The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (3 page)

His cart loaded, he remembered
Maggie’s requests and rushed along to the remaining vendors, finding their
stocks depleted. The baker had only one loaf and since it was a little moldy on
one side, gave it to John at no charge; the supply of vegetables was reduced to
a small pile of potatoes, rejected ones with bruises. Maggie’s favorite gardener
who raised herbs had also departed. It said something of his good fortune, he
decided, that the candle maker had a nice supply. He spent the majority of his
coins there, tucking the heavy wax sticks deeply in among his tools.

A shout caught his attention as
he picked up the cart’s handle, turning toward home.

“You! I’ve one last chicken,”
called the poultry woman.

He pulled up short beside the
stack of empty cages.

“You’re John Carver, aren’t you? I
noticed you trying to round up some food.” She nodded toward the lone hen. “She
was not my largest but maybe she’ll provide the children with something.”

John felt his face redden. Was
this the new rumor about the village, that his children were going hungry? He
started to decline her charity.

“It’ll be ten pence,” the woman
said.

He reached into his coin pocket
and discovered that ten was all he had. He tossed it to her. She expertly
grabbed the chicken and wrung its neck in one quick move.

“There. All ready for tonight’s
supper.” She stacked the empty cage onto her hand-truck and started off in the
opposite direction.

John fumed, wanting to shout
something about how his children ate quite well, thank you very much, but what
would be the point? At least now he had a decent meal to soothe Maggie’s likely
complaint about how much he’d spent on candles.

His legs ached as he pulled the
cart home, the rising moon lighting the double track by the time he caught
sight of the cottage. He stopped beside the lean-to workshop and secured the
tarpaulin against a possible night rain before picking up the dead chicken and
small net bag of potatoes.

Inside, smoke rose to the peak of
the thatched roof, a little of it wafting out the hole at the top, most of it
filling the room. Maggie stirred a pot that smelled like boiled cabbage,
balancing the eighteen-month-old baby on her hip and ignoring the pitiful
whines of the next two. Her brother sat on the bench against the wall, scraping
thick mud from his boots, making no move to help. She brightened slightly when
she saw the chicken, but her brows knitted together in worry only a moment
later. John followed her gaze.

On the floor in the corner young
Ethan lay on his straw pallet, his eyes closed. John started to tease his oldest
son for being lazy but noticed that the boy’s face was unnaturally red, his
breathing shallow.

“He’s taken worse and worse all
day,” Maggie said, leaving the cookpot long enough to take the new food from
John and set it on her work table.

He marveled at how she handled it
all one-handed and kept the toddler under control with the other, and he
wondered how she would manage once the new infant came. Soon, Ethan would be
strong enough to lend a hand. But a second glance told him the six-year-old was
not doing well.

“What’s the matter with him?” he
asked.

“Fever, and now he’s got some
spots on his skin.”

“Better not be bringing the Black
Death in upon us,” Sean piped up from his corner.

John felt his stomach tighten.
Surely, here in this little village ... even in town, a half mile away ...
surely, the dreaded plague had not come this close. He rushed to the bedside
and knelt down. Ethan’s skin was hot and dry to the touch.

“He’s burning up! Why haven’t ye
done anything?”

Maggie’s face tightened. How much
could one woman cope with, he supposed. He found a scrap of cloth lying beside
his son’s head.

“It’s slipped off,” Maggie said.
“Dampen it with cold water. Try to cool him.”

John dipped the rag into a crock
of stream water they kept beside the door and returned to dab at the boy’s
face. Ethan barely responded. Meanwhile, the others began to wail and Maggie
ordered them to the table where she set out bowls of cabbage soup. Sean joined
them, John noticed, while Maggie tended the baby and he continued to press the
wet cloth to Ethan’s face.

“I’d best bring in the animals,”
Sean said a few minutes later, wiping his mouth after he stuffed in a sizeable
chunk of bread. “We’ll have milk for the little ones soon.” He walked out into
the moonlight.

