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October 1831
JANET MARTIN LIFTED the spoon from her second-best mixing bowl and used the back of her wrist to push a strand of hair away from her face. Ketchum would be home soon and she was nowhere near having the noon meal ready. She had wanted to surprise him with a crumble cake. His mother had been so proud of her crumble cake, and now that she was gone, Janet had the receipt box that Betsey Surratt Martin had kept secret all her life.
Janet could not see the sense of hoarding receipts, but Mother Martin had always had her own way of doing things. Janet had her own private opinion about that, but she was careful never to voice it. Ketchum idolized his mother, and Janet would never let him know just how happy she had been to see the clods of dirt raining down on that woman’s coffin.
She had wasted a fair amount of time this morning poring over the receipt and trying to recall the last time she’d seen Mother Martin whip up a crumble cake. Just how big was a good-sized dollop? And how much less than a cup was a bit less? It would have been more than half a cup, for she’d seen another of Mother Martin’s receipts this morning that called for a half cup of oats.
She peered at the spidery handwriting on the splattered square of paper one more time.
Crumble Cake
Beat together
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
a good-sized dollop of molasses
Remove half of this mixture and reserve for topping
Beat remainder along with
a bit less than a cup of lard
small spoonful of cinnamon
same of soda
half small spoon of salt
1 egg
1 cup soured milk
Place batter in pan Cover with reserved mixture
Bake for half an hour or until done
Do not overcook
So far the batter looked tolerably good, so her guesses couldn’t have been too far wrong.
As soon as she popped the cake into the oven, she stuffed the receipt back into the box—it really was entirely too full—and tucked the whole thing away out of sight on a shelf above the flour barrel. She doubted Ketchum would recognize the box, but then again, he just might. Let him think, for a while at least, that Janet could work miracles.
She needed to think of a good wedding present for her niece Grace, who would marry Arthur Hoskins next year. She could so easily copy all the messiest of the receipts for herself and give the box to Grace. It was fairly attractive, although obviously well-used. It would make a perfect wedding present. Grace would appreciate having something with so much history behind it.
She scraped the remaining batter from the sides of the bowl and lifted the spoon to her mouth. Ahh! She loved these little joys of cooking.
~ ~ ~
"MAY I BORROW THIS RECIPE, Sadie?" I asked. "It looks pretty good."
"If you can figure out what a dollop is," Pat said.
"Be my guest." Sadie made a queenly gesture. "You can have the whole box, in fact. I certainly don’t need it."
"Are you sure? You’re the one who found it."
"Well," she said, "first of all you’re probably going to have to give it back to the museum once it gets started." She glanced toward Maddy as if for confirmation.
"Uh-huh," Maddy said.
"And second of all?"
She grinned at me again. "I don’t need it. I have my own mother-in-law’s recipe box."
I took a quick look at some of the recipe names. Apple Cake, Fish Muddle, Shepherd’s Pie, Hannah Heath’s Pan Dowdy, Peanut Soup. Once the storm was over, I was going to get Bob to help me make up some of these. We’d have to figure out what Fish Muddle was. The writing on that one didn’t look as old and spidery as the others. A quick look at the ingredients told me that some cook in Martinsville had access to clams and shrimp—definitely not something the early settlers would have had here in this land-locked valley.
"Does anybody know who Hannah Heath is? Or was, rather."
"Doesn’t ring a bell," Sadie said.
"No idea," Rebecca Jo said.
I guess it didn’t matter, although I hated to think that somebody’s history in the town could just disappear like that. "When we have that birthday party for Beechnut House next September," I said to the attic at large, "maybe we could do a colonial theme and make up a bunch of these recipes instead of the chicken and burgers."
"And the spare ribs Dave wants," Pat reminded me.
"Maybe," Glaze said, "we could do some of these in addition to the spareribs. I doubt everybody’s going to want to eat nothing but"—she looked over the jumble of recipes I’d set out on the card table—"nothing but Hannah Heath’s Pan Dowdy and Peanut Soup. Or Fish Muddle."
"It might be hard to make enough of that stuff for the whole town anyway," Sadie said, "if all the recipes call for a dollop of this and a small spoon of that."
She had a point.
"You know what?" Glaze waved her arms around. "Tom’s culinary students are going to be doing the cooking. Why don’t I show him this box and see what he can come up with?"
"It’ll be like a history lesson," Maddy said.
"A whole new menu for the restaurant?"
Glaze widened her eyes and her hands at Rebecca Jo. "I don’t see why not."
"Let’s make up some little booklets of the best recipes," Pat suggested.
"We could sell them in the museum store," Maddy said.
"There’s a museum store?"
Maddy smiled at me. "There will be eventually."
"Okay." I stuffed the recipes, all except the one for Crumble Cake, back in the box and handed it to her. "Herewith are the menu additions to our September eleventh party next year."
