The Midwife's Dilemma (22 page)

She headed back to town and prayed the work she had waiting for her in town would also turn out to be less than she expected it to be. Maybe if it did, she could use all of her energy to climb out from despair and find hope again that she and Thomas would still have a future together.

T
he rest of the afternoon did not turn out to be as good as Martha had hoped. It turned out even better. Not a single person had come to summon her away the entire afternoon.

Not one!

After an early supper, Martha headed upstairs to finally unpack her travel bag and settle properly back in her room again. She found Bird asleep on her pillow and decided to leave him there for now.

It was easy to believe that there had not been a teeming woman ready to deliver today, but Martha found it impossible to believe there was not a single soul in Trinity who had not been feeling poorly enough to need her help.

Well, there had been one. Apparently Cassie had complained most of the morning about a toothache, but Jane had given her a clove or two to chew on. By the time Martha returned from Samuel's, just in time for dinner, the girl's tooth was feeling just fine and Cassie was back to her usual happy self.

She took her soiled clothes out of her travel bag and shook her head as she tried to think of a reason why the afternoon had been so quiet. It was possible that some folks did not seek her out because of the hot, humid weather. They'd had fewer customers than usual at the confectionery, too.

Considering the night air was still steamy, that made some sense to her, and she piled her soiled clothes in the corner, where they would stay until tomorrow. If Jane was not doing laundry, Martha intended to do it herself, since she had only one clean gown left to wear. Besides, getting wet while she was scrubbing her clothes clean was not a bad way to cool off.

She stopped for a moment to mop her brow before she removed her notes from the travel bag and slipped the bag under her cot, right next to her birthing stool. She was still searching her mind for an explanation for the quiet afternoon, though. There were lots of things changing in Trinity these days, but she was confident that gossipmongers had not given up their self-appointed roles as the town's network of news and keepers of people's comings and goings.

Unless the hot, humid weather had made the spread of gossipmongers' news as sluggish as the folks who did venture out to shop around town today.

She then opened up the trunk at the foot of her bed. She retrieved her grandmother's diary, which was actually a box filled with the records Grandmother Poore had kept of every birth in and around Trinity since the town's beginning. After adding her own notes from her recent trip, she left the remaining notes right where they were and returned the box to the trunk.

With lots more work ahead of her, in part because she had let things pile up, she pulled out her record book, where she kept a listing of her rewards. She spent a little more than an hour recording what she had done recently, when she had done it, and
what reward she expected to be given for her work, leaving the furthest column blank until she received it. By the time she was done, her hand was tired from all that writing, and she made a mental note to never, ever let so many notes pile up again.

She was ready to store the record book away again when she realized she had forgotten to make one important entry about a reward she had recently received. When she found the one she wanted, she smiled:

16 June Thursday    Bella, white mare    Left anonymously

With a flourish, she crossed of
left anonymously
and wrote,
Given by Samuel Meeks in error and given back to him.
“And happily so,” she murmured and closed the book. She was all set to close the trunk when there was a knock at her door.

“Martha?”

“I'm coming, Jane,” she replied, then closed the trunk lid and opened the door. “I suppose I'm being called away this late now, when I've been waiting all day?”

Jane's eyes were twinkling. “You're needed, but only downstairs. Cassie begged me to ask you to join us downstairs in the sitting room. I know you're probably too busy or tired enough to want to go to bed, but—”

“I just finished up doing what I truly had to do. I can always do the rest tomorrow. Just give me a few minutes to freshen up a bit first.”

Jane grinned and handed her an old cotton nightdress that was so big she could have wrapped it around her twice. “Since we're all wearing something a little unusual, you might want to remove your gown and some of your petticoats and change into this. I'll tell her you'll be down soon,” she said and was halfway down the back staircase before Martha had a chance to ask her what exactly they were doing in the sitting room.

