Love's First Bloom (7 page)

She quickly wrapped her shawl around her shoulders before carefully making her way down the alley that separated the buildings and outbuildings planted along Water Street and the wild grasses and stands of pine trees that hugged the northern bank of the Toms River.

The sun was threatening to break across the horizon now, directly behind her to the east. With the world bathed in soft, gray light, she reached Main Street, which had yet to welcome the traffic of a new day.

She stopped to shift the strap of the canvas bag that was digging into her shoulder, and she looked around to see if anyone was out and about. As usual, the stable directly ahead lay dark and quiet, although it would soon burst with activity as travelers staying at the inn arose and sent for their horses and wagons. To her right, the planked sidewalks that ran on either side of the main thoroughfare in front of a variety of buildings were empty.

It would be a few hours before storekeepers made ready for another day of commerce. Their wives, however, would rise to prepare breakfast soon, adding soft light and fragrant aromas to the village. Nearby farmers and others who harvested the bounty of the pinelands that surrounded the village would not arrive until midday. By early afternoon, packet ships would arrive carrying cargo that would include a fresh set of city newspapers she was anxious to read for news of her father’s trial. Once all the cargo was unloaded, local wares would be loaded onto the packet ships that would return to New York City the next morning.

She was not certain about the schedule for the stagecoach or even whether it would travel through here today. If it did, she hoped that none of the passengers on board would be reporters who had the village of Toms River as their final destination in their search for Rev. Livingstone’s daughter.

Satisfied when she finally had the canvas bag in place that she could proceed alone and unnoticed, she turned left and crossed the bridge to get to the south side of the river. Although the day promised to be fair, a strong easterly breeze blew across the river, capping brackish waves with white foam, and she tightened her shawl around her shoulders.

She stopped when she reached the middle of the bridge to finish her morning prayers, a new ritual that seemed to make it easier for her to pray, despite the uncertainty of her father’s trial and her own future. After she folded her hands and rested them on the wooden railing, she raised her face to the heavens and closed her eyes. As the breeze caressed her face, she acknowledged that if she had to be anywhere other than home, she was grateful that He had brought her here to this place and to this particular couple’s home.

Because Phanaby and Elias Garner were such faithful followers of the Word and solid members of the community, most of the villagers here had accepted her. No one had ever questioned that she was exactly what she pretended to be: a young widow with a little girl to raise on her own.

Most simply offered their friendship and understanding. She did not know whether it was out of respect or pity, but they had never asked her about where she had lived before or how her husband had died, beyond the brief explanations either Phanaby or Elias had offered to them before she had even arrived: Ruth’s husband, Martin, had owned a small stationery store in New York City, but was heavily in debt. After his unexpected death due to some unnamed illness, she only lasted a year on her own until it was necessary for her to turn to distant relatives for help.

Ruth sighed, bowed her head, and tried again to open her heart. “Heavenly Father, I come to you again this morning to praise your wisdom and to ask you to help me,” she whispered.

Unbidden, tears welled, and she paused to blink them away and swallow the lump in her throat. “I don’t understand why you would let my father suffer so cruelly,” she murmured. “I don’t understand why you chose me to protect Lily when I have to learn so much about caring for such a young child. Or why my burden has to get even harder now that reporters are trying to find me, which only places Lily at even more risk of being discovered. Please, Father. Help me to understand. Help me to be more patient. And please touch the hearts of the jurors, that they might truly believe in my father’s innocence and set him free to continue the work he has been doing in your name so we can be together again very soon. Amen,” she whispered and opened her eyes.

Less than a heartbeat later, she closed her eyes again for just a moment. “I forgot to ask you earlier to bless Phanaby for agreeing to take care of Lily until breakfast each day and giving me a very special place to spend that time. Amen,” she finished before the first hint of golden light burst through the shadowed horizon.

Her heart began to race with anticipation once she reached the other side of the bridge. She turned down a narrow, sandy path that hugged the shoreline on the south side of the river, which had yet to develop as the village had done. She slowed her pace and meandered her way between the low vegetation that flourished along the river’s edge and a forest of cedar and pine that extended west for miles.

From here she had an unobstructed view of the series of stately clapboard homes on the opposite side of the river, just below the apothecary, where many of the local ship captains lived with their families when they were not at sea. She had not actually seen Capt. Grant since he had brought her here, but she had seen his ship, the
Sheller,
anchored in the river or being unloaded at the end of Dock Street. By listening carefully to snippets of gossip when she had gone into the village with Phanaby, she had learned that he was a confirmed bachelor who called his ship his home, and that he sailed between here and a number of coastal cities as far north as Boston and as far south as Charleston.

She stopped for a moment and scanned the river, but since all the ships anchored there had dropped their sails, she could not be sure if the
Sheller
was among them. She did not know if Grant was part of her father’s network, or if any of the other towns or villages on his route had become home to the fallen angels who had started new lives. She suspected he was simply one of many sea captains who carried her father’s precious cargo simply for the money they earned.

Choking back the fear that her father’s life and his ministry might soon end if he was wrongly convicted, she hurried along to the one place that gave her any sense of hope, as well as privacy. She finally rounded the bend and spotted the finger of land she now claimed as her own, and her smile stretched into an ear-to-ear grin when she approached the very place where Jane Canfield’s flower garden had once flourished. She set down her heavy canvas bag and rotated her shoulder to ease out a kink before tackling today’s work to get the earth ready to receive plants that would bloom with color again—at least she hoped. The garden itself had surrendered to weeds many years ago. Ruth had spent two hours here every morning for the past week, ripping out anything and everything that had taken root.

