"It’s a little like death, I suppose,” Daisy was remarking in a wistful tone. “When Michael died, all I could think of were all the things I should have said when I had the chance."
“I’m sure you said most of them, Daisy." Elvira’s voice regained some of its tartness. "I never heard you utter a mean word to Michael. I certainly never understood how you could stick by that man in spite of everything.”
Elvira was sounding more like herself already, Hannah decided with a wry grin.
“Oh, there were lots of times when I felt like leaving him.”
Hannah could hardly believe her ears. She’d never once heard her mother confess any misgivings about her marriage. What had always driven Hannah nuts was the way her mother defended her father, no matter what he did.
"And why didn’t you?” Elvira sounded as curious as Hannah felt. "Goodness knows he gave you reason, losing your money the way he did."
"Because I was always madly in love with him, right up to the day he died," Daisy confessed with a sad little laugh. "And he with me. He went through money, and goodness knows he drank more than he should have, but there was never another woman for him, Elvira. And I knew there never would be." Her voice grew soft and secretive in the darkness. "We had such fun together, when times were good.”
Hannah’s face flamed in the darkness. Something in her mother’s tone made it plain she was talking about sex, and no matter how old she was, it was shocking for Hannah to think of her parents as passionate lovers.
“And even when they were bad," Daisy was saying, “he adored me. It's hard to explain that kind of love to someone who’s never experienced it."
Instantly, Daisy realized what she’d insinuated, and she added hastily, "Oh, Elvira, I don’t for one second mean that you and Gordon—"
“It’s all right, Daisy. Ours was never a love match." Elvira was silent for a long moment, and then she said in a sad tone, “To be honest with you, I’ve envied you at times.”
"Me?” Daisy sounded as astonished as Hannah felt.
"Gordon’s a good man. He's been a good provider. We both wanted financial security and we've got it. He never drank. But it was my sister he had eyes for, and when she married someone else, he turned to me. I always knew I was second choice, and I guess I never forgave him for it."
There was such pain in her words that Hannah wanted to cry.
"And then he wanted children, and I couldn’t have any. I felt such a failure. And I wanted to adopt, but then he wouldn’t." She sighed. "We spent our lives at cross purposes." She fell silent, and Daisy didn’t reply.
There wasn’t much a person could say, Hannah thought.
"Well, it's all water under the bridge now," Elvira said after a while. "We should try to get some sleep, I suppose, if you’re serious about getting up at the crack of dawn just to make breakfast, Daisy."
The other two women were soon snoring softly, but Hannah lay wide awake, thinking over what she’d heard. It almost sounded as if Daisy had had the better marriage, after all, which went against everything Hannah had ever suspected.
How could a marriage based solely on sexual attraction be better than one where finances and goals were the important thing? Sexually, she and Brad were ... she fished around for a word. Compatible came close.
Comfortable? She supposed so. But whatever they had, it sure didn't sound anything like what her mother was talking about.
Logan was suddenly there in her mind, and she spent a long, guilty time trying not to think of him in that way.
Then it seemed Hannah had just dozed off when Klaus decided he wanted to go out. Daisy continued to snore softly, so the dog finally jumped down from the bed and nudged at Hannah with his wet nose. Cursing the animal, Hannah staggered to her feet, pulled on her sandals and a sweat shirt, and grabbed the flashlight.
She made her way down the stairs, eerily aware of the sound of male snoring from the rooms along the corridor. The saloon was closed for the night, which meant it had to be long after midnight. She wondered where Logan was sleeping, and whether or not he snored, and that led to other things, like whether or not he wore pajamas.
Somehow she doubted it.
When she made her way back up the stairs, Klaus stopped suddenly at the top and growled, peering down the dark corridor with the hair on his back standing erect. Heart hammering, Hannah shone the light along the dark hall, and a certain door suddenly clicked shut.
Klaus growled again and then made his way to the door of their bedroom. Hannah hurried after him, wondering if someone had been watching her. She thought of Jeb Slater and shivered.
