“Of course, I’m sure.” Jemma watched her wrap the thread around the end of her needle to knot it. “I may never master pie dough, but I think I can dust without any problem.”
Jemma was determined to do her share while she was in Sandy Shoals, and so far she had helped Nette with everything except cooking—which continually proved to be almost as big a disaster as pig feeding.
“Hunter’s mighty particular about his things,” Nette warned. “Just stick to dusting the shelves and sweeping the floor. That’ll be plenty.”
“All right.” Jemma buttoned up her wool coat and wrapped a wool scarf around her face and neck until only her eyes and nose were showing.
“Try to be finished before he gets back from Noah’s.”
“I will.” Jemma had yet to lay eyes on the elusive Noah LeCroix, the half-breed renowned for his ability to pilot boats through the shoals.
“If any boats pull in, ring the bell outside the kitchen door and Luther’ll come runnin’.”
“I know, Nette.” Her voice was muffled by the wool scarf. She had her hand on the door latch.
“And keep the fire going.”
“I will.” The shawl hid Jemma’s smile. Nette looked after everyone like a mother hen. Jemma loved it.
“If you see Lucy anywhere, remind her that I need her to card more wool so I can do some spinning later.” Nette began rocking a needle through the layers of pieced materials and the cotton batting.
“All right.” Jemma stood there waiting for the final word before she opened the door and let the cold air into the cabin.
Glancing up from her work, Nette waved in the direction of the trading post. “Well, what are you waiting for, child? Get a move on.”
Jemma laughed and stepped out into the cold.
Thanking the saints for her good fortune had become a habit. A fair share of keelboats and flatboats were still headed downriver, but November had brought snow, and even though it soon melted, mornings like this one were still biting cold. The trees were skeletal, the sky gray. Except for an occasional ruckus from the henhouse or a complaint from one of the pigs, it was absolutely still outside. The contrast between mornings in Sandy Shoals and the hustle and bustle of the vendors, carriages, and wagons on the streets of Boston was the same as the contrast between night and day. The peacefulness of the place permeated her soul.
Burying her hands in the sleeves of her coat, Jemma gingerly picked her way through the scattering of snow and ice that covered the ground between Nette’s cabin and the trading post. She was determined to linger there until Hunter showed up so she could tell him that his worries were over. Her monthly time had come to her in the night. For the week-and-a-half they had waited, he had avoided being alone with her.
Inside, the trading post was warm and cozy. Hunter had left a low fire burning in back of the massive hearth. The tables were wiped clean. Everything was in its place. She found the rags under the counter just where Nette had said they would be, along with some oil for polishing and a turkey-feather duster. Jemma took off her scarf and coat, rolled up the sleeves of the blue gown that had survived the pigsty, and went to work.
An hour later she stood atop a ladder propped against the highest shelf in the store. She tossed the dust rag onto the counter behind her and had started down the ladder when the toe of her heel caught in the hem of her gown. There was a rending tear just before she fell backwards. Polished shelves full of trade items flashed past her as she hurtled to the floor with a startled cry.
Jemma heard an angel singing with such heavenly sounds that she was certain she had died and gone to paradise until she realized that her head was pounding. She didn’t think there was supposed to be pain in heaven.
When she opened her eyes, the angel was still singing. Stars danced and shimmered on the ceiling of the trading post. She blinked to clear her vision but otherwise lay still, not certain if she could move anything at all, unwilling to try.
Gradually the stars faded and she slowly pushed herself up to a sitting position, pausing when her head began to swim. The angel was still singing, the notes so pure and ethereal that Jemma didn’t know whether it was the sound that made her want to cry or the horrid pain at the back of her head. She reached up to feel her scalp and her hand came away bloody.
Jemma couldn’t utter more than a squeak at first, but as she sat there on the floor behind the counter staring at the blood on her palm, she finally managed to shout, “Help!”
The angel abruptly stopped. Jemma heard footsteps outside the post. The back door flew open and someone ran in.
“Jemma?”
“Lucy, I’m down here.” Jemma breathed a sigh of relief as Lucy rounded the corner of the counter and ran over to her.
