by Jody Hedlund
She wasn’t sure how to go about changing his view of her. Reinhold wasn’t like the street boys she’d associated with. He operated by a different code of conduct around women. He wouldn’t kiss her too intimately or grope her or pressure her to sleep with him the way Danny had.
Reinhold was too honorable and decent and considerate. He’d likely never allow himself to think of her as anything other than Elise and Marianne’s little sister. Even if he might have an initial spark of attraction, he wouldn’t act on it.
Or maybe she’d just imagined the spark. Maybe the draw was only on her part.
He stood silently for a moment, stroking the horse. Although she’d been frightened to see him earlier and had wanted to flee, she realized now that she was grateful he was here. He was someone solid, a safe link to her past, especially with his promise not to contact Elise and Marianne.
She knew he wanted to ask her more questions, wanted to understand why she’d alienated herself from her sisters. But how could she tell him she couldn’t bear the thought of seeing them again after all she’d done? Then she’d have to face her wrongdoings, admit her sins not only to herself but also to him and her sisters. No, someday, if she was able to finally make something of her life, she’d contact them and show them she didn’t need them, that she’d done just fine for herself.
In the meantime, she was too embarrassed for them to see how low she’d fallen, especially now that she’d learned they were both so wealthy and happily married.
“Reinhold,” she started, unsure how to voice everything inside her.
His eyes flew to hers. There was something intense and deep in them, something that once again charged the air between them and made her insides quiver with strange anticipation.
Before she could speak, their privacy was broken by the approach of the two younger Duff boys and Jakob from inside the barn. Jakob was still as quiet and reserved as he’d been in New York. After living on the streets for so long, she guessed farm life was as much a change for Jakob as it was for her. But from what she’d been able to tell, he was adjusting to his new life.
Reinhold had only briefly mentioned Peter’s death. From the terseness of his comments regarding Peter and his two younger sisters still in New York living with Elise and Marianne, Sophie could tell that he didn’t care to talk about his family.
Reluctantly, she stepped away from the wagon. She wasn’t ready for him to go.
After settling onto the wagon bench, Reinhold started to roll away, tipping the brim of his hat in good-bye. Though he hadn’t spoken to her again, something in his expression pleaded with her to stay at the Duffs’, not to run away, that he wanted to see her again.
He wanted to see her again.
She let that revelation settle in her heart. Maybe she was making more of his look than he’d meant, but she didn’t care. Reinhold Weiss wanted her to stay. And so she would.
Chapter 10
Sophie sat back on her heels in the dirt and examined her hands. Her fingernails and the grooves of her flesh were crusted with soil. And her skin was red and chafed.
Now she understood why Euphemia’s hands were always so chapped. Between doing dishes, scrubbing vegetables, and washing up after chores, their hands were in and out of the water so often that Sophie was beginning to think she might end up washing her skin away. Or at least the soft beauty she’d always had.
She sighed before plunging her fingers into the ground and clawing at the stubborn carrot that refused to come out. A white hen scratched at the ground an arm’s length away, pecking at the worms and other insects Sophie had exposed with the digging.
Among other chores, Euphemia had put Sophie in charge of gathering eggs. Sophie had expected the task to be an easy one, something she could learn quickly and so finally show herself to be worthwhile. Instead, gathering the eggs turned out to be just as difficult as every other farm chore she’d attempted.
During the spring and summer, instead of staying in the chicken house, Euphemia allowed the hens to roam the farm freely, which meant some of them hid their nests.
“When the hens are allowed to feed on the fresh grass, seeds, and insects, their eggs are better,” Euphemia explained. “The yolks are a darker yellow, which makes my cakes tastier.”
For someone like Sophie who couldn’t remember the last time she’d even had a crumb of something sweet, Euphemia’s cakes and pies and cookies would have been fine without any eggs. But Sophie had refrained from commenting and had searched for the hidden hen nests in fence corners, unused feedboxes, and dark corners of the haymow.
