“I’ve already given you an answer.”
“You aren’t even thinking about what she wants.”
“You think she wants to come back with you?”
He hesitates, but we both know the answer. Does it make me a bad mother, a selfish mother, to fight to keep her where she doesn’t want to be? Is that what I’m doing right now? Pushing her? Making her miserable?
My thoughts, though, are drowned out by Taylor’s voice, the answer to all of my questions, though she doesn’t realize it. Fromdown the hall, there’s an enthusiastic scream. “Yes, Mom! Please let me go with Dad!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ANNA WILDE - 1695
The knock comes too late in the day, just before the sun disappears behind the lowest part of the trees. It’s a knock that worries me—three hard raps at the wood. Too rigid to be a friend, too brazen for a peddler. Besides, no one comes to Foxglove without cause. Not for many years.
At first, I don’t move. I just sit straight as a stick at the table, my palm wrapped around my mug of tea, steam rising to fill the air in front of my eyes.
I lift my hand and place it on the gem I wear around my neck, rubbing my fingers across the cool stone. Long ago, I learned to wait when the knocks come. Not every visitor who arrives at Foxglove comes in kindness.
The knock comes again, more urgent, and I blink my eyes, looking for signs of a torch or any movement outside the window.
Slowly, as quiet as a mouse, I rise from my seat. My joints scream in protest, and I wonder if I still have willow bark in the cupboard. At the door, I’m slow to open it, but as I do, I find my guest still waiting.
She’s young, no more than five and thirty, and at first glance her face reminds me of my dear Mary. I’m struck by how badly Imiss her, how badly I miss our mama. Her dark hair clings damp to her brow, though I can’t recall it raining, and her cloak is far too thin for the season.
Her eyes speak of secrets, her expression of fears. Something is wrong, and I know it without her having to say a word. In the distance, the trees seem to know it, too. I feel them leaning in, listening.
“Are you Anna Wilde?” the woman asks me. Her hands are wrapped tightly around the shoulders of a girl—and a girl she is, barely more than a child.
The girl keeps her eyes down, not meeting mine, and I want to tip her face up, ask her the meaning of this. Ask her why she looks as empty as a mug that’s never been refilled.
Her expression is vacant. Hollow. Haunted. I know that look. I wore it myself after Mama was taken from us. And then again after the cough took my sister from me last winter.
“Please,” she repeats, and my eyes find hers again, looking away from the child. “They said… I asked, and they said if there was anyone who could help, it was you. It was Anna Wilde.” She repeats my name as if it’s an incantation, low and slow. “Please, Mistress.…”
Still, I don’t speak. Not yet. Our family has been tricked by their type before, and I won’t make the same mistakes again.
The woman thrusts her daughter forward, so I can get a better look at her in the firelight from the hearth. “It’s my daughter who needs your help. She’s just a child.”
I survey the girl. She flinches under my gaze as quickly as if I’ve slapped her and, for the first time, I notice the way she’s clutching her cloak tighter over her belly.
My joints ache, but it’s no longer from my own pain. I’m feeling hers. I understand now that I don’t have a choice. I never did.
With a quick nod, I step aside, glancing over the woman’s shoulder toward the village to be sure they haven’t been followed. “Get inside.”
The woman’s breath sounds more like a prayer as she pushes the girl forward and through the door. I latch it behind them, whispering a prayer of my own, asking the earth to shield us, and for it to look away.
Silence fills Foxglove as heavily as rain as I move across the parlor to the kitchen, picking up my candle from the table on the way.
I set the candle upon the wooden counter and take two mugs down from the shelf. As I turn, the hem of my shawl brushes the candle, sending it tumbling to the counter with a sharp crash.
I scoop it up, but not before the wax has spilled a line as white as bone, and the flame has scorched a dark spot the size of my finger. I scrape away the wax with my fingernail, hands trembling, then pause and draw in a breath. My finger—wrinkled and swollen at the joints with age—passes over the blackened scorch mark.
I can’t fix it.
This moment and this memory will remain with Foxglove long after I am gone. I close my eyes, grounding myself the way my mother taught me to when my worries get the best of me.
By the fire, I take the copper kettle and fill their mugs with tea.
