by Delia Parr
Wryn put her finger on the tip of her chin for a moment. “Hmmm. Legally, I’m not sure exactly how I’m related to her. I suppose she might be my . . . what? Grandmother, maybe? Or my great-aunt? It’s all very confusing to me, but since you’re a lawyer, maybe you could tell me.”
“As confusing as it is, try your best to enlighten us,” Emma said. Certain that this young woman was not any part of her family at all, she directed Wryn’s attention away from Zachary and back to herself.
“I’ll try. Let’s see if I can explain this right,” Wryn began. “Uncle Mark is my uncle, of course, because he’s married to my Aunt Catherine. I’m related by blood to her because she’s my mother’s sister. I’m just confused about how I’m related to you since you’re Uncle Mark’s mother. If you were Aunt Catherine’s mother, you’d be my grandmother, of course. But since—”
“Mark? And Catherine? They’re here?” Emma exclaimed, stunned to learn that her youngest son and his family had apparently arrived more than two weeks earlier than she’d expected.
“Yes, they’re here. We’re all here. As we speak, Uncle Mark is upstairs with Aunt Catherine. The twins needed their naps and poor Aunt Catherine was completely tuckered out from our travel, so she’s napping, too. By the time Uncle Mark had unloaded our trunks from the wagon and lugged them upstairs, he said he needed to rest awhile, as well. It’s been a nasty few days of traveling, especially with today’s weather, but I don’t suppose I have to tell you that, do I?” she asked, eyes dancing.
“Obviously not,” Emma snapped. At this point, the mud was making her skirt and cape awfully heavy. She was dirty and tired and cold. She could still taste the grit of the mud on her lips, and she had little patience left for dealing with this little snip. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where I might find Mother Garrett, could you?”
Wryn fished another cruller out of the tin and nibbled off the end. “She went into town.”
“Alone? In this weather? Why on earth would she do that?”
“Since we arrived a little earlier than you all expected us, Mother Garrett said she needed some supplies from the General Store,” the young woman explained. “But she didn’t go alone, if that’s what is putting you into a bit of a stew. She went with a man. Mr. . . . Oh, I forget his name. Anyway, he was here visiting with her, so he drove her into town. I’m sure you know who he is. Since he seems to be smitten with her, he’s probably been here a lot. You do know who I mean, don’t you?”
Emma noticed her jaw was clenched again and prayed this new habit would not be an integral part of her relationship with this young woman. Obviously, Widower Anson Kirk had stopped by to see her mother-in-law. He had moved into Hill House for several months this past winter after his family’s home had been one of those destroyed when the match factory exploded, and he eventually set his sights on Mother Garrett.
Although her mother-in-law was decidedly outspoken about her refusal to ever marry again, she did seem to enjoy being courted, albeit unofficially, by the widower Mr. Kirk, who seemed impervious to her repeated rejections.
Staring at Wryn, who seemingly had no sense of what was proper for a young woman to discuss with her elders, Emma tried to remain calm. After raising three sons, she had always felt confident dealing with young men. Handling young women was quite another matter, as her initial difficulties supervising Liesel and Ditty had proven in the past. Unfortunately, this young lady offered a challenge far beyond Emma’s experience and well beyond her interests at the moment.
Zachary cleared his throat, which broke the tension of the standoff between the two women. “I’m certain you’d like to freshen up before reuniting with your son and his family. Since you’re safe and sound inside now, I think I should get the horses back to the livery,” he suggested.
Emma looked up at him, noted the hint of amusement in his gaze, and frowned. “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to wash up a bit here first?”
“I think I’ll wait. I still have to cross that mud slick to get to the horses again, remember?”
“Then be careful. And thank you for today. For everything,” she murmured.
He smiled. “I’ll see you at church in the morning. If the weather improves, we might try finishing our outing in the afternoon, although you’re probably more inclined to stay home with your son and his family.”
“Yes, I am. Perhaps we might go later in the week on Wednesday. Would the same time suit you?”
