Hearts Awakening (3 page)

In fact, there remained two sad loaves of bread, visible testimony to her inability to control the heat in the oven in the top tier of the cookstove while she attempted to manage the heat and cook on the middle tier. Bending down, she swiped at a bit of mud on the floor she had missed, thoroughly disgusted with herself. She had a good sense of what Cousin Mark would say and do if he knew how badly she was faring today, and her frown deepened.

That confounded cookstove! If she were to prove herself a capable housekeeper—and in turn receive a reference from Jackson Smith—it centered around mastering that contraption. And unless she did exactly that, and rather quickly, she doubted he would want her to finish out the two weeks he had been promised. Without a reference, she would never be able to secure a permanent position for herself, which would give her the dignity of finally making her own way in this world, instead of relying on her cousin’s charity, such as it was.

Determined to earn that reference, she rinsed out her cleaning rag one last time and laid it flat to dry. Before tackling her next important task, she glanced over at the two boys sitting on the far side of the room. There was more than enough room for both boys to sit together on the overly wide window seat, a feature she had noted on the other windows on the first floor.

Ethan was still watching out the window for his father, which he had done most of the day. Daniel, however, was sitting straight and tall, staring at her, his open distrust of her still simmering in the depths of his dark blue eyes, which were remarkably like his father’s. Handling Daniel had proven to be a greater challenge than dealing with Ethan’s inability to speak, but their latest bout of mischief tested the very limits of her patience.

“There,” she said, patting the cloth. “The kitchen floor is good and clean again, and I expect both of you to help me keep it that way. Let’s take one more look at those shoes of yours while we wait for the floor to dry a bit more,” she said sternly.

Daniel’s bravado crumbled as she tiptoed over to them. “I got all the mud off me and Ethan. I didn’t mean to get any on you. It was an accident,” he insisted in a trembling voice.

Regretting her harsh tone, Ellie stopped in front of him, looked down at her gown, and sighed. Winning this child’s trust would take love and patience, not cold words. “There’s a reason why I wear this dark work gown. It doesn’t show the dirt or the mud, although it does show blackberry stains rather well,” she added with a smile.

She shook her gown and apron to show him no trace of the mud remained without telling him that even if he had gotten mud on the soiled apron she had borrowed, it would have been hard to spot it among the stains that were too ingrained in the fabric to ever soak away.

“Do you . . . do you want me to get you one of Pappy’s belts now?”

She drew back her head and furrowed her brow. “One of his belts?”

He nodded. “So you can strap me like Mrs. Hill did when we were bad. But please don’t strap Ethan,” he said and scrunched a little closer to his brother before lowering his voice. “He’s too little.”

Blinking back her disbelief that anyone would strap these two boys for such a minor incident, if ever, Ellie drew in a long breath and knelt down in front of the five-year-old. “Who’s Mrs. Hill?” she asked, wondering if this was the housekeeper Jackson Smith had mentioned had left just a few weeks ago.

Daniel scrunched up his face. “She was a keeperhouse, but Pappy made her leave ’cause she was bad to me and Ethan.”

“You mean a housekeeper,” she corrected gently.

He nodded. “Pappy told her he was the only one who could strap us, even though he never does. Then he told her she had to pack up and go, and she couldn’t never, ever come back,” he added, puffing out his chest.

Ellie let out a long breath, even as her admiration for the man grew. “Well, good for your father,” she replied. “But don’t worry. I have no intention of strapping either one of you, and I’ve reminded you more than once already that I’m only going to be here for two weeks.”

Smiling, she patted the soles of their shoes. “Besides, it’s partly my fault that you two wound up marching through that big mud puddle on the side of the house.”

When Daniel’s eyes opened wide, she chuckled. “I should have known not to ask you two boys to sit on the side porch while I scrubbed the kitchen floor.”

Daniel eyed her suspiciously. “Why not?”

“Because I know there isn’t a mud puddle in this whole world that wouldn’t invite little boys to trudge through it. If I’d kept you inside to play with your blocks in the first place, you wouldn’t have gotten into trouble now, would you?”