Back in bed, she was not able to fall asleep again, for some time, and she was restless for the remainder of the night.
They had no alarm clock, and Daisy fumbled with the flashlight several times, turning it on to peer at her watch and waking Hannah in the process. Then Daisy insisted they all get up at five-fifteen, a prospect so awful that even Klaus objected. He whined and tried to snuggle back into the cozy nest he’d made at the foot of the bed, but Daisy put him firmly on the floor and gave Elvira a shake.
“Wake up. You, too, Hannah. I can’t do this by myself. I don't know why I ever got into it. What’ll I do if that boy hasn’t lit the stove? I've been worried sick all night. I don't know how to cook on that antiquated thing," she moaned.
Elvira grunted and sat up, rubbing her face with her hands. “For heaven's sakes, Daisy, shut up," she commanded. "It's only breakfast. How far wrong can a person go with some bacon and eggs?”
In spite of the tears and the confidences of the night before, Elvira sounded just like her old cranky self again. From her pallet on the floor, Hannah figured that Gordon was probably going to adjust rather quickly and happily to Elvira's disappearance. She certainly would if she were in his shoes, she decided as Elvira went on complaining about the cold water.
Hannah snuggled further under the quilt and wished her mother had kept her mouth shut about this cooking production. She, too, felt cranky and depressed this morning, and she wanted to sleep longer.
Outside, dawn was barely beginning to turn the sky gray, and the muscles in her arms and legs hurt, probably from carrying all the bath water up and down. Hannah suppressed a groan as she rolled out of her blankets and got to her feet. She staggered over to the washstand, pouring water into the basin and sloshing her face and arms. Just as Elvira had warned, the water was icy cold, and although it woke her up with a jolt, it didn’t improve Hannah's mood.
God, she wanted hot water from a tap, coffee from an electric perk, a toilet that flushed. She wanted a room of her own. She wanted to go home. Everything in this era seemed to require twice the patience and triple the effort it did in her own time.
When she contemplated staying in Barkerville for an indefinite period, Hannah wished she could just lie back down on her pallet and pull the blankets over her head and sleep for a very long time…..namely, until someone found out how to transport the three of them and Klaus back to their proper place in history.
Urged on by Daisy and trailed by a snappy Klaus, they went down to the dark kitchen.
Angus was shaving slivers from a block of wood with his pocket knife and laying them carefully in the firebox of the stove. Elvira lit the coal-oil lamp, and Hannah went to the outhouse, shivering in the cold mountain dawn.
By the time she came back, the stove was going and Angus was giving Daisy a careful lesson on keeping it at a steady temperature. "You gotta remember to put wood on all the time," he instructed. “This is the damper. You gotta move it this way as the stove hots up if’n you wanta cook in the oven or keep the wood from burnin’ up too fast.”
It was obvious that the care and maintenance of a fire was something Angus took very seriously.
Daisy was paying close attention to Angus’s instructions. “How did you learn to start fires in stoves like this one?"
"Yeah, how did you? You're good at this, Angus," Hannah said, standing as close to the stove as she co
uld get in hopes that it would warm her. “It would take me all morning to figure out how to get this thing going," she told him.
Angus wasn’t used to compliments. He looked at her as if he thought she was teasing him, and then a wide, pleased smile broke over the boy’s face. “Jeannie showed me how. She shows me lotsa things.”
"And who’s Jeannie?" Elvira, too, was hovering near the welcome warmth beginning to radiate from the stove.
"My sister. We always took care of each other.” A shadow flickered across his face and his smile disappeared. “Then Jeannie got married, to Oscar. I don’t like Oscar." There was fear in his dark eyes. “He hurts me when he’s mad, and he hurts Jeannie, too."
He began to wring his hands anxiously, and shift from one foot to the other.
Hannah felt a stab of pity for him. "Does your sister live here in Barkerville, Angus?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Down the trail 'bout three miles, and then inta the bush."
“Does she come into town? I’d like to meet her."
Angus was pulling his fingers and making the knuckles crack. "She don’t get ta come inta town much. Oscar don't like it. And I can't go see her neither."
