The Bridal Veil

by Alexis Harrington

  As she approached the sun-bleached henhouse, some of her resolve evaporated. The coop chickens didn’t pay her much attention, but those laying hens . . . God, those hens. She stood before the door, the basket handle on her forearm.

  She squared her shoulders, determined to establish her dominance over the situation. “I’m coming in now!” she announced, and then felt rather foolish. She opened the door and a rush of warm, nasty odor washed over her. The chickens peered at her with their black-bead eyes and made distrustful clucking noises as they moved their heads in jerky motions. “I know I’m a stranger to you,” she went on in her best schoolmistress voice, “but I am in charge now and we will become acquainted.”

  Luke had pulled the wagon up to the back porch, figuring he’d give Rose a ride into town after seeing Cora back to her own home. It had been a tense, stiff trip, and the mile to her place had seemed more like five.

  He knew that Rose would be unhappy about the last twenty-four hours. He couldn’t change or fix things, and he didn’t even know what he would say to his girl to make her feel better. But he had to try. He hoped that some gem of wisdom would come to him between now and then. He hopped down from the wagon seat and had one foot on the bottom step when he heard a feminine voice coming from the henhouse. Curiosity turned him toward the source of the sound.

  “ . . . got off to a bad start, but I’ll be collecting your eggs every morning from now on and there will be no more nonsense about it. That’s just the way things are going to be. I won’t tolerate rude behavior or disrespect. Any of you who give me an unreasonable amount of trouble, well, she’ll find herself in my skillet one Sunday afternoon. And I’m not joking.”

  Luke rounded the weathered henhouse and crept to the open door where he saw Emily, her spine straight, her shoulders back, addressing the ten chickens inside as if she were holding class. Her hair hung down the center of her back in a single yellow braid, and damn but if she wasn’t wearing a dress that wasn’t black. It was the color of lilacs, he thought, some kind of pale violet shade. He was so completely enchanted by the sight and sound of her that he managed to keep from laughing at her technique of chicken-taming. She sounded so stern, he half expected the chickens to step up and lay their eggs in the basket for her.

  “All right, then, I believe I’ve made myself clear,” she said, and stepped deeper into the structure. Luke heard some flapping and squawking, and Emily’s sharp replies, but eventually she emerged wearing a triumphant expression. The morning sun made her skin glow like fresh cream.

  “Oh! Luke, I didn’t know you were back. Look!” She held out the basket for inspection. “I did it. I got the eggs away from those cranky birds.”

  He couldn’t keep his chuckle to himself any longer. It felt good to laugh a little after the last day or so. He came closer and looked into her basket. A clutch of eggs sat inside, all unbroken. “Yes, you did. What about the old biddy?”

  Emily pursed her lips. “She didn’t have any to give.” The subject of the hen apparently reminded both of them of Cora. “Cora is settled in her own home?”

  His smile faded and he shrugged. “Well, she’s there, anyway. We didn’t talk much on the way. I promised her that I’d help out around her place whenever she needs it. And I told her that Rose understands she can go there anytime she likes. I wouldn’t stop her from doing that.”

  Emily nodded and sighed. “Maybe it’s all for the best. I’m just sorry that the situation became so, well, unpleasant.”

  He laughed again. Still the expert at the understatement, he noticed. With all the shouting, arguing, and recriminations thrown around the day before, the description hardly fit. “No, ma’am. Working in the rain is unpleasant, slipping on a cow flop or drinking burned coffee is unpleasant. Yesterday was flat-out hell.”

  She gave him a wry smile and didn’t comment on his language. “I would be inclined to agree.”

  They turned and headed back to the house, and almost without thinking, Luke put his hand on the small of Emily’s back.

  She stiffened and turned her head to look at him.

  He dropped his arm.

  “Sorry—I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, it’s fine, I’m just not used to—“ She glanced away, giving him a nice view of her profile.

