this mystery,” Rose said.

“Me?” Andrew's dark eyebrows arched in surprise.

Rose regarded him for a long moment. “Surely you realize that Josie asked you to examine the girls' symptoms
because she hoped you might recognize them. In fact, it seemed to us that you did. Yet you said nothing.” Rose gazed at him with an expectant tilt to her head. The gesture had often extracted information from hesitant informants, but Andrew only frowned.

“I'm sorry, Rose, but I could not identify what the girls might have eaten, if that's what they did. Certainly there are several plants or medicines that could cause such symptoms if eaten or taken to excess, but . . . It seemed to me that Josie did the best thing possible for them—she gave them an emetic. That's all I would have recommended.”

“Andrew, I apologize for being so insistent, but if there's anything, anything at all that you suspect, we can't afford not to know.”

“Truly, I would never keep knowledge to myself if it would help those children. You must believe me.”