Euphemia had shown Sophie some of the usual egg-laying spots and instructed her on the types of hen cackles that indicated whether a hen might be laying on the ground versus in high places. Even so, finding the eggs was much harder than it looked, especially because some of the hens seemed to make a full-time job of outsmarting her.
“If you dinnae get the eggs in time, they’ll either be rotten or have a baby chick growing inside of them,” Euphemia warned. “And we dinnae want baby chicks this time of year with winter right around the corner.”
Sophie wiped a sleeve across her perspiring forehead. Several other hens fought over insects, their cackling reminding Sophie of the times Olivia and Nicholas bickered with each other. The two hadn’t fought often because Olivia almost always gave in to Nicholas’s whims. But they’d had their share of sibling disagreements.
It had been three days since she’d seen the children at church, and she wasn’t sure she could wait another day to visit them. She’d asked Euphemia every morning if one of the boys could drive her over to the Ramseys’. But Euphemia had just shaken her head and said the boys had begun harvesting oats and couldn’t be spared.
Sophie hadn’t complained. It hadn’t taken long to learn just how hard the Duff boys worked. They were up every morning by five o’clock to milk the cows. After milking and eating breakfast, they loaded drums of milk into the back of a wagon, and then Lyle or Gavin would take some to town to be sold to the locals before hauling the rest to the cheese plant.
While Lyle or Gavin was gone, the other boys fed and watered the cows. Euphemia explained that one dairy cow alone could guzzle a bathtub full of water a day. With thirty cows, the work of caring for them was never-ending. From what Sophie could tell, when the cows weren’t needing to be milked or watered, their stalls required mucking or they had to be brought in from one pasture or another.
In addition to the cows, the men had to tend the fields. Euphemia had attempted to explain the types of crops that were growing, but Sophie couldn’t keep track of anything except hay and oats. Apparently, the boys had just finished cutting and storing up hay in the barn for the coming winter to be used to feed the cows and horses. And now they were working on harvesting the oats.
She didn’t envy the long hours the men spent out in the fields under the burning sun. But it hadn’t taken her long to realize that the farmwife had just as much work, if not more.
Each morning, Euphemia used the cream drained off the milk and made pounds of butter in her churn. When finished, she divided the creamy mixture into crocks and stored them in basins of cold well water in the cellar, ready for taking to town.
Besides making butter, Euphemia was always baking or cooking something for the boys, who had ravenous appetites. Then there was the canning of the garden produce, the process of packing glass jars with vegetables and heating the jars in boiling water so the lids would somehow magically seal. Euphemia claimed the food in the jars would stay fresh through the winter, but Sophie wasn’t sure she believed her.
In addition to the canning, they also dried herbs by hanging them in bunches, and they pickled various vegetables by soaking them in vinegar in heavy crocks. Euphemia said that they’d store the majority of the root vegetables—carrots, potatoes, onions, turnips—in the cool cellar where they could survive for most of the winter before going bad.
Sophie tugged at the thin leafy carrot top. The stubborn v
egetable still wouldn’t budge from the ground. Euphemia only needed half a dozen today for stew and said they’d wait to harvest the rest until just before the first killing frost. Sophie glanced to the long row of carrots that stretched out ahead of her and dreaded the day when she’d have to come back out and remove them all.
With the sun beating down on Sophie’s hat, and the heat radiating off the soil into the air around her, a killer frost seemed like a fictional character in a book. Next time she told Olivia and Nicholas a bedtime story, she’d have to include an enemy by the name of Killer Frost. For long moments, Sophie let herself plot a new story with the new antagonist.
“There you are, lass,” Euphemia called from beyond the fence that surrounded the garden.
Sophie snapped back to reality and closed her fingers around the leafy carrot top. She jerked it upward as if she’d been doing it all along instead of daydreaming.
“I’ll be needing to ride to town for more laudanum for Stu,” Euphemia said.
Sophie dropped her pretense of working and scrambled to her feet. “Can I come with you?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way, lass.” Euphemia was in the process of fitting her bright yellow kerchief over her hair. “And while we’re there, we’ll ride over to the Ramseys’ and see your wee brother and sister.”