"How did you remember the date?" Pat asked.
"It’s on the Beechnut House sign—11 September 1753. Easy to remember."
"Well, I’ll be jiggered," my mom said. I had the feeling she wasn’t talking about the upcoming party. She, Sylvia, and Esther were bent over the desk where we’d found the vet’s ledger. "I haven’t seen one of these since the fifties. Remember what this is, Bisque?"
I had to laugh. "A roller skate key. Elizabeth Hoskins must have left it up here."
Maddy grunted. "Not necessarily. It could have been someone earlier than Elizabeth. Clamp-on roller skates were patented just a couple of years after the Civil War ended."
That woman never failed to astonish me. "Where’d you learn that one?"
"Research!" The word broke from four or five women at the same time.
"Diary time!"
We all obeyed Ida’s call—sort of like Pavlov’s dogs.
Dogs? Where?
Wednesday 18 April 1770
Despite the warmth of the evenings now, I find myself ever thankful for the extra-heavy wool socks my sweet daughter-in-law knitted for me. Not only do I wear them to bed at night, but I relish their warmth in the evening. It does not seem to matter that I am sitting as close to the fire as I can without endangering my skirts. My daughter-in-law suggested some time ago that I place my well-padded feet on a stool so they will not be subject to the drafts at floor-level, and she was so very right. It does help. So now I sit here with my knees drawn up. I must look like a misshapen mushroom, with no lap in which to hold my knitting.
But that is little loss, for my fingers will not always cooperate with the needles and the yarn. The advantage of this knees-up position is that it gives me a readymade desk on which to write, and I do not have to bend so close to the paper, as the paper is already practically at my chin! My dear son has constructed a wide, thin board on which I can place my paper. This way the paper does not bend across my knees, and my daughter-in-law most thoughtfully lined the bottom of the board with several layers of old quilt pieces, between which she sewed handfuls of goose down, and tied the resultant pad tightly with string at the corners, so it does not slip and slide.
"I’ll be darned," Maddy said. "They invented the lap desk!"
"You could be right," Carol said. "Lap desks were originally called lap boxes. They were usually fairly bulky, so they could hold paper, pen, and ink. They were designed to sit on a table."
"Then why didn’t they call them table boxes?"
Carol ignored Pat. "Some of them had a lid that lifted. Others had a drawer. But I never saw any that were like what Mary Frances describes."
"Sounds much more comfortable than just a plain board," Dee said.
"Alexander Pope had one," Melissa said, surprising all of us.
"How?" Maddy stuttered in her astonishment. "I thought I was the researcher here. Where’d you ever learn that?"
"Just one of those little facts I learned in a high school English class. Pope instructed that his box be placed on his bed before he woke each morning, apparently so he could begin writing immediately."
Maddy scoffed. "I can barely put two spoken words together in the morning, much less write anything intelligent. At least until I get my coffee."
"And your cinnamon rolls," Dee said.
"Which have been"—Maddy lowered her tone to one of censure—"notably lacking in this Beechnut House Hotel."
"It’s your own fault," I said. "If you’d wanted them, you should have made a trip to the Delicious before you came here."
Carol looked confused, so I explained. "The Delicious, as we call it, is the Deli Schuss, owned by Margot and Hans Schuss. It’s down on Main Street. They make the best cinnamon rolls in the world. I’m addicted to them."
"Me too," Dee said, "but Maddy’s the worst of all of us."
"I may be the worst, but you’re a close second."
"Did you notice," Pat said, "that Mary Frances still hasn’t named her daughter-in-law?"
"Maybe she was mad at her for something," Dee said.
She couldn’t have been," Ida pointed out. "Notice how she always calls her my dear daughter-in-law?"
I had the feeling Dee wasn’t even listening to Ida. "My mother hasn’t spoken my name even once since I divorced Barkley."
I felt my eyes widen, but I tried not to show it. Dee hadn’t shared that with me. I looked at Glaze, and she gave a minuscule shake to her head. So she didn’t know either.
Rebecca Jo leaned a bit to her side so her shoulder brushed Dee’s. "Dee, Dee, Dee." She made a little song of those three syllables. "My dear Dee. I love your name. And I feel sorry that your mother’s the one who’s lost out." She rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of her other hand. "I can’t imagine why anybody would choose to side with my son after what he did, no matter how charming he seemed to be."
There didn’t seem to be a lot to say to that, and one of those uncomfortable silences settled around us. Ida broke it, of course.
"I am glad," she said, warning us by her tone that she’d returned to the diary entry.
We breathed more comfortably and settled down.