“I don’t have to leave on business until Thursday. I’ll bring the horses at one o’clock on Wednesday,” he agreed and took his leave.
Emma closed the door to the dining room again, ready to pose a host of questions to Wryn, but the young woman took the initiative.
“Is he really your lawyer? Or is he a lawyer you know who also happens to be interested in you, which was very apparent by the way he—”
“He’s just my lawyer,” Emma replied, more annoyed at herself for answering Wryn’s question than she was at Wryn for having the audacity to ask it. Without offering any further explanation, she tiptoed past Wryn to get to the sink, where she pumped water into a pot that had been resting on the counter.
“Even I can see he’s more than just your lawyer, although he isn’t a very good one,” Wryn stated before wiping her sugared hands on her skirts.
“And after living all of what—fourteen years?—you can tell how good a lawyer he is?” Emma snapped, unable to juggle both her patience and the heavy pot of water she was now carrying to the cookstove.
“Fifteen years. I’m fifteen,” Wryn said, completely unaffected by Emma’s curtness. “And yes, I can tell he isn’t that good of a lawyer, because he couldn’t answer my question. Or he didn’t want to answer it, which means I still don’t know how we’re related legally. Mother Garrett had no problem telling me what to call her, but I still don’t know what to call you. Would you prefer Grandmother or Aunt?”
“Widow Garrett will do quite nicely for now,” Emma insisted, more concerned about how she was going to get washed up than she was about how Wryn might address her. Once she set the pot of water onto the cookstove and set it to heat, she stared long and hard at the water, as if she could will it to heat faster.
With Mark and his family staying here at Hill House now, she could hardly clean up right here in the kitchen. Tracking mud through the rest of the house to get to her room upstairs made no sense. She would only make more unnecessary work for herself, since she could not very well leave it until tomorrow night, when Liesel and Ditty would be coming back.
Instead, once the water had heated, she decided she should carry the pot with her, slip out the back door, cross the yard, and enter her office by using the door that opened on the side porch, which was the same door guests usually used when they arrived to register. Once she was inside her office, she would have the privacy she needed to get out of these muddy clothes and wash up just enough to use the private staircase that connected directly to her bedroom upstairs so she could change.
With her problem solved, at least in her own mind, and anxious to get started so she would be presentable by the time Mark and his family were awake, she returned her attention to Wryn. “As soon as this water is warm enough, I’m going to freshen up and change. In the meantime, I’d like you to go back upstairs. Once Mark and Catherine and the boys are up, you can let them know I’ve returned and that I’ll be waiting for them in one of the front parlors. I assume that Mother Garrett made sure you had a room of your own close to them,” she said, confident that her mother-in-law had put Mark and Catherine and the twins in the suite of rooms they had prepared for them on the west side of the house. Hopefully, she had put Wryn into one of the rooms directly across the hall from them.
Wryn shrugged, put the lid back on the tin of crullers, hoisted the tin to one hip, and set a pout to her lips. “I liked one of the rooms in the opposite hall, but I wasn’t allowed to have that one.” She let out a long sigh. “She made me take that bland, boring room. You mus
t know the one. It’s completely beige and without any spirit at all.”
“I know it well,” Emma replied. She was not surprised that Mother Garrett had refused to be intimidated by this wisp of a young woman, forcing Wryn to take the room directly across the hall from Mark and his family. Emma would sorely have loved being home to watch their encounter, though.
When the young woman abruptly left the room, Emma was tempted to call after her to remind her to store the tin of crullers back in the sideboard in the dining room where it belonged, but decided to let the issue drop. For now. She was too excited about reuniting with Mark and his wife and seeing her two grandsons for the first time to worry about an ordinary tin of crullers.
At the same time, Emma was curious to learn why Wryn had come along with them. To put it gently, this girl had a feisty, but abrasive, temperament. Mark and Catherine, however, were both gentle and soft-spoken by nature, and Emma could scarcely imagine them traveling together, let alone living together here at Hill House.
