by Merry Farmer
“Sorry,” he whispered when he found her staring fixedly at the wall, fully awake. He reached for the towel he kept draped over the chair beside the wash table, drying off then wrapping it around his waist. “You get used to seeing all sorts of things when you share a house with so many people,” he chuckled.
“Oh? Oh, it’s not that.” Elspeth’s cheeks were bright pink as she slipped out of bed and skittered to her trunk, throwing open the lid. She paused, dissolving into a laugh and shaking her head. “All right, it is that.” She straightened and dragged her eyes over to meet his.
Of course, that was the exact moment that the towel chose to fall off as he reached for his britches on the far end of the bureau. He fumbled for the towel and missed. It plopped to the floor as he pivoted in such a way that exposed more than he intended to. Elspeth gasped and slapped a hand to her mouth…but only to hide a giddy giggle. She spun away, her shoulders still shaking with mirth. If Athos wasn’t mistaken, there was a certain sparkle in her eyes.
“Sorry, sorry,” he laughed, scrambling to pick up the towel and retrieve his britches and a pair of trousers to boot.
Although if he wasn’t mistaken, a certain long-ignored part of him leapt to life, more sensitive and reactive than it had been in years. He blushed furiously and turned away, getting dressed as fast as he could, casting a scolding look and pointing a stern finger of warning at his wayward organ.
He waited until he was fully dressed in his uniform before risking a glance at Elspeth. The beautiful and soft-spoken woman had set to work making their bed rather than attempting to bathe or change in front of him. It was another mark in her favor.
“I’ll just go downstairs and start breakfast,” he said, rushing toward the door. “Although I think I hear Ivy and Heather down there already.”
“You can tell it’s them?” She turned to him, brow lifted.
“Yes. It must be Ivy and Heather, since Piper isn’t here. They’re trying to be quiet, there are no crashes of dropped pots, and since they’re twins and have a way of communicating without words—unlike the boys, who aren’t twins—I don’t hear any whispering.”
Elspeth smiled. “Clever. And I’m sorry, I should have gotten up earlier to make breakfast myself.”
“No, no.” Athos waved away her apology as he opened the bedroom door and took one step into the hall. “You were exhausted last night and needed sleep. We’ll ease you into motherhood.” He risked winking at her—good grief, he hadn’t winked at anyone in years—and zipped out into the hall.
He was right about Ivy and Heather starting breakfast. As he walked into the kitchen, the smell of bacon frying filled the air. He breathed it in with a happy sigh and went to kiss each of his girls on the cheek. As they minded the bacon and began frying eggs, he did his best to tidy up. Tidying was a hopeless operation, though. Perhaps if he had an extra set of hands, like the strange drawing of a Hindu god that he’d once seen.
“I’m so sorry that I wasn’t here to help you with breakfast.” Minutes later, Elspeth was apologizing before she was fully in the kitchen.
“That’s all right.”
“We don’t mind.”
Athos grinned at the grace and responsibility of the twins. How he managed to raise such polite and helpful children was beyond him. Natalie had had a hand in Ivy and Heather’s childhood, even though she’d been gone for over four years now. That had to explain it. That also probably explained why the house erupted into noise as soon as the younger children were awake.
“Bacon, bacon, bacon!” Thomas’s shout could be heard all through the upstairs hall and down the stairs as he charged into the kitchen.
“I can’t find my stockings,” Geneva called a few minutes later.
“Papa! Hubert is hogging the wash water,” Lael hollered not long after that.
The sunny calm of morning was broken. The day’s battles had begun. Footsteps clunked and thumped around the house, bacon sizzled, pots rattled, and plates clinked as the whirlwind of breakfast got underway. Athos watched as Elspeth went from smiling to concentrating with all her might to wide-eyed panic as she tried to keep up.
“I’m sorry about all the chaos,” he apologized as they all sat down to gobble down the meal before the older kids had to rush off to school. “You’ll—”
“—get used to it.” Elspeth finished his sentence with a smile. “I’m sure I will.”
