A Solemn Promise

I

"I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart." L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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I.

Ashwood, Hertfordshire, 1806

Twelve Years Later

"Thank you for coming all this way, Doctor Carlton," Grace Denham said again as she walked him to her family's front door.

Doctor Carlton's practice was in London, and a thirty-mile distance was no easy journey. However, the only doctor near the Hertfordshire village of Ashwood charged about a month's wages for a house call.

Doctor Carlton had a merciful reputation, and he thankfully had only charged Grace a small fee for her mother's care.

"I am only sorry I could not do more to help," replied Doctor Carlton regretfully. "Your mother must stay in bed and rest that leg. She is not to walk on it. Not for two months at least. I shall return then to check on her. Are you to care for her?"

Grace shook her head. "No. My younger sister, Claire, whom you met upstairs. She is to stay home and tend Mama. I would ordinarily be at my employer's this minute ... but alas ..."

Doctor Carlton held up his hand. "Not to worry. I am certain your sister is more than up to the task. You have my address in London. Please do not hesitate to write." Placing his hat atop his greying tight curls, the doctor bowed his head. "Good day, Miss Denham."

"Good day, Doctor," replied Grace with a small smile, and she closed the door. Exhaling, she leaned against the timber frame, and her eyes ran over the room before her.

The mending was piling up. The laundry had not been done. The breakfast dishes were still dirty. Bread had not been made. And those were only the downstairs chores. Upstairs were bedrooms full of dusting work and laundry that had not been attended to.

Grace's seventeen-year-old sister, Claire, usually tended to the house, and had done so on her own since their middle sister Kate had married a year earlier. But Claire's time had been greatly occupied by their mother, and the household chores had not been a priority.

Grace quickly returned to her mother's bedroom upstairs, where Claire was propping her broken leg up with a pillow.

Mrs Ellen Denham smiled at her eldest child as she entered the room and held her hand out for Grace. Grace sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand in her mother's.

Mrs Denham was a lovely lady, with a rounded face and figure and a kind constitution. She had aged in her face, and her dark hair had greyed, in the last five years since Mr Denham had passed away.

When her father died, both Grace and Mrs Denham had found employment as housemaids with the wealthy Slickson family; a landed family in a neighbouring village. It was where they had remained employed until Mrs Denham had taken a fall down a flight of stairs and had snapped a bone in her lower leg.

Were it not for Doctor Carlton, her leg might have been removed.

But without their mother's income, Grace's would not be enough to live on. Her meagre wage would not feed her mother, and her three siblings still at home. Her fifteen-year-old brother, Peter, hardly made a wage as a blacksmith's apprentice, and were it not be for Jim Ellis being their brother-in-law, and Kate's husband, they would not have been able to afford him that.

Jem was the youngest, at twelve years old, and much like Grace at that age, he was much too concerned with being a child, and Grace did not have the heart to ask him to give that up.