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IDA SET ASIDE volume three and opened the final volume to the first page. I saw her eyes widen in what looked like shock. “Biscuit? When you pulled these journals from that trunk, are you sure there wasn’t another book lying in the bottom?”
“Pretty sure. Why?”
“This”—she indicated the open page—“says Volume Five.”
“Five?” Pat leaned forward. “It can’t say five. This is the fourth book.”
Ida spread her hands. “It says five. It may be written backwards, but I know what I’m reading.”
“Maybe she just made a mistake,” Dee suggested.
“Not Mary Frances Garner Brandt.” Maddy turned to Ida. “She’s meticulous about dating each entry. When does this one pick up?”
Ida tilted the page toward the lantern, as if extra light might give her a different answer. “It’s the last day of December.” She paused and scanned our faces. “Seventeen-sixty-seven.”
“Impossible,” Rebecca Jo said. “How could we have lost one?”
“Oh dear,” said Sadie.
Even Amanda voiced dismay. “But how will we know what happened between then”—she pointed to the previous volume—“and now?”
Dee mirrored Amanda’s gesture. “That one ended in seventeen-fifty-four. We’re missing a dozen years!”
I headed for the trunk where I’d found the journals. Even though I’d already searched it thoroughly, we looked a second time, forming a sort of bucket brigade—everybody except Ida and Carol and Charlie—unloading the piles of papers and checking each stack carefully. But no other journals showed up.
“Doggone it.”
“Phooey.”
“Rats.”
“If you’re quite finished?”
Ida’s tone left little room for objection, but Dee objected anyway. “I want to know what happened to those missing years.”
“Welcome to the world of the historian,” Carol said. “Frustrations like this are unfortunately frequent. Think of how many times we’ve wanted to know more as we’ve read these entries. There are always more unanswered questions than ones for which we know the beginning, middle, and end of the story.”
“Bummer,” Pat said, as Ida opened volume five.
“Wait!” Melissa held up her hand. “We still have the rest of the Silas sketches. They’ll help fill in the missing years, don’t you think?”
“Good idea.” Maddy went back to the third card table. “There are four, from 1762, 1768, 1770, and 1776.”
“I hate to be the one to put a damper on this,” Carol said, “but only 1762 is from the missing years, if Mary Frances starts volume five in 1767.”
Pat gave her a sour look. “How can you keep all those dates straight in your head?”
Carol grinned. “It’s my job.”
“Settle back in, ladies,” Pat said with resignation. “We’re going to get us at least one answer.”
“Okay," Maddy said. “Here’s 1762. It shows a young woman on the left, doing something with some yarn and a fella on the right, with his hand running through his hair.”
“I wanna know if it’s labeled,” Dee said.
“Louise and Brand, it says. Plus the date. That’s all.”
Carol let out another big sigh as Maddy walked around the circle so we all could look at the drawing. “It’s a great picture, but it sure doesn’t tell us anything about what was going on in the town at that time.”
“Sure it does,” Ida said. “It shows us that Louise, my great-great-great—”
“You don’t have to keep reminding us,” Dee said. “We know darn well she’s your ancestor.”
“As I was saying, my great-etc. got her yarn all tangled up.” Ida grinned. “I came by it honestly I guess.” The rest of us knew what she was talking about, but she explained to Carol, “I gave up knitting a long time ago. Never could keep from snarling the yarn and splitting the stitches.”
“Now,” Maddy said, “we need another drum roll.” Dee obliged. “On the back, as I’m sure some of you may have noticed, is another sketch. This one sure looks like a much younger Brand with a tiny girl perched on his shoulders.”
“Louise?” Ida reached out for the drawing and held it with some awe. “She’s cuter than a bug’s ear.”
Bugs? Where?
Marmalade stirred in my lap. I stroked her silky back until the fur stopped standing on end, and she settled down. Once everybody had seen 1762, Rebecca Jo asked, “Can we peek ahead to the next one?”
“No,” Maddy said. “If we plunge ahead we’ll get all confused as to the timeline.”
“I’m already confused.”
Charlie hadn’t said anything in such a long time, it took me a moment to place whose voice that was. She was standing, leaning against one of the dilapidated bookcases, her arms crossed. When had she left the circle? Had she ever been in it? Of course she had. A couple of times she’d been sitting right next to me. I took a quick survey. There was one empty chair. The one right beside me. Good grief. I’d noticed this before, and here it was again—the woman was practically invisible.
I can see her. She is not happy.
Even her chair was invisible. “Come join the circle, Charlie.”
Once she was settled, Ida said, “Here we go. The last volume.”