“What have you done?” The girl tossed aside her thick shawl and knelt down on the floor beside Jemma.
“I fell off the ladder,” Jemma said, unable to keep the embarrassment out of her tone. “And I think I cracked my skull open.”
Crawling around behind her, Lucy gently parted Jemma’s hair and inspected the wound.
“You cracked your head good. Sit tight and I’ll press a clean rag to it.” She pulled a rag off the shelf under the bar top and held it against the cut.
“Was that you I heard singing?” Jemma fought to keep her mind off the throbbing ache at the back of her head. She tested her ankles and bent her knees one at a time. Everything seemed to be working.
Lucy didn’t answer outright. Making conversation was an effort for the girl, especially when the subject was herself.
Finally, after she had helped Jemma to her feet and led her over to a bench, Lucy blushed. “That was me singing.”
Jemma reached up to hold the compress herself.
“When I came to and heard that voice, I thought I was in heaven listening to an angel,” Jemma said.
Lucy’s eyes began to sparkle. Then she smiled one of her rare smiles. “Jemma, you say the funniest things.” After a moment she lifted a hand to her hair and asked, “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Lucy, you are so genuinely beautiful when you smile. You should do so more often.” Jemma was stunned by the change that had come over the girl.
Lucy was blushing, staring at the table where her graceful hands lay folded one atop the other. “I’m not beautiful,” she whispered. “Please don’t say that.”
The cut on her head had stopped bleeding and the throb had receded to a dull ache. Jemma set aside the compress. “Yes, you are. Why, I’ll bet with a bit of spit and polish and that new dress Nette’s promised you, you’ll turn the head of every young man who stops here. And that voice! Lucy, have the others ever heard you sing?”
“I don’t want to turn heads,” Lucy cried, twisting her fingers together. “I’m not beautiful. Not like my ma. And Nette’s never gonna finish making that dress, not with her quilt takin’ up every spare minute she’s got.”
Jemma reached out and lifted a lock of Lucy’s hair off her shoulders. “I could fix your hair, if you let me. It would be fun—”
A sparkle replaced the pained look in Lucy’s eyes. “I never had anyone fix my hair for me.”
“This is as good a time as any to start. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Since her arrival at Sandy Shoals, Jemma had tried hard to fill Lucy’s wish for a friend, but the girl was so shy; she kept to herself most of the time and spent the quiet hours of an evening reading the Bible by firelight. As much as Lucy claimed she wanted a friend, Jemma had almost despaired of ever really getting to know her.
“You know, Lucy,” she said, “I’m not a bad seamstress myself. At least, I’m fairly certain I could manage to put a dress together. I used to embroider samplers in … well, at home.”
“It’d be a heap of trouble for you.” Lucy protested, but there was a thread of hope in her tone.
Jemma stood up and waited to see if her head would start spinning. It merely thrummed, so she smiled over at Lucy and took the girl’s hand.
>
“Come on. Let’s look through the bolts of cloth Hunter has on the back shelf and find one that will look good on you.”
“I don’t think we should.”
“Why not?” Jemma shrugged.
“Nette already cut out a yellow dress for me.”
Jemma looked at Lucy’s tangled brown hair and her big, wide, brown eyes. “What’s wrong with owning two dresses? You would look wonderful in pink.”
“Two new dresses? I think that fall might have knocked you senseless, Jemma.”
Lucy hadn’t budged, so Jemma sat back down. She thought of her armoires in Boston, full of gowns that she hadn’t worn in ages. Noticing Lucy’s forlorn expression, Jemma asked, “Lucy, what’s wrong?”
Lucy shook her head and shoved her hair back off her face, looping it behind her ears. “I can’t ask Hunter for material for a dress. I heard Nette tell you all about my ma the night you came here, about how she up and left me with Hunter and Nette and didn’t look back. I’m beholden to them for everything as it is. I can’t ask for more.”
“But—” Jemma knew Hunter was thrifty, but she couldn’t imagine him begrudging Lucy a few yards of material and some thread. “I’ll ask him for the things we’ll need myself. Surely he won’t mind.”