“Every time I get ready to give
him a piece of my mind, he does something like that,” Maggie said, “offering
the first milk to the children.”

Unless John wanted to start
farming, himself, and get his family into their own cottage, he would have to
live with Sean—his unhelpfulness and his moods. And the truth was, right now
there were no new tenancies available. Unless the baron opened up new lands,
their lot in life was set.

He went outside to dampen the
cloth again and when he came in Maggie took it and made him take her place at
the table, setting out the last bowl of soup for him. She placed the cool cloth
on Ethan’s forehead before turning to the others, washing their faces and hands
and telling them to go use the privy one last time before bed.

In the adjoining room, John heard
the sounds of the two goats bleating as Sean penned them into their corner,
followed by the crisp sound of milk from the cow hitting the bottom of a wooden
pail. Maggie spread two more straw pallets on the floor and shook out blankets.
She dipped warm milk from the bucket and gave the three- and four-year-old each
a small cup before settling them onto their beds. Sean had climbed the ladder
to the small half-loft above the room, and they could hear him groaning as he
settled himself for the night.

“You rest,” John told his wife,
nodding toward the only real bed in the house, the wooden frame standing
against the far wall. “I shall sit up with Ethan and watch him.”

“Wake me if he gets worse. I can
walk to Mrs. O’Sullivan’s for some herbs.”

“You’ll do no walking about in
the dark,” he told her, placing a kiss on her forehead. She smelled of sweat
and smoke from the peat fire, but then everyone did. “I can go for help if we
need it.”

Even among the two-dozen similar
cottages clustered together in what was known as the village, there was always
a woman who specialized in cures. She would be the same one who would come when
Maggie knew the new baby was arriving. The nearest real doctor lived in town
but it cost money to bring him out and, aside from drawing blood from the sick
child, John doubted the man knew any more than Mrs. O’Sullivan about making
their Ethan well. He knelt again beside the boy and felt his face—not a bit
cooler. He found a second cloth and wet it from the cool water in a bowl,
switching it with the overheated one.

Settling himself against the wall
near the child’s head, John dozed then woke. He replaced the cloth again and
found himself more alert now. He thought of the wooden box he had worked on all
day. With the hinges, it seemed a nicer piece, more finished. He rose quietly
and went out to the cart where he pulled it from under the tarp.

The design consisted of diagonal
cuts at ninety-degree angles to each other resulting in a quilted look. The high
points between the X-shaped intersections rose in soft pillowy curves. At the
bottom he had smoothed a border around the base, and at the edge of the lid
he’d made a precise row of small raised dots, like beadwork carved of wood. In
the moonlight the piece was nearly beautiful, the uneven effects of the
ill-chosen stain adding depth now. He smiled and opened the lid.

He would smooth the inside a bit
more and perhaps add a fine cloth lining if he could get the right material. He
ran his index finger around the inner edges of it, starting in the upper corner
and moving down and around, feeling for any small unevenness. When his finger
completed the circuit of all four sides, a jolt shot through his hand, up the
arm to the elbow, and into his body. Blinded and dizzy, he fell to his knees,
dropping the box on the ground.

*
* *

His breath came in short bursts;
panting, John sat up. He held his head in his hands for a minute or more,
willing the dizziness away. What in the Lord’s name had happened just now? How
much time had passed? He blinked and dared a glance at the moon. It had not
moved, so he’d not been out very long. He rubbed his hands down the sides of
his face and flexed his fingers. The tingling that had intermittently plagued
him since the day of the lightning incident was gone.

He stood. The pain in his legs
had vanished.

His arms. They no longer ached.

He looked around at the other
cottages in the village. No lights showed under doorways, no human shadow
appeared in the moonlit meadows. He prayed no one had witnessed the event.
There was talk enough in the village and in town about his escape from the
lightning bolt that had felled the massive tree. He took a step and felt ... he
felt good! Young, spry!

He retrieved the carved box from
the ground. Did the ugly brown stain take on a golden glow when he touched it?
He held it at arm’s length and decided it was only a trick of the moonlight. He
started to set the box back on the cart but at the last moment changed his mind
and carried it into the house.

