Where Love Dwells (29 page)

Clasping her hand to her heart, Morning gasped. “You did that? For me?”

“I did,” Emma replied, although she realized now she had also ridden to Bounty to satisfy her own curiosity about whether or not she might be able to help this young woman. Without waiting any further, she quickly explained what Zachary had been able to confirm: Morning Drummond was legally free to marry again.

“You'll still need to speak to Mr. Breckenwith, but you'll have to stop back another time to make an appointment,” Emma cautioned. “I'll be there with you when you do meet with him, just as I promised.”

Morning reached over, took Emma's hand, and squeezed it hard as tears ran down her cheeks. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Emma murmured, unable to recall when she had felt so good about something she had done for someone else.

When Morning's tears were spent, she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hands, got to her feet, and glanced out the windows to the back garden. “I know you said you couldn't help my friend, too, but would I be able to trouble you to make her a cup of tea before we leave? She tends to take a chill fairly easily. I'm not certain she has much in her larder at home, and I don't have kitchen privileges at Mrs. Sweeney's.”

Emma rose. The moment she turned, looked out the window, and saw the elderly woman sitting forlornly on the bench in that garden of weeds, her heart skipped a beat. “She must be eighty years old,” Emma murmured. She was unable to take her eyes off the woman wearing a threadbare cape and a bonnet limp with age whose eyes were clouded with disillusionment.

“Miss Burns is eighty-six,” Morning explained. “She'd been living with her brother and family, but when he passed a few weeks ago—he was only seventy—his widow told Miss Burns she had to leave by the first of next month, even though her brother promised she could stay and supposedly left provisions for his sister in his will. Can she do that? Can she go against the terms of the will and just turn poor Miss Burns out into the street?”

Emma shrugged. “I suppose that depends on what the will actually says,” she replied, trying to remember what Zachary had told her last fall about the will Aunt Frances' first husband had drawn up to provide for her. “Please bring Miss Burns inside while I set some water to boil. There's bound to be some tea somewhere in this kitchen,” she said, certain she now knew what He intended for her to do once she was living in town.

Amazed by how quickly God was revealing His plans for her, Emma said a silent prayer that He might touch Zachary's heart and convince him to support her efforts just as quickly.

An hour later, Emma watched Morning slip through the garden holding on to Miss Burns with one hand and a basket of foodstuffs Emma had raided from the little she found in Zachary's larder with the other.

Reminded once again how she had been blessed with a loving family and the financial resources to safeguard herself and her loved ones, she washed up the cups and saucers they had used, rinsed out the teapot she had found in the cupboard, and dried everything. She was just storing the dishes away again when Zachary poked his head into the kitchen.

“Are you alone?”

She smiled. “Not anymore, now that you're here. Have you finished meeting with your client?”

“Yes,” he said as he walked into the kitchen. “I trust you've set Miss Drummond and her friend straight and that they'll both stop back to make an appointment with me? In the meantime, I have some time before my next appointment. Shall we go to see Reverend Glenn now to ask him if he's available to marry us on your birthday?”

She smiled again. Convinced she knew how she might be His instrument in the days ahead, her goal now was to convince the man she was going to marry to support her efforts to help the women of Candlewood with their legal problems when they were either too embarrassed or too poor to seek out the services of a lawyer.

“I think we might,” she ventured. “Along the way, perhaps you could tell me a bit about the laws providing for the protection
of widows, particularly when there's a will in place,” she suggested as she donned her bonnet. “I'm not certain I remember exactly what you told me last fall when I came to you to discuss Aunt Frances' problem.”

He raised one brow. “Are you interested in the laws in general or in particular?”

“Just in general for now,” she replied as he helped her with her cape. “I know you have shelves of law books in your office that I could read—assuming I could make my way to them without tripping over a pile of one thing or another—but it would be much quicker if you simply told me what I'd find there.”

He let out a long breath. “Based on what you've asked, I assume Morning Drummond is now as interested in what she might have inherited from her late husband as she apparently was to find out her legal status.”

“Then you'd be wrong. In point of fact, I'd like to find out some information for Miss Burns, the elderly woman who came with Morning.”

“I thought you said she agreed to stop back and make an appointment with me.”

“No, you said that,” Emma countered. “Miss Burns hasn't a coin to her name. She can't afford to see a lawyer, but if I could help her—”

He stiffened his back. “I thought I made myself clear in Bounty. You can't dispense legal advice. You're not a lawyer and you can't be a lawyer, as fair or as unfair as you find that reality to be.”

“That may be true, but I can read, I can think, and I can reason, and above all, I can listen to women who aren't comfortable discussing certain issues with a man or who can't afford to pay for a lawyer,” she stated firmly. “Besides, I don't have to worry about actually being a lawyer. Not when I'm going to be married to one.
You know I wouldn't hesitate to turn a legal matter over to you, if that became necessary.”

“What you're asking is . . . is out of the question. Allowing you to give anyone legal advice could get me disbarred!”

Emma's temper flared, and it suddenly became clear that she was the only one willing to make concessions when it came to building a life together. She could not imagine ever having this kind of discussion with Jonas, but she couldn't imagine the future she envisioned for herself with Zachary, either. Not unless he could see her side of things.

“No. It isn't out of the question. It's fair and it's right. I highly doubt anyone who comes to speak to me with a legal problem is likely to make a complaint against you, and I don't think it's too much for you to at least consider the opportunities I would have here in town once we were married,” she countered.

