And she was determined not to think about him.
“With loving care—” Sari’s gaze met and held Becca’s “—and time, Samuel found his way back to life again.”
“Did he marry an Indian woman?” Janice asked, picking at her Caesar salad.
“No.” Sari shook her head, shoveling in bites as fast as she could. Becca had rediscovered her appetite, too. “Shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday—sometime in the early 1870s—a group of white people came to the Indian village where Samuel was living. They were a Christian sect bent on civilizing what they saw as the poor Indian savages, intending to teach them Christianity and culture.”
“That’s right.” Rose nodded. “The government had turned over the task of educating the Indians to the churches,” she said with her usual confident tone.
“You know, there was an Indian boy at school with us.” She leaned in, lowering her voice to a near-whisper. “Lenore had a crush on him. I think she—”
“Mother!” Becca interrupted.
“Well, I’m sure she—”
“Mother—”
“Yes.” Rose lifted her napkin to her mouth.
“Well, anyway, the boy told us about how his tribe had first been introduced to our culture.”
Sari smiled. “While the missionaries of Montford’s day managed to sway a few natives in their direction, for the most part the ‘savages’ listened with interest, but not with commitment—”
“She did do it with him,” Rose interrupted again.
“The white man’s religion had no impact on them,” Sari continued, ignoring Rose. “They weren’t swayed from who they were and what they believed to be true.”
“That boy wasn’t going to be swayed, either,” Rose said when Sari stopped for another bite. “He got what he wanted and then bade Lenore adios—”
Sari broke in. “One of the missionary women did sway the heart of Sam Montford,” she said.
She suddenly had all the Naylor women’s attention. “Elizabeth Campbell had weathered her own share of life’s pain but, as Samuel put it, she’d learned to endure and ‘wore peace like a mantle.”’
Becca wondered if that was how she could win back her husband. By finding some peace to wear.
“Samuel was apparently attracted to that sense of peace, and then to Lizzie Campbell herself,” Sari continued. Not one of them was eating.
“Before she left with her group, he asked her to marry him.”
Even Betty was waiting attentively, no longer taking notes. “She accepted.”
“I knew that,” Rose told them all. “Lizzie is the mother of Samuel’s children.”
The restaurant’s manager, the pregnant daughter of one of the men Becca had graduated from high school with, came to check on them. A few minutes later, their waitress was back, offering dessert. They all declined in favor of more to drink.
Except for Sari. She asked for both.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Betty asked Sari once the younger woman had taken their order.
“No.” Sari shook her head. “Lizzie stayed behind with Samuel when her group moved on, but he was no longer content just to drift. He wanted a home again.”
Becca’s heart went out to the town’s founder. She’d never expected her quest to unearth the life of Samuel Montford would affect her so personally.
“He wanted children,” Sari murmured.
He wanted exactly what she and Will had always wanted.
“But whenever he considered returning to Boston with his new bride, a bride he knew his family would approve of, he’d start to suffocate. That was the word he used in his journal—suffocate. He couldn’t make himself go back there, couldn’t live in a society that had rules where its heart should have been.”