Inside, sounds of sleep filled
the small space. Overhead, Sean’s loud snores echoed through the rafters, while
Maggie moaned lightly as she rolled over, adjusting to find comfort for her
large belly. In the corner, Ethan was quiet—too quiet. John knelt and held the
lamp above the pallet in the corner. The boy’s face now had a rash of dark
spots against the heat of the fever. John’s heart lurched. He held the back of
his hand near the boy’s open mouth, hoping to feel breath. It was there, but
very shallow.

Should he wake Maggie? Should he
start for the O’Sullivan place?

“I don’t know what to do for
you,” he whispered under his breath. “Son, I don’t know what to do.”

He leaned forward and pulled
Ethan’s limp body into his arms, hugging the boy to his chest, stroking one
puffy, hot arm with the hand that was accustomed to discerning every knot in a
piece of fine wood. Ethan stirred, his eyelids fluttering.

“Da’?”

“Hey,
boyo
,
how are you?” John kept his voice low, rubbed a fingertip across his son’s
forehead. It seemed a little cooler than a moment ago.

“Da’ I don’t know what happened.”

“You’re a little bit sick. Your
mother’s been here all afternoon but she needed to sleep.”

The flush drained from the
child’s skin, and John could barely tell a difference now between his own
temperature and the boy’s. Ethan struggled in his arms and sat up.

“I’m hungry, Da’. I missed my
supper, I think.”

John nearly laughed aloud, tears
of joy threatening to spill. “Aye, you did that. Supper’s long over, but I’ll
find you something. Wait here.”

But when John stood to look for
something to feed the child, Ethan got off his pallet and skipped to the table.
“There’s bread,” he said gleefully, “oh, and fresh milk!”

Maggie sat up. “What’s this noise
about, then?”

John found himself speechless. He
moved the lamp to the table and watched his son scramble around, picking up and
munching whatever he spotted to eat. Maggie stared at John, almost accusing.

“You let him out of bed!”

“He got up. The fever’s gone and
look at him!”

She couldn’t argue with the happy
face and exuberant energy of their son. But she gave John a long, hard look.

“We’ll not be repeating this
story,” she said. “Not unless you want to see me burned as a witch.”

He nodded somberly. There was one
suspected witch who lived in the town, and she’d gained that reputation for an
event very similar to this. When a young girl had fallen ill two summers past,
the gray-haired woman had brewed a concoction—she protested that it was a tea
of herbs but no one else, including the doctor, knew of these herbs. When the
little girl began to sing and dance about, the old woman’s friends had all
stood at a distance, denying that they knew her. Twice, the church had sent men
to get her, to put her to the stake, but the woman had a disappearing-spell and
knew how to stay away from them.

Maggie had no spells, no way to
escape. They would take her, for certain.

*
* *

At daylight, Sean woke early and
left for the day. John and Maggie sent each other signals across the table as
the children ate their breakfast of bread and goat cheese. When the young ones
had been sent out with little chores to fulfill, they spoke of it for the last
time.

“We must proceed as normal,” John
said. “Sean is the one person who might ask. Tell him only that the fever broke
during the night and our Ethan has recovered.”

He left her to pluck the chicken
and he picked up the carved box and made his way quickly to his small workshop.

In the light of day, sitting
among his other carvings, the piece was as ugly and benign as ever. Somehow he
had expected it to have retained that near-translucent glow. He lifted the lid,
letting it rest open on the new hinges. Nothing about the plain interior gave a
hint as to how it came to contain such power. He tentatively touched the inner
edges. Nothing happened.

Last evening he had sat for a
long time at his son’s bedside. Perhaps he had dreamed the episode. Maybe Ethan
had gotten well simply because the disease ran its course. He picked up the box
with both hands, examining the workmanship, contemplating whether to make
another one, a finer one. After a minute, the wood began to warm to his touch
and the brown stain turned to the color of dark honey. His heart quickened. The
thing did possess some sort of power!