“Papa, do you have to go to work today?” Millicent asked from Elspeth’s end of the table.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Athos answered, heart squeezing. “There’s an early train today, and I have to be there to unload it. And then there’s another train coming from the west this afternoon.”
“I hate trains,” Geneva sighed.
“You should take a day off, since you got married yesterday,” Hubert said with a philosophic tilt of his head.
“Yeah, and we shouldn’t have to go to school today,” Vernon added. “We need to get to know our new mother better, after all.”
Athos laughed. “Nice try, my boy.”
The others giggled, then proceeded to make their own arguments about why they should stay home from school. It was all in fun, but in the process of debating and laughing and coming up with ideas of things they could do instead of school that would be equally as educational, the hands of the clock moved a little too much.
“We’re late,” Heather cried out all at once. “We’re late for school!”
Another rush of chaos followed as the children all jumped up from the table and scrambled to find their books and shoes. The older kids were quicker and managed to get out the door fast enough, but Lael, Geneva, and Millicent lagged behind.
“Come on,” Athos encouraged them, tossing an apologetic smile Elspeth’s way as they crouched before the tardy ones, tying shoes and fixing hair bows. “You’re going to make me late too.”
As if to emphasize the point, a train whistle blew in the distance. All joking was over, and Athos joined the rush. The three kids managed to make it out the door as he hurried back upstairs to grab his uniform jacket, then thundered downstairs and into the kitchen, where Elspeth had begun to clean up.
“Geneva, Millie, and Lael only have a half day of school today since it’s Friday,” he rushed to inform her. “They’ll be home for lunch around noon. The older ones will be back by three. Fridays are usually laundry days. If you need anything, Josephine Evans is right next door and can help a bit.”
“All right.” Elspeth nodded, a little out of breath.
Athos searched for his hat, found it sitting inside the breadbox, reached for it and settled it on his head, along with a shower of crumbs. “If things get really dicey, send Hubert down to the station to fetch me. He’s not supposed to work today. I told him he’d be a much bigger help at home until you’re settled.”
“Right.”
“Papa, Papa!” Thomas shot into the room from the hall, smashing into Athos’s legs and hugging him. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”
“Be nice for Elspeth now.” He bent over to hug Thomas. As soon as he let the boy go, he turned and gave Elspeth a quick peck on the cheek out of long-forgotten habit, the way he always had with Natalie.
Both Athos and Elspeth widened their eyes and stiffened in surprise. For a long moment, their eyes met. Something warm and tender shifted in Athos’s heart. He found himself wanting to give her another, longer kiss, and not on the cheek.
“Well.” He cleared his throat and started for the door. “I really do need to get going. Busy day ahead!”
Busy enough that his heart was still racing as he rushed out the door and hurried to the station.
Chapter Four
Work was not something young women of Elspeth’s social class were supposed to do, and yet, as she bent over the Strong family’s enormous washtub in the downstairs washroom, scrubbing dresses and knickers, shirts and underclothes in all sizes imaginable, Elspeth considered that she was quite good at it. At least for someone who hadn’t worked
a day in her life before her nineteenth birthday.
Working and minding children at the same time, however, was another thing.
“Bleh!” Thomas exclaimed with sudden violence from his place in the hall just on the other side of the washroom doorway.
Elspeth glanced up to see him making a horrible face, his tongue stuck out and covered with white flakes. “Oh, Thomas, no, no!” She pulled back from the washtub with a splash, rushing to yank a box of laundry soap out of the young boy’s hands.
“It looks like mashed potatoes,” he complained, tongue still hanging out. “It hurts!”
Elspeth didn’t need to look at the box’s label to know there was lye in the soap flakes. She rushed Thomas to the kitchen and rinsed his mouth with copious amounts of water, urging him not to swallow the whole time. There were a few tears, but with a thorough rinse and a glass of milk—which Elspeth had once heard could help if someone swallowed soap, but had no idea whether it was actually true—Thomas was none the worse for wear.
“I nearly died!” Thomas announced to Geneva, Millicent, and Lael when the younger children came home at lunchtime.