Thursday 31 December 1767
It is fitting that I should begin this last volume of my treasured journals on the final day of this year. I can only hope that 1768 will bring much prosperity to our valley, yet I am reminded of the moon, which is now nearing its full. It waxes with hope, but each month inevitably wanes. Just so, I fear our company may see much discord in the coming year. Even now there are rumours of many who oppose the King.
“She’s talking about the American Revolution, isn’t she?”
Carol nodded slowly. “I think you’re right, Maddy. Even though this is almost a decade before the war started, there had been mutterings for a lot of years.”
“I’m just surprised they heard anything about what was happening in the other colonies, since Martinsville was tucked so far away from ... from everything.”
Carol rubbed the back of her neck and twisted her head from side to side. “Right again.”
We hear little of the outside world, hidden away as we are, but Lucius Hastings has of late traveled out of the valley on business of his own. Each time he returns, he makes the trek down the valley to this end to visit his family. While here, he gives us what news he has collected. It seems half the town, men and women alike and myself included, gather in Beechnut House Tavern to hear his tales.
“Well,” Maddy said, “that answers my question.”
I have spent a few moments in thumbing back through the pages of the previous one of my beloved volumes, as I do each time I begin another of these journals. I say beloved because every page reminds me of my dear husband who gave me these five precious tomes so many years ago. It has been long since Mister Homer Martin has objected to the time it takes me to do my writing. I assume he still believes these to be records of the household accounts, although he says nothing about them.
"He really was stupid, wasn’t he?"
Carol shook her head at Dee. "Maybe not stupid, but certainly illiterate."
"Stupid," Dee insisted.
There was, I am sorry to say, little of import in any of those pages. They merely reflected the meanderings of my mind. I recorded the death of the King, for instance. The new King, George the Third, was crowned in 1760, although we did not hear of either of these events until 1762. I do wonder what happens even now in the outer world, the world beyond this cliff-lined valley, and how soon we will know of what has transpired.
I look forward to the wedding of Alonzo Hastings and Margaret DeWitt in just six more days.
"Alonzo and Margaret," Rebecca Jo said. "Margaret. I wonder if this was the Margaret Nicholas Foley wrote to."
"Not necessarily," Carol warned.
"Think about it, though," Sadie said. "I’ve heard of families where all the names keep being repeated from one generation to another—all of the boys named William or all the girls named Mary. But we haven’t found very much repetition up here. And there certainly haven’t been any other Margarets."
"Or Alonzos," Dee said.
Before Carol could temporize, I said, "I can’t remember any repetition at all."
"That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any." She was bound and determined to temporize anyway. "If Maddy’s going to write that history, you’re going to have to have documentation to back you up. Guesses won’t work."
Maddy looked a bit rebellious, but I could see Carol’s point.
"Back to Alonzo and Margaret," Ida said.
They are suited so well to each other. I do hope they will manage to get their noses out of the books they seem to carry around constantly, long enough to begin having Hastings children. And yet, I doubt that will be long in happening, for they seem truly affectionate. Young Alonzo Hastings is a fine schoolmaster, as fine a scholar as Master Ormsby was when I was a schoolgirl. The death of his grandfather Robert Hastings just a month ago
"Robert Hastings," I interrupted. "The innkeeper. The one who built Beechnut House." I looked around my big old attic. "I’m sorry he died."
Ida waited a moment, giving me time to say something else, but I just shook my head.
... was a blow to the entire community, and although Alonzo’s father Charles has taken over as publican, I have no doubt that Alonzo will close the public house once his father is gone. May it be many years. Charles is a fine man. In the meantime, I am sure Alonzo and Margaret will have numerous children with which to fill Beechnut House once it is theirs.
My John will be 26 years of age in but another week. His courting is coming apace, and I hope to see him wed soon. I long to hold a grandchild in my arms—and long, too, to see if the child will favor its true grandfather.
“Courting?” Easton’s ears perked up. “Does she say who he was courting?”
“Not yet,” Ida said. “Don’t worry. She’ll tell us later.”
“I don’t even recall the name of John Martin’s wife,” Rebecca Jo said. “Sadie? What about you?”
Sadie shook her head. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known. Funny how some people just seem to be sort of invisible.”
Rather like Charlie Ellis sitting beside me but not saying a word, I thought.
“Surely there will be town records somewhere,” Carol said.
“All we have to do,” Ida said, “is keep reading. She’ll write about the wedding at some point.”
Maddy turned to Carol. “Don’t you hope she’ll talk about the Stamp Act in—whenever it was? Or the Boston Tea Party?”
