The letter came on a Tuesday in February 1876, with a pressed violet inside it, and Hannah Birch read it three times standing at the mailbox before she let herself believe it was meant for her.
My dear Mrs. Birch, it said. Thy cheek is like the morning rose, thy voice the woodland dove. I find I cannot pass a day without thinking of thee. With your permission I should like to call on Sunday. Your servant, Ezekiel Stout.
Hannah was sixty years old. Nobody had compared her cheek to anything in thirty years.
She put the violet in her Bible, at the Song of Solomon, and went inside and looked at herself in the glass over the washstand.
Ezekiel Stout was sixty-two, a widower with a good farm on the Cedar River, in Iowa. He was a deacon of the Methodist church. He was a broad, slow, kindly man with a white beard and big, careful hands, and he had buried his wife two years before.
Hannah had known him for twenty years. She had taught school in the township for eleven of them, the last few after Mr. Birch died, and had taught two of Ezekiel's grandchildren their letters. She had always thought him a good man and a dull one.
He did not seem dull on Sunday.
He sat in her front room in his best black coat, with his hat on his knee, and said very little, but he looked at her in a way that made her feel nineteen. When he left, he shook her hand and held it a moment longer than he needed to.
He wrote again the next week. Another violet. Another letter. My dear Mrs. Birch, thou art the lily of the valley.
On his third Sunday, Hannah handed him the church paper and asked him to read her the notice about the spring fair, because the print was small. He held it a moment, then handed it back and said his eyes were tired from the lamp. She thought nothing of it. Men his age were vain about spectacles. Mr. Birch had been the same.
The quilting was set for the second Thursday in March, at Ada Fenn's.
It was the church's missionary quilt, a Star of Bethlehem in red and green, to be sold at the spring fair for the mission in China. Twelve women would be at the frame. It was the first bee of the year, after a long winter shut in by snow, and every woman in the township meant to be there, because a quilting bee in March was where you found out everything that had happened since November.
Hannah wore her good gray wool. She brought a jar of plum preserves and her silver thimble. She did not mention Ezekiel Stout to anyone. She did not intend to. But she found she was humming all the way there, in the buggy, with the reins slack.
The frame was set up in Ada Fenn's front room, with the quilt stretched tight across it and the chairs all around. The stove was going. The coffee was on. The women sat down and threaded their needles and began, as they always did, with the weather.
They moved on to the Lindquist baby, and the price of eggs, and whether the new preacher's wife was proud or only shy.
Then Prudence Gale, who sat across the frame from Hannah, said in a careless voice, "I have been receiving letters."
Prudence was fifty-five, a schoolteacher's daughter who had never married, sharp-nosed and particular and generally considered the best needlewoman in the county. Every woman at the frame stopped stitching.
"Letters?" said Ada Fenn. "From whom?"
"A gentleman," said Prudence, pink to her ears. "I shan't say who. But he writes very beautifully." She paused. "He says my voice is like the woodland dove."
Hannah's needle went straight into her finger.
Nobody noticed but Ada.
Ada Fenn was fifty-seven, a big, comfortable widow with a laugh that carried, and she was looking across the frame at Prudence with a very strange expression.
"Does he send violets?" Ada asked.
Prudence stared at her. "Pressed ones. How on earth did you know?"
Ada put down her needle. She reached into the pocket of her apron and took out a folded letter, and unfolded it, and laid it flat on top of the Star of Bethlehem, where everyone could see.
There was a pressed violet in the fold.
"Thy cheek is like the morning rose," Ada read aloud, slowly. "Thy voice the woodland dove."
Twelve women looked at the letter on the quilt.
Then eleven of them looked at Prudence, and Prudence went from pink to white. And then, one by one, they began to look at Hannah, because Hannah had gone very still, and was holding her pricked finger in her handkerchief, and had not said a word.
"Hannah," said Ada gently. "You too?"
Hannah thought of the violet in her Bible at the Song of Solomon. She thought of the way he had held her hand a moment too long.
She nodded.
The room went quiet. Then, all at once, nine women who had not received letters began to talk at the same time.
And in the middle of the noise, there was a knock at the front door, and Ada's little boy ran to open it, and there on the step stood Deacon Ezekiel Stout, in his best black coat, holding three small bunches of hothouse violets in his big careful hands.
"Afternoon, ladies," he said. "I was passing."