Sophie wanted to race to Euphemia and throw her arms around the dear woman. Instead, she clapped her hands together. “Thank you.”
“We can’t stay long, mind you,” Euphemia added with a smile. “But I know how much you’ve been missing the bairns, and I have no doubt they’ve been missing you just as much.”
They were on their way to town in no time, with Stuart’s angry shouts ringing in their ears. “He’s in pain,” Euphemia said, as though that excused his atrocious behavior.
After stumbling into Stu’s room on her first morning, Sophie had gone out of her way to avoid the young man. But even then, his curses and temper tantrums were difficult to miss.
“I don’t understand how you do it,” Sophie said as they jolted along the rutted dirt road with tall yellow weeds and thistles growing in the center undisturbed by wagon wheels and horse hooves.
“Do what, lass?”
“How you can be so nice to Stuart even though he’s so rude to you.” The words were bold, yet the question had been growing inside her every day as she witnessed Euphemia bustle to and from Stuart’s room, caring for her crippled son without a word of complaint or anger.
To be sure, Euphemia’s eyes had reflected sadness. And a time or two, she’d even seen Euphemia wipe away tears. But no matter how often Stuart pushed her away, Euphemia always went back.
“I think I would have left him to rot in his own filth,” Sophie admitted.
“Dinnae mistake me for a saint, lass,” Euphemia said with a mirthless chuckle. “I’ve lost my temper with the boy too many times to count.”
Sophie shifted and searched for a comfortable position on the hard wooden bench that was bruising her backside with each bumpy roll of the wheels. “I can’t believe you ever lost your temper. You’re the sweetest lady I’ve ever met.”
Euphemia laughed again, this time with pleasure. “Och, you’re a sweet one yourself for saying so. But I wasn’t always so patient or loving. I’m a bit stubborn, like my skillet when something’s burned to the bottom. I haven’t always let the good Lord chip away at my faults and clean me up the way He wanted to. But I’m learning to let Him do His work in His way. His scraping and cleaning might hurt for a bit, but then His character and beauty can shine through all my messes and mistakes.”
Sophie fell silent. She’d made plenty of messes and mistakes in her own life. In fact, she wouldn’t be in Illinois separated from Nicholas and Olivia if she hadn’t gotten involved with Danny and the Bowery Boys. She’d known the gangs were trouble and that she should stay away. But she’d ignored the inner warnings, had set aside her good judgment, and had done what she wanted regardless.
Were the Roach Guards still searching for her and Anna? Would the law be looking for them as well, to testify against Danny and Mugs? She could only hope that the Roach Guards would decide tracing her and Anna was too much time and trouble. And if they’d decided to pursue them to Chicago, Sophie prayed they wouldn’t learn she and Anna had stayed with the Children’s Aid Society group and gone south.
Whatever the case, Sophie knew her skillet was much more charred and burned than Euphemia’s had ever been. God might be able to clean up Euphemia and make her into a beautiful person, but her mistakes were too messy.
Sophie fingered the bolts of calico print and then moved to the ribbon. A dozen paces away, at the front counter of the general store, Euphemia chattered away with Mr. Wilson. Sophie had recognized him as one of the community members who’d sat in the back of the church as part of Reverend Poole’s placing committee. He’d been polite to her the evening of the meeting and nice enough to her now.
Nevertheless, Sophie couldn’t shake the discomfort at being in town. She’d thought it was just her, that she would need time to adjust to a new place. Today, however, she was distinctly aware of the unfriendly stares from other patrons that silently rebuked her to go back to where she’d come from, that her type wasn’t wanted in Mayfield.
“Afternoon, Sheriff,” Mr. Wilson said as the door squeaked open.
Sheriff? Sophie ducked behind a shelf that was piled high with an assortment of farming tools she couldn’t begin to name. She feigned interest in a long-handled item that had a sharp, pointed blade at the bottom.
Why was the sheriff in the store?
