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“They are worthless as they are.”
“I beg your pardon?” Faith said.
“Read one.”
Faith looked at a recipe for face cream. It was simple enough: oil, water, a bit of beeswax, a few herbs. Then at the bottom she saw that it called for something called “balm.” “What is this last thing?” she asked. “A Balm of Gilead?” She looked at Beth’s eyes and saw that she thought this Biblical herb was not attainable. “We have this in my country,” Faith said, and wanted to add, “In my time.”
“Would you like to take a walk?” Beth asked.
“Certainly.” Faith slipped the book into the pocket of the apron she was wearing and followed her outside. She stopped to tell Thomas to look after William while she was gone.
William looked at his niece in surprise. “Do not tell me, Beth, that you are going to show her the secret of the women of this family?” His voice was teasing, but Faith could hear a deeper note under it. “Do you say that my life is worth that much to you?”
Beth, who had just a short while before been in tears to see her uncle, now gave him a look of dismissal. “You will never know,” she said to him over her shoulder.
Faith looked at William in question.
“Do not ask me to tell you,” William said loudly as the women left the garden. With the weight he’d gained his voice had improved. “Only once did I try to invade their secret. My father made sure I did not sit down for a week.”
“Beth,” Faith said when they were outside the walls, “what’s he talking about?”
They were walking past the old house, but Beth didn’t so much as glance at it. “Do you remember that I told you my family has lived here for a long time?”
“You said ‘since the dawn of time.’”
“Yes. That old house that you love so much—no, don’t deny it, I’ve heard how you shoo the cows out and wander through it every day—was the third house my family has had on this land.”
“Third?” Faith asked, thinking about how long they must have lived here.
“Come, and I will show you something that will interest you.”
Faith had to hurry to keep up with young Beth as she walked quickly across the pasture, then through a gate and into the woods. There was a narrow path, meant for one person only, that snaked through the dark woods. She looked up at the trees, growing so close together that no sunlight came through, and she wondered if she was seeing virgin forest: uncut since the creation of the world.
“No one is allowed in here,” Beth said. “There have been signs of wolves so sometimes I’ve taken Thomas with me, but never Tristan or my uncle. My mother hated it in here and refused to go, but then she was not of Hawthorne blood. I learned what I know from my grandmother and she from her mother.”
Faith had no idea what Beth was talking about, but the hairs on the back of her neck were beginning to stand up. The woods were dark and a bit creepy, and Beth’s words made it seem as though they were going to come upon a house full of witches.
“Beth, are you sure it’s all right for us to be back here alone?”
“Of course. There!” she said at last. “Look at that.”
Faith saw a clearing in the woods just ahead of them. There was a little hill and unless she missed her guess it was man-made, and looked to have been built a very long time ago. On the top of it was a short, round tower of stone, with a door in it, but no roof that she could see.
“What in the world is that?” Faith asked. “And how old is that thing?”
“It was there when one of my ancestors went on the Fourth Crusade,” Beth said.
“Crusade? So we’re talking about the year one thousand?”
“The Fourth Crusade was from 1201 to 1204,” she said, looking at Faith oddly, as though wondering if she’d ever been to school. “The tower is older than that. My grandmother told me that all the stones from the fields were piled here, then the stones were covered with dirt. More stones were used to build the tower.”
“I wonder if it could be Roman,” Faith said, looking up at it. It couldn’t have been more plain. The trees had been cut back from around it and from the look of the place, some trimming had been done recently. “Do you take care of it now?”
“Yes. I will pass it on to my daughter.”
There wasn’t a weed around the base of the building. If Beth was taking care of the tower, she was doing a good job. With the trees cut back, it was bright on the little hill and the sun fell onto the top of the stone building.
Beth reached into her pocket and withdrew a big iron key. “I am going to show you what is inside.”