Completely intrigued, Martha got as far as the kitchen in less than ten minutes. She was as surprised to find the air so much cooler downstairs, almost as much as she was intrigued by the oddly pitched voices coming from the sitting room.

The voices got louder and stranger the closer she got to the sitting room.

She opened the door very slowly, took one look inside, and clapped her hand to her mouth to keep a cackle from bursting free. Jane and Cassie and Fern and Ivy were all inside, as she expected, but what they were doing together stretched well beyond the realm of her imagination.

Totally absorbed in what they were doing, they took no note that she was even there. She did not need anyone to explain that they were in the midst of a rather unusual play, and they were indeed wearing costumes, of a sort.

All of the furniture normally in the sitting room had been pushed to the walls. Four wooden chairs were lined up side by side in the center of the room. Cassie was standing on the first chair, with the other three stretched ahead of her. She was wearing one of Ivy's better gowns, her mother's only Sunday bonnet, and a ruby necklace that Martha recognized as one of the pieces of Fern's valuable jewelry she had left.

Fern stood next to Cassie. She was dressed in a feathered cap and a man's robe, the source of which further defied Martha's imagination, and she was holding out one of her rolling pins like a sword. For her part, Ivy held on to a ribbon that was tied to Cassie's wrist. Her costume consisted of a pair of burlap bags held together with string, to resemble a long jacket. Jane stood an arm's length away like a soldier on guard, if you imagined the broom she was holding against her shoulder was a rifle of some kind.

“Surrender your jewels, or I'll have one of my crew take them
before you walk the plank,” Fern commanded in a ridiculously low voice.

Cassie knelt down on the chair seat and steepled her hands. “Please, Captain, they're all I have left. I'd willingly share them with you if you'd spare my life. I am a godly, Christian woman. Have mercy on me.”

Fern scowled. “I show no mercy, and I share booty with no man or woman!”

Ivy pointed toward her sister. “You'll share with me, or you'll walk the plank with her!”

Fern puffed out her bottom lip and looked over at Cassie. “I thought you said I was the captain. Can't I keep all the booty from this woman that we captured?”

“No, you can't. I already told you, remember? The captain has to share all the booty with every member of the crew. And Miss Ivy, you can't talk to the captain like that,” Cassie insisted. The girl looked like she was about to cry with frustration until she saw Martha standing at the door.

She yelped with joy, jumped down from the makeshift plank, and ran straight to her. “Miss Martha! You really did come to play pirates with us. Now we'll have a proper captain. You don't have to change costumes with Miss Fern unless you want to. If you don't, she can be the pretend captain and you can be the real one she captured and put in irons. But now you escaped and want your ship back,” she said.

Martha knew just who to blame for the girl's obvious fascination with pirates, but she had no idea how Cassie had convinced these three grown women to join in her play. Since she did not have the heart to disappoint Cassie, Martha did not even try. Instead, she decided to make that four grown women instead of three and joined in the play.

Two hilarious hours later, after each of them had switched
character roles again, Martha was about to walk the plank, planning to pretend to jump to her death, when there was a loud knock at the back door. “I've been rescued,” Martha exclaimed and stepped down very carefully from the chair and held up her hand. “I'll go. The caller is most likely looking for me.”

Grateful that she was wearing a gown now instead of a nightdress, she answered the door expecting to be summoned away. Instead, she found her entire family standing there—including her two precious granddaughters, who were standing on the top of the steps and looking up at her with expressions of great expectation on their little faces.

Her heart leaped and banged against the wall of her chest.

“Hi, Grandma,” Lucy said. “Papa said you could give us some more cookies, and if we're really, really good, you'd let us see Bird again. We promise to be good, don't we, Hannah?”

“Really, really good,” Hannah promised.

Torn between disbelief that they were here and sheer joy that they were, Martha was absolutely speechless, possibly for the first time in her entire life. While she struggled to find her voice, she glanced up at Oliver and Comfort, who were standing behind the girls, and saw that Victoria and Dr. McMillan were there, too. She could not decide which one had the widest grin.