  Damn it, he wasn’t sure he even knew how to court a woman anymore. He’d probably been ham-handed and clumsy, and scared her. Then he realized the path of his thoughts. God, was he trying to court Emily, the tall drink of water who had more rules for living than Reverend Ackerman? Yes, he supposed he was. And he had been since the day he’d brought her the silk from Fran’s store. Because there was a whole lot more to Emily than her manners and rules, and beneath her cool, composed exterior, he sensed a full-blooded woman trying to break out. Someone—certainly her stepfather and her mother—had squashed the confidence right out of her. He’d seen coquettish women in his time, females who could bring a man to his knees simply by giving him a hot, unspoken promise with their eyes. Sometimes it was flattering. In other cases, such as with Clara Thurmon and Franny Eakins, it was just embarrassing.

  Emily had none of their clumsy guile, and none of an accomplished flirt’s, either. She wasn’t heavily decorated or given to putting on fine airs, despite her way of doing things.

  She was just Emily.

  And that was fine with Luke.

  He put his hand on her waist again, and this time he felt her lean against it as they walked back to the kitchen.

  ~~*~*~*~~

  Emily turned Rose toward her reflection. She’d perched the girl on a stool so that she could see herself in the dresser’s high mirror. “Well, what do you think?”

  Rose stared at herself in the glass in her bedroom, her eyes wide. “Is that really how I look?” The pale-blue broadcloth dress they’d finished together was a pretty outfit with simple lines and a white apron. Her own girlish beauty was allowed to shine through without having to compete with garish colors and oceans of flounces.

  Emily smiled. “Yes, dear, that’s you. Do you like it?”

  Rose spun toward her, her face glowing. “Oh, it’s wonderful, Miss Emily. Thank you so much!” It was so good to see her smiling again.

  In the days that followed Cora’s departure and Cotton’s death, Rose had been barely more than a shadow moving through the house, as silent as a cat, barely speaking and picking at her food. Emily had worried about the pale violet smudges that underscored her dark eyes, and she knew that Luke had been troubled about her too. He’d brought her a gray tabby barn kitten to keep in the house. Rose had shown only polite interest until Luke told her that the mother cat had rejected the runt. That had brought out Rose’s nurturing instincts, and now the little cat she’d named Stripe slept with her in her bed. Thank God for children’s resilience. Of course, there were scars that remained a lifetime—Emily knew that from personal experience. But youth made it a little easier to bounce back from some disappointments and hurts.

  “I’ve never had such a pretty dress!”

  “You had a lot to do with it, Rose. You worked hard and learned a lot.” Emily had taken over those tasks that she knew would give a beginning seamstress trouble, like setting the sleeves and sewing the tucks in the hem of the apron. But Rose had done her share of pulling basting threads and stitching the straight seams on the machine, and she’d done a good job. “Do you think you like sewing?”

  Rose turned back to the mirror. “Yes, ma’am! Can we make another dress?”

  “Yes, we will eventually. But at least now you have something to wear to the basket social at church this Saturday night.”

  “So do you,” Rose said, craning her neck to look at the back of her apron where Emily had tied the sash into a big bow. “Your dress is pretty too.”

  It was. The teal grosgrain had turned out very nicely, and Emily had felt as giddy as a girl all week, thinking about the upcoming event. There would be music and dancing and dinner. She’d get a chance to meet some of the neighbo
rs, hopefully without Cora there working to diminish her status. She would appear on Luke’s arm in her silk dress with Rose beside them. The new Becker family. It would be wonderful. It would be terrifying. And it was coming tomorrow night.

  Emily shook off the thoughts and looked at her watch. They still had work to do. “For now, though, we’ve got dinner to finish. Your father will be coming in from the fields, hungry as a bear. Change your clothes and come down and help. And don’t forget to hang your dress.”

  “All right,” the girl agreed and hopped down from the stool.

  Emily hurried down the steps to the kitchen to baste the roast she’d put into the oven earlier. Opening one oven door, she spooned meat juices over the beef and the potatoes and tiny onions that ringed it. Its fragrant aroma filled the room and mingled with the warm, yeasty scent of bread and an apple crisp baking in the other oven.

