Olivia knew she should get her anger under control, but at the moment, life seemed too unfair for her to think clearly. Everything had been so perfect. She’d had Broadway and a future that held nothing but promise.
Turning, she looked at the four of them, their heads down and eating in silence.
Damnation! How did she get out of this job? She was totally unsuited for it. She’d never cooked much and wasn’t interested in learning how. These men and the children—especially little Ace—deserved better. Last night she’d called around and foun
d an opening at Abigail’s Dress Shop. If she could find a replacement here, she could have that job.
Olivia looked at Uncle Freddy’s bent head. He was an old man and she didn’t want to hurt him. Beside him was his lifelong companion, Mr. Gates. The two men often told how they’d been born on the same day. “And that makes us twins,” they’d say, and laugh every time. Uncle Freddy was blond and fair skinned; Mr. Gates was African American.
Same birthday but very different worlds, and everyone in Summer Hill knew the story.
Frederick Ethan Tattington had been the youngest of four sons born to an old, rich, hardworking, humorless family in Philadelphia. On his twenty-first birthday, his father did what he’d done to each of his children: He asked Freddy what he most wanted. His older brothers had each said a variation of “Own the world.” Their father had set them up with businesses they could rule.
But young Freddy, handsome to the point of prettiness and beloved by them all, said he wanted Tattwell, the plantation in Virginia that the family still owned. The family’s ownership in a Southern state was still an embarrassment to them. Not because of the humanity involved, but because they’d been on the side that had lost a war.
Gladly—for his father had run out of businesses to give away—he turned over the decaying plantation to his son, along with the money needed to bring it back to life.
Freddy had always been a happy person, but on his twenty-third birthday his joy was severely tested. He had three glasses of champagne as he toasted the good that was his life. Then he mounted his horse and decided to see if he could jump over a hay wagon. Everyone begged him not to do it.
He made it over the wagon but just as his horse hit the ground, one of the barn cats ran past. Rather than hurt the creature, Freddy jerked the reins to the right. The horse tried to turn but couldn’t. Freddy went flying off and hit the old stone well in the small of his back. He was paralyzed from the waist down.
His beautiful fiancée left him and his family ordered him to return to Philadelphia. But Freddy stayed where he was, and he never lost his love of life. About a year after the accident, after he’d very kindly fired three highly qualified men his family had hired to help him, a tall, thin, African American young man came by looking for work. He glanced at the entry gates and said his name was Gates, just the one name.
Freddy hired him, added the Mr. to his name, and two weeks later they were inseparable companions.
Over the many years, Uncle Freddy—as he became known to everyone—had helped a lot of people. He gave them jobs on the old plantation that seemed to devour money. And he listened to them. In fact, he lived by the belief that most problems could be fixed by people genuinely listening to each other.
He developed contacts in law enforcement, social services, with clergy. He learned who to ask for help with any problem.
The only aspect of his life where he wasn’t successful was in keeping a housekeeper-cook. No one lasted very long. The house was too big, there were too many mouths to feed, et cetera. The longest anyone had lasted was three years. That was Margaret and she had stayed because Uncle Freddy gave her the summers off.
Three years ago Uncle Freddy’s distant cousin William, his wife, Nina, and their two-year-old daughter, Ruth, came for the summer. Bill taught physics at an eastern college and Nina was a housewife. The idea was that for the whole summer, Bill would work with some local boys in cleaning up the acres around the old house and tending the orchard and vegetable garden. Nina would cook, can, and freeze anything that grew. In the fall, they’d go back east and Margaret would return from her sister’s place in Alabama to a pantry full of food that she didn’t have to prepare.
It had all worked perfectly for about a month, then Summer Hill’s Dr. Everett Chapman came to check on Uncle Freddy. His wife had some church meeting, so the doctor took his two-year-old son Kyle with him. Nina said she’d watch the kids so the men could visit.
The children disappeared. They just plain vanished. Half the town joined in the search for them. After eight hours of looking and no sign of the children, the families, the entire town, were sick with worry.
But then the kids came down from the attic, dirty and covered in cobwebs. They were hungry.
That night there were some serious lectures and threats given to the children—but they made no difference.
The next day when young Kyle saw Mr. Gates’s red truck go by, he sneaked out of the house. The child climbed in the back and hid behind the bags of cracked corn.
His parents found him at Tattwell with Ruth. “Let him stay,” Uncle Freddy said.
Mrs. Chapman, who was pregnant and feeling awful, agreed that Kyle could stay for two nights. When she lost the baby, she was so depressed and weak that she went to Tennessee to stay with her mother for what came to be the rest of the summer. Kyle moved into one of the many bedrooms at Tattwell so his father would be free to take care of the medical needs of the town.
The next summer Kyle’s parents were trying for another baby and after the boy sneaked off three times in two days, they agreed to let him stay at Tattwell. That was the summer Ruth said that from now on she was to be called Princess Colette, and Kyle was Ace. Her title was shortened to Letty, and the names stuck.
This was the third year the children were spending the summer together at Tattwell. Letty stayed with her parents in what had once been the old kitchen, while Ace had his own room upstairs in the Big House.
On the surface, this summer looked like the others, but three weeks ago, Nina had slipped on the bathtub and broken her right forearm. She couldn’t do the huge amount of cooking that she usually did in the summer. She couldn’t tend the big vegetable garden and put up all those quarts of beans and tomatoes, or make gallons of applesauce for the winter. And if all that prepared food wasn’t waiting for Margaret when she got back, she just might stay in Alabama. Then what would the men do?
But what had really changed was that little Ace’s mother was dying of ovarian cancer.
When Olivia was told this, she knew she couldn’t deal with such grief. It wasn’t something she knew about. Mr. Gates said she should just be kind to the children, but yesterday the kids had run through the clean sheets hanging on the line and knocked half of them into the dirt. She’d seen the girl wearing her favorite silk scarf—which meant that the children had been in her bedroom going through her things. Olivia asked Uncle Freddy for a key to the lock on her bedroom door but he’d laughed. None of the doors had been locked in a century or more. “Maybe not since the Yankees came through here,” Mr. Gates said, and the two old men had laughed together.
All in all, the three days she’d been at Tattwell were more than she could handle. Bratty kids, old men who found everything amusing, trying to cook—something she had no aptitude for—and having no contact with the world of theater overwhelmed her. Drained her.