Christmas at Harmony Hill Read online

  She could tell herself she did not know, but it would only be pretense. Ever since spring when she had sprained her ankle and the doctor’s strong, slender fingers had moved across her leg to determine the extent of her injury, she had been unable to forget his touch on her skin. She should twirl and shake to rid herself of such wrong thoughts, but instead she stood still and shut her eyes to better experience the feeling.

  “What is wrong with you, Sister Sophrena?” Sister Evelyn spoke up from her stool by the apple peeler. “The spindle has been without an apple for a long minute.”

  “Yea, forgive me, Sister.” Sophrena grabbed an apple and in her haste, set it on the spike at a crook. She kept her eyes away from her sister’s face as she pulled the apple off and reset it properly. Her hands trembled as she reached for the next apple.

  Sister Evelyn turned the wheel at exactly the right speed to take the peeling efficiently from the apple. She watched as Sophrena set another apple in place. “If you feel ill, perhaps you should ask Eldress Lilith’s permission to rest in your room this afternoon or even see Brother Kenton for some sort of tonic.”

  “Nay,” Sophrena said. “I am fine. I will do my duty.”

  “To properly do so you must take care of your body and mind. Mother Ann tells us it takes a whole woman to be a Shaker sister.”

  “I have been a Believer for many years.” Sophrena could not completely keep the irritation out of her voice. Yet another sin of lack of patience she would have need to confess. But would she dare confess the shivery feeling thoughts of Brother Kenton had sent through her? At her age, the very thought of such a sin was ridiculous. She was not a young person who had to stomp out such desires. She long ago picked up her cross of self-denial and carried it faithfully.

  She would turn her mind once more to the coming Sacrifice Day to ready herself for the celebration of Christmas. She stepped back into a rhythm with the apples as she pushed aside her wayward thoughts and instead concentrated on the good things the Shaker sisters would cook with the apples for their Christmas dinner. Applesauce cakes. Spiced applesauce to go with the baked ham. Bread fresh from the oven.

  But first would be a special meeting with songs and dances to recognize the birth of the Christ. This year Christmas fell on Sunday, so the meeting would be doubly good. A day to rest and pray for the peace promised by the angels on that long ago Christmas.

  Peace. That wasn’t only what she needed, but what the country needed as well. While their village had weathered the conflict so far, Sophrena couldn’t forget the sound of cannons or the reports of casualties. How could she feel peace with the echo of death in her ears? Eldress Lilith could not understand why such thoughts were assaulting Sophrena. Nor could Sophrena.

  “Sacrifice Day, a day of atonement, is upon us,” the eldress had told Sophrena that morning during her time of confession. “Perhaps you are harboring ill will toward one of your sisters that is upsetting your spirit.” She had waved off Sophrena when she tried to speak. “Whatever it is, you will have the opportunity to rid your heart of wrong thinking so you can properly celebrate the gift of the Christ child on Christmas Day.”

  Sacrifice Day. On that day, she would have much to consider as she begged the Lord to free her from her conflicted spirit. She would wipe from her mind any thought of Brother Kenton’s gentle hands. She would fervently pray to feel her proper age and not be tempted by sins of the flesh. She had no reason to dwell on this discontent that kept poking her with wonderings of what she might have missed by putting on the Shaker dress and bonnet.

  She had not missed out on love. She had that in plenty from her sisters and brothers here in the village. And from the Lord. She knew his great love in her heart. But there were other kinds of love she had vowed to forget. Family love as the world knew it. That was the loss that was nipping at her heart. She would never know the love of a man and woman. It mattered not that she had been married before she came to the Shaker village. They had known no love. She would never hold a child born of her own body close to her heart and be the one to whisper his name into his ear.

  Were those desires so wrong? She had once thought so, but then Jessamine had shown her the joy of such love. Perhaps loving Jessamine as she imagined a mother would love had given birth to the discontent that had wormed its way into her mind and was eating away her peace.