  Cooking hadn’t been the daunting task she’d thought it might be. She had cooked for Alyssa and her father, but now she felt that she had to prove herself to Luke and Rose. What she hadn’t expected was that they were so grateful for palatable food, she could have served them just about anything, decently cooked, and they’d have been pleased.

  She had yet to learn to make butter, and Rose knew only what she’d seen Cora do, which was no better than Emily’s own ignorance. So for the time being she’d worked out an arrangement with Jennie Manning, Chester’s wife. Rose stopped by the Mannings’s place once a week to pick up Jennie’s butter, and in exchange, Emily gave the Manning girls some basic etiquette lessons. It buoyed Emily’s spirit to know that not every farm wife thought that manners and refinement were a “blame-fool waste of time.” Jennie was a pretty, practical woman who worked hard, but also recognized the value of developing her daughters’ brains and beauty.

  In her own home, Emily made a special point to set an attractive table for the family meals and to give the house her own little touches. She put wild lupines in a canning jar on the hall table, since she couldn’t find a vase. She opened the windows in the parlor and aired it out, something she believed hadn’t been done in three years. She washed and ironed the few of Belinda’s table linens that Cora had left behind and had used them for the one Sunday dinner they’d shared together thus far. And she put all of Cora’s caustic homemade soap in a box and put it in the back of a closet. Now they were using white, store-bought bars from the druggist’s. The soap was a new product that not only was mild, but floated on the surface of the water.

  With just the three of them in the house, Emily had been more acutely aware of Luke than ever. She knew what time he came in from the fields in the afternoons, and often caught herself wandering over to the side window to watch him wash at the pump. Guilty pleasure warred with a lifetime of moral lessons. She knew that none of the experts who had penned the tomes she used in her own classrooms would approve of her watching her husband strip off his shirt and lather his face and upper body with a slick bar of white soap. Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, who had written Letters To Young Ladies, a book devoted to deportment and character, would soundly denounce as vulgar her peeking at Luke through the lace curtains as he sluiced water over himself. Emily’s fascination at the play of muscle across his back and chest, glistening wet in the low sun, would not be a reasonable excuse for her behavior. Miss Anna Ferguson, author of The Young Lady’s Guide to Knowledge and Virtue, would probably wither in shame at Emily’s furtive spying. But knowing all of this, she persisted. In fact, wasn’t that the pump handle she heard right now out in the yard?

  She ambled to the side window in the kitchen, telling herself that she was only looking for a gravy boat that she’d seen on a nearby shelf. Outside, as she’d expected, there was her husband briskly rubbing soap over himself, raising the suds into a high lather as he ran the bar up and down his arms and across his chest. She had made it a practice to leave a clean shirt outside for him, and it laid neatly folded on a crate beside the pump. Now Luke worked the pump handle again and stooped to let the water pour over his head and bare torso. Emily swallowed and glanced back over her shoulder. Goodness, but that stove put out a lot of heat, she thought. She returned her attention to Luke. The water streamed down his back in crystal rivulets and snaked their way into the waistband of his dungarees. Even from here, she could the goose bumps erupt on his flesh when a breeze kicked up. What would they feel like under her fingertips if she were to—

  Suddenly he turned and looked right at her, as if he’d felt her eyes on him. His knowing grin left no doubt that she’d been caught. Emily jumped back out of view and pressed her hands to her hot face.

  Rose thundered down the stairs, through the hall, and into the kitchen like a runaway colt. “Okay, I’m ready,” she announced, wearing her faded overalls and fortunately unaware of Emily’s impure thoughts about Luke. She whirled and went back to the table, glad for once that Rose hadn’t yet mastered the art of entering a room with grace.

  She straightened and tried to pretend that she’d only been basting the roast and not her imagination. “Let’s set the table the way I showed you. Remember, knife edges point toward the plates.”