When a grin lit his face for the very first time that day, she narrowed her gaze. “I still expect you and your brother to be more obedient, like your father told you to be,” she admonished gently. “Now, if you and Ethan would like to apologize, I think I can promise we can put the whole episode to rest.”

He narrowed his gaze. “You won’t tell Pappy?”

“If your father asks me about what happened, I’ll have to tell him. Otherwise, I don’t see why I should mention it, do you?”

His head bobbed from side to side. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay on the porch,” he blurted and tugged on Ethan’s shirt. “You’re sorry, too, aren’t you, Ethan?”

Ethan turned his head around, nodded once, then returned his attention to the window.

Daniel slipped off the window seat and stood next to her. “You made a big, big pot of soup. We’ll have lots and lots to eat, so you don’t have to come back tomorrow,” he suggested.

“You’ll need more than a pot of leftover soup to eat tomorrow, and I haven’t finished cleaning the house yet, either,” she ventured, although she would not blame Jackson if he agreed with Daniel that they could make do with soup instead of more burnt meals. Fortunately, the man had a sweet tooth, which made her perfectly baked apple turnovers today the only saving grace to the entire dinner she had served.

Since the other odors were still overpowering the smell of the soup she had set to cook earlier, she made her way over to the cookstove to check on it. As usual, Ethan seemed oblivious to her very presence in the room, but Daniel was right on her heels when she took one look into the pot of soup and froze.

No steam.

No bubbles around the edges, either.

With her heart racing, she took the spoon and poked at one of the potatoes and then another. “Rock hard.” Gingerly, she tapped the side of the pot with her fingertips. “Scarcely warm. Mercy! There’s not enough heat,” she grumbled. Ellie opened the side plate on the oven and shook her head. The firewood inside was nothing but embers. “No wood.”

Daniel poked his head beside hers to look inside the stove. “My mama never forgot to add the wood.”

Ellie frowned. “Perhaps not, but I promised you soup for supper, and soup you shall have,” she declared and headed off to the side porch to get more wood.

Daniel raced ahead of her and helped her carry some hickory wood back to the stove. Even though she rebuilt the fire quickly, she had little hope the soup would be done in time for supper.

“You already broked some promises today. You shouldn’t make a promise if you’re not gonna keep it,” Daniel said glumly.

She stilled and glanced down at him. “I broke a promise? When?”

His gaze narrowed. “You said you’d make a good stack of griddle cakes, but you burned them and they tasted bad. You said you were sorry and you wouldn’t burn nothin’ again, and then you burned the bread.”

Instinctively, Ellie stiffened her back. “I didn’t burn the griddle cakes or the bread on purpose. I just had a little trouble with the oven and this . . . this cookstove,” she explained, surprised at how sensitive she was to the child’s criticism.

“My mama didn’t burn nothin’ like you do. She was a good cook,” he muttered.

Ellie stirred the soup, hoping it would heat faster if she did. “I’m sure your mother was a very good cook, but I didn’t burn the apple turnovers today. And I didn’t completely ruin the bread. Now that I’ve cut off the burnt crust on the two loaves that are left, I promise the bread will taste better with supper tonight, and that’s one promise I know I can keep.”

“Is that the only one?” Daniel whispered, his dark eyes troubled.

“No, that’s not the only one,” she replied, thinking she knew what was really bothering him. “We’ve already discussed that you and Ethan were wrong to slip outside and get yourselves all muddied up while I was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen today. Since you’ve both apologized, I don’t intend to break my promise not to mention it to your father,” she reminded him.

“Lots of people don’t keep their promises,” Daniel insisted, apparently unimpressed by her reassurances.

She cocked a brow. “Like who?”

“My mother promised she wouldn’t be gone long,” he whispered, then returned to the window to sit with his brother.

Before Ellie could find her voice to reply to his poignant words, Daniel let out a whoop. “Pappy’s coming!” he cried, tugging Ethan down. Together they scurried out the back door to meet their father.

Ellie smiled as she watched the boys tear out of the house with such enthusiasm. As a child she had looked forward to having her own father return at the end of the day, too, and listening later as her parents shared an accounting of their day with each other.