  Sacrifice Day could not come too soon. Confession and concentrated prayers would help her get back in step with her sisters.

  The ringing of the bell to signal the midday meal was welcome. She lined up with her sisters and silently found her place at the table. She knelt with them for the silent prayer and then stood and sat at the same instant. The unity of movement was easy for her after so many years. In time, the unity of thought would return as well.

  Eldress Lilith stopped her as she left the eating room to start back down the stairs to her duty with the apples. “Sister Willa will be working with Sister Evelyn this afternoon.”

  Thinking Sister Evelyn had reported her trembling hands, Sophrena said, “I am not ill. I will be able to continue my duty.”

  “This has naught to do with how you feel.” The eldress made the clicking noise with her tongue as furrows formed between her eyebrows. “You have a visitor at the Trustees’ House.”

  “A visitor?” No one had ever come to see her. Her first thought was of Jessamine, but that dear girl was all the way across the country in California.

  “No reason to spend words discussing what we cannot know. The Ministry sent for you to greet whoever is there.” Eldress Lilith’s voice was firm. “Obedience is a trait to be desired.”

  “Yea.” Sophrena bent her head before she turned from the eldress and went out the door.

  A visitor for her. From the world. Who could it be? She shoved her hands under her apron to hide their trembling. She knew not why they trembled. She was not afraid, but there was the feeling of something about to happen. A new spirit coming to life within her.

  10

  Come in, my sister. You look to be in need of a respite.” The woman greeted Heather kindly as she ushered her into the building. “I’m Sister Muriel.”

  The woman barely gave Heather time to say her name before she turned to lead her past a set of spiral stairways that appeared to almost float upward over Heather’s head. When Heather looked up at them, she had to grasp the nearest stair rail to fight off the sudden light-headedness.

  “Nay.” The woman gently but firmly moved Heather’s hand away from the railing. “That is the stairs for the brethren. It is not for us. The sisters must use those on the other side.”

  “Are we going upstairs?” Heather dropped her hand to her side and willed away her dizziness as she looked toward the winding stairs on the other side of the hallway. Oh, to be able to drop down on that bottom step and find a moment of rest. She was so tired. She had walked across entire states and scrubbed hundreds of uniforms and never felt so weary.

  “Nay. Come, follow me and we will see to your needs.” She started on down the hallway.

  Heather spoke to the woman’s back. “I’ve come to see my aunt, Sophrena.” She hesitated. Her mother’s letter had given no surname. She knew her aunt had been married, but if she had ever been told her name, it had long been lost in her memory. But surely there could not be that many Sophrenas. “Her maiden name was Prescott.” She did know that much.

  Sister Muriel’s step slowed for a pace at the name, but she didn’t stop. “It would be best to save your words until I fetch Eldress Corrine. That way effort will not be wasted speaking them twice over.”

  Heather said no more as she followed her and let the silence settle around them. Even the woman’s footsteps made no noise on the wooden floors, as though she were walking in stocking feet instead of the black shoes that peeked out below her gray dress. Gray like the Rebels. The Rebels who might be shooting at Gideon. Heather pulled in a breath and pushed that thought away as the woman opened a door and motioned her to enter ahead of h
er.

  Heather stepped into the small room and let the warmth from the odd-looking black iron stove wrap around her. A narrow stovepipe shot up from the stove to the tall ceiling. A writing desk was against one of the walls, but strangely enough no chair sat in front of it. Instead three chairs were hung upside down on pegs on a blue railing that ran around the room. The pegs also held a candle sconce and a broom. A rag rug gave the room its only color other than the blue railing. Sister Muriel lifted one of the chairs down from the pegs and set it near the stove.

  “Rest here.” She motioned Heather toward the chair. “I will return with Eldress Corinne and some refreshment.”