Nevertheless, just thinking about Wryn matching wits with Mother Garrett for the next several weeks made her smile, especially since she knew who would survive as the winner in the end.
* * *
One muddy cape. Two mud-crusted boots. A sodden bonnet. One nearly ruined riding skirt. A pair of riding gloves destined for the trash heap.
“Not bad, considering,” Emma murmured as she passed the day’s casualties she had piled on the porch outside of her office door on her way back to the kitchen. Grateful that the rain had finally stopped, she paused for a moment in the yard to dump the soiled water from the pot and checked the winter chicken coop near the house. She also made a mental note to have the chickens moved to the coop near the woods as soon as the mulberry trees began to blossom—a sure sign that spring had arrived to stay.
She peered into the coop, looking specifically for one chicken she had named Faith. As she hoped, she found Faith roosting with her charges, safe and sound and dry inside the coop. “We’re going to need lots and lots of eggs for my family,” she crooned before hurrying off to the kitchen again. Collecting eggs with her grandchildren was only one of the many activities she had missed sharing with them, since they were all growing up so far from Candlewood. Mindful of her many other blessings, however, including the fact they’d all be together very, very soon, she opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen.
Mother Garrett looked up from her place at the cookstove, where she was frying bacon, and grinned. As plump as Emma was slender, the elderly woman wore visible testimony that she was the finest cook in all of Candlewood. “Good. You’re back!”
“Barely. I’ve only had time to slip upstairs to get changed,” Emma replied, relieved that she had also had time to rebraid her hair and coil it neatly at the nape of her neck before encountering her mother-in-law. She tied an apron over the dark blue work gown she had changed into and shrugged. “We were gone a bit longer than we expected, I suppose, although the weather—”
“Don’t quibble about the weather. Start with your good news first, then I’ll tell you mine. Just hurry. Tell me, tell me. I’m about to burst with curiosity. Which one did you choose? The bay mare or the chestnut one?”
“Mare? Did you say mare?” Emma asked, completely perplexed by her mother-in-law’s questions.
The grin on Mother Garrett’s face sank into a frown. “Just because I teased you shamelessly for the past few weeks doesn’t give you license to tease me back. I’m your elder. Unlike some other person currently residing in this boardinghouse of yours, who shall remain nameless at the moment because that’s part of my news, you’re unlikely to forget that. Save for a rare occasion or two over the years for which I’ve completely forgiven you,” she cautioned before turning back to turn over her bacon.
Emma set the pot into the sink to be washed and joined her mother-in-law at the cookstove. “I’m not teasing you. I simply have no idea what you’re talking about,” she insisted and snatched a piece of cooked bacon from a platter on a nearby counter. She took a nibble but stopped almost instantly to stare wide-eyed at her mother-in-law when she realized exactly what Mother Garrett had asked her. “It’s the secret! It’s the secret you’ve been keeping with Mr. Breckenwith, isn’t it? It’s a . . . a horse! He got me a mare. He did, didn’t he?” she gushed, completely overwhelmed at the very thought she might have a horse of her own. Although riding had been one of the ways they had enjoyed spending time together, she had been perfectly content using the mare he had rented for her from the livery while he rode the horse he kept stabled there.
Mother Garrett’s eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me you didn’t know. I saw you both leave together and—”
“We never got to finish our outing. The weather slowed us down and then got worse, so we had to turn around and come home.”
Mother Garrett dropped her gaze and let out a long, sad sigh. “I did it again, didn’t I?” she whispered. “I’ve been trying so hard lately to keep secrets people tell me, but now I just let this one slip out. I didn’t mean to do it. I truly didn’t, but now I’ve ruined his surprise for you. I just thought—”
“You just assumed that since I’d been gone so long he must have taken me to see what he’d gotten for me, that’s all,” Emma said gently, putting her arm around her mother-in-law’s shoulders. “You couldn’t have known, any more than you could have warned me it was going to hail this afternoon.”
“Hail? We didn’t have any hail today.”
