Free Her Loving Husband's Curse by Meredith Allard Page B

You know, like old times.”
    “You always hated all the laces and straps.”
    “I’ve changed my mind.”
    Sarah skipped away, then took a book from the chest and handed it to him. “I found this too,” she said. “Don’t you recognize it?”
    James turned the tattered volume over in his hands. The binding was torn and a few pages fell loose. “It’s our family Bible,” he said. “This was one of the few belongings my father brought with us on our journey from England. I remember how, when we were packing for our trip, my father wouldn’t leave without it.”
    “Tell me,” Sarah said.
    James smiled as he always did when talking about his father. “I remember standing in our home when he gestured at the fashionable furnishings in our fashionable house in a fashionable part of London. ‘Most of this, ‘tis not necessary, James,’ he said, his hand sweeping across the room. ‘The chairs, the tables, even the expensive dishware your mother loved so. They’re only things, and when we die we cannot take them with us. Our Lord has no need for them. They shan’t come with us to the colonies, either. We’ll find new things, whatever things we’ll need, right there wherever we are.’
    “Then, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he slipped this Bible into his bag. When he saw me watching he laughed.
    “‘‘Tis that not merely a thing?’ I asked.
    “‘This,’ he said, taking the book from his bag, ‘‘tis not merely a thing, James. ‘Tis our memories. Your mother is in here. Your grandparents, maternal and paternal, and their parents, maternal and paternal. We’re fortunate to have such records since most families do not keep them.’
    “Already by 1690, the book was old and worn. My father placed a few wayward pages back between the covers and slipped the book into the bottom of his bag. ‘We must keep our memories, Son, because as we move on through this life, what else have we?’”
    Sarah took the book and flipped the pages, careful because she didn’t want the binding to disintegrate in her hands. She saw the listing of James’s family back to the year 1579. Some entries were complete, with birthdate and death date, who they married, when they married, and the birthdates of various offspring. Some entries had birthdates but no death dates. Others had death dates but no birthdates. Others were merely an imprint of a long-forgotten name. She saw the date of James’s mother’s birth, 12 August 1642, and the date of her death, 30 October 1689. His father, John William Wentworth, was listed as born 27 May 1630, and there was John’s father’s name and birthdate, too blurred by time and ink to make out clearly, and John’s mother’s too, though all Sarah could make out was an R at the beginning of her name. Sarah found James’s listing, his details written in his father’s perfectly curled seventeenth century calligraphy—James John Wentworth, son of John and Emily Wentworth, born 19 April 1662. Where the date of his death should have been recorded was, also in John’s hand, the word “Dead?”
    “Should the night I was turned be listed as the date of my death?” James asked. “After all these years I still can’t decide.”
    “You’re still here,” Sarah said. “You haven’t died.”
    “A doctor might disagree with you.”
    “When you’re no longer animate, no longer conscious, that’s when you die.”
    “Then I’ll never have a death date.”
    “Is that a bad thing?”
    “I would like to have a death date.”
    “James…” Sarah turned away. “Don’t say that.”
    He sighed, then pointed to the open page in her hands. “My father added you the day we were married.”
    There she was, Elizabeth Wentworth nee Jones, born 27 November 1669. And there was the date of her death, 13 August 1692. Then the shock of the other name, Grace Wentworth, died 13 August 1692. Their baby. Sarah felt a surge of love for her father-in-law. He always had the warmest, most loving heart