Sophie’s pulse sped with the need to find a back door and escape. She told herself she had no reason to run this time. Even though she’d been tempted to pilfer two apples from a bushel near a basket of squash, she’d resisted. She’d once again reminded herself that Nicolas and Olivia didn’t need her to steal anything anymore. They could probably pick all the apples they wanted and were likely getting cakes and pies and cookies with rich yellow yolks just like she was.
“Lyle was sure talkin’ up a storm about that there orphan gal you took in,” said the new voice that Sophie assumed belonged to the sheriff. It was a testy voice and lacked the warmth and humor that Mr. Wilson’s contained.
Sophie hunched lower, wanting to make herself invisible.
“Now, Sheriff, you know my Lyle, that you do,” Euphemia said good-naturedly. “He’s a good bairn, that one, but he’s mighty anxious to find himself a wife.”
A wife? Sophie bumped the farm tool, and it clanked against the others. She caught them all in time to keep them from crashing to the floor.
“He’d do well to stay away from those orphan gals,” the sheriff said. “They’re nothin’ but trouble.”
Mr. Wilson’s and Euphemia’s voices rose in protest, but the sheriff was louder and more forceful, drowning them out. “Most of those kids are crooks and criminals, and we don’t need their like in our community.”
At the sheriff’s accusation, shame burned a trail through Sophie. He was right. She was a crook.
“Now, don’t you go forgetting what happened here last summer with that orphan boy murdering one of his kind and dumping the body in Percy Pond and letting someone else take the blame for it.”
“Och, Sheriff,” Euphemia said, her voice ringing with consternation. “Crooks, criminals, or not, those bairns are in need of the love of the good Lord just as much or more than anyone else.”
“Just don’t come running to me,” the sheriff continued, “if’n you find yourself in trouble on account of your orphan.”
For several more minutes, the sheriff carried on a largely one-sided conversation with Euphemia and the store clerk. When he finally left, Sophie sagged against the tools. She didn’t like that man and hoped she didn’t have to face him anytime soon.
A short while later, when she and Euphemia rode out of Mayfield on the main road south of town in the direction of the Ramseys’ place, Sophie sat quietly,
unable to shake the ragged coat of shame she’d donned since hearing the sheriff’s opinion of her and the other orphans.
“Dinnae you pay any attention to Sheriff Paddy,” Euphemia said. She then reached over and patted Sophie’s arm. “He takes his job seriously, and for that we’re grateful. But sometimes he sees trouble when there is none.”
Sophie nodded and tried to stuff her guilt and shame away to the far corners of her mind where they belonged. “Did an orphan really kill someone last summer?”
Euphemia hesitated. Finally she sighed and nodded. “Not only did your Reinhold find the body, but the boy living with him at the Turners’ was the culprit.”
Sophie tried to digest Euphemia’s comment, but somehow the only part of it she heard was your Reinhold. The idea of Reinhold being hers stirred the same longing she felt when she’d been with him, a longing she hadn’t been able to squelch, which had been hovering in both her dreams and waking moments since she’d last seen him.
“Reinhold isn’t mine, Euphemia,” she said. “He loved my sister, not me.”
“That may be. But in all the time I’ve known that boy, he’s never shown interest in any other lass until he set his eyes upon you. Then he couldn’t tear his eyes away.”
“He’s like a brother and only wanted to make sure I was doing all right.”
“He wasn’t looking at you like a brother. And you weren’t looking at him like a sister.”
Sophie shook her head in denial, but as Euphemia’s eyebrows shot up, Sophie shrugged and then smiled. “Fine. I admit it. I’ve been admiring him. It’s hard not to.”
Euphemia smiled in return. “He’s a good boy, that one. And he deserves a good woman to take care of him.”
The warmth in Sophie’s middle swirled at the thought of taking care of Reinhold the way Euphemia took care of her men. But just as soon as she pictured herself in Reinhold’s kitchen, her guilt chased the image away. She wasn’t a good woman. She didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a man. And Reinhold certainly deserved someone better than her.