He shrugged and went to the next door. It was partially open and he stepped inside, tiptoeing now. Emily’s bed was closest to the door, so she would get the most light from the hallway. She was lying on her back, one arm above her head, the other across her stomach. Her hair, as dark as her mother’s, spread across the pillow, framing her face and making her look all the more angelic. Smiling, he reached down and pulled the blanket up around her chin, then tucked Susannah, the doll they had given her for Christmas, under one arm.
When he turned, he saw that young Joshua was still awake. His eyes were heavy and drooping, but they followed him as he came to the bed. Nathan bent down and kissed him on the forehead. “Good night, son.”
“Good night, Papa.” He mumbled something about tomorrow, then turned over on his side, pulling the covers up and over his shoulders. The eyes closed, and he was asleep.
Elizabeth Mary slept in the smallest bed, which stood closest to the flue from the downstairs fireplace. Nathan could feel the heat radiating from the bricks and nodded in satisfaction. He had banked the fire downstairs a few minutes before and was pleased that it was doing its job. Their youngest had turned eighteen months the first part of November. She was on her stomach, one knee cocked up and the opposite hand bent over her head. Against the white of the pillowcase, she could almost be missed completely in the semidarkness. As opposite in every way from Emily as one child could be from another, Elizabeth Mary was a towhead, her short hair as white as sunlit snow. She was fair of skin and had pale blue eyes. Where Emily was confident and aggressive, Elizabeth Mary was shy and often lost in her own thoughts. Where Emily loved people—adults, children, male, female—Elizabeth Mary felt comfortable only with her own family. Even with her grandparents it had taken her weeks to feel comfortable enough to lapse into those chattering conversations she held with herself when she was playing. But let anyone else come into the room, and nothing they did, said, or begged her to do would break through her inscrutable soberness and utter silence.
Nathan leaned clear over to get low enough to kiss her hair, and as he straightened, once again he offered the little prayer that he said every time he came in to kiss her good night. They had lost little Nathan to the fever. Days later they had come within inches of losing this one too. If Joseph hadn’t come and blessed her . . . “Thank you, Lord,” he murmured once again.
As he came out and started towards the end bedroom where he and Lydia slept, he stopped again. The door was open only an inch or two, and the light was on. This was no surprise, for she always waited up for him when he worked into the night doing the books. What surprised him was that he could hear her softly humming. Reaching down, he untied the laces of his boots, then removed them, taking care not to make any noise. Finally, he moved forward to stand just outside the door. His face softened as he recognized the melody. She was humming the lullaby his own mother had taught her, the lullaby that Mary Ann had used with each of her children and that was now being used in four additional households.
The angle of the door was such that he couldn’t see clear into the room, so very slowly he pulled the door open another inch or two, hoping it would not creak and give him away. He still couldn’t see the bed where she was, but he could see the mirror above the dresser, and in it he could see Lydia’s reflection. She was propped up with both of their pillows. The Book of Mormon was in her lap, open but facedown. Her eyes seemed to be looking off at nothing. Her hair was undone and cascaded in dark waves across her shoulders, just as Emily’s did. He shook his head, marveling again at her beauty.
The humming stopped, and for a minute he thought she was going to go back to her reading. But she only fluffed up the pillows a little, then settled in again. Then she laid her head back slightly, and, to his surprise, she began to sing.
Thy mercy, my God, is the theme of my song,
The joy of my heart, and the boast of my tongue;
Thy free grace alone, from the first to the last,
Hath won my affections and bound my soul fast.
Nathan recognized the song immediately. It was one of the songs Emma Smith chose for the hymnal published a few years before. It was not one of the most popular hymns, but it was sung frequently enough that Nathan knew part of the words. He was surprised that Lydia knew them all.
Without thy sweet mercy I could not live here,
Sin soon would reduce me to utter despair;
But, through thy free goodness, my spirits revive,
And he that first made me still keeps me alive.
He felt a lump forming in his throat as he suddenly realized something. It had been a long time since he had heard Lydia sing like this. She had always sung the lullaby to the children; but alone, singing to herself—that hadn’t happened for a long, long time, and it made him want to weep.
Now she straightened and sat up fully. Her hands were folded in her lap and her face was filled with happiness.
Thy mercy is more than a match for my heart,
Which wonders to feel its own hardness depart;
Dissolv’d by thy goodness I fall to the ground,
And weep to the praise of the mercy I found.
Memories of a day in an apple orchard came flooding back to him now. He had gone to town looking for Joshua and been told that Lydia might know where he was. She was at her aunt’s house south of town, so Nathan went there to ask her about Joshua. The aunt said he would find Lydia out in the orchard. It was spring, and the whole orchard was in bloom. And he had indeed found her there, dancing among the trees, singing the hauntingly sad and tragic love song “Barbara Allen.” Only later had he come to realize that it was at that moment he had started to love her.
The singing stopped now for a moment, and Nathan leaned forward to see better. At first he thought she had forgotten the words. But she had only lifted the Book of Mormon and clasped it to her bosom. He could see her eyes in the mirror. They were shining, but not tearful. It was not sadness that filled her face, but a quiet, inner joy.
Great Father of mercies, thy goodness I own,
And the covenant love of thy crucified Son;
All praise to the Spirit, whose whisper divine,
Seals mercy, and pardon, and righteousness mine.
She stopped and the words hung in the air, not willing to die. As he watched her, he was struck again with an overwhelming feeling of love for this woman. Slowly, Nathan pushed the door open.
She started as she saw him in the mirror, and stood quickly. “Oh, Nathan. I didn’t hear you.” She saw the boots in his hand and her eyebrows arched in surprise. Then she understood. “I . . . How long were you there?”
“Long enough,” he said softly.
She laughed, embarrassed and suddenly shy. “You did that to me once before, many years ago. Do you remember?”
“I do. And I remember that I had never heard anything so lovely or seen anything so beautiful as what I heard and saw that day in the orchard. And I have not again until this very moment.”
The color in her cheeks deepened. “Why, thank you, Nathan.”
He set the boots down and went to her. Taking her face in his hands, he looked deeply into her eyes. Then he leaned down and kissed her softly. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for singing again.”
Now the tears did come, but she was smiling through them. She reached up, her hands touching his. “No, thank
you,
Nathan, for making me
want
to sing again.”
Wilford Woodruff was right, of course. The storm didn’t last for the entire trip, though they had semirough seas a good part of the way. On January eleventh, under a slate gray sky, twenty-two days after leaving New York, the packet ship
Oxford
was towed slowly up the Mersey River and into Liverpool.
Derek had to resist the temptation to drop to his knees when he finally stepped off the gangplank and onto the solid planking of the wharf. He stopped, lifting his head and breathing deeply, savoring the sheer joy of being freed from the smell, from the confinement, and from the everlasting movement of the ship.
“Hey, mate!” someone snarled behind him. “Move it ohver, eh, what?”
Derek jumped as a dockworker rattled past with a cart full of hemp.
“Stupid colonials,” the man muttered angrily as he went by. “Why don’tcha go back to America where ya come from?”
“Ah, put a button on it, mate,” Derek called back without rancor, letting his best English accent roll out. The man gave him a startled look, then moved on, still muttering.
There was a movement beside him and Derek turned. John Taylor was standing there, smiling broadly. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? To hear a good old Cockney accent again.”
“I’ll say.”
“Welcome home, Derek,” he said. “Welcome home.”
Chapter Notes
While in Philadelphia with Joseph, Parley Pratt and others were taught the doctrine of eternal marriage and the eternal nature of the family. The personal feelings Parley expresses to his wife here in the novel come largely from his own words. (See
PPP Auto.
, pp. 259–60.)
The hymn sung by Lydia here is number 73 in the original hymnal that the Church published under the direction of Emma Smith.
Chapter Eighteen
As the train moved slowly out of Penwortham Station, Derek felt his heart begin to race a little. Preston was the next stop, just five or six miles away. He had once told Rebecca that his home was America now, and that he had no regrets about leaving England. So his excitement at returning was surprising to him. For all its harshness, for all the grim realities of their existence here, it was still home. Suddenly he desperately wished that Peter were here beside him to share the moment.
It had been a hasty three days since their arrival. They docked in Liverpool on Saturday afternoon and spent a miserable night in a most distasteful inn. The next morning, the Sabbath, they attended two different Anglican church services, then sought out the only contact they had in Liverpool. John Taylor’s wife, Leonora, had a brother here. George Q. Cannon was completely bowled over to find his brother-in-law standing at the door. The missionaries were received warmly and fed a hearty supper, and the Cannons listened very favorably to the message of the Restoration.
Anxious to get to Preston, they had spent most of this day, Monday, getting their limited amount of luggage out of customs; then, leaving most of it at the Cannon home, they caught the six o’clock train for Preston. Now at five minutes of eight p.m., they had almost reached their destination.
It was full dark, and outside, the air was cold and filled with a touch of fog. But Derek didn’t need light to know what lay just ahead of the train. In a moment they would come along the bluffs that marked the edge of the River Ribble Valley, with its sweeping curves and beautiful green vistas. Here the river was wide and deep, moving slowly, with barely a ripple. On the north side would be the city proper, with its endless rows of two- and three-story apartment buildings that overlooked the river. These were the nicer housing complexes. Behind them, between the river and the great textile factories, would be the housing for the poor—gray-black apartment houses, windows almost covered with black soot, the streets and alleys no more than a rabbit’s warren where the laboring poor crammed eight and twelve deep into one-room flats.
Without thinking, Derek wrinkled his nose. He could almost smell the open sewage running down the streets and alleyways, the stench of half-rotten cabbage cooking in pots with very little meat. He could almost hear the clatter of the wooden shoes worn by the factory workers, the raucous shouts of the gaunt-eyed children playing some game with a stick and a rock, darting in and out among the great cotton wagons which thundered by, day and night.
Derek closed his eyes and lay back against the seat. No, he didn’t need the light of day to know what lay waiting for them. But smells or no smells, filth or no filth, it was home, and he was excited to get off the train and be in the midst of it again.
As the train began to slow for the station, Wilford Woodruff lowered the window, letting the cold air pour into the coach. No one seemed to mind, for several people had done the same. Men and women and a couple of children leaned way out, eyes half-closed against the freezing air as they tried to see who was waiting for them at the station.
“There’s Willard Richards,” Wilford cried.
John Taylor jumped up and thrust his body half out of the train. He was searching the crowd for his old friend Joseph Fielding, who had also come on the first mission and stayed behind to keep the work going. John Taylor and Joseph Fielding had emigrated from England to Canada together some years before and were longtime friends. It was in Canada that Parley Pratt and Nathan Steed had found both families and helped convert them to the Church. He sat back, disappointed to see that Joseph was not there.
Derek went up on the balls of his feet to see over their heads. The train was nearly stopped now, huffing and puffing, sending heavy black smoke and hot cinders over everything. But through the smoke and the light fog, he saw the heavy girth of Willard Richards, and a woman standing by him. There was a small group of Saints crowded around them, already starting to wave a welcome to the new arrivals.
“There’s Sister Richards,” Derek said.
“Is she the ‘prophecy’ girl?” Wilford asked Derek.
He nodded.
They pulled back inside the coach, shivering and red faced. “Prophecy girl?” John Taylor asked Derek.
“Yes, she’s the one that Heber baptized, then wrote and told Willard that he had baptized his wife that day.”
“Oh, yes, I remember Heber telling me that now.”
“And did Heber tell you about Brother Willard’s proposal to her?”