All Things Beautiful (Uncharted Beginnings Book 3) Read online

  Books by Keely Brooke Keith

  UNCHARTED

  The Land Uncharted

  Uncharted Redemption

  Uncharted Inheritance

  Christmas with the Colburns

  Uncharted Hope

  Uncharted Journey

  Uncharted Destiny

  Uncharted Promises

  UNCHARTED BEGINNINGS

  Aboard Providence

  Above Rubies

  All Things Beautiful

  All Things Beautiful

  Keely Brooke Keith

  Edenbrooke Press

  All Things Beautiful

  Copyright 2018 Keely Brooke Keith

  Published by Edenbrooke Press

  Nashville, Tennessee

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. For inquiries and information, please contact the publisher at: [email protected]

  Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, names, events are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any likeness to any events, locations, or persons, alive or otherwise, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Designed by Najla Qamber Designs

  Interior Designed by Edenbrooke Press

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Chapter One of The Land Uncharted

  More Books by Keely Brooke Keith

  About the Author

  “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

  Ecclesiastes 3:11

  Chapter One

  The settlement of Good Springs

  Late spring, 1868

  Hannah Vestal scribbled a story idea on a quartered piece of gray leaf paper. She slipped it back into her apron pocket before anyone could notice. The morning sunlight had yet to peek between the kitchen curtains, and already four of her five hungry siblings were hovering around the table. As she flipped the johnnycakes, the kettle whistled. She poured the steaming water into a copper teapot.

  What would Prince Aric think if the maiden Adeline’s days began in such a tizzy of feeding family members and packing school lunches?

  Hannah checked the underside of the johnnycakes. The batter sizzled on the iron skillet, filling the kitchen with a sweet aroma that reminded her of her mother. While the johnnycakes cooked, she squeezed between the girls to carry the butter dish and the apple jam to the table.

  Prince Aric might consider it noble if Adeline had set aside her dreams to help her father raise her younger siblings.

  The edges of the cakes turned golden brown. Hannah gripped the skillet’s handle with a folded tea towel and dropped the stove cover back into place. Metal clanked sharply against metal, ringing through the farmhouse kitchen, but no one noticed.

  Then again, maybe the prince wouldn’t appreciate common work no matter the maiden’s motivation.

  It was a good thing Hannah wasn’t writing herself into Adeline’s character. The story had changed many times since she’d started writing it during her mother’s illness, but over the years since, she’d been careful not to give Adeline her own circumstances. The prince wouldn’t be interested in a grown woman who entertained herself by dreaming up stories. What man would?

  Hannah passed a milk pitcher to her thirteen-year-old sister. Doris was mid-sentence but didn’t miss a syllable as she accepted the pitcher and twirled to the table. “And then Roseanna said that Sarah doesn’t like Benjamin anymore since Anthony wrote her a love letter with a poem.” Doris held still long enough to hum a wistful sigh. “I hope someday a boy writes me a poem.”

  Hannah checked a bowl of boiled eggs, which were cooling on an open shelf. “I wish you would stop worrying about boys and focus on your schoolwork.”

  Breakfast was ready. Looking out the back window, Hannah scanned the property for the rest of her family. Her father and brother were walking toward the house from the orchard. “Here they come.”

  “Good. I’m starving.” Doris rolled one of her two braids between her fingertips. “Hannah, have you seen my pink ribbons anywhere?”

  “They are in your second drawer.”

  Doris snapped her fingers. “I’ll be right back.”

  “No, wait until after we eat.” Hannah poured several cups of fresh milk while the seven-year-old twins set the table. The girls’ bouncy blond ringlets reminded Hannah of the hair color she’d given Adeline in her story. Surrounded by light-haired girls, it was no wonder she’d written her heroine with the same appearance. But perhaps auburn would suit her character better.

  Doris pouted. “But Sarah said we should both wear our pink ribbons today.”

  One twin bumped the table and milk sloshed out of a cup. Hannah yanked a tea towel from the dish rack and wiped the spill. She glanced at Doris. “It’s best to focus on one task at a time. The ribbons can wait.”

  One of the little girls reached for a boiled egg, but the other protested. “Hannah, she is taking an egg.”

  Doris swatted the air. “Don’t touch the food until after Father says grace.”

  Hannah gave the girls a motherly glower then forked the johnnycakes onto a platter. “Doris is right,” she said to one twin. Then she looked at the other. “And don’t snitch on your sister.”

  “I’m sorry,” the twins said in unison. Missing baby teeth added a slur to their apology. Both girls needed their hair combed before school.

