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“I beg your pardon; it is not over and done. You’d better explain yourself, child. You’re not too old to get a whipping from me.”
“The man behaved like a boor,” Hannah said. “He tripped me, so I was sprawling in the mud. When I finally got to my feet—with no help from him, I slapped his face for his impudence, and well—”
Sarah was aghast. “You shame us all.”
“What do you mean?”
“You shame, me, yourself, your father. A lady would never behave so boldly.”
“Well, then, I’m not much of a lady, mother!” Her eyes spit arrows.
“Hannah, please,” her father said, as he often did in a plea to mollify the testy spirits of the two women.
“You will go to the man tomorrow and apologize,” Sarah said.
“No. I will not!”
Sarah bristled. “You will or I’ll march you in front of the Brethren who will see to your punishment.”
“Father?” she turned to Andrew, her face suddenly pale.
“You’re not going to the Brethren for any reason, Hannah. But as I understand the incident, you were as much at fault as Mr. Crowe. Tomorrow you will ride out to his farm and make proper amends with him.”
“But, sir!” she whimpered.
Her mother glared.
“Enough from both of you!” the man declared. “We’re going to have a pleasant dinner with smiles on our faces. Beau, young man, pass me the biscuits.”
And in this way, Andrew Noble settled every matter that needed to be settled. There was no doubt that it could be any other way. In Sarah Noble’s world she would never dare to defy her husband, though she often disagreed with the man. He did not have her sterner sensibility about life and how it should be rightly lived. Sarah could be a foul and mean-spirited woman. Her religion was hard and punishing. She hated where they lived, in a world she considered savage and remote. In her mind, extras measure had to be taken to ensure good discipline for a brood of spirited children. If Andrew would not give them appropriate guidance, she would. That was where the Brethren came in. The five elders of her strict religious sect could be called on to counsel children in need of discipline, although ‘counsel’ virtually equated with the heavy use of a rod, paddle or switch on a miscreant’s bare behind.
Andrew was totally against such measures and on all but a few occasions forbade his wife from subjecting his children to the dreadful dealings at the Meeting House. He preferred to take care of such matters himself if his children needed discipline, using a switch Sarah kept for that purpose. Most often, he believed that corporal punishment was ineffectual as a child-raising tool. The scientist in him rationalized that such treatment would only skew a child’s sense of right and wrong. He used the treatment sparingly and usually to satisfy his wife.
There were occasions, however, when each child ended up before the Brethren. At those times, the subject in question had so angered Andrew that he willingly gave in to Sarah’s methods and gladly watched their proffered behinds punished with a healthy dose of humiliation and the Brethren’s dreadful rod. To earn this wrath, Beau had stolen goods from a local merchant and the high-strung Hannah had lashed out against her shrewish mother. In this case, Andrew would have preferred to have had Sarah face a punishment equally as damaging as his daughter’s, since she was as much to blame. He actually threatened it.
Hannah’s punishment before the Brethren had so humiliated the girl that when Jolie misbehaved enough to earn a trip before these sober judges, Andrew refused to let her go. By then, he was convinced the practice was barbaric, despite his daughter’s misdeeds. Jolie had been smoking tobacco with one of the wild young men in town—which was two strikes against her. On hearing of the girl’s bad behavior, he informed Sarah that he would take care of the matter himself, and she was not to subject Jolie to ‘those self-righteous bastards’—he rarely used such language, but he did this time. Unfortunately, he was called away before he had the opportunity, and Sarah in defiance of her husband’s wishes brought the girl to the Meeting House for the counseling she deserved. When Andrew learned of Sarah’s subterfuge, he was so furious with his wife that the two hardly spoke for a week. The entire family was on edge for months afterwards. The siblings quarreled with each other and their mother. The parents sometimes quarreled late into the night. Life in the Noble family seemed splintered beyond repair. It was only after Andrew Noble was accidentally killed in a hunting accident—he had an unfortunate back-breaking fall—that the family finally stopped battling. They were all in shock.
Although Andrew was not a perfect father or husband, he was loved by them all and their world turned exceedingly grim with his passing. Worse than anything was that the three adolescent children were left with their mother and they quaked at the thought of her assuming complete control over the household and their lives.
To the trio’s surprise, however, a strange miracle took place. Having hated her home with great passion, and feeling little affection for her children, Sarah Noble announced just a month and a day after her husband’s burial that she was returning to Philadelphia where her mother lived. She made no effort to encourage her children to go with her. Announcing her plans to her shocked progeny, she said directly, “Some will probably think I’m skirting my duties with the three of you, but I cannot bear to stay in this Godforsaken place a moment longer. Your father’s affection and a wife’s propriety were the only things that kept me here. I suppose I’m not much of a mother,” she conceded with an odd, wistful air, “and I’m not sure I even regret that fact. But I do get the notion that the three of you would rather take care of yourselves without me. Now you’ll get your chance. You’re certainly old enough.” Her voice nearly cracked with pain and she sniffled noticeably, but she didn’t actually cry. Her stunned children stared at her silently as she wiped her nose with a crumpled handkerchief, then made her final remark in the same stern tone of voice they would always associate with their mother. “Make your father proud.”
She did not say more, but turned away, walked into her bedroom and closed the door. The following day, she was packed and ready to leave, catching the early stage which
took her to Springfield for the train ride to Philadelphia, and they hadn’t seen her since.
By the time Sarah Noble left for her mother’s home, Hannah was nearly engaged to Daniel Crowe. How she got to the place was another miracle that astounded everyone but Hannah and Daniel.
After their unfortunate run-in in town, Hannah did as she was ordered by her parents and went to Daniel to make amends. Sarah insisted that she take Beau with her because ‘Young ladies of breeding do not put themselves in vulnerable situations with strange men.’ Once the pair arrived at the entrance to the Crowe farm, Beau agreed to wait at the gate, out of earshot, while Hannah searched for the man.
She looked in the immediate area seeing nothing but a few cackling chickens, then she peeked in the barn. No sign of him. As she was moving back toward the house, suspecting he was inside, she reached the porch steps just in time to find Daniel moving from the farmhouse to his porch. He must have seen her from the window.
“Why, Miss Noble! How surprising to see you here,” he said with some amazement, a glint of amusement in his eye. No sign of his previous animosity remained.
“I’m sure you are, Mr. Crowe. However, I’ve been told that I must apologize to you for my unseemly behavior over our encounter in town two days ago.”
“I see.”
This was the first time that Hannah had looked at the man closely when she wasn’t furious with him. He was more handsome than she remembered. The light in his eyes was intense, almost blistering to her sexual body. It hardly seemed fair that he could affect her so profoundly. She wondered if this had anything to do with the violent reaction she had to him while she was foundering in the mud.
