Down Jasper Lane (Amherst Island Trilogy)

“Ellen, oh Ellen! It’s so wonderful to have you back, child!”

“It’s wonderful to be back,” Ellen replied, enveloped in Rose’s warm hug, her cheek pressed against hers. She was laughing even as tears stung her eyes, and she just managed to pull away to introduce Louisa to Rose and the children.

“But of course!” Rose brushed a stray wisp of hair from her eyes, smiling as easily as Dyle had. “We’re so pleased to have you here for the summer. Any friend of Ellen’s is a friend of ours.”

Louisa was looking very pale and pinched; her dress of rose silk embroidered with silk French knots in darker pink seemed ridiculously fancy and inappropriate in the farmhouse’s yard of pecked dirt and patchy grass.

With a pang of conscience Ellen realized how the journey must have tired her, and how out of place and homesick she must feel.

“Louisa’s been ill all winter, Aunt Rose,” she said. “I’m sure she’s quite worn out.”

“Oh, but I’m so sorry!” Rose exclaimed. “Ellen, why don’t you show Louisa her room? The back bedroom with the yellow curtains.”

Ellen took Louisa up the front stairs with their tarnished brass runner and worn carpet, down a long, narrow hallway to a bedroom at the end. The McCafferty farmhouse was large and rambling, and had no end of funny little nooks and rooms, including the small bedroom by the top of the backstairs that seemed almost an afterthought.

“This is one of my favorite rooms,” Ellen confided. “It gets so much sunshine.”

Whistling, Dyle came in with Louisa’s valise and deposited it at the end of the bed.

Ellen drew the curtains and glanced around at the simple furnishings. There was an iron bedstead, a dresser with a washstand and a plain enamel pitcher and bowl, a cheerful rag rug on the floor and a few hooks for dresses, and that was all. Rose had put a jar of daisies on the dresser, but despite this welcoming touch the room still seemed rather barren. Ellen was used to it—her room back in Seaton was nearly as sparse—but she remembered Louisa’s bedchamber with its canopy bed and sumptuous furnishings, and thought it must all seem rather hard.

“Will this be all right?” she asked, gently, for Louisa’s face was still pinched tight and she hadn’t spoken. Ellen almost—almost—felt a pang of sympathy for her.

“You meant what you said, didn’t you?” Louisa said after a moment. She removed her straw boater with its trailing silk ribbons and

put it carefully by the washstand. “It’s very different here.”

“Yes.”

Louisa nodded slowly, as if deciding or perhaps just accepting something in her own mind. “I’m very tired, as you said. I think I just might go to bed.”

“Shall I bring you up some dinner on a tray?”

Louisa paused, and then shook her head. “No... no. I haven’t any appetite. Give my regards to everyone. I’m sorry not to say hello properly. I will tomorrow.”

“Of course.” Impulsively Ellen squeezed Louisa’s shoulder lightly on her way out. “You'll get used to it, Louisa,” she said, but the other girl did not reply. This might feel like home to her, but Ellen could see the rooms, their furnishings shabby yet filled with noise and laughter, were strange indeed to Louisa.

Back in the farmhouse kitchen, Ellen was passed from person to person like a parcel as they examined her and exclaimed in surprised delight how much she’d grown.

“You must be a foot taller!” Dyle stated and Rose chimed in, smiling,

“We’ll have to cut down some more dresses for you—although I don’t know how much cutting down we’ll have to do!”

“I think she looks exactly the same,” Ruthie announced in a loud voice, and Ellen smiled in return.

“I feel the same,” she confided to the not-so-little girl. “I feel exactly the same when I’m here.”

Over dinner Ellen caught up on all the island news.

“The Lymans have had a hard winter,” Rose said as she served the summer’s first strawberry and rhubarb pie, generously doused with fresh cream.

“You mean Mrs. Lyman?” Ellen asked, swallowing her bite of pie.

Rose exchanged a quick look with her husband. “Yes, that too, of course, but the pond between our properties flooded from all the rain we had over the spring. The land runs downhill from here to there, and a good five acres was covered in water. Some of his best crops.”

Ellen’s eyed widened in shocked dismay. “But that’s terrible!”

“So it is,” Dyle agreed. “But the Lymans have a bit put by. They can survive one poor harvest, and now that Jed is back for good they’ll be all right.”