Ellen glanced down at her plate that had only a few crumbs. Somehow, in talking to Lucas, she’d managed to eat the large portion he’d laid out for her. “How do you know that?” she demanded, and Jed’s smile grew into a full-fledged grin.
“I saw Dyle this afternoon and he mentioned there was pie for dinner tonight.”
“Well,” Ellen said defensively, “you can’t have too much pie.”
“No,” Jed agreed, “I reckon you can’t.”
They all fell silent, yet it was a strangely expectant hush that made Ellen’s heart beat all the more. She couldn’t quite tear her expression from Jed, who watched her with that faint, mocking smile on his face, lighting his eyes. He looked the same, and yet different too, taller and broader and more like a man. He would be seventeen come winter.
After a long moment, when she finally did drag her gaze away, she saw Lucas looking at her in a speculative way that made her want to fidget. She stood up instead.
“I ought to go pay my respects to your ma,” she said, and with the room still strangely expectant and silent, she hurried out to the relative safety upstairs.
NINE
It took Louisa a while to ‘find her feet’ as Dyle said, learning everyone’s names (Ruthie and Sarah kept switching names, trying to confuse her) and getting used to island ways.
Ellen tried to help her as much as she could, although she soon realized that she did Louisa no favors by treating her differently.
“She’s a bit snooty, isn’t she?” Caro said one evening as they were washing up the supper dishes. She pumped water into the pail, the rusty squeaking of the pump keeping them from being overheard by Rose.
“She’s been ill,” Ellen said, and Caro simply looked at her.
“So? She acts like a princess, excusing herself after supper without so much as taking in her plate! And when we asked her if she wanted to come berry picking, she looked as if we were telling her to scrub the outhouse! I don’t like her.”
Ellen looked at Caro’s mutinous face, her sturdy ten-year-old body, still with a childish chubbiness, in a stance of stubborn dislike, and sighed. “Louisa is from a wealthy family, it’s true,” she said, “and she’s an only child. This is all very strange for her.”
“What I want to know,” Caro asked, “is why she wanted to come?”
Ellen shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.” She hadn’t really asked Louisa if she was enjoying being here, for she didn’t think she wanted to hear the answer. Louisa kept herself apart from everyone most of the time, often not leaving her bedroom until ten o’clock in the morning, when everyone else had been up for hours. Ellen had taken to making a breakfast plate up for her and putting it aside until Louisa saw fit to greet the world.
The rest of Louisa’s days were spent in pursuits worthy only of an invalid: resting on the porch or in the front parlor (she was the only one who really went in there), or occasionally taking a walk with Ellen into Stella for a sarsaparilla at the general store.
Despite Louisa’s discomfort with this new world, Ellen still found time to enjoy all her old island pursuits. She took the children for walks, Patch frisking by her heels, and then found a rock or grassy meadow to sit in while she sketched the many delights of the island in full summer: Andrew, now two and a half, running through a field as the grass tickled his face; the fat, red raspberries fairly dripping from brambles; the tumbled stones of an old barn overlooking the placid bay. All these and more went into her sketchbooks, which Ellen showed no one, save Lucas.
Their friendship began to deepen unexpectedly over the summer, fed by the letters they’d exchanged over the winter. Now Ellen found she trusted Lucas’ quiet, thoughtful replies and enjoyed his soothing, steady presence. If, when at the Lyman farm, she found her gaze wandering for a familiar, solitary figure, she did not admit it even to herself. At nearly seventeen, Jed was too busy for childish pursuits such as berry picking or woodland walks. He worked on the farm now from dawn to dusk, and Ellen hardly ever saw him.
Lucas, with a hoped-for high school career ahead of him, was exempt from some of the more demanding farm labor just as he’d always been. Still, Ellen knew Lucas helped out in other ways; he was always willing to sit by his mother’s bedside and read to her from the Bible or a novel taken out of Stella’s small but steadily growing library, and he even tried making the noontime meal, although the good ladies of St Paul’s soon put paid to that, and kept the Lymans in casseroles and baked pies for the entire month of July.
One afternoon in the middle of July, he and Ellen sat in the hayloft of the Lymans’ barn, the bales of hay as good as any pillow, the sun streaming in from the open hatch. It had become their hiding place, by default, Ellen supposed, for they’d never really discussed it.
Yet up in the quiet solitude of the hayloft their conversation would often turn to the future, and both of their otherwise unconfessed dreams. Lucas spoke of wanting to go to Queen’s to study biology and then on to explore the last untouched corners of the earth, cataloguing plants and animals.
“There’s still so much to be seen,” he told Ellen in his earnest way, his hair falling over his forehead. “But time’s running out too—some say Shackleton will reach the South Pole when he sets off on his next expedition.”
Ellen nodded, for Lucas had told her all about two of his heroes, Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton. They’d explored the Antarctic a few years ago, but the bitter cold had forced them back. Shackleton, Lucas had told her, was hoping to make his own attempt on the Pole in another year or two.
“And what about you, Ellen?” Lucas asked, stretched out among the bales, chewing on a piece of straw. “Will you go to Glebe or high school back in Rutland? And onto Queen’s?”
“Queen’s!” Ellen shook her head. She’d never dared think of such a thing; high school seemed grand enough. “Aunt Ruth said I might be able to go to high school if I pass the exam” she said slowly. “But I don't know if I will.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Why not?” Ellen just shook her head, unwilling to put into words all her doubts and concerns, and he leaned forward. “Why not go to school, Ellen? If you can? You’re not like Jed.” Ellen stiffened, hearing the slightest sneer in Lucas’ voice.
“What do you mean by that, Lucas Lyman?”
Lucas shrugged. “Jed is clever enough, if he puts his mind to it. He passed the exam, didn’t he? But he’s content to work away on the farm and stay his whole life on this island. He doesn’t want to know things. Not like you and I do.”
Ellen said nothing, for she wasn’t sure if she was as like Lucas as he seemed to think. And the thought of living out her life on the island seemed like a glorious possibility rather than the prison Lucas’ tone suggested he considered such a choice.