  Before Heather could lower herself into the chair, the woman was out the door without a sound. Heather sat very still and wondered if her ears had ever been assaulted with such silence. The night before in her father’s barn had been dark and lonely, but there was noise. The pigs snuffling in their pen. The hens shifting on their roosts up in the hayloft. Mice scurrying along the timbers of the barn. The screech of an owl from the woods.

  Here the silence was so profound she had to push away the thought of being entombed in this small room. She pulled in a steadying breath to stop her head from spinning again. A tomb would have no window, and this room had a tall window to let in plenty of light. Besides, she was not alone in this huge building. Sister Muriel had gone to fetch someone to talk to her. She had simply forgotten how to listen for the quiet sounds of life after becoming accustomed to the crashing sounds of an army.

  Heather held her breath and listened intently. Was that the whisper of a step on the floor above her head? A door opened and shut somewhere in the building. She peered out the window again but heard no sound from outside. The window sat back in a pocket that indicated the walls of the building were of double thickness. To hold in warmth.

  The warmth was good. So very good. She scooted around in the chair so her feet would be closer to the stove. What did it matter what else was happening in the building? She had a fire to chase away the chill of her ride to the village. She would not worry about what the next hour might bring. She would simply sit in the ladder-back chair that was more comfortable than it looked and be glad of a warm place to wait. Even if Sister Muriel did forget about her there, someone would eventually come to feed the stove more wood.

  If she’d learned nothing else while with the army, she’d learned there were many things she couldn’t speed up or slow down. The water in her wash pots took a long while to heat even when she had plentiful wood to feed the fire. Night came to the battlefields at its own pace no matter how desperately she prayed for darkness to hurry to end the fighting at least until daylight returned. The night before as an outcast in her father’s barn she had wanted the sun to hurry over the horizon. But she could make none of that happen.

  Nor could she make anything happen here. She could only wait to see what these strange people would decide to do with her. If they didn’t allow it, she might not even see this aunt her mother had hoped would be God’s plan for Heather.

  Aunt Sophrena. She tried to imagine what she would look like. She had to be getting old. But then her mother had talked of playing with her as a child, that Sophrena had been much younger than Heather’s grandfather. Her mother was twenty-one when Heather was born. That meant she was forty-two when she died. This aunt Sophrena might not be so very much older than that. Many officers in the army claimed forty years, even fifty, and led their men into battle with vigor.

  Why did her every thought circle back around to battles? But what else could occupy her mind with Gideon marching on with the army? She shut her eyes. She wouldn’t think of him fighting the Rebels. Instead she would think about the way he looked as he held her that last morning with the gentle light of love in his eyes. With that thought warming her heart while the fire warmed her body, she let her mind drift back to the first time she saw him at his cousins’ house making sorghum.

  He had looked so different from the boys she’d known all her life as he led the horse around in a circle to keep the rollers squeezing the juice out of cane his uncle fed into the mill. His red hair lopped down over his forehead and his freckles were bright in the sunshine. She’d never seen anyone with that many freckles. When Gideon spotted her standing there holding onto Lucas to keep him out of trouble, he had grinned and grabbed up the boy to perch him on the broad back of the workhorse.

  “Grab a couple of handfuls of the old girl’s mane there, kid,” he told Lucas with a a big grin over at Heather. “We wouldn’t want you falling off and cracking open your head before you have a chance to introduce me to your sister. She is your sister and not your girl, isn’t she?”

  Lucas had laughed, excited to be on the horse, even if it was only a tired old workhorse. Heather had smiled a bit at Gideon, but that was all. She hadn’t encouraged his attentions that day. He was too different. He even sounded different with a northern twang to his voice. Simon said he was from up in Ohio and that he wouldn’t be around that long.

  “Joey says he don’t know why he decided to come visit them, unless he thought he could find some freckle-removing juice down this way,” Simon said. “He’s needing it for certain.”

