“She wasn’t a bad sort,” Judy remembered. “She was, well, disappointed, I suppose is what you’d call her. She took to her bed every evening right after dinner, and stayed there till I made the breakfast. She was a watery sort of person.
She made tea so weak, and soupy stew, and sometimes her biscuits came to the table as gruel.
“After she passed away, I stayed on and cared for the boys till I was eighteen and I got a place with a family in Gloucester, where I met a boy named Arthur. We used to go walking on Sundays when we should have been in church.
I thought we’d get married, but he got into some kind of trouble and shipped out without a good-bye. That decided me against marriage.
“Not that he ever asked,” she said.
Cornelius raised a finger to signal that he was still listening. “I worked for some other families after that.
None of them were cruel to me. None were all that kind, either. But wherever I lived, I never felt at home. I never had a sound sleep. Even my dreams were full of being told to clean a mess, or haul some more water, or stir a pot.
“But that seems like a hundred years ago,” she said.
“Like I’m talking about a girl in a book someone else wrote.
“Then the day I wandered into Dogtown and stopped at Easter Carter’s house, it was, well, like some revelation.
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There she was, living on her own—that was long before Ruth moved in. Tiny Easter Carter in that big house, all by herself. Bold as brass, and didn’t care who said what about her. I asked her wasn’t she afraid to sleep up there all alone.
She said she liked being where no one else was breathing up the fresh air.
“That planted the seed,” Judy said. “Knowing that Easter would be near helped me get up the gumption. So even if I never stopped being a scullery girl, and even if I was poor, I could be my own mistress in Dogtown. I suppose it was the same for you, too, wasn’t it, Cornelius, dear? You could be your own master there. As much as anywhere.”
Judy put his hand to her lips. He squeezed her fingers.
“You changed that, Cornelius. When you came to my house, to my bed, I was not the mistr
ess of my own heart any longer. And when you did not return to me, I was more alone than ever, even more than when my sister left. I used to think about going to sleep out in the cold like Abraham Wharf.
“I suppose Easter kept me from it. And Greyling. Isn’t it odd how much comfort a dog can be.” Judy stopped, hoarse and exhausted from three days of weeping and whispering.
She watched Cornelius’s chest rise and sink, the breaths shallow and more uneven than before. His skin was clammy, and he was quiet for so long, she wondered if he was past hearing her.
His eyes flew open. “No coffin,” he rasped.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I know. I won’t let them put you in a box. Is there something else I can do, anything else?”
“Shepherd,” he croaked.
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“Shepherd?”
“Lord. Shepherd.”
Judy ran to the library and took the large Bible from its stand, riffling through its gilt-edged pages until she found it.