It sounded to Hannah as if Jeannie’s marriage left a lot to be desired. She wondered exactly what this Oscar character had done to Angus. Compassion for the boy filled her, and she tried to set his mind at ease. "I'd like to meet your sister, but only when it doesn’t cause any problems.”
"Okay, miss. Not now, though. I gotta get water now to heat up. Can Klaus come?"
Daisy assented, and Angus took the buckets and headed out the door with Klaus bounding along at his heels as if he were a puppy again.
"Sounds as if his sister has herself a real prize in this Oscar,” Elvira commented, and Hannah had to agree.
Daisy wasn't listening. "Look, everyone, Logan kept his word about the groceries.”
The table was heaped with supplies: dried beans, molasses, a tin of butter, a cloth bag of sugar, eggs in a basket, a bag of flour, a package of baking soda, and a tin of salt.
"Hannah, could you put some of this stuff away? Just leave me out the bacon and eggs. And Elvira, maybe you could set the table. Oh, dear, there doesn't seem to be any bread, does there?" Daisy was measuring coffee into the pot and adding water. "I wonder if I should try making biscuits? How do you tell if the oven's at the right temperature?”
Hannah sighed. Her mother was never going to make it through this, she just knew it. Daisy might be a good cook at home with all the conveniences, but here?
When were cornflakes invented, anyhow?
Yesterday’s Gold: Chapter Eleven
But Hannah’s mother surprised her.
By quarter to seven, there were biscuits in the oven, although Daisy kept saying she didn’t hold out much hope that they’d be edible when they emerged. Hash browns made from potatoes Hannah had peeled and sliced sizzled in the black iron frypan the bacon had cooked in. There were eggs ready to slide onto a griddle, and the coffee smelled wonderful, although Hannah had only managed one quick cup.
It was unbelievable how much there was to do. The stove was a constant challenge; damped down too much, it smoked. Add too much wood, and everything was in danger of burning. Too little, and nothing cooked. The food needed watching every minute; finding necessary utensils involved a major search, and everything needed scouring before they could use it.
Hannah wondered if this cooking thing would get any easier as time went on. She doubted it. Without a microwave, electric kettle, toaster, griddle, or blender, a cook needed eight arms and four sets of eyes, as far as Hannah could see.
And there wasn’t even a sink. Dirty dishes had to be washed in the dishpan and dried by hand.
Hannah’s mood hadn’t improved. Now she was uncomfortably hot, and she was hungry as well. The kitchen was no longer cool. The wood stove had heated it to what must be eighty degrees, and the morning sun was glaring in the window.
Elvira opened the door wide and complained bitterly.
Hannah kept trying to find a moment to run upstairs and put on something cooler than the warm sweatshirt she’d pulled on at dawn, but an increasingly frantic Daisy kept her busy every second, bringing more wood from the storeroom, locating suitable platters to hold the food, filling kettles with water to heat for washing up, checking on the infernal biscuits every two seconds.
If it took all three women this much work just to make breakfast for Logan, Angus, and themselves, exactly how did Daisy think she was going to be able to cook for half-a-dozen men?
And she’d have to do it without Hannah's help. Hannah had decided that the instant this breakfast extravaganza was over, she was going to wash the sweat off, put on something cool, and march out and find a job that didn't involve burning her fingers from shoving wood into the maw of a vicious cookstove, or getting her hands swollen and her nails wrecked from washing stacks of dishes.
She had a university education, she reminded herself, slamming the oven door shut for the umpteenth time. She was a career woman, not a domestic servant. She'd disliked cooking and cleaning in her own time. She certainly wasn’t going to make a career out of it now just to please her mother.
Or was it Logan McGraw she was pleasing? At five past seven he appeared, rested and well groomed in his usual dark suit and white shirt, boots polished to a high sheen. The very sight of him made Hannah’s blood boil.
“It smells wonderful in here, ladies," he greeted them cheerfully, pouring a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove and leisurely taking a seat at the table. "I trust you all slept well?"
