The late afternoon sun slanted through the single, clean-swept window of Seraphina Mayhew’s cabin, casting long, dusty fingers of light across the rough-hewn floorboards.
The air inside was a complex tapestry of scents: the earthy perfume of dried herbs hanging in tied bundles from the rafters, the sharp tang of pine from the firewood stacked neatly beside the hearth, and the faint, clean smell of soap.
For Alistair Finch, it was the scent of the primitive, a world away from the coal smoke and newsprint of Philadelphia.
He sat on a simple, three-legged stool, his back straight and his notebook open on his knee. He had prepared for this.
This was not a casual conversation; it was an interrogation cloaked in civility. His questions were loaded, each one a carefully constructed snare designed to expose the inconsistencies he was certain lay at the heart of her supposed miracles.
He was a hunter, and her faith was the elusive prey.
Sera sat opposite him in a low rocking chair, her hands resting calmly in her lap. They were not the delicate, ethereal hands he might have expected of a mystic.
They were capable hands, the knuckles slightly calloused, the nails short and clean but with a permanent, faint stain of soil beneath them. She wore a simple calico dress, the fabric faded from countless washings, and her gaze was as direct and unassuming as the rest of her.
She did not fidget. She simply waited, her patience a silent challenge to his own restless energy.
“Thank you again for agreeing to this, Miss Mayhew,” Alistair began, his voice tuned to the professional, disarming tone he’d perfected over years.
“My readers in the city are… fascinated by stories of folk healing. They want to understand your methods.”
“There’s not much to understand, Mr. Finch,” she replied, her voice soft but clear, carrying the gentle lilt of the mountains. “The knowledge belongs to the mountain. I just listen.”
Alistair scribbled a note, though he’d already decided on his opening gambit.
“Let’s start with the herbs, then. When the Cooper boy cut his leg, you applied a poultice. Yarrow, I believe you called it.”
“That’s right. It’s a good friend for staunching blood.”
“Indeed. It has known astringent properties. A logical, almost scientific, application of botany. But you also prayed over him. A quiet prayer.”
He paused, letting the question hang in the air.
“Which was it that healed the boy, Miss Mayhew? The plant, or the prayer?”
It was his first trap, a simple binary choice designed to force her hand. If she said the herb, she diminished her divine connection.
If she said the prayer, she admitted the herb was mere theater.
Sera considered the question without a flicker of anxiety.
“Why would a person have to choose? God made the yarrow to grow in the field, and He put the power to heal in its leaves. The prayer is just… reminding the boy and the yarrow what they’re both there for. It’s all part of the same thing.”
Frustration, hot and quick, pricked at Alistair. She had sidestepped it with an effortless, maddening simplicity.
He pressed on, turning a page in his notebook.
“Let’s talk about the Miller baby. A severe case of croup. Frightening for the parents, certainly. You prepared a steam inhalation—mullein and horehound, I’m told. A traditional, if rustic, remedy for respiratory distress. The steam would naturally help loosen the congestion.”
“It often does,” she agreed, her rocking chair giving a gentle creak.
“And yet, again, you prayed. The mother, Mrs. Miller, told anyone who would listen that you performed a miracle. That God, through you, saved her child.”
He leaned forward, his pencil poised. “Do you believe you performed a miracle, Miss Mayhew?”
This was the crux of it. This was where charlatans preened, where they claimed a special connection, a divine power that set them apart.
He expected humility, but a false humility that hinted at a deeper arrogance.
Sera stopped rocking. She looked at him, her gaze so steady it was unnerving.
“No, sir. I believe Mrs. Miller’s fear was so great, she needed a faith to hold onto that was bigger than her fear. The steam helped the baby’s lungs, and her faith helped her heart. The miracle, if there was one, was that she found the strength not to give in to despair. I had very little to do with that.”
Alistair’s pencil point snapped against the page. He set it down with a sharp click, pulling a spare from his jacket pocket.
Her refusal to take credit was more disarming than any boast. She wasn’t just deflecting; she was deconstructing his entire premise.
He was here to expose a fraud who claimed to have power, but she was claiming none.
“But the people here,” he insisted, his voice hardening slightly, “they don’t see it that way. They see you as a conduit, a vessel for divine will. They bring you their sick, their dying. They look at you with a reverence most men reserve for a saint. Does that not place a heavy burden on you?”