“You did not nearly die.” Elspeth laughed, her smile tight, trying to reassure the children as much as herself.
“Wow!” Lael exclaimed, helping himself to the plate of leftover chicken and vegetables that Elspeth had prepared for them. “I wish I had almost died.”
“Believe me, you don’t,” Elspeth told him.
“I bet if I climbed really high in the tree outside then jumped, I might almost die too!”
“Oh good gracious, Lael.” Elspeth pressed a hand to her heart. “Please don’t try it.”
Their cozy meal was interrupted by a knock at the door. “Hello?”
“It’s Mrs. Murphy,” Millicent explained. She jumped up from her seat at the kitchen table and tore through the house to greet the newly arrived neighbor.
Mrs. Katie Murphy turned out to be one of Elspeth’s nearest neighbors. She was a charming Irishwoman in her middle years who had been among the first to journey out to Haskell eleven years ago, when the town was founded. But as much as Elspeth enjoyed being introduced to the woman and chatting for a few minutes, the laundry was still overflowing, the breakfast dishes hadn’t been cleared from the dining room table, and the four youngest Strong children were growing louder and louder in the kitchen as they finished their lunch and began playing their favorite game: train wreck.
“Perhaps I’ll come back another day and we can get to know each other better,” Mrs. Murphy laughed after Elspeth glanced over her shoulder for the thousandth time to see what the children were up to. She departed with a kind farewell.
“I like Mrs. Murphy,” Geneva informed Elspeth as she returned to the kitchen to make sure the kids were finished eating. “She has red hair. And Morgan Murphy is in mine and Millie’s class in school. He has red hair too.”
“You shall have to invite them over to play sometime,” Elspeth said, breathless and distracted as she put away the remaining food.
“Yes, I shall.” Geneva imitated her accent, but it was clear to Elspeth that in this case the imitation was intended to be flattery.
She didn’t have much time to think of it either way. As soon as the children were fed and their hands and faces washed, she lugged the huge, heavy basket of clean laundry out to the backyard and began hanging it up to dry.
“Can I climb the tree?” Lael asked before she had two shirts hung. He eyed the tree with longing and mischief.
“Not if you intend to throw yourself to your almost death,” Elspeth answered.
“You climb up the tree and we’ll throw rocks at you,” Millicent suggested.
“Yes! Yes!”
“Girls, I hardly think—” Elspeth began.
But Lael was quick to answer, “Okay!”
“But—”
Lael scrambled up the tree before Elspeth could stop him. The twins and Thomas ran around the base of the tree, giggling and looking for rocks.
“They do that all the time.”
Elspeth straightened from the laundry basket and whipped around to find the older woman who had spoken. “They do?”
The older woman was hanging her own laundry in the yard beside the Strong house. She laughed. “Believe it or not, they do. If you ask me, it’s good practice for the girls. They will be fine pitchers on one of Haskell’s baseball teams someday.” The woman finished fastening a pair of long underwear, wiped her hands on her apron, then crossed the few yards that separated the two laundry lines to shake Elspeth’s hand. “Josephine Evans. I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced yet.”
“Oh.” Elspeth finished hanging one of the older twins’ petticoats, then took her neighbor’s hand. “Elspeth Leo—Strong.” She smiled as she used her new name for the first time.
“I know.” Josephine nodded. “We’ve all been waiting for Athos to remarry for a long time. Why, he started talking about it last Christmas, before that, even. You’d be hard pressed to find a soul in Haskell who doesn’t know Athos or wish him well.”
As happy as Elspeth was to hear that Athos’s neighbors liked and respected him, the more Josephine talked, the more Elspeth ached to get back to hanging laundry. She didn’t suppose clothes could mold in the laundry basket, but the longer it took for her to hang them, the longer it would take for them to dry. And she still had to iron the shirts and dresses once they were dry.
“Yeow!” A loud cry from Lael—halfway up the tree—pulled both Elspeth’s and Josephine’s attention. “You hit me!”
