Dear Readers: This is 9th of my vignettes. They go in sequential order, but each one has a different unique theme. I hope you have fun reading all of them.
"Jack and Elizabeth Vignette One"
"Vignette Two – The Cold Winter" (Jack and Elizabeth cope with the rough winter)
"Vignette Three – The Test: Don't Fail Me Now" – (It's fun and romantic)
"Vignette Four – Gypsy Woes" (The most light-hearted in my mind)
"Vignette Five - Blind Faith" (Drama, Suspense, New Friends, and powerful love.)
"Vignette Six - Wedding Dust" (The romance of getting married and the hours afterwards)
"Vignette Seven - The Rules of being a Wife." (Jack and Elizabeth's first weeks as husband and wife)
"Vignette Eight –Changes" (A mystery of who injured Elizabeth.)
(Another writer has written a story and called it a vignette. It is not written by me and I have nothing to do with it. All my vignettes are by jellybean49.)
Vignette 9 – The Lingering Scent of Lavender
Chapter 1 - The Hilltop Welcome
The dirt made a thudding sound as it landed after being tossed by the men with shovels.
Shovelful after shovelful.
It wasn't the nice pleasant sound made by a little spade when one prepared a garden and imagined an abundance of fresh green vegetables growing from the earth.
And it wasn't the hopeful joyous sound made when a smiling man dug the foundation of a home for his new bride.
It wasn't even the laborious sound made when a row of sweating men with tired muscles moved miles of dirt to make way for the railroad.
It was the sad sound of finality of a shovelful of dirt hitting wood.
Elizabeth stood apart from the crowd, watching from a distance from her position high on the hill.
Jack had forbidden her from going any closer.
When Elizabeth and Jack had left Hope Valley more than a week ago, children had stopped playing ball in the street to run after their wagon, laughing and yelling goodbye to their beloved teacher and town constable until they could no longer keep up. Shopkeepers sweeping the wooden sidewalks in front of their businesses had stopped swishing their brooms to wave. The lumberjacks on the edge of the woods had relaxed their arms, wiped their brows, and nodded or raised a hand in well wishing.
Hope Valley. Even its name had held promise.
This new town was nothing like Hope Valley.
During the long trip from Hope Valley, Elizabeth had imagined how it would be to be welcomed into this new town. Although they had planned to visit months ago - ahead of their actual move, their unfortunate encounter with a trio of less than upstanding citizens had changed those plans. And so, they had recently packed up and left Hope Valley without Elizabeth ever having seen this town. The place which would be her home for the next 12 months.
She had envisioned ladies dropping off warm dinners or baskets of freshly baked muffins for her and Jack. Mothers stopping by to introduce their children to the new school teacher. Telling Elizabeth about their sons and daughters. The subjects they had already mastered. What they needed to learn. Which were the troublesome boys with whom she needed to have a strong hand. Which were the shy little ones who needed encouragement and mothering.
She had imagined businessmen knocking on their door, eager to meet the town's new Mountie and maybe to drop off a box of candy for her or a jar of jam from the mercantile. Telling Jack about places for fishing and hunting. Where to find a good card game. The names of the town drunks, who needed to be encouraged to go home when the restaurant and saloon closed for the night.
But it hadn't been like that at all.
Jack and Elizabeth had been here four days and she hadn't met a single person.
Elizabeth had waved to people from a distance. A few had waved back. Some had merely nodded. Most had ignored her, enveloped in their own thoughts.
No one had knocked on their hotel door.
There had been no muffins or dinners. No candy or jam. No parents eager to talk about their children.
If anyone wanted to speak to Jack, they had done it briefly when he out riding or walking through town.
Everyone was careful to keep their distance.
Now, standing outside on the grassy hill, Elizabeth turned her eyes away from the crowd of people and looked off in the distance, towards the charred remains of the school house.
She and Jack had passed it when they had come to town four days ago. At first, Elizabeth had ignored the black pile of rubble. She had swiveled her head around at the various buildings, looking for the school. She had seen the barbershop, the mercantile, the land office, the Mountie office and jail, two Cafes, and a few other establishments. She had seen houses and barns and a livery.
But no school. Only a pile of burned wood where it should have been.
It was when her eyes spied the broken chalkboard amongst the debris that she knew it had once been the school.
The books. The chalkboard. The desks. Even the erasers. The townspeople had insisted that it all be burned until there was nothing left but ash. Only some pieces of metal, and the slate from the chalkboard had survived.
Now Elizabeth stood alone on a hill.
She was a school teacher without a school.
Elizabeth looked down at her hands. Despite the warm day, she was wearing gloves. They weren't winter gloves, but dainty ladies gloves. The type usually worn for social etiquette rather than warmth.
Jack had insisted that she wear gloves and she had rummaged through their crates of belongings until she found several pairs in perfect condition, still wrapped in thin paper and in their original cardboard boxes.
When she had lived in Hamilton, Elizabeth had never left the house without wearing a pair of pale-colored day gloves. Ever since she had been a small child, she had known that to appear in public without proper lady hand-covering was simply unheard of in her social settings, as in most places. It would have been like leaving the house without brushing one's hair or walking barefoot down the street.
She had worn them when she had first arrived in Hope Valley, then called Coal Valley. But after a few weeks, they had become an afterthought. If they were on the table by the door, she would grab them and put them on. But more often than not, she had misplaced them or they were smudged with dirt and therefore, unacceptable to wear.
Ladies' gloves simply hadn't been practical in Hope Valley. She was forever getting them soiled with chalk dust from her hands, or jam and peanut butter when she instinctively wiped a child's face, or dirt when a small child grabbed her hand to walk with her. She had long ago given up wearing a pair of gloves for any reason but to keep her hands warm in the wintertime.