  The younger of Hannah’s two brothers trudged past the stove. She passed the platter to him. “Set this on the table. And don’t forget your History report today. Olivia won’t let you graduate if you don’t turn in your assignments on time.”

  He groaned. “I know, I know.”

  “If you know I’m right, then don’t grumble.” Hannah dabbed her sweaty forehead and moved away from the cook stove. “Doris, did you wash the lunch pails when you got home yesterday?”

  “Washed and dried.” Doris reached for the pails, which were on the top shelf beside the cook stove. “Did I tell you Olivia will help me make the decorations for the spring dance?”

  “You did. And please call her Mrs. McIntosh.”

  “But you call her Olivia.”

  “Because she
is my friend. You must call her Mrs. McIntosh because she is your teacher.”

  Doris wrinkled her petite nose, bringing out her lingering childishness. “That’s the trouble with being thirteen. I’m half grown up and half kid.”

  Hannah recalled her teen years. Doris was right about being at an awkward age, but every age had some awkwardness to it. When Hannah had first started writing Adeline and Prince Aric’s story, she’d been young and awkward and had written Adeline’s character to be the same way. Now, she tried to fold what she’d learned in life into Adeline.

  Had she succeeded in maturing her character? She would ask Olivia’s opinion on the subject the next time she took pages to her for critique. Those rare afternoons of talking with Olivia about the story were Hannah’s only escape from the responsibilities of managing a home. It had been too long since their last visit, but she hadn’t written anything new in weeks. She reached into her apron pocket for her notepaper.

  Christopher Vestal opened the back door and pulled off his muddy boots. “It will be a great day!”

  Hannah smiled at her father as she plucked her pencil from behind her ear. “Plenty of bees in the orchard this morning?”

  “The blossoms are humming with the music of spring.” He hung his field smock on a peg by the door and climbed the two steps from the mudroom into the kitchen. “Where are my morning kisses?”

  The twins scurried to him, giggling. He scooped them up, one in each arm. Their legs dangled as they gave him loud kisses on his clean-shaven cheek. When he’d set the girls down, Doris wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him as if she were still little. He kissed the top of her head. “Good morning, Kitten.”

  Hannah studied Doris for a moment. With a long neck and cinched waist, Doris looked more like a young woman than a little girl. How had her little sister grown up so quickly?

  Christopher’s heels thumped the wooden floor as he walked to his seat at the head of the table. He gave her youngest brother’s shoulder a squeeze as he passed. “Did you finish that English paper?”

  “History paper,” the young man corrected without making eye contact. He scowled at his milk cup.

  David ascended the mudroom steps with his dog behind him. He washed his hands in the basin then shoved past Hannah like he owned the place. As the eldest son, this farm would one day be his, but that day was a long time coming. The dog scampered around him, trying to get to the table.

  Hannah flicked a wrist at the yellow retriever. “Keep him out of here, please. I scrubbed the floors yesterday, and I’d like it to last more than a day this time.”

  David smirked. “Give Gideon some respect. He became a proud papa of eight last night.”

  Doris shot up so quickly her chair squeaked. “The puppies were born?”

  The twins ran to the door. “Can we see them? Can we?”

  “After breakfast,” their father answered, his voice stern but kind. “Come sit down, girls.”

  Hannah carried a pewter plate of sliced cheese to the table and placed it near her father. She sat next to David and glanced at the empty chair at the end of the long table. She meant to look for only a second, to acknowledge her late mother as she did at every meal, but while her father said the blessing, Hannah’s eyes never closed.

  A layer of dust dulled the ladder-back slats of the dining chair. She should have kept it cleaner. She had meant to. Doris did the dusting last week. Hannah would do it herself this week. That’s what she had promised her mother—not the dusting specifically, but to take care of everything: the home and her siblings, to raise them, to protect them, to teach the girls to be women who would one day take care of their own households.

  She had promised to put her family first. Her father, David, Wade, Doris, Ida, and Minnie—they all depended on her to keep that promise. Put them before your friends and your schooling, Mother had said. Keep writing your stories, but put your family first. They need you.

  Five and a half years later, they still needed her. She touched the folded-up paper in her apron pocket. They needed her and she needed to write. Creating her story made it easier to stay dedicated to her promise and not yearn for a life apart from this house.

  The imaginative process wasn’t enough though. It was the actual pencil to page that made the story come alive. If only she had more time—time alone, time to write, time to think. The busyness of a full house kept her on her feet and at the stove for hours each day, and school would be out soon, so there would be even more voices and more needs to put before her own.