  Rose went to the sideboard and took out dishes and silver while Emily transferred the roast and potatoes to a flowered platter. Just as she put them on the table, Luke walked in the back door. Flustered, she couldn’t meet his eyes, and he only grinned like a fool.

  Leaning over the platter on the table, he inhaled the aroma of their dinner. “Hey, something smells pretty good around here,” he said, gave them both a good-humored smile.

  And it might be him, Emily thought, before she could harness her musings. He brought with him the scents of fresh air, a clean shirt, and Ivory Soap. Mixed with those was his own male scent, one that she could not seem to ignore. His wet hair curled on the ends and at the base of his neck where it had begun to dry, and his smoke-colored eyes seemed to darken when he looked at her.

  What had come over her lately? More than ever she fought to conquer her indelicate, unladylike instincts, and it seemed to be a losing battle. Last night as she lay in bed, she’d even found herself trying to picture what Luke would look like with no clothes, not just without his shirt. God in heaven! Marriage was not supposed to be about carnality. The ideal marriage was romantic, tender, and sentimental. Hearts and flowers. Love letters and devotion. Soft words and kind comments. Quiet evenings of reading and music.

  All of her manuals stressed these virtues. They said nothing about wantonness of thought or the need for moral restraint. It was generally accepted that it shouldn’t even be necessary to warn against such things. But Luke had been a wild troublemaker in his youth, not the suit-and-tie-wearing man that the books’s illustrations depicted.

  “Both of you take your seats,” she said, trying to bring her attention back to the matter at hand. She cleared her throat. “Luke, will you carve the meat, please?” He caught her eye and gave her a secret little smile that only made her face flame again. He actually seemed to be enjoying her embarrassment. Emily turned back to the stove to pull out the bread and the dessert.

  “Daddy, you should see my new dress!” Rose piped in mercifully. She put her napkin on her lap, just as Emily had shown her. “It’s so beautiful, the beautifullest one I’ve ever seen.”

  “I guess we owe Miss Emily a big thanks for that, don’t we?”

  Emily put the sliced bread on the table and slipped into her own chair. “I was happy to help. And Rose is a good student. She learns quickly.”

  Luke took a bite of roast and closed his eyes as he chewed. Alarmed, Emily feared that he’d found something about the taste he didn’t like. “Is it all right?”

  He looked at her with a transcendent expression. “It’s more than all right, Emily. It’s wonderful. I can’t remember the last time I ate so well. It’s been years.”

  “Oh—I’m glad you like it.” She ducked her chin.

  Luke took another bite of roast and then buttered a piece of tender, piping-hot bread. As doubt
ful and apprehensive as he’d been the day he saw Emily Cannon on the dock in town, everything was working out. He’d hoped for was a woman who looked like Belinda and he’d gotten the exact opposite. But it had begun to dawn on him that trying to replace his late wife wasn’t a good idea. It just kept him living in the past, a past that hadn’t been especially happy. It was a hard thing for him to admit, but he realized it was true.

  Having a wife with fancy manners, who knew how to cook and set a nice table, wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. Rose’s snotty attitude had improved and she was learning from Emily. Even more amazing, he found his tall, blond wife’s flowing grace as arousing as he’d once found Belinda’s brunette petiteness.

  Best of all, he saw Emily at the window every afternoon, eyeing him while he washed up. Today, he decided to let her know that he’d seen her watching him, and was amused and touched by her look of flustered surprise.

  It seemed that she was interested in him, too.

  “ . . . fix for the social? Fried chicken? Potato salad? Chocolate cake?”

  Luke realized that Emily was talking to him. “Sure, that all sounds good. I’ll dress out a chicken for you.”

  She looked relieved. He doubted that she’d ever had to swing a flapping fowl over her head to wring its neck, or lop off its noggin with a hatchet. It was enough that she’d overcome her fear of the henhouse.

  “Daddy, you’re going to buy Miss Emily’s basket, aren’t you?” Rose asked. “We want to eat her supper, not someone else’s.”