The streets were quiet, everything hushed as if the whole town were sharing my anticipation of reading Mary’s diaries. I had stopped just short of buckling them into the passenger seat as I would a child. It took me about fifteen minutes to get back to town and park in front of the B&B. When I let myself in, Carroll was in the kitchen, staring silently into an open cupboard where boxes of cereal might have been, if we had bought any cereal. She turned her head to me as I walked in.
“What’s that?” She nodded at the cardboard box I was holding carefully in front of my chest. I could barely contain my excitement.
“A treat! A treasure! Serendipity! You won’t believe it. I just got back from talking with Bethany. It turns out she was following electrical wires through the house and she found a stack of Mary’s diaries hidden under a floorboard in her bedroom.”
Carroll’s eyes widened. She let go of the cabinet she had been holding open, turned to face me, and spread her hands wide on the kitchen island between us. “So no one has seen them? Have you looked at them? Are they for real?”
I grinned at her. “Yes to all of those—and they’re in good condition. I’d guess she never shared them with anyone—maybe not even Henry, considering how well hidden they were. I’ve only read a few lines so far, but it’s definitely more than a shopping list.” I stopped for a moment, playing coy. I put the box down on the island between us and slowly pushed it toward Carroll. “Want to read them?”
Carroll looked briefly like a terrier who’s cornered a juicy rat. “Are you kidding? Of course I do! When can we start? I’m free now. I was looking for a snack, but that is so not important right now.” Her slight hands fluttered in front of her, not daring to touch the box without permission, but clearly aching to get her mitts on those primary sources.
“Well, I don’t have anything else planned for the afternoon, so I figured we could lock the doors, pull the curtains, turn off our phones, and settle in to read them cover to cover. We probably won’t finish before bedtime, but we can get a good start and keep going tomorrow. Deal?”
“Deal.” Carroll turned and retreated to the sink, washing her hands thoroughly—she knew to be careful with old paper. I respected that. I followed suit when she was done, looking back hungrily at the box of diaries as I dried my hands on one of Cordelia’s monogrammed shell-pink kitchen towels. Forget the cereal, which we didn’t have anyway—if Carroll and I came up for air long enough to consider dinner, we could order takeout.
I carried the precious box of diaries as though its contents were made of glass. “Where do you think we’d be most comfortable?” I asked Carroll.
“The office? There are two nice leather chairs in there, and good lighting.”
“Got it. How fast do you read?” I picked up the box, and we walked into the office as we spoke, setting the volumes down on the coffee table and canvassing the room to shut off any outside sight lines or interior distractions. I even unplugged the landline. I had never felt so serious about reading before.
“For research, mostly I skim,” she answered, “unless I stumble on something that might be important. This will probably be more personal, so I could go slower. But I’ll follow your lead. I suppose it’s a good thing that there weren’t many relatives—not too many names to confuse. Remember, no food or drink in there—I’d be heartbroken if we damaged anything.”
“Okay, okay, I get it. Shall we don our cotton gloves?” I gestured daintily with my newly cleaned hands, and Carroll shot me a smirk. “And how will we do this? Both crowd around one volume and read it together, or should one of us read the books out of order to keep things moving?”
“I think asynchronous, sequential study may be best in this case,” Carroll demurred, pulling out a few of her best ten-dollar librarian words. “Which is to say: Why don’t you start with the first volume on your own, and when you’ve finished, you can hand it to me and start on the second? It might be important to keep events in proper order in our minds. I’ll take notes, of course.”
“Are you sure you can wait that long? Old handwriting can be hard to read—for me anyway, since I don’t do it much. You may have to wait awhile.”
Carroll bit her lip, genuinely considering the delay she’d have to endure before diving into Mary’s writing. She made a brave face and met my eyes with a sober seriousness, which I found more than a little funny. Then she nodded. “I’ll be okay. Make a note of anything you don’t understand—are the pages numbered? We’ll have to see—and we can correspond at a stopping point whenever we get too tired.” I had to give it to her: the girl had solid research methods.
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said, tipping an imaginary hat in her direction. I straightened one final curtain, joining its two sides at the center so the golden sunlight of late afternoon wouldn’t creep through the window and distract us or allow prying eyes from the outside to interrupt our time with the books.
I sat down in one of the room’s two well-worn leather chairs, moved a lamp a little closer, and carefully opened the first diary. Written in the upper-left corner of the pastedown inside the front cover was the year: 1865. Mary had written her name atop the first page—she didn’t waste paper creating an otherwise-blank cover page, but inked her name on top of the first viable space and filled the rest of it entirely with dense, looping text. I was rapt immediately.