When the girls started tugging on Martha's skirts, obviously anxious to get their grandmother's full attention, Oliver started to chuckle. “Before we explain why we're all here, it might be a good idea to let the girls have a cookie or two like I promised since there won't be any peace until you do.”

“Cookies,” Martha repeated, glanced down at the girls, and took each of them by a hand. “Of course we have cookies at the confectionery, and I'm going to let you pick out exactly which cookies you'd like to have today,” she promised and bent down to press a kiss to the top of their blond curls before she
let them inside. “Along the way, maybe your father can explain what you're all doing back in Trinity.”

Lucy skipped her way down the hallway. “We're gonna get a new house and live here.”

Hannah walked along more sedately and tugged on Martha's hand. “And we're gonna get a puppy and a kitten and a . . . and a—”

“A pony. Papa said we could get a pony, but we have to share it,” Lucy added.

Martha stopped dead in her tracks, which forced her granddaughters to do the same. She turned and searched Oliver's face for some sign that the girls were mistaken.

He returned her quizzical expression with a grin. “The girls have vivid imaginations, but in this case, they're absolutely right.”

Martha's heart trembled. “They are? You're moving back to Trinity with your family? Truly?”

“That's my intention. I thought about telling you our idea when we were here last, but we hadn't decided then exactly what we were going to do, which is why I kept it a secret from you. Now I'm just trying to decide whether or not we should buy an existing house, build one of our own here in town, or settle farther out on some kind of homestead. In the meantime, we'll be staying with Victoria instead of the cottage so we're all a bit closer to town.”

“In other words, the girls will be closer to the confectionery—so they can visit with their grandmother more often. You might want to warn Miss Fern and Miss Ivy that they'll need to bake more cookies than usual,” Comfort teased.

Martha chuckled and turned to Oliver. “I can't even begin to tell you how happy I am with your decision to come home to Trinity and raise your family here.”

Before they could continue their conversation, everyone in the household poured out of the sitting room and pandemonium erupted. Before conversation reached a level that would frighten the girls, Martha let Cassie take the girls into the shop to pick out their cookies. Once they were gone, Victoria came up behind Martha and whispered in her ear, “Thanks for not telling Oliver you knew he had a secret.”

Martha turned and gave her daughter a hug. “I trust my secret is still safe with you, as well?”

“It is, but I'm ever so curious to know what you've decided to do. Are you going to marry Mr. Dillon or not?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“We'll make that decision together when he gets back, which may not happen until sometime in September,” Martha whispered as she studied her daughter's features. “You look wonderful and so very happy. Maybe tomorrow we can find some time to be together and you can tell me all about your honeymoon travels.”

“We will, assuming you're not called away and Lucy and Hannah agree to share you with me,” Victoria teased before Oliver reached his mother's side and claimed her attention. They all spent the rest of the evening together, and for the first time, Martha created memories with them that were all the sweeter because the days they would have together now stretched ahead with endless promises of many more.

The only possible way those memories could be any better would be if Thomas could be part of those memories, too.

She prayed together with Jane briefly because they were both uncommonly tired. Martha had promised to take her granddaughters swimming tomorrow afternoon and needed all the energy she could muster. She was headed back to her room to change into her nightgown when she heard a pounding at the
back door. Grumbling under her breath, she passed Ivy in the upstairs hallway, insisted on answering the door herself, and hurried downstairs.

When she finally got to the back door and opened it, she found Eleanor's husband, Micah, standing there, and her heart started to race with worry.

Before she could ask him if it was Eleanor or little Jacob who had taken ill, he handed her a note. “Mr. Dillon just got back from his trip. He asked me to give you this and wait for you to write back your response. I'll wait out here, if that's all right.”

She felt her blood drain from her face and nodded before she closed the door. Her hands were shaking as she unfolded the note and walked rather unsteadily down the hall to the kitchen. She waited until she had the better light there to read his words: