Tomorrow's Treasure by Linda Lee Chaikin Page A

Derwent
was
silly.
    At that, her conscience smote her. She must not be so hard on Derwent. He was a kind boy, and she knew he would never deliberately say anything about her or her parents to make her unhappy.
    By the time she started across the green Evy was thoroughly soaked. Aunt Grace was going to be upset with her again. “You are so willful at times, Evy,” she said time and again. “You must learn to be more like Junia.”
    Evy saw the old sexton persevering across the rectory yard toward the cemetery. The village gravedigger was carrying a large piece of canvas.
    He must be on his way to cover the trench he was digging earlier this morning.
If he could keep the rain out, he would be able to finish tomorrow. Uncle Edmund said the sexton was the most superstitious person in Grimston Way, even more so than Old Lady Armitage, who hung garlic on her kitchen door to keep the vampires away on Allhallows Eve. According to the good sexton, if the rain interfered with digging a grave, it meant the Grim Reaper on his horse had been delayed.
    Evy waved at the old man, smiling. “No Grim Reaper is going to overtake me,” she sang out and took off running toward the church and the rectory house.
    The soggy lawn sank beneath her shoes as Evy dashed through the wicker gate and up the walkway, through Aunt Grace’s heavily pruned rose bushes. Little remained of the summer flower garden except a few worn-out daisies. The seedpods that her aunt had out on a drying screen for the next spring’s planting were getting a drenching. Evy put them under the porch before entering the front door, remembering to wipe her shoes on the mat.
    Inside the rectory hall she removed her shoes, then stood quite still, looking up at the photographs that hung over the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs.
    Evy went to stand and look as she had done unnumbered times in the past. There they were, Dr. Clyde Varley and his wife, Junia, servants of God to the savages in Zululand. A handsome couple. He had grave but kind eyes. “They are amber colored with flecks of jade green,” she assured herself in a whisper. “The color just does not show up in the photograph.”
    And there was her beloved mother, Junia, with her bright, sweet smile and her dark hair pulled back in a knot.
    Evy pulled her own wet hair back from her face and tried to wind it into a knot, but it was so thick, heavy, and wavy, that it ended up spilling from her grasp. She gave up and let it fall about her shoulders. “I look just like you, Mum. I know I do.”
    She reached a hand to touch her mother’s portrait, closing her eyes, imagining as she so often did that she could feel her mother’s loving embrace across time, across the miles.
Mother is a heroine.
After all, they died as Christian martyrs, in much the same way other Christian leaders laid down their lives throughout the centuries. Evy was learning about many of those heroes in her Sunday studies at the rectory. “But I wish I had your heart for God too. Your gentle spirit. Aunt Grace says I have a willful spirit. But where did I get it? Not from you. From father?”
    Evy could hear Mrs. Croft’s twanging voice singing in the kitchen. She turned from the photographs and ran down the stairs and to the back of the rectory, where the fragrant smells of hot bread wafted to entice her.
    Aunt Grace was out calling on the parishioners with Uncle Edmund, and they must have been delayed by the rain. She would ask Mrs. Croft about it. Evy had learned early that if one wanted to know anything about what was going on in the village, the person to ask was the sextons wife, Mrs. Croft. She had a full basket of relatives, so it seemed, and they all apparently worked in Rookswood as parlor maids, downstairs maids, grooms in the stables, cooks and washers in the kitchen, or gardeners. Whatever gossip was astir, be it upstairs or down, it was sure to drift down the hill