“She may never have gotten a chance to hear of either of those,” Carol said. “News was still pretty spotty in the backwoods of the country.”
Was that how Carol saw Martinsville, this town I loved? I loved its private character, its seclusion from the rest of the state, but we heard the news we needed to know, and the people who needed to come here always seemed to find it. “I can see how people back then were isolated,” I said, “but I don’t feel like I’m living in the backwoods."
This house is in front of the woods, not the back.
Carol translated Marmalade’s comment, and I scooped her off my lap and into my arms for a big hug.
I like hugs, but the woods are still behind the house.
Marmalade still sounded like she was complaining, so Carol interpreted the meaning of what I’d said. “You know,” she said, “you’re right, Biscuit. It’s not really fair to call a place like Martinsville primitive, even though it was isolated then, back in the 1700s, as well as now. It sounds like this was a thriving community, almost from the start, and people had so many skills back then. It’s too bad so many of them have pretty much been lost.”
Dee cocked her head to one side. “Like what?”
Carol didn’t even have to think about it. “Think about some of the letters we’ve found and what Mary Frances says in her diary. All the healing herbs, finding our way without benefit of maps, making kegs and wagon wheels, making candles.”
“Sadie knows how to make candles,” Easton said.
“I’m not saying there’s nobody who can do those things,” Carol said, “but most of us wouldn’t know how to make shingles or build a cabin from logs we’d prepared with only hand tools at our disposal, harvest a whole field of grain by hand, or preserve meat without refrigeration. Everything seems to be done by machinery these days.”
“Okay, okay.” Easton still had that chip on her shoulder. “I get what you’re saying.”
“Good thing Biscuit and Bob have a generator.” Maddy sounded like she was trying to make peace.
“I still want to know what happened to volume four,” Dee grumped.
~ ~ ~
SUMMER 1840
HARRIETT SURRATT’S VERY dearest friend was Aleeza Martin, so naturally the two girls shared confidences and adventures any time they could. This day, they huddled over a very strange book in the back parlor of Leezy’s house.
“Leezy! Come here!”
Aleeza hardly reacted to her mother’s loud voice, having heard it often and knowing that there would be no repercussions should she ignore the summons for a little while, but Harriett was somewhat taken aback, most likely because she had been concentrating so closely on what Leezy was trying to read.
“Do not worry, Harriett.” Aleeza grinned impishly at her friend. “You know she never acts as mean as she sounds.” She bit at her lower lip. “Not usually, that is. Shall we try to read a little bit more?”
They knew of course, that reading this book would be forbidden should anyone find out about it, but neither of the girls could resist such strange writing. This particular book had a corner that had obviously been eaten away by a mouse, but the chewed-up area was not extensive enough to ruin any of the funny writing. It had taken Aleeza a long time to decipher the way in which it was written, so they had not gotten very far into the book, and a lot of it did not make a great deal of sense to them. Still, they were seething with curiosity to find what secrets the strange book might reveal. Aleeza lowered her voice even more and, using her index finger to point to each word as she struggled across the page from right to left, she sounded out the words.
My niece Parley is plagued again with a persistent cough, which began at the onset of winter.
“That is disgusting,” Aleeza said, and Harriett had to agree. “I wonder why they did not call on a doctor to help her?” Harriett had no answer to Aleeza’s question, so Aleeza went back to reading, stumbling over the longer words, of which there were a great many.
Today Brand brought Parley his most treasured possession, the enormous bear claw he wears on a plaited string around his neck, and offered it to her as a talisman, and I must say her cough seems to have abated somewhat. The blush she exhibited when he presented it was hot enough to have burned away whatever it is that bothers her throat so. I am glad I was there to see—
So caught up were they in the words, neither of them heard the steps of Aleeza’s mother, who swooped upon them and seized the book. “What is this? And why have you dawdled so? I called you not once, not twice, but—”
Janet Tarkington Martin broke off suddenly as she took a look at the book. Her eyes widened, and she slammed the pages shut. “Harriett!” She obviously had deduced that Harriett was the culprit. Harriett usually was. “Your Uncle Ketchum will surely think this is witchcraft, should he see it. Have I not warned you girls often enough not to dingle in such matters lest they pull you into a deep abyss”—she skewered them with her gimlet glare—“from which you might never climb your way out?”
“We meant nothing by it, Mama,” Aleeza whined. “Harriett showed it to me.”
