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Yr. loving daughter,
Lydia Worthen
She didn’t take the time to check her spelling. She sealed the letter at once. Then, reluctantly, reopened it to slip in a dollar.
She awoke once in the night and pondered on what she had once been and what she seemed to have become. She marveled that there had been a time when she had almost gladly given a perfect stranger everything she had, but now found it hard to send her own mother a dollar.
15
Rachel
She told no one about the money. She wanted to tell Diana. Diana, she knew, would rejoice with her, but she decided to wait. She was so close now to having the money she needed, and when she did, she would surprise Diana by signing the petition. Then, not more than a week after Luke had brought the money, she had a second visitor who turned her life upside down.
She had left the bedroom door open, trying to encourage a faint breeze through the stuffy room while she washed out her stockings and underwear in the basin. Suddenly she was aware of Tim, standing in the doorway. She looked up from her washing.
“There’s a visitor for you in the parlor, Ma says to tell you. A gentleman.”
Charlie! She was sure it must be he, all grown up to a gentleman, for who else would come to see her? She could hardly count Luke Stevens. She squeezed the water from her laundry and hastily wiped her hands upon her apron as she ran down the stairs.
But it wasn’t Charlie waiting in the corner of the dining room that Mrs. Bedlow called a parlor. Nor was it Luke. She wondered why Tim had called him a “gentleman” at all. At first she was sure he was a stranger. He seemed so out of place in the room of neatly dressed, chattering factory girls, this short man, very thin, with a weathered face and the homespun clothes of a hill farmer.
“Don’t you know your uncle, ey?” the man asked at the same moment she recognized him for Judah, Aunt Clarissa’s husband, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a small thing.
“Made it in two days,” he boasted. “Slept right in the wagon.”
She tried to smile, but her heart was beating like a churning blade against her breast. What could have brought him here? Anything to do with Clarissa had always spelled trouble. “What’s the matter?” She spoke as quietly as she could, feeling every eye in the crowded parlor turned their way. “Why’ve you come?”
He sobered at once, as though remembering a solemn duty. “Your Aunt Clarissa thought you need be told—”
“Told what?” A chill went through her.
“Your ma’s never been stout, you know—”
“The fever? Did she catch the fever?”
He glanced around at the girls seated in the room, who were pretending not to listen, but whose ears stood up, alert as wild creatures in a meadow. He lowered his voice, tapping his head. “Stout up here, ey?”
Lyddie stared at him. What had they done to her mother?
Judah dropped his eyes, uncomfortable under her stare. “So we been obliged—”
“What have you done to my mother?” she whispered fiercely.
“We been obliged to remand her to Brattleboro—to the asylum down there.”
“But that’s for crazy folk!”
Judah put on a face of hound-dog sorrow and sighed deeply. “It were just too much care for poor Clarissa, delicate as she be.”
“Why didn’t you ask me? I been responsible for her before. I can do it.”
He cocked his head. “You waren’t there, ey?”
“Where’s Rachel? What have you done with the baby?”
“Why,” he said, relieved to have gotten off the subject of her mother, “why she’s just fine. Right out front in the wagon. I brung her to you.”
Lyddie brushed past him out the door. The farm wagon stood outside; the patient oxen, oblivious to how comically out of place they looked on a city street, chewed their cuds contentedly. For all the stuffiness upstairs, it was damp and chilly down on the street, and Rachel sat shivering on the bench of the wagon, wrapped in a worn shawl that Lyddie recognized as her mother’s.