The first thing I noticed was the name given: Mary Gawther. I realized I hadn’t come across her maiden name before. The first volume contained terse summaries of her days in the farmhouse: the war had just ended, Henry was a presence but only dimly described in a few places, and the sadness and chaos of the postwar town were evident. Mary and her mother were scraping by, nursing Henry and a handful of other straggling soldiers back to health, collecting money from the government and the grateful families of recovered soldiers wherever they could. I found myself wondering how she and Henry had gotten together. Was there a negotiation? Had it been a love match, or a practical decision, made more by the mother than Mary herself? I realized I’d begun staring into space, rather than at the page in front of me, when Carroll cleared her throat suggestively. She had obviously been waiting for me to finish the volume, glaring at me from the armchair a few feet away.
I chuckled and returned to the writing. Mary’s diary pages were no larger than four by six inches. The binding was leather, smooth and soft in my hands; the paper was of nice quality and had survived well. Mary wrote with an ink pen, although I couldn’t begin to guess what kind—maybe Carroll would know. Just as I began to wonder how this fine volume had come into the possession of someone so impoverished as Mary had been at this time, there it was, a detail offhandedly offered: Henry had given it to her. It seemed he had brought it along to the war to record his own experiences, but had been unable to find the words, and so had passed it on to his nurse—and future wife. How lovely.
When I reached the end of the first volume, I handed it to Carroll, who pounced on it with glee, having in the meantime retrieved a small magnifying glass from her bag, in case she should come upon details in need of close inspection. And so we passed the hours of the afternoon and into the evening, reading one volume and then the next, getting almost halfway through the stack. I jolted awake at around 9:00 p.m., not aware of having fallen asleep at my post. And there it was, on the page in front of me: a new detail. I whooped aloud.
“Florence!”
“What?” Carroll raised her head slowly to look at me, evidently feeling the heavy pull of sleep as well. “Who’s that?”
“I’m in this volume from, er”—I flipped the pages carefully back to the front cover to check—“1873. Mary has just had a second child, and though they’re still in the old farmhouse, she and Henry clearly need help. They’re getting to have a bit of money at this point, so they go ahead and hire someone. Florence!”
“Oh, Florence the maid!” Carroll’s face regained its usual animation. “I’m so glad to have a name to put in that attic room up there. Anything else about her?”
“She’s young—just turned eighteen, it says here. Not much else about her, but Mary seems to like her. She’s glad to have another woman in the house.”
“Is that all she said?” Carroll asked.
“For now, yes. At least we have a name and a date for her.”
We resumed our silent reading, but I didn’t last long. Just after 10:00, another sudden jolt awake informed me that my body had decided to go to sleep for the evening, whether my brain consented or not. I tried to soldier on, but my vision was getting bleary, and my mind was working like a car with a flat tire—I kept losing the thread of what I was looking at. I decided I’d better call it a night.
“Carroll? I think I have to go to bed. Can we start again where we left off tomorrow?”
She lifted her heavy head, nodded, and closed the volume she was holding, carefully sliding a slip of thick paper between the pages to keep her place.
“How far did you get?” she asked sleepily.
“It’s 1875, Henry and Mary have two kids, the factory is going gangbusters … It’s all good for them right now, but I know what happens. Or, I don’t know, actually—but I know it’s sad, whatever it is. Those kids don’t stay in the story forever. I almost don’t want to know.”
“I see what you mean.” She stood from her seat and briefly wavered, as if even remaining upright long enough to head upstairs and fall into bed was too much to ask of her remaining energies. “That’s the thing, though: when you start reading history, you learn a lot about child mortality. It wasn’t all pretty, living in those times. Very sad.”
Carroll waved vaguely and turned to ascend the stairs. I remained in my seat a few minutes longer, then climbed the stairs myself and flopped onto the big, eyelet-covered bed, still in my clothes, teeth unbrushed. I drifted toward sleep, remembering something from my distant past: an aunt who’d once sat me down in my teen years for a talk that was both jarring and revelatory. She had been a pediatric nurse, by then retired, as well as an amateur historian, and she was the first person who ever clued me in as to just how good I had it, living in the modern era. Call it a supplement to my high school history studies. Even a hundred years ago, she told me, many things I considered normal were not customary or widely available: running water, antibiotics, ultrasound machines. Even in the most heightened and precarious moments—surgery, childbirth—consistent handwashing wasn’t a guarantee. I shuddered at the thought.
It all flashed through my mind, real and imagined: the myriad small mistakes of flesh that could take a child, or a whole string of them, before the interventions of modern medicine. And there on the back lawn of the mansion, right in front of me in the grass and brambles, had been direct evidence of three such casualties, though what had taken them—genetic problem? accident? infection?—I still didn’t know. My eyelids fell shut like heavy blinds, and I drifted into silent sleep. Poor Henry, poor Mary. Did they ever get what they wanted?