As Mother Garrett's words at the cemetery echoed in her mind, she stiffened her spine and forged ahead before she lost her nerve. “When you proposed to me, I thought you wanted a woman as strong in her own way as you are, but it's become abundantly clear that's not what you want at all. If you find the prospect too disturbing that your future wife might be able to use her mind and her wits to help other women, then perhaps you've chosen the wrong one. Perhaps you should marry someone more like your first wife, whose entire world revolved around you, because that's apparently what you expect of me. You want me to focus on you and only you, and you haven't shown one whit of concern about what I might want or need in addition to that.”

He froze in place. “That's not true. Not at all true.”

She blinked back tears of frustration. As different events during their courtship flashed through her mind, she grew more and more convinced she was right. “Yes, it is, and I should have seen
the signs of it before now,” she said. “You knew exactly how to sway me to your point of view from the start. I won't bother to mention the mare you gave me again. You've already admitted you had ulterior motives in selecting that gift. Then later, although I didn't realize it at the time, I can see now that showing me the extent of your fortune and drafting a will leaving that fortune to my sons, all the while magnanimously protecting the holdings I have, was meant to convince me how foolish I would be to let a man of your means slip away. You also know how much it would mean to me to wear a pin that belonged to your mother as a symbol of our betrothal, so that I would be only too willing to bend to each of your expectations about what I would have to do in order to marry you. I don't need you to rescue me from the life I have. I need you to love me enough to want to share a life just as meaningful with me here. B-but I wonder now if you truly love me and want to marry me at all, and . . . and unless you can reach a more equitable vision of what we will each bring to this marriage, then . . . then I don't think we should marry at all. And this time,” she whispered, “whether or not we should marry is entirely up to you.”

Drawing a deep breath, she blinked back tears that blurred her vision. “Think hard before you make your decision, but until you do, I have no desire to see you or to step another foot in this house,” she said, then grabbed the canvas bag and let herself out the back door to the kitchen.

Heart pounding, she walked slowly through the garden to go home.

To her great sorrow, Zachary did not stop her and simply let her go.

27

S
TILL TREMBLING FROM HER ARGUMENT
with Zachary, Emma never heard the freight wagon approaching from behind as she trudged back to Hill House.

She never heard the driver cry out a warning until it was almost too late.

Startled out of her reverie when she felt a solid nudge at her back, she looked over her shoulder into the eyes of a pair of draft horses, and literally dove out of the way.

Her cape flew open and she landed facedown on top of her canvas bag and nearly sank in a pit of cold, rank mud.

She sputtered and spewed and coughed and gasped as she struggled to crawl out of the pit and get herself into a sitting position. With her heart pounding, she clawed the mud from her face. When she decided she could safely open her eyes, she looked straight into the frightened face of the driver who had leaped down from his wagon to assist her.

“Mother!”

“W-Warren? Is that really you?” she managed, only to end up with more mud in her mouth once she opened her lips.

He grimaced. “Yes, Mother, I'm afraid it is. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do to help you.”

Emma stared up from the ground at her eldest son. When mud oozed from the brim of her bonnet into her eyes, she slammed them shut again, yanked off her bonnet, and tossed it away. “I don't know what to tell you to do, Warren. I've never been covered with this much mud before. Not in fifty-one years,” she gritted behind closed teeth, convinced her day could not possibly get any worse.

“I tried to warn you that you were too far out into the roadway, but there wasn't anything I could do. The brakes barely held in all this mud, and the horses—”

“Don't worry about blame,” Emma said, grateful she had her eyes closed so she would not notice if anyone passed by. “There's enough of that to go around. I'm not even certain I care to know why you're driving a wagon down Main Street when I can't recall a single time you've ever driven a wagon in your life.”

“I went to see Andy Sherling this morning to see about getting some kind of work. He sent me to Dan Haley, who hired me just for the day to haul some freight out to—”

“I don't care where you were heading or what freight you're carting about. Not unless you've got a barrel of water on board the wagon that you can dump on me before this mud hardens and I end up looking like a cast for a wax figure that's going to be a permanent fixture on the roadway.”

“No. There's no water.”

Emma groaned and kept her eyes shut tight. “I've got to get this mud off. What about cider or . . . or anything . . . anything wet?” she asked, pausing between words to keep as much mud out of her mouth as she could.

“Wait. There might be something. Don't move.”

She scowled at him and tried not to think about the mud stuck to her teeth for fear she might gag.

“Sorry. Poor bit of advice,” he said. “I'll be right back.”

Beyond being mortified and shivering with cold, she listened to his footsteps fade and then return a few moments later. “Tuck your head down as far as you can and put your hands on top of your head. I'll try not to let—”

“Stop your hemming and hawing. Just pour whatever it is on top of me,” she snapped, but did as he had told her to do.

“But, Mother—”

“Warren Baxter Garrett, if you don't do as you're told this very instant, I'm going to . . . I'm going to write you out of my will!”

“If you insist,” he said.

She tensed, expecting to get drenched, which she did. But she also got pelted on her head and shoulders, again and again, with something solid. She did not have to open her eyes to know what those somethings were, because the taste of vinegar and spices that seeped through her lips and stung her eyes was too distinctive.

“Pickles!” she exclaimed, swiping her hands across her face. “You dumped a barrel of pickles on top of me?”

“I tried not to let all of them fall on you. Now hold still so I can wipe your face with my handkerchief, or your eyes are going to sting even worse when you try to open them,” he insisted.

She dropped her hands to her lap. When she felt a dozen or so pickles lying there, she pursed her lips while he gently mopped her face.

“There. That should do it. You can try opening your eyes now.”

Emma fluttered her lashes and opened her eyes and chanced a quick look at herself. Sure enough, she was rinsed free of mud, at least from the waist up, but her ruined costume reeked of pickles.
She was also surrounded by half a barrel of the nasty things. Poor Warren looked so desperately frightened of what he had done, she reacted instinctively, picked up one of the pickles, and tossed it at his feet.