“Don’t you see? It’s not that he might mind—”
“Then what is it? Something else is bothering you.”
Lucy stared down at her hands.
“We’re friends, aren’t we, Lucy? Friends share their troubles.” The silence in the post was deafening. Jemma waited, hoping she hadn’t pushed the girl too far. Finally, she watched Lucy swallow and then lift her soulful eyes.
“I don’t want to be like my ma.”
Jemma frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Ma is so beautiful that she can get a man to do anything for her. She came here and made Hunter fall in love with her and then up and left. It was that way my whole life, watching her move from one man to another, one place to another, takin’ and takin’ and never givin’ back.” She drew a deep shuddering breath. “I never thought she would leave me behind. You know what it’s like, bein’ left behind, Jemma? Havin’ someone think so little of you that they disappear without a good-bye, without any warning at all?”
Not only did Jemma’s heart go out to Lucy, but through the girl’s heartfelt words she had a glimpse of the pain her own disappearance would cause her father if he arrived in New Orleans earlier than expected and discovered that she had vanished without a trace.
Tears shimmered in Lucy’s eyes. “For a long time I kept waiting for Ma, thinking that she would just be gone a while and that she’d come back for me—”
“Maybe she will,” Jemma encouraged.
Lucy shook her head. “It’s been too long. She won’t come back now.”
At a loss for words, Jemma fingered her wound again. It was tender and still oozing, so she picked up the compress and held it against the back of her head.
“You’re not anything like your mother, Lucy.”
“But if you fix up my hair and I start wearin’ pretty dresses, then it might go to my head. What if I start thinkin’ like my ma, actin’ like her? What then, Jemma? That’s not the way God intended a body to behave.”
“Oh, Lucy.” Jemma set aside the compress and put her arms around the girl’s thin shoulders. “You’ve got too good a heart to change, no matter what you wear, or how you look. Why, you’re good to Nette, always doing your chores and helping out, and you take care of Hannah’s little ones whenever she needs you. I don’t think you have a thing to worry about.”
“Really?” Lucy sniffed and pulled back.
“Absolutely. Just like that wonderful voice of yours, beauty comes from the inside, Lucy. Not the outside.” Jemma glanced at the stack of fabric again and smiled. She pulled Lucy over to an open space between the counter and the table, prized the girl’s hands off her shawl, and set the knitted blue wool aside. “Stand here.”
“What are you doing?” Lucy looked around the room as if she expected Hunter to pop out of the mud chinked between the logs.
“What any good dressmaker would do—I’m going to see which fabric looks the best on you.” She opened a length of blush-pink fabric and draped it over Lucy’s shoulder. “Very nice.”
Lucy smiled. “Really?”
Jemma whipped another bolt off the table, shook it out, and draped it across the girl’s opposite shoulder. “Terrible,” Jemma mumbled as she pulled off the mustard-yellow cloth and tossed it behind her.
“I like the first one,” Lucy said, fingering the pink.
They both started laughing when Jemma wound a length of cloth around Lucy’s head like a turban and let the end of the fabric trail down to the floor.
“Do you know that some Africans wear turbans that are a foot high?” Jemma said as she unwound Lucy’s impromptu headpiece.
“Have you ever been to Africa, Jemma?” The girl was so sincere that Jemma couldn’t even launch into one of her tales.
“No, but my grandfather was a long time ago, and when he told a story, he had the ability to make me feel as if I had been there right along with him. I used to pretend I had been there, too.”
“You have that gift,” Lucy said. “When you tell one of your tales, I feel like I’m right there in it myself.”
“Why, thank you, Lucy. That’s quite a compliment.”
Lucy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thank you, Jemma. I never had this much fun before. Ever. I hope you don’t ever leave.”
So moved that she was unable to respond, Jemma picked up the cloth that Lucy liked best.
There was nothing to keep her here now. Hunter certainly didn’t share her feelings—that much was evident. She almost hated to see the look of relief that would surely come over him when she told him her news. No, Hunter Boone wouldn’t be begging her to stay. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t start packing the minute she told him.