  She had promised to raise her siblings, but the twins were only seven now. Could she do this for a decade more? The weight of the years pushed on her shoulders as if she were strapped with a fifty-pound sack of flour. How pleasant it would feel to drop that sack and run! But no. These people were her family, the anchor of her promise.

  Still, the glum ache remained. She could only write that yearning, that desperate stirring for something more, into Adeline’s story.

  As Christopher said Amen, Hannah closed her eyes and opened them again, this time careful not to look at her mother’s dusty chair. The twins needed help with peeling eggs, and Doris’s chatter rose over the twins’ whining about seeing the puppies.

  Her brothers held a quieter conversation about the dogs and which family in the village would get one. Christopher interrupted them. “We must offer the puppies to those in village-supported positions before trading with other families. I doubt the reverend, the doctor, or our schoolteacher will want another dog, but we must ask them first. Then we’ll talk about the puppies that are left.” He looked past the twins and winked at Hannah. “Delicious breakfast.”

  Her father’s approval made everything feel better. Almost everything.

  After they ate, she packed the children’s lunches while Doris dashed into the bedroom she and Hannah shared. Doris plodded out a moment later, frowning. A pink ribbon dangled from the end of one of her braids. She touched the other braid. “I guess I’ve lost one of my ribbons somewhere. I don’t remember when I wore them last.”

  Hannah covered each lunch pail with a square of cheesecloth and tied it with twine. “Forget about the ribbon and come get your lunch pail.”

  “I can’t go to school today.” Doris’s chin quivered. “I can’t be seen like this.”

  Hannah’s father and David were already back to work in the orchard, and the other children were standing on the stoop, waiting to walk to school with Doris. There was always some stall, some lost item, some emotional upheaval before school, but once she got the children out the door, the day was hers to do her housework and to think.

  Hannah wiped her hands on her apron and turned Doris around. She untied the long pink ribbon and draped it over her sister’s shoulder as she unwound the two braids. Using the same gentle touch her mother had used with her, she combed out Doris’s dishwater blond waves and wove them into one thick plait. The kitchen fell quiet, save for Doris’s sniffles.

  “I remember the way it feels,” Hannah said. She tied the ribbon into the prettiest bow possible. “Wanting the other girls to like you, wanting to feel pretty. You are as pretty as Sarah Ashton and Roseanna Colburn and the others.”

  Doris turned, pulling the fresh braid to the front of her dress. The tip of her nose was as pink as the ribbon. “But all the boys like Sarah.”

  “Things change very quickly at your age. They might all like her today and all like you tomorrow.”

  “Did that ever happen to you?”

  Hannah had spent her early teen years helping her bedridden mother with twin infants while her father planted the orchard. There hadn’t been time for school or ribbons or boys. The isolation had stopped bothering her once she started writing, but looking back, a lonely pang echoed inside her heart. She rubbed Doris’s arm. “My adolescence differed greatly from yours. Enjoy your freedom and your friends.”

  Doris pointed at the ribbon. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You
sound like her… like Mother. Sometimes I dream about her and hear her voice. When I awaken, I realize it was your voice in my dream.” Doris spun to pick up her schoolbooks from the edge of the table, leaving Hannah gaping as the words took hold. Her sister had spent as many years being cared for by her as by their mother. Doris’s young mind had given their mother’s image Hannah’s voice.

  The significance of Hannah’s influence on the children pressed her insides together. Her siblings had no mother, but they had her and would as long as they needed her. She passed a lunch pail to each of the girls and a second pail to Doris. “Hand this to Wade, please.”

  She closed the door and waved goodbye through the window in the back door. Her breath fogged the glass, which had once been a window in the sterncastle of the ship that brought them to this uncharted land. After that arduous voyage aboard the Providence, the families had spent years building the settlement of Good Springs, but before she could enjoy the new village and schoolhouse, her mother passed away, entrusting her with the task of mothering five children.

  A stack of dirty dishes called to her as did the dough that needed baking and laundry that needed washing. She traced a finger over the folded piece of paper in her pocket. She might not have the freedom to choose her lot or experience her own romance, but she was the master of her stories, the creator and controller of an ideal universe where adventure awaited, health abounded, and love made people glad to be alive.

  If she couldn’t have the life she dreamed of, she could create it for Adeline and Aric. They deserved to live happily ever after. Now if only she could finish her story in a way she felt was worthy of her noble characters, even though no one besides Olivia would ever read it.

  Chapter Two

  Henry Roberts loathed waiting for his brother. He worked better at the letterpress by himself anyway. If Simon hoped to improve his typesetting skills, he should have come straight to the print shop after breakfast too.