Hannah blew hair out of her eyes and gave him a stony look. Didn’t he have the slightest idea what it was like to sleep in one small room with two women who snored all night and a dog with a weak bladder?
Didn’t he realize that making it smell wonderful in the kitchen had involved an hour and a half of ridiculously hard physical work? Didn't he realize it was hotter than an inferno in here?
She was trying to come up with a suitably scathing remark that would indicate exactly how she felt when a trail of smoke and the smell of burning alerted her to the biscuits, which she’d forgotten for all of two minutes. She snatched the oven door open and grabbed at them, but it was too late. They were burned beyond recognition.
Hannah shot an apprehensive look at her mother, fully expecting Daisy to dissolve in tears and run upstairs, leaving her and Elvira to cope with the rest of this ludicrous performance. But Daisy just looked at the incinerated biscuits and shook her head sorrowfully.
“Throw them out the back door, Hannah, the little birds might like them,” she said in a remarkably calm tone. "Take those hash browns out of the frying pan and put them on a plate. I’ll need the frying pan washed and oiled and heated up again while I mix up some pancake batter."
Hannah gaped at her mother, then hurried to do what she’d asked. What on earth had come over Daisy? At home in Victoria, in their proper place and time, the slightest mishap had reduced her to floods of tears. Pressure of any kind brought on a migraine, which necessitated bed rest and quantities of pills and a great deal of pampering.
Here, in a situation that made Hannah consider hysterics, Daisy was coping wonderfully well. What was going on?
Hannah scrubbed diligently at the stubborn potatoes stuck to the bottom of the iron pan, wondering whether Daisy had brought extra-strength tranquilizers with her. If she had, Hannah figured she’d ask her mother to share them.
In spite of the burned biscuits, breakfast was an enormous success. The pancakes Daisy whipped up were light and fluffy, and even though there was no maple syrup to smother them in, they tasted wonderful.
Even Hannah’s bad temper had almost disappeared by the time she’d finished eating. The kitchen felt cooler, too. Logan had opened the window and propped open the door leading to the hallway, and a breeze was blowing through the room.
"My compliments to the cook," Logan said, raising his coffee cup in a toast to Dai
sy when he’d finished the meal. "I believe we’ll be swamped with customers when word gets out about your cooking, madam. If you agree, I'll spread the news that we'll be serving meals as of dinner tonight. Is that agreeable, Daisy?”
Still pink from standing over the blazing cookstove flipping pancakes, Daisy now turned scarlet with pleasure. "You mean you really want to hire me to cook for you?”
"Absolutely. Is tonight too soon? We can always delay until tomorrow."
"Tonight's fine. I’ll make a thick soup. We'll have to order bread from the bakery, though. I need to experiment a bit more with that oven before I try bread.”
Hannah couldn’t believe that anyone in her right mind would want to do this again, but obviously Daisy did. She was almost wriggling with joy as Logan assured her she was now the cook at the Nugget, but warning bells went off in Hannah’s head at her mother's next words.
"I couldn’t have made breakfast without Hannah and Elvira to help me. With the three of us, we’ll manage dinner just fine.”
Hannah looked up, straight into Elvira’s horrified eyes. It was obvious the other woman had no more intention of slaving in this kitchen than Hannah did.
"I'll give you a hand with dinner, but I won’t be able to help after today, Daisy. I’m—ummm, I’m going to the—the hospital this afternoon to see about getting hired on as a nurse,” Elvira blurted out, and the surprised expression on her face told Hannah that she hadn't thought of doing so until that very moment.
“And I'm going to find a job in one of the businesses around town,” Hannah said firmly. She didn’t even try to be diplomatic. “Cooking drives me nuts, you know that, Mom. Besides, we're all going to have to earn money. Logan certainly can't afford to hire all three of us to work in the kitchen.”
Logan was smiling, and Hannah didn't trust that smile at all. “Oh, I don't know about that," he purred. "If Daisy thinks she needs the assistance, I suppose I could—"
Now and Forever: Time Travel Romance Superbundle Page 48