She stared at the rocks peeking through the broken earth and sighed. Although the soil was dark and moist with promise, it also contained a heavy crop of rocks that needed to be cleared before she could plant anything at all. Ruth assumed that the rocks must have bordered the garden at one time, but since many were scorched, it appeared that someone at another time had used them to provide a bed for an open fire.

Still, she was not going to let anything, including a little hard work, keep her from developing this garden into a private sanctuary where she could be alone with her thoughts and forget for a time the future of her father and the disturbing news that reporters were seeking to find her.

She leaned back on her haunches to rest her arms. According to Phanaby, the nearest family lived on a ranch a good four miles downriver. Ruth had caught a glimpse of their cattle grazing on wild salt grass, but she had never seen anyone tending to them, which meant that this little piece of land was hers and hers alone to enjoy for as long as she lived here in the village.

Completely at ease with her isolation, if not ecstatic, she removed her shawl to make it easier to work. She neatly folded it and set it on top of a patch of clover a good bit away from the garden and opened the canvas sack. She secured a pair of old gloves Phanaby had given her and put them on, happy to have them despite the fact they were too big for her. After glancing at the rocks one more time, she chose a small, iron garden pick as her first weapon of choice from the tools Phanaby had loaned to her.

The first rock she attempted to remove was so stubborn she gave up trying and tackled a smaller one, which gave up its hold on the earth but tore a small hole in the palm of one of her gloves in the process. “Why?” she asked, gritting her teeth as she struggled to remove the next rock. “Why does everything I want to do have to be so hard? Can’t you help me do this?” she grumbled, hoping God might just this once take mercy on her.

By the time she finished struggling seven rocks from the ground, she had also managed to berate God for every trouble He had sent her way lately, starting with the accusations against her father that had resulted in his arrest.

Disgusted with herself for losing whatever grace she had received during her morning prayers, she squinted as she wiped away a band of perspiration on her forehead. Now that the sun was much brighter, she realized she had forgotten her bonnet again. Blinking back tears of frustration that added more exhaustion to both her body and her spirit, she sniffled, but it was the strong smell of fire, far too close to dismiss, which had her quickly scrambling to her feet.

Heart racing, she whirled about, looking for the source of the fire. When she noticed the smoke swirling up from the chimney in the abandoned Canfield cabin, only yards away from her garden sanctuary, her heart sank down to the soles of her feet and stayed there.

Someone had moved into that vacant cabin.

An overwhelming sense of disappointment flooded her body, and her heart started to pound when she heard someone open the cabin door. Her disappointment flashed straight to annoyance, which lingered there for a moment. Clenching her fists, she squared her shoulders and tilted her chin up defiantly, yet she had no right to be annoyed, let alone claim an entire finger of land as her own.

When she spied the figure of a man approaching, however, she instinctively took a step back. He was too far away to be able to distinguish his features, but he appeared to be a very old man who was wearing well-worn denim coveralls and a yellowed shirt. Leaning heavily on a makeshift cane, his shoulders were rounded, if not hunched. Even though he stopped every few steps, as if he needed to garner up enough energy to take a few more, he exuded a level of annoyance, if not outright anger, that made her heart pound even harder.

Eight

Jake paused when he was halfway through the copse of young pine and cedar trees and feigned the need to stop to get enough energy to continue walking. He had been working so feverishly for the past few weeks, grabbing only a bit of sleep here and there, he almost did not mind using the cane he had fashioned by his own hand out of a twisted tree limb late last night.

Because he knew and trusted Capt. Grant, he had come here to Toms River. It didn’t take long to learn from village gossip that a young woman had arrived only days after Grant delivered that wooden chest to Mrs. Garner and had moved in with the family—a woman he believed could very well be Ruth Livingstone.

Unfortunately, Jake was still too unsure of his own abilities as a reporter to completely trust his own instincts. He was too far away from her now to see if she matched the description his brother had compiled for him from a number of sources to know if he had made a crucial mistake and wasted precious time by waiting several days before trying to actually meet her.

Shadowed by the canopy of foliage overhead, he coughed and rounded his back a bit to give evidence of the ruse he’d devised for his temporary identity as Jake Spencer. He observed the wisp of a woman, who was standing near a pile of rocks he had seen her struggle from the ground this morning. He had been encouraged to see that she was petite in size, which seemed about right, although the dark blue gown she wore hung a bit from her frame, as if she had recently lost some weight. Her dark wavy hair was long and styled quite simply, however, just as he had expected it to be. Still, he was far from satisfied that this young woman was the one that every daily newspaper in New York City had sent their best reporters to find.

He resumed his painfully slow progress down the rocky path toward her. Step after careful step, ever mindful of the image he needed to project, he kept his gaze locked with hers while he mentally sorted through the information he had memorized about the elusive minister’s daughter.

According to all accounts, she was a shy, soft-spoken, reserved young woman who had only started keeping house for her infamous father five or six years ago, replacing a long series of housekeepers who had helped the young widower raise his infant daughter. While he devoted his time to the needs of the city’s fallen angels, she lived far from the controversy surrounding her father; indeed, from everything he had read, the minister had never allowed her to actively participate in his work at all.