“Perhaps not, but we did. Now let’s get back to that mare you mentioned,” Emma prompted, anxious to know more. “I think you said one was a bay, but I didn’t quite catch the color of the other one I could choose from.”
Mother Garrett focused her attention on her work. “I don’t believe I remember precisely.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course you do.”
“Even if I did remember, I couldn’t tell you. It’s supposed to be a secret, and I’m still bound by my promise to keep Mr. Breckenwith’s secret, although there isn’t much left of it now.” She paused, stared at the bacon she was frying for a moment, and looked up at Emma. “You won’t tell him I blabbed a little, will you?”
Emma planted a kiss on the elderly woman’s cheek. “No, I won’t. It’ll be our secret.”
Mother Garrett smiled just a little. “Good. And don’t worry—I’ll keep this secret for sure. I hope he doesn’t wait too long, though. And you have to promise me that you’ll act surprised.”
“I promise,” Emma said, although she doubted she would be able to fool Zachary. He knew her too well. “We’re going to try again Wednesday afternoon, weather permitting, of course,” Emma offered before she polished off her piece of bacon. “This bacon is delicious, but it’s nearly suppertime. Why are you cooking bacon now?”
Mother Garrett smiled. “I need the grease to make those potatoes Mark loves. That’s the good news I’ve got for you. Mark and Catherine and the boys arrived while you were gone. They brought a surprise with them, too.”
Before Emma could reply, the door to the dining room burst open. When Wryn charged into the kitchen, Mother Garrett leaned toward Emma. “Speaking of surprises, here she is.”
“You’ve got to help me,” the young woman cried, panting for breath. “Please, please help me!”
3
HE’S . . . HE’S MISSING . . . HE’S gone! I’ve . . . I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find him. I’ve gone into every room upstairs. I’ve looked under the beds. But he’s gone . . . gone! We have to find him. Please, help me. Help me find Jonas,” Wryn gushed and wrung her hands together as she gulped to catch her breath. With her face flushed and her eyes filled with panic, she bore no resemblance to the overconfident, defiant young woman Emma had met less than an hour ago.
Emma’s pulse quickened with alarm the moment she heard Wryn say the name of one of her twin two-year-old grandsons. “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Now another one,” she said firmly. Although Emma had yet to meet
either of her grandsons, Mark and Catherine had written enough about them in their letters that she felt as if she knew them. Both boys, according to Mark, were sweet, gentle souls, much like both of their parents. Although he was the younger of the two by all of twelve minutes, Jonas was the leader of the two, so it did not surprise Emma to learn that he was the one who had wandered off.
“Tell me what happened,” she said when the young woman was breathing normally again.
Wryn blinked back tears. “I . . . I did what you said. I went upstairs to wait for Uncle Mark and Aunt Catherine and the babies to wake up. About twenty minutes ago, I peeked into their little sitting room to see if anyone was up yet, but they weren’t. Except for Jonas.”
“Jonas was in the sitting room? By himself?” Emma asked as Mother Garrett moved the frying pan off the stove and began wiping her hands on her apron.
“He and Paul are pretty quiet babies, especially for boys. He must have woken up and wandered out into the sitting room. That’s where I found him playing with the latch on one of the trunks Uncle Mark had brought upstairs.”
“How did he get away from you?” Mother Garrett interjected.
Wryn gulped. “The door to the bedroom was ajar, and I could see everyone else was still sleeping, so I took Jonas with me back to my room. I played with him for a bit, then I went back again to see if anyone was up yet. I . . . I only left him in my room for a minute. Not even a minute! When I got back to my room, he was gone. Please! Can’t we stop talking and start looking for him? We need to find him before Uncle Mark and Aunt Catherine discover he’s missing!”
“Mark and Catherine need to know, and they need to help us find Jonas,” Emma insisted, less concerned about Wryn having to explain herself than she was about finding her little grandson. “Go back upstairs. Wake them up if you have to, but tell them exactly what happened and have them help you search the upstairs again. In the meantime, Mother Garrett and I will start searching here on the first floor.”
