Samuel drew a breath, slow and deliberate, and let it out again as he moved quickly through the streets, eager to embrace the comfort of home. Hang his schedule. The work could wait until tomorrow. After a wretched night and afternoon, he’d earned a respite. The familiar outline of The Parsonage came into view at last, and Samuel felt liable to collapse as he stumbled over the threshold.
“I am so glad you are home. I have just come from the village.” Phoebe was on him in a flash, bursting from the parlor. The words spilled out one atop the other before he set aside his coat as she fretted about starving children, bare pantries, and poor harvests.
“Why are you forcing the issue when they are struggling so?” she demanded, her brows pulled low. “The Hollises will pay their rent in due time, and it is no burden to us if it is tardy.”
Samuel stood there with his coat stuck halfway off, his head throbbing with his quickening pulse, and forced his voice to remain level. “Things are not as dire as you think. Lean months come after poor harvests. They always do. And yet, somehow, the rent is found. It always is.”
Phoebe’s head came up at once, eyes flashing. “Do you think I cannot tell when a cupboard is bare? Or the difference between inconvenience and hunger?”
“That is not what I meant,” he said, weariness tugging at every syllable as he ripped off his coat. “But I have known the Hollises for years. If they are short, it is because they have spent too much at the inn—”
“But their children do not deserve to starve, regardless of their parents’ behavior.”
His jaw tightened. “I am not saying they do, but protecting people from the consequences of their actions is nice but not kind. I will not enable them.”
Phoebe scoffed. “And in the meantime, the children go to bed hungry. I didn’t think you were capable of such cruelty!”
The color rose in her cheeks, and her posture stiffened as the corridor closed in around him. Samuel’s remaining patience frayed at the edges, straining to keep hold of his tongue—yet she still pestered him, those accusations clogging the air and burrowing into his skin like midges.
Clenching his jaw, Samuel forced himself to breathe. Phoebe didn’t understand how much damage even the best of intentions could do. It was no small task to learn the ways of another parish, and he couldn’t expect her to find her footing when it had taken him a good many months to gain his.
Yet as he tried to extricate himself, Phoebe followed him into the parlor, heaping more petitions and judgments upon him. Refusing to listen. Once more, she was sticking her nose in things she did not understand. And once more, Phoebe insisted she knew what was right.
And in the meantime, Mr. Colby was packing his meager possessions, readying himself to be tossed from his home.
Samuel drew another breath, slow and deliberate, and let it out again. The fault lay with a system that left little room for mercy. He would not allow his weariness to sour into blame.
“Phoebe,” he said, more sharply than he intended, but she did not stop. The words flowed one right after the other, quickly enough that Samuel could not keep them all straight. There was some nonsense about misjudgments and asking too much of a wife, but he could not follow the logic, for there was none to be found.
“Why can you not simply listen?” he snapped at last, the words breaking free. “You cannot fix everything the instant you lay eyes upon it.”
Silence followed, sudden and taut.
Head throbbing dully, Samuel felt everything piling one atop the other, the day’s weight surging up at once. The pressure built, tightening behind his eyes, his chest, his throat. He felt it in the way his hands trembled before he clenched them into fists, and the bitterness he had tried so hard to keep at bay finally found its voice.
“I apologize if I am not in the mood to deal with yet another of your troubles, but the last one you unleashed on the parish has done me in. Because of your interference, Mr. Colby is to be removed from our parish. He is leaving us tomorrow morning.”
*
The words slipped past her as though spoken in a foreign tongue. Familiar sounds, though their meanings were lost. Phoebe’s thoughts skidded about uselessly, reaching for something solid and finding nothing to hold as he detailed the council meeting.
“The journey will be his death,” she whispered. “His lungs have grown worse of late, and his knees pain him something terrible—”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” demanded Samuel.
“But surely if we explained it to them,” she insisted, though Phoebe did her best to keep her voice even. “The council must not understand how frail he is.”
“And you think I did not attempt to convince them?” he scoffed, his arm flinging wide as he jabbed a finger toward the church. “I did what I could! I am but one man on the council, and I have little power to do anything in this parish without their support and permission!”
Pressing a hand to her head, Phoebe turned away. “This is madness. To send an old man to his death out of spite?”
“Are you not listening?” he barked once more. “As I told you long ago, this is not personal. It is the law. Why can you not simply stop and consider that perhaps you are not the font of all wisdom and understanding? That when others act, there is reason behind it?”
Phoebe straightened. “Do not raise your voice at me, Samuel Godwin! I only wished to help him.”
“And I only wish to fulfill my duties—something you are making infinitely more difficult. I am doing my best, and yet you call my efforts insufficient and heartless.”
“That isn’t fair—”