“It would,” she said softly, “if I thought their faith was in me. But it’s not. It’s in the hope of being healed. I’m just the one who holds their hand while they reach for it.”
He found himself staring at her, at the placid surface of her conviction. It was like throwing stones into a deep, still lake; they disappeared without a ripple.
He decided to change tactics, to make it personal.
“Has your method ever failed? Has there ever been a time when the herbs and the prayers… weren’t enough?”
For the first time, a shadow passed over her features. It was not guilt or doubt, but a deep, abiding sorrow.
“Of course, Mr. Finch. I’m not God. I’ve sat with families as a fever took a child. I’ve watched old men draw their last breath. The mountain gives, and the mountain takes. Death is as natural as a sunrise. My work is not to stop it, but to bring comfort where I can. To ease the passage when it can’t be turned back.”
The words were an unexpected echo of the scene that haunted his own past. His sister, Lily, her breath rattling in her small chest, his own futile prayers bouncing off the ceiling.
He had prayed to stop death, to turn it back. Sera spoke of merely easing its passage.
The thought was both an offense to his grief and, strangely, a comfort.
He cleared his throat, pushing the memory away.
“So, you make no claim to any power. You are simply a woman with a knowledge of herbs and a comforting bedside manner.”
He framed it as a dismissal, a final categorization for his article: The Mountain Healer: Simple Folk Medicine, Not Miracles.
Sera smiled then, a small, sad smile that did not quite reach her eyes.
“You work so hard to make everything small, Mr. Finch. To fit it into little boxes with labels. ‘Science.’ ‘Faith.’ ‘Trickery.’ ‘Truth.’ Don’t you ever wonder if maybe they all live in the same box?”
She leaned forward, the intensity in her gaze returning.
“Why are you so determined to take God out of the world? What are you afraid you’ll find if you let Him stay?”
The question struck him like a physical blow. It was no longer about her methods; it was about his.
The interview had been turned back on him, his own motivations laid bare on the table between them. He felt a flush of anger rise in his cheeks.
Who was this uneducated woman from the backwoods to psychoanalyze him?
But beneath the anger was a tremor of something else. He looked at her, truly looked at her, and saw not a charlatan or a saint, but a woman.
A woman whose resilience was a quiet force of nature, whose unwavering conviction was a bedrock against which his logic crashed and broke. He had come here to dismantle her, piece by piece, until nothing was left but trickery.
Instead, her quiet integrity was beginning to dismantle him.
He found himself captivated by the way the fading light caught the stray strands of auburn in her hair, the earnestness in her clear, grey eyes. There was an unexpected spark in this intellectual sparring, a current of energy that had nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with the man and woman sitting across from each other.
He disagreed with every word she said, yet he found himself compelled, wanting to hear more.
He finally broke the silence, his voice rougher than he intended.
“I’m not afraid of anything, Miss Mayhew. I just believe in facts. In what can be proven.”
“There are plenty of things that are real even if you can’t prove them,” she said, her voice gentle again.
“Love. Grief. Hope. You can’t hold them in your hand or measure them with a ruler, but I imagine you’d say they exist.”
He had no answer for that. His notebook lay forgotten on his knee, its pages filled with her quotes—calm, consistent, and utterly devoid of the gotcha moments he had engineered the interview to produce.
He had failed. He had not trapped her, nor had he forced an admission.
She had offered none because, he was beginning to suspect, she had none to offer.
Alistair stood up, the legs of the stool scraping against the floor.
“Thank you for your time. This has been… illuminating.”
“You are welcome to come back anytime, Mr. Finch,” Sera said, rising as well.
She stood a full head shorter than him, yet in that moment, in her own home, she seemed to possess a quiet authority that towered over his city-bred confidence.
As he stepped out of the cabin and into the cool evening air, the scents of the forest rushing in to replace the herbal quiet of her home, Alistair felt a profound sense of disorientation.
He had come to cage a myth, to pin the butterfly to the board and label its parts. But Seraphina Mayhew refused to be caged.
She was not a myth. She was a woman made of something far more complex and resilient than simple faith.
Walking back toward the small room he’d rented, he glanced at his notes. They were useless for the scathing exposé he’d planned to write.
He had a collection of philosophies, not confessions. He had her steadfast words, her unnerving questions.
He had the memory of her steady gaze. He had come seeking a lie and had instead been confronted by a woman whose truth, however different from his own, felt unshakable.
And that, Alistair Finch had to admit, was a far more interesting story.