Harriett bit her tongue. She could not blame Aleeza for choosing not to say that she and Harriett together had found the book while going through the bottom drawer of a chest in the back of a closet in Aleeza’s grandmother’s bedroom. Well, to be truthful, Aleeza had stayed out in the bedroom while Harriett looked through the chest. Everyone knew Leezy hated close spaces.
“She could not read it,” Aleeza went on, “and asked for my help. The woman writing knows a child who is most ill. It is truly interesting, what I have been able to read of it.”
Auntie Janet opened the book slightly and glanced at the incriminating page. She was not truly Harriett’s aunt, but Harriett had gotten used to calling her such over the twelve years—all of her life—that she had been friends with Aleeza. “It appears you have read enough of it already to put your soul in jeopardy. How did you come to have this?”
Aleeza looked at Harriett.
“I found it.” Harriett finally admitted, leaving out her friend’s complicity in the matter. She thought it might be best if she did not mention either, that there had been a stack of other volumes, all written in the same illegible script. Or that they had taken the entire stack with them, and even now the other bits were secreted in the room Harriett shared with her sisters.
Auntie Janet strode out of the back room where the girls had been sequestered, ripping out pages as she went. Feeding them one at a time into the fireplace, lecturing all the time as she burned the offending pages, she set the girls to reading from the heavy family Bible. “Lest you forget from whence your blessings flow.”
~ ~ ~
GRACE SURRATT HOSKINS was startled when her niece Harriett burst into Grace’s kitchen.
“Why the hurry, Harriett?”
“I have something to show you, Aunt Grace.”
Harriett looked a bit shamefaced, Grace thought. But then again, Harriett was always getting into scrapes that many another child would have had a hard time conceiving. Rather like myself at her age, Grace thought. She smiled at the girl and motioned to the stack of books Harriett held.
“Put down your burden, sit yourself down at the table, and help me eat a bit of this pudding I made too much of.” She dished up two large helpings of the raisin pudding she was known for throughout Martinsville. She had indeed made too large a batch of it, despite the fact that Arthur had eaten more than his fill of it over their luncheon earlier that day. She scraped the remaining few spoonfuls into Harriett’s bowl. The child was scrawny as a fence rail and needed fattening up. Maybe if she did not run everywhere she went, she might put on a bit more weight.
Harriett started to speak, but Grace held up her hand and pointed to the dish. “Finish that first, every single morsel, and then we will talk.”
Grace took the empty bowls and set them to one side of the large table. “Now, what is of so much import?”
Harriett lifted the pile of books she had placed on the floor beside her chair. “These. At least I believe they are important.”
Grace opened the top volume and raised an eyebrow.
“Leezy and I were trying to read one of the books, and Aunt Janet caught us and said it was”—she lowered her voice—“witchcraft. So she burned the book. Tore out the pages and burned them.” The words tumbled out of Harriett so fast, Grace could barely follow the train of thought. “We were afraid to tell her we had these five other books, just like the one she destroyed.”
Burning a book simply because one did not understand it was anathema to Grace Hoskins. Knowing Janet Tarkington Martin the way she did, though, Grace was not surprised at the woman’s reaction. Always one to jump first and think later, if she thought at all. She and Ketchum Martin were well suited to each other.
Harriett bumbled through a rather disjointed explanation of where the two girls had found the books.
Grace looked with care at the firm writing, glanced briefly at a page or two of the next book in the stack, and hefted the volumes in her hands. “They do not have either the look or the feel of witchcraft. I would hazard a guess that they may be written in some foreign language. I do not think they are French or German, neither of which I can read, but I do believe I would recognize a few words here and there. The world is a wide and wonderful place full of much that we do not yet know.”
Harriett looked for a moment as if she were going to say something, but then she subsided.
Grace smiled at her niece and adjusted the ribbon that had held the books so loosely together. She tied it more tightly so the volumes would not be separated. “You did the right thing, Harriett, in bringing them to me. I know, though, that you must feel badly because you think that somehow you have deceived Mistress Martin and done wrong in taking books from Aleeza’s grannie’s room, so soon after the death of the old woman.”
She waited for Harriett’s reluctant and somewhat shamefaced nod. Grace was fairly certain that until that moment, Harriett had not thought a whit about either of those transgressions.
“Come with me.” Grace led her to a nearby box room, where she rummaged in the rag bag. “Let us put these away where they need not bother us.” Wrapping the four volumes in a roomy piece of gingham, she said, “Someday, perhaps there will be someone who will be able to decipher these.”
She took Harriett by the hand and ushered her up the long flights of stairs to the attic. “Select one of these trunks, dear, and we’ll tuck this package away at the bottom of it. Someday, no doubt, these books will be thought a treasure.”