I am glad I can still find it within me to laugh as I become more aged, although perhaps I should not dwell on thoughts of growing old, for I am but forty-five. Miss Julia told me some time ago of her sister, whose back was so bent she could barely look around her as she walked. I am nowhere near that state, for which I am most grateful. Miss Julia is ever a model for me to follow, for she strides about, still in her divided skirts, with her head held high and her back straight as a ram rod. If one ignores her white hair and the laugh lines around her eyes and mouth—and lines of pain, too, for she has lost much—she looks more like a young woman in her twenties. But my eyes seem every day less able to tell faces apart at a distance, and my writing seems less distinct to me when I try to read over previous entries in this little book. I do hope I shall not go blind. I hope to live many more years and to hold grandchildren on my lap. I fear I need glasses for my eyes, which I read about in the most recent newspaper to reach our valley, but these spectacles, as they are sometimes called, are not available so far as I know. I spoke with Frederick Breeton about the possibility of ordering them through his store—for I am not the only one in this valley who must peer close to read or to write, but he holds little hope of obtaining any for quite some time.
John’s wife is breeding yet again, and I pray that this child might live, as none of the others have before.
"When was John Martin’s son born?" my mom asked. "The one who became the next town council chair?"
"I have no idea," Maddy said, "but he’d better hurry up. Maybe this is the one."
"Jerrod, his name was," Sadie said.
"Poor thing," Rebecca Jo said. "Can you imagine having that many miscarriages? I wonder what was wrong."
"It could have been anything," Carol said, "and they would have called it an imbalance of the humours."
"I sure hope that beastly doctor wasn’t there," Melissa said. "What was his name? Blanket or something like that."
"Blanchard," Maddy said. "The one with the unsanitary fleam."
"Even if he had been there," Dee said, "I doubt John would have let him anywhere near his wife."
"And if John wasn’t around, Mary Frances probably would have clonked the doctor with a frying pan before she’d let him anywhere near poor what’s-her-name."
"There’s not much more to this entry," Ida said.
This entry was supposed to sum up the previous six months, since my last letter to Myra Sue, but I find I am not interested in the happenings of the town. Not when my feet are cold and my eyes are fading and I worry so for the unborn babe. Pray God that he—or she—lives. Had my Hubbard lived, he and I would have been married for twenty-nine years this night.
She marked her place with a ribbon and set down the journal. Pulling off her white gloves, she turned to Amanda. "Okay, another six months down. Your turn."
Amanda grimaced. "You’re not going to like this one."
"No fair," Pat said. "You peeked."
"Just the first line."
Thursday 18 October 1770
My dearest Myra Sue,
My sweet daughter-in-law lost yet another babe two months ago, and the mood of this household is somewhat grim. My son is like to strip the meadow of all its wildflowers, for he brings a posy to his wife several times every day—sometimes thrice—but nothing seems to bring her cheer. My heart wants to cry when I see how bravely she tries to smile at him.
If my Hubbard had lived, would he and I have had many more children? I cannot imagine that I could love another child as much as I do my John, but I know that when a child of John’s finally lives—as I trust will happen eventually—I imagine my heart will expand in a new and touching way. Are grandchildren dearer than one’s own offspring? I have no way of knowing, but I watch my sister Constance and the way she delights in her children’s children, and I feel fair certain that it is so. Not dearer, perhaps, but most certainly as dearly loved.
With a wistful look on her face, Amanda rested the letter on her lap. She wasn’t married, had no children, but she was still young. I wondered if she resonated with Mary Frances in a particular way as a result. Maybe she was remembering her own grandmother, the one who’d been murdered.
"I’ve been wondering something," Dee said. "Mary Frances has never mentioned anything about what John does for a living."
"You’re right," I said. "I hadn’t really thought about it."
"He spent so much time gathering wildflowers," Easton said, "maybe he didn’t have a job."
"He was the town council chairman," Charlie said. "That was his job."
Carol spoke up before anyone else could say anything. "That’s not the way it was. In the colonial era, positions of authority like that were in addition to a man’s regular employment. He might be a farmer or a cooper or a blacksmith who just happened to serve in a political position as well." Her mouth turned up in a sideways grimace. "Nowadays we have career politicians, but it wasn’t supposed to be like that." She held up her hands. "Don’t get me started on this soapbox."
"So why didn’t Mary Frances say anything about it? About what he did, I mean."
Carol thought for a moment about Easton’s question. "I guess it never occurred to her. She knew what he did, how he spent his days. It probably never seemed like anything remarkable."
"It probably wasn’t," Dee said, "if he had all that free time to gather flowers."
Amanda picked the letter up again.
Louetta has been a prop to my flagging spirits, for she assures me that my beloved daughter-in-law will still be able to bear a child. The ones she has lost have been early on, well before she becomes heavy, and there has been no apparent damage to—to the workings of her body. I pray the next child might live.
Amanda had a watery glint to her eyes when she set the letter face down on the stack beside her.
Ida picked up her white gloves. I noticed they were beginning to look just a little grayish, so I handed her one of the fresher pairs.