Growing up, she never suspected she would never know the joy of married life or having children of her own, which made her memories all the more bittersweet. Shaking her head, she turned her attention back to the soup, which was just beginning to simmer now. The layers of responsibility she had lovingly accepted had all but erased her childhood dreams of marriage and children, and she could not afford to add to the resentments that already tested her very faith in God by resurrecting those dreams now.

While she stirred the soup and waited for the boys and their father to return to the house, she looked over to a side window, caught a glimpse of her reflection, and sighed. Her features were as unremarkable as her dark brown eyes and hair, which she simply parted in the middle and pulled back in a single braid. The freckles that skipped across the top of her cheeks had gotten darker during the summer months, which was her own fault. Contrary to custom, she did not favor wearing a hat or bonnet and often dropped the hood on her cape so she could feel the warmth of the sun on her head.

Leaning closer to get a better look, she noted the crinkles at the corner of her eyes and just a hint of wrinkles forming across her brow and frowned again. She carried every one of her thirty-one years on her face, and after working hard all day cooking and cleaning and taking care of those two boys, she could feel every one of them, too. And she had a good two-hour walk back to her cousin’s home ahead of her.

Startled back to reality when Jackson opened the back door and stepped inside, holding a son by either hand, she began stirring the soup again. She hoped the steam that had just started bubbling off the soup would explain the warm blush on her cheeks and braced herself for Jackson’s disappointment when he learned his supper was not waiting for him.

Daniel tried to tug his father toward the cookstove. “Come see, Pappy! We’re having soup for supper. Miss Ellie didn’t burn it ’cause she forgot to put enough wood in the cookstove, but I helped her carry in more wood. Wanna see?”

Jackson frowned and let go of his boys long enough to stick his hat on the peg by the door. “Is that fresh bread I see on the table, too?”

“Nope. It’s the same burned bread,” Daniel offered. “Miss Ellie cut off all the black parts.”

Ellie managed half a smile, in spite of the boy’s apparent glee at pointing out her deficiencies. “I’m afraid I’m still trying to master this cookstove of yours. The soup isn’t quite ready yet, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer than you might like for supper tonight.”

Frowning again, he ruffled the hair on his sons’ heads. “I suppose we can wait a spell for supper, if we must, but there’s no sense wasting time. You two boys come with me and help me put some apples I picked today into the root cellar. Maybe Miss Ellie will have time to make a couple of apple pies for us tomorrow,” he added hopefully.

Even though she had managed to make perfectly baked apple turnovers earlier, she could only pray that the pies would be a success and not just more disasters like the bread had been. “I’ll try.”

When he glanced around the kitchen, where she even had the windows sparkling clean, his frown finally eased into a smile. “You managed to clean all this today? With the boys underfoot?”

“We never really left the kitchen for long,” she replied, taking no small measure of satisfaction in the surprise that laced his words. “Ethan even took a bit of a nap here with us, so I’m afraid I didn’t get to do much more than sweep out the rest of the first floor. I was hoping to tackle the great room and the parlor tomorrow,” she ventured, hoping he would be pleased enough with her cleaning efforts to overlook her failures at the stove and allow her to return another day.

“That would be fine. More than fine. Thank you.”

Relief washed over her. “You’re very welcome. I noticed earlier today that the room on the first floor next to the staircase is locked. If you’d like me to clean that room, too, I’ll need the key. And I need a key for the door at the bottom of the staircase, as well, although I doubt I’ll get as far as cleaning the upstairs tomorrow.”

“There’s no need to clean the room downstairs. We haven’t used it at all since the housekeeper left. Just remind me to leave the key to the staircase when you get here tomorrow,” he countered.

Relieved that he actually wanted her to return, yet anxious to start her long trek back to the city, she untied her apron. “I should start back now. I’d rather not travel much after dusk.”

He cocked a brow. “What about your supper?”

“I really can’t wait for the soup to finish cooking. I’ll have something to eat at home,” she insisted, even though she had little more than a tin of crackers set aside for herself to eat in her room. “Did you make arrangements for Mr. Grant to meet me at the landing again to ferry me back across the river?”