  All the boys made fun of his freckles, but Gideon just laughed right along with them until they began to see past his freckles. And he didn’t head back north. At least not right away. Instead he headed over to Heather’s house. At first he pretended it was to see Simon, but it wasn’t very many days until everybody knew he was courting Heather. He took Lucas and Willie fishing but told Heather she’d better come along to make sure he didn’t lose one of the boys. He did handstands in the yard to make her mother laugh and gave Jimmy rides on his shoulders so he could be taller than his brothers, even Simon.

  And Heather tumbled right into the quicksand of love. She sank fast with no interest in being rescued. They shared their first kiss in the golden light of a harvest moon in late October. They were together every moment possible through November. He went home in December.

  “But I’ll be back next summer,” he had promised. On the way home from church, he pulled her off the road in behind Mr. Johnson’s barn. Sheltered there from the early winter wind and hidden from curious eyes, he kissed her before he asked, “You’ll wait for me, won’t you, Heather Lou? You won’t let another boy steal your heart if I’m not around to chase him away.”

  “They can’t steal what’s not here. You’ll be taking my heart home with you,” Heather had whispered.

  She couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving her. She wanted to go with him. She was nearly eighteen. Lots of girls married that young. She would have gone with him in a minute, but he hadn’t asked her. He’d kissed her. He’d held her close. He’d even said he loved her, but he hadn’t said anything about getting married and loving her forever.

  Her mother said that was good. They hadn’t really known each other very long. It was better to be patient when a person was talking about love for the rest of her life. She reminded Heather that he’d promised to be back in the spring, and if the feelings were still strong between them, then would be time enough to think about the future.

  The future. How easy it had been to dream about the future through the cold months of that winter of 1861. He wrote to her. She wrote him back even though her father frowned on the exchange.

  “Plenty of good boys right here in the neighborhood,” he told her. “No sense you pining after some boy way up north.”

  But she hadn’t given any other boy the time of day no matter how they sidled up to her at church. Gideon had taken her heart back to Ohio with him, and she was doing no more than marking time until he returned. Then he would ask her to marry him. Then her father would see Gideon’s good points. Then they could find a little place and settle down to begin the rest of their lives.

  She didn’t pay much attention to what was going on in the world. It didn’t have all that much to do with her back on the ridge where they lived. At least that’s what she
thought until April when the Rebels fired on Fort Sumter and tore the country apart. The North on one side and the South on the other, with Kentucky right in the middle, leaning first one way, then another. Neighbors became enemies. Families split, with brothers lining up in opposing armies ready to shoot at one another. Gideon stayed in Ohio—a Northerner through and through.

  After Simon shouldered his hunting gun and headed south, Heather’s father threw Gideon’s letters in the fire when they came. Yankees were the enemy, and he forbade Heather to persist in imagining herself to be in love with one of them.

  But she had persisted. Oh, how she had persisted. Nothing could keep her from loving Gideon then or now. She shifted in the chair by the Shakers’ stove to ease her aching back as she cradled the baby growing inside her. Sweet evidence of her persistence.

  “Little one, we will see your father again. We will.” She spoke the words aloud for she needed them for her own ears, and even though she kept her voice very soft, it seemed too loud in the silence of the Shaker house.

  As if her spoken words had drawn them, Sister Muriel and another woman came into the room. Sister Muriel carried a tray that Heather tried not to eye too eagerly. She moistened her dry lips and looked away from the steaming cup and bowl on the tray to the woman who had come in with Sister Muriel. She wore the same type dress with the overlapping white collar and the same bonnet covering her hair, but she was much older and even sterner looking than Sister Muriel.

  Heather pushed up out of her chair to meet the women. She didn’t know if she should smile or try to look as serious as they did. Perhaps smiling was against their rules here.

  Sister Muriel stepped back from the tray without speaking. She tucked her hands under her apron and lowered her eyes. The older woman motioned toward the tray and spoke in a voice that had a quiver in it. Heather wasn’t sure if that was due to her age or perhaps from infrequent use in this silent place.