Page 70 of In These Hills

Seeing the steel in Miss Mary’s eyes, Josephine nodded, feeling the warning.

“And for what it’s worth, Josephine . . . heartache teaches what happiness can’t. Whatever it is you’ve been through, take the lesson and leave the pain, if you’re able.”

Miss Mary bid her good night and closed her bedroom door, and Josephine was reminded again of how old a soul she was—perceptive in ways that bordered on uncanny. But what heartache shaped Miss Mary?

She couldn’t say why, but Mr. Bobo wasn’t what she’d expected Miss Mary’s husband to be like. His remark that morning about the inn’s name had struck a dissonant note. Perhaps Miss Mary’s competence—or her independence—sat ill with him, as it would have with most men Josephine had known.

Taking the oil lamp from the foyer table, she slipped into the library and traced the spines of the books, just as she’d done as a child in her father’s library. Passing over familiar titles—Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Life of Robert E. Lee, and History of the United States—she decided to look for one completely unfamiliar to her. And found it.

Cattle: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases by William Youatt.

She pulled the leather tome—the first in a series—from the shelf and opened it. Dr. Ezekiel Young Salmon was written in embellished script on an interior page. The copyright date read 1834 and portrayed a picture of a bull, if the prominent horns were any indication.

She thumbed through, already half inclined to return it to the shelf, when the margins, crowded with notes, caught her eye. The handwriting was clean and precise, markedly different from the ornate signature in the front.

She set the lamp on the side table and settled into the corner chair, then turned the book sideways to better read the notes.

A good stockman should be as attentive to the health and comfort of his cattle as to his own family. Their well-being is his wealth.

An intelligent observation. She read on.

It is not the quantity of food, but the quality, and the manner in which it is given, that determine the profit of feeding.

Again, insightful. A few pages later . . .

The cow is the poor man’s friend. She supplies his children with food, and his garden with manure; she is the nurse of his family, and the support of his field.

She smiled. Poetic, especially for a passage about a cow.

Then she noticed page numbers penciled beside underlined sentences. She flipped to one, then another, and realized whoever had made these notes hadn’t merely read this book. They had studied it.

On a whim, she pulled down the next volume. It, too, held copious margin notes in the same careful hand. As did the next. And the next.

Yawning, the day finally catching up with her, she began to close the book when heavily underlined sentences stopped her. She leaned closer to the lamp.

“Man was placed at the head of the animal creation to be its master,” she read the text aloud. “But not its tyrant. The treatment of the brute creation is one of the surest tests of the character of a people or an individual.”

She continued to the handwritten note in the margin—the same script, though smaller, more deliberate . . . If you have to punish something into obedience, you’ve already failed it. Fear isn’t the same as respect. And never will be.

She read both again, hearing echoes of the stewardship Anna Sewell had woven so powerfully into Black Beauty. She wondered if Miss Sewell had read this very book. If not, she would surely have approved.

But more than that, Josephine wondered who in Lynchburg, Tennessee, had read it—and left these words behind.

28

“QUEEN VICTORIA?” Fountain pen in hand, Josephine peered up from her seat behind Mr. Daniel’s desk, a years-old invoice in hand. She’d been waiting for this moment since she’d discovered the document two days earlier. “You sent a barrel of whiskey to the queen of England?”

With a Cheshire cat grin, Jack Daniel, immaculately dressed in his customary vested suit with tails, closed the office door behind him and hung his hat on the coat tree. “Your eyes do not deceive you, Mrs. Dunham. Note the address . . . Windsor Castle.”

It was Wednesday morning, and though she wasn’t about to admit it, she secretly welcomed his return. Even if she was still a little tired from her impromptu reading of animal husbandry the night before.

“It was one summer evening several years back,” he continued, “when I found myself in a state of repose on my veranda and thought, Why shouldn’t the most important woman in England—perhaps the world—slow sip the world’s best whiskey?”

Josephine gave him a look. “Possibly, sir, because Queen Victoria, God rest her, didn’t drink whiskey. Or perhaps because she didn’t drink at all.”

“Oh, my dear Mrs. Dunham, allow this humble student of life to correct you.” He moved toward the desk. “This revelation may cause a suffragist such as yourself no small emotional upheaval, which will, of course, bring me enormous personal delight.”

Josephine managed to keep a straight face. Barely. She had missed their sparring.