“But you told us to throw rocks at you,” Millicent complained.
“You were supposed to miss.”
“Excuse me.” Elspeth dismissed herself from her conversation with Josephine, hoping she wasn’t being unfriendly, and raced to the bottom of the tree. “If you didn’t want to be hit with rocks, you shouldn’t have told your sisters to throw them.”
“I’m a good rock thrower,” Thomas informed her. He promptly attempted to hurl a small, sharp rock, let go at the wrong time, and hurled the rock right into his foot. His bare foot. When had he taken off his shoes?
The question was banished from Elspeth’s mind as Thomas broke into a wail. She scooped him into her arms to comfort him, dabbing at the tiny trickle of blood he’d managed to draw with the corner of her apron.
“I want to help hang the laundry,” Geneva declared.
“Me too!”
The girls dashed for the basket and the clothesline before Elspeth could think about it.
“I almost died again,” Thomas wailed.
“I’m sorry, is this a bad time?”
Elspeth glanced around the corner of the house to find a handsome and very pregnant black woman in an exquisite gown rounding the corner. “Wendy!” She was so surprised to see her old friend from Hurst Home that she stood. In the process, Thomas slipped off her lap, his feet—injured and whole—landing in a puddle made by the wash water.
“Ooh!” He declared, then started stomping. Muddy water flew everywhere.
“It is a bad time,” Wendy laughed. She waddled around to meet Elspeth on the garden path anyhow, giving her a hug. “I just wanted to say hello and see how you’re settling in.”
“Well enough, I suppose.” As wonderful as it was to see Wendy again, and as much catching up as she longed to do, the laundry still needed to be hung, and now Thomas was covered from head to toe in muddy water.
“Travis and I live on the other side of the yard there.” Wendy pointed through a hedge at the back of the Strong property to the backyard of another building. “I can see you’re busy right now, but I wanted to invite you to tea at some point.
“I’d love to come.” Elspeth brushed splatters of mud off of her apron. feeling decidedly feeble compared to her stately friend. “I just don’t know when I’ll possibly have time.”
“The Strong children are a handful, aren’t they? I hope mine and Travis’s little bundle of joy has just as much en
ergy.” Wendy patted her stomach, then proceeded to go on and talk all about how delightful the Strong children were and how she and Travis hoped to have many of their own. Time itched down Elspeth’s back like prickles of fire. Lael continued to climb around in the tree nearly directly above them.
It wasn’t until Vernon’s call of, “We’re home,” followed by the older four children pouring out onto the back porch from the kitchen that Elspeth dared to drag her polite attention away from Wendy to see what was going on. What she found was Geneva and Millicent hanging dirt and grass stained clothes on the line.
“Oh no!” She left Wendy and rushed to the clothesline.
“Do you need me to help with that?” Wendy offered. She started to waddle forward, one hand on her back.
Elspeth couldn’t let a very pregnant woman stoop and reach and otherwise strain herself over a little bit of spoiled laundry. “No, you should be at home resting.” She tried to sound lighthearted but was afraid she was more of a shrew.
“We’ll help,” Ivy and Heather said in unison.
“What’s wrong?” Geneva asked as her sisters joined them.
“We’re just hanging laundry,” Millie added.
“You’ve dragged it through the grass and mud,” Heather pointed out.
“Oh.”
“Do we have any food?” Hubert asked from the porch rail.
Elspeth didn’t have time to check to see if Wendy had gone or not. “I’m sure there’s something in the pantry,” she said, rushing back to the porch.
“I want to climb the tree too,” Vernon hollered, rushing for the tree. “Hey Millie, Neva, you wanna throw rocks at me?”
“No!” Elspeth had reached the porch steps as the question was asked. She whirled back, intent on stopping the mischief, but it was too late. Geneva and Millicent were racing back to the tree.
Elspeth only barely noticed the older lady in a grey suit, her hair pulled back under a small, black hat, a large, flat purse of some sort clutched in her hands. She wore a brittle smile that was fading fast as she glanced around the yard, taking in each set of children in turn.