And yet, now, she was wearing them again. In the summer. I suppose they'll keep the sun off my hands, she thought as she looked at the fine stitching of the pair covering her delicate hands.
Jack had insisted and so, she wore them.
The sound of a dog barking caused Elizabeth to look up from her gloved hands and she noticed that Jack was now walking up the hill with another man.
After all of Jack's many reminders that she was to stay away from the townspeople, Elizabeth was surprised that he was allowing another man to approach her.
As she watched from her vantage point on the hill, Elizabeth saw the shaking shoulders of the women and men dressed in black as the crowd below started to disperse.
When the men with shovels finished covering the small casket, they moved onto the next casket. And then the next.
Instinctively, Elizabeth held out her hand in greeting to the man in black, the thin white collar around his neck tacitly identifying him. He looked at her outstretched gloved hand but didn't offer his. At the same time, Jack gently took ahold of elbow and pulled her hand back, keeping her at least four feet from the man, who spoke in a gravelly voice.
"Welcome to Bear Creek."
The irony of his words was not lost on Elizabeth.
Hours later, Jack sat on the hotel bed watching Elizabeth change out of her clothes and into her nightdress.
"I should have left you back in Hope Valley."
"It's too late for that now. I'm here. And by the way, just for future reference, that's not exactly the kind of thing a wife likes to hear", Elizabeth added with a small chuckle.
They had discussed this over and over for the past four days.
What to do with Elizabeth.
"Did they really have to burn down the school? And all those beautiful books?", she asked, suddenly somber again.
For the first time since they had arrived in Bear Creek, Jack gave a faint smile. "You didn't see any of the books. How do you know they were beautiful?"
"All books are beautiful", Elizabeth said as if it were obvious.
"Well, to answer your question, yes. They did. I spoke to the town doctor again. There wasn't any available sulphur, and even if there was, there was no guarantee that the schoolhouse could have been totally disinfected. It would have had to have been totally sealed shut for the sulphur to work, and there were just too many chinks and cracks in it. Even now that the antitoxins have arrived, the town didn't want to risk any more cases. The books had all been handled, as had probably everything else in the building."
"If we lived near a big city, the children could have had better treatment", Elizabeth remarked with a forlorn slight shake of her head.
"I don't know if it would have mattered. Some people are just more susceptible. A couple years back, President Cleveland, in the United States, his daughter died from it. And she probably had the best possible care. From what the doc said, the young and old are susceptible.
"So they had to burn down the school", Elizabeth conceded sadly.
Jack walked the few feet across the hotel room to where Elizabeth was now hanging up her clothing in the small closet. Wrapping his arms around her, he spoke apologetically before giving her a kiss.
"I'm sorry, sweetie. I know this isn't how we thought things would be."
Elizabeth smiled at the feel of her husband's lips on her before she moved away and picked up her hairbrush, handing it to him.
After pulling back the quilt of the bed, she sank into the soft mattress, sitting at an angle as Jack moved to sit next to her. He lifted her long hair from around her shoulders and began moving the brush through it.
"I'll be fine. It should only be a few more days and then things will get back to normal around here. Whatever that is. In the meantime, I'll keep busy by writing."
"Your typewriter's still packed away in a crate and I thought you already wrote a letter to Abigail. And my family. And your family. And each of your students in Hope Valley. We've been gone from Hope Valley less than two weeks and you've already used up most of the paper in this place. Do we even know anyone left to write to?", he teased.
Elizabeth grinned. "Now I'm writing to the baby."
"To the baby?" Jack furrowed his brow in confusion.
"I was thinking of writing more short stories and well, I thought, what would be a better way of remembering everything and keeping a journal than to write to the baby. I started a new journal just for him or her."
"You do realize it will be years until the little thing can read . . . even if you are the best teacher in the world," Jack said with a grin.
"I do. Which means, I may need a few journals!"
The diphtheria had spread through Bear Creek and the outlying areas, leaving its residents with hoarse voices, worrisome breathing, fevers and chills, and in a few cases, death. The townspeople, desperate to know how it had been transmitted and how to stop it, had focused on the schoolhouse.
It was a likely place for airborne droplets from sneezing and coughing children to land on a variety of surfaces. Surfaces which were then touched by more children as they shared desks and traded pencils and books. Children who had laughed and giggled and wiped their noses on their sleeves and with their hands before sharing their drinking cups at lunch time.
And the children, even if they didn't succumb themselves, had carried the germs home to their families.
While the town had tended to its sick and waited for anti-toxins to arrive, it had done the only things it could think to do.
Quarantine the sick.
And burn down the school.
Even if Elizabeth was willing to risk her own health, neither she nor Jack was willing to risk her pregnancy. Until all danger was gone, she was to remain isolated away from the townspeople. Jack was careful to stand back from those taken ill and he made it a habit to wash his hands when he came back to the hotel room, even before greeting Elizabeth.
Elizabeth wouldn't have minded the isolationism too much, except . . . sometimes . . when Jack was gone on rounds and trying to familrize himself with the area and she was all alone. . sometimes . . .
. . . . in the back of her mind . . .
she had the uncanny feeling that she wasn't alone, even though she knew that she was.
Someone - or something - seemed to be lingering around in the air.
Hovering around her while she wrote in the baby's journal. While she dressed. When she ate. When she read a novel.
Something she couldn't describe.
. . . But she could feel its presence.
Creeping up on her.
Like a mist.
Ready to envelope her.
Up next: Chapter 2- Their New Home