Thursday 18 April 1771
I put pen to paper with much trepidation, for my daughter-in-law is coming close to her time. Although she experienced the usual signs of sickness in the mornings early on in her pregnancy, they dissipated and she seems to bloom. Miss Julia and Louetta both agree with me that the babe should come some time in May. A lovely month to be born, but I would welcome this child even should it come in the bleak midwinter, as my John did. She and John have had so many disappointments, so many lost babes. I pray God that this one might thrive.
Ida paused. "How many miscarriages has she had so far?"
"I didn’t keep count," Pat said, "but it seemed like there were a lot of them."
"Do you think this one will make it?"
"Glaze," Maddy said with some irritation, "he must have made it. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had all these town council chairmen named Martin."
"That doesn’t mean this particular baby survived," Dee said. "It just means Ms. No-Name finally succeeded somewhere down the line."
"I’m irritated with Mary Frances," Rebecca Jo said. "You’d think that even once—just once—she’d mention her daughter-in-law’s name."
"Why should she?" Charlie sounded a lot more argumentative than such a simple question warranted. "She knew the girl’s name. No need to go writing it down every ten seconds."
"I guess you’re right," Rebecca Jo conceded, "but it seems to me it would be easier to write out a name than always be writing my lovely daughter-in-law."
Sadie snickered. "Maybe her name was longer than daughter-in-law. When I worked in the airplane plant during the war, there was a woman on our line named Anastasia Cordelia Beckenport."
Maddy made a rude sound. "And I thought my name was long." When Carol raised her eyebrows, Maddy said, "Madeleine Annabelle Ames is my name. But I like Maddy."
"Annabelle?" Dee sounded as astonished as I was. "I never knew that."
"You never asked."
Melissa turned back to Sadie. "What about Anastasia? Did she have a nickname?"
"Nope. She insisted on being called by both names. Sort of like you, Rebecca Jo."
Rebecca Jo snorted. "The Jo is only one syllable. If my parents named me Anastasia Cordelia, I’d be smart enough to shorten it like Maddy did."
"Cathy and I called her Anchor," Sadie said. "But only between ourselves."
"You could have called her Anelia," Maddy suggested.
"Or Stacie-Del."
"What about Ann Nasty?"
And so on. The ridiculous recommendations came from right and left and kept getting worse. I guess we needed a break from the tension of John’s wife’s woes.
Ida, of course, was the one who put a stop to it. "There is much unrest outside this valley," she read, and then glared at us until we settled down.
There is much unrest outside of this valley, with many whispers of dissatisfaction over the actions of representatives of the King, but I will not waste my precious paper recounting those rumours. Instead I will record news of far greater import to us here in this town. Our valley has a newspaper at last.
"Yes!"
I felt just like Maddy. "It’s about time."
Rebecca Jo reached out to the nearest card table and picked up a short length of ribbon. "Mark that spot, Ida. Myrtle’s going to want to see it."
Before I could remind Carol that Myrtle was our elderly columnist, she beat me to it. "Myrtle’s Musings," she said. "Maybe she’ll write a column about it."
Frederick Breeton has taken it upon himself to ride to Garner Creek every Wednesday, for that is the day of the weekly publication, to bring back a sheaf of these most informative periodicals. He sells them in his store, and we flock there to be among the first to acquire a copy. The paper always contains—I say always, but so far there have been only four issues. Each one of them, though, has contained a column titled Obituaries. The word comes from the Latin, I understand, and it lists all the death notices, of which there are a great many.
"They didn’t have obituaries before this?" Dee sounded appalled.
What are those?
Carol leaned down to Marmalade, who had put a paw on her knee. "An obituary is a list of people who died."
Thank you.
"Well of course they had them," Ida said after Marmalade finished. "They just didn’t call them by that name."
Yesterday’s issue featured a report from the editor that was, I must say, inflammatory. The wording was careful, but there were allusions to the problems elsewhere in the colonies. There was no obvious verbiage against our King, but I must say I found the writing to be disturbing, and I fear the way in which the men in many of these colonies might be heading.
"Looks like she wasn’t exactly on our side yet," Pat said, her tone almost as sardonic as Ida’s usually was.
"There’re still five years to go before the Revolution starts," Maddy pointed out.
What is a rev lushun?
"Not exactly," Carol said. "The revolution, that was the fight between the British and Americans"—she was obviously explaining to Marmalade—"had already started. There just wasn’t open dissension yet ..."
Thank you.
"... and at this point a lot of people were afraid to take a position."
I like this position.
Marmalade jumped onto my lap. Even with her curling up there, I couldn’t help but shiver.
I will keep you warm.
How hard it must have been back then, not to know who would be on which side when the shooting started. Who could anyone trust as tensions mounted? I was glad Mary Frances wrote backwards.