“Someday I’ll have to leave, but that doesn’t mean we won’t still be friends. Why, I expect someday a young man will catch your eye and you’ll be thinking of getting married.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lucy said. “Nobody ever looked twice at me before, but I did hear that Hannah married Luther when she was sixteen and I’ll be that old in a few months.”
“You see,” Jemma said as she fluffed open a bolt of light-blue wool and held it up to Lucy, gently wrapped it across the front of the girl’s bodice, then smiled and stepped back.
“How come you’re not married yet, Jemma?”
Caught off-guard, Jemma could only founder. “Well, I … that is … I just never met anyone I wanted to marry. I … up until a few weeks ago, I led a very sheltered life.”
“You ever think about it? What it would be like to be married?” Lucy asked.
Jemma paused, considering her answer. “A few weeks ago I thought that it would be a nightmare, too confining, because I’d be forced to stay in one place and give up my freedom. That was before I saw the way Hannah and Luther get along, before I knew what being part of a family was all about. I’m beginning to think that maybe, if you find the right man, marriage can be a joy, not a jail sentence.” Most of all, she now knew what it was like to lie in a man’s arms, to want to feel him inside her, to wait to hear his step outside the door, the sound of his voice.
“I think about it some,” Lucy said, surprising Jemma. “I don’t intend to jump up and marry the first man who asks me, if one ever does. But I’ll know him when I see him.”
Jemma paused, holding a folded bolt of fabric against her heart. Lucy had never sounded so confident before. “How will you know?”
Lucy suddenly became dreamy-eyed. “I’ll look in his eyes and see him looking back at me and I’ll get all tingly and warm inside … and I’ll just know.”
Jemma closed her eyes. Lucy had just described the way she felt every time she looked at Hunter.
“Jemma? Does your head hurt? You want
to go back to Nette’s?”
“No, I’m fine.” Jemma put the material aside and looked at the pink fabric in Lucy’s hands. “That’s your favorite, isn’t it? It’s perfect.”
Satisfied with the choice, Jemma walked over, took hold of Lucy’s limp hair, and lifted it up to the crown of the girl’s head. Lucy laughed aloud, let go of the fabric, and began to help Jemma.
Standing at arm’s length, Jemma had pronounced her friend lovely when she heard the sound of men’s voices outside.
Lucy’s eyes went wide with panic. Jemma let go of her hair and spun around.
The door opened and Hunter stepped over the threshold, followed by a broad-shouldered man just as tall but of dark hair and eyes. His clothing was a mixture of wool and leathers, like his heritage—a blending of two worlds, Indian and white.
“I’m sorry, Hunter,” Lucy mumbled. Her radiant smile had dissolved. She tore the fabric off herself. So nervous that her hands shook, the girl began balling it into a wad.
“I thought you’d be at Nette’s.” Hunter was staring at Jemma, looking as if he wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
“I came over to do some dusting—”
“She fell off the ladder and busted her head open,” Lucy finished.
“She what?” He glanced over at the ladder leaning up against the shelves at the back of the room, and then back to Jemma.
“Did you know that Lucy has a beautiful voice?” Not the least bit thrilled with the turn in the conversation, Jemma tried to change it.
Hunter glanced down at the bloodstained rag. His eyes flashed with anger. In three strides he was looming over her.
“It’s nothing but a little cut,” she protested.
He took her chin in his hand and gently forced her to look up into his eyes. A frown marred his forehead. He looked mad enough to spit fire as he searched her eyes intently.
“You could have broken your neck.” The soft tone coupled with his intensity had her feeling dizzy all over again. Warm and tingly.
“I’m fine, really,” she whispered, too entranced to look away. It suddenly dawned on her that he used anger to disguise his concern. Even when he was upset, there was no denying what a handsome specimen of a man he was. She lost herself in his eyes. Thanks to his campaign to avoid her, she hadn’t seen him in so long that she had forgotten just how handsome he was. She wound up staring at his lips.
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