She nearly laughed. He was trying to comfort her. Or maybe she nearly cried. She watched the gaping mouth of the mill swallow up his small form. He turned in the immense doorway—it was large enough to drive a high wagon through—and waved. “Let’s be going,” she said. “It’s late.”
* * *
* * *
Luke nodded his head with a dip of his funny black hat. “This here is Cutler’s Tavern,” he said. They hadn’t spoken since they left the mill. “Shall I come to the door with thee?” The wagon had stopped before a low stone wall, hung with a rail gate.
She was horrified. “No, no need,” she said. “They might not understand me riding up with a …” She scrambled to the ground.
He grinned. “I hope to see thee before too much time is up,” he said. “Meantime, I’ll see to thy house.” He leaned over the seat. “I’ll give a look in on thy Charlie, too,” he said. “He’s a good boy.”
She didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed, but he clicked his tongue and the wagon pulled away, leaving her alone in her new life.
3
Cutler’s Tavern
Lyddie stood outside the gate, waiting until Luke and his wagon disappeared around the curve of the road. Then she watched a pair of swallows dive and soar around the huge chimney in the center of the main house. The tavern was larger than the Stevenses’ farmhouse. Addition after addition, porch, shed, and a couple of barns, the end one at least four stories high. The whole complex, recently painted with a mix of red ochre and buttermilk, stood against the sky like a row of giant beets popped clear of the earth.
The pastures, a lush new green, were dotted with merino sheep and fat milk cows. There was a huge sugar maple in front of what must be the parlor door, and another at the porch, which, from the presence of churns and cooling pans, must lead into the kitchen.
Once I walk in th
at gate, I ain’t free anymore, she thought. No matter how handsome the house, once I enter I’m a servant girl—no more than a black slave. She had been queen of the cabin and the straggly fields and sugar bush up there on the hill. But now someone else would call the tune. How could her mother have done such a thing? She was sure her father would be horrified—she and Charlie drudges on someone else’s place. It didn’t matter that plenty of poor people put out their children for hire to save having to feed them. She and Charlie could have fed themselves—just one good harvest—one good sugaring—that was all they needed. And they could have stayed together.
She was startled out of her dreaming by a hideous roar, and before she could figure out what animal could have made such a noise, a stagecoach appeared, drawn by two spans of sweating Morgan horses, shaking their great heads, showing their fierce teeth, saliva foaming on their iron bits. The coach had rounded the curve, its horn bellowing.
The driver was yelling as well, and then, just in time, she realized that he was yelling at her. She jumped hard against the wall. He was still yelling back at her as he pulled up the reins, the coach itself now on the very spot where she had been standing seconds before.
Should she apologize? No, he wasn’t paying her any attention now. He was turning the team over to a boy who had run out of the shed. A woman was hurrying out of the kitchen door to welcome the passengers, who were climbing stiffly from the coach. Lyddie stared. They were very grand looking. One of the gentlemen, a man in a beaver hat and frilled shirt, turned to hand a woman down the coach step. The lady’s face was hidden by a fancy straw bonnet, the brim decorated with roses that matched her gown. Was it silk? Lyddie couldn’t be sure, never having seen a real silk dress before, but it was smooth and pink like a baby’s cheek. Around her shoulders the lady wore a shawl woven in a deeper shade of pink. Lyddie marveled that the woman would wear something so delicate for a ride to the northland in a dusty coach.
Safely on the ground, the woman lifted her head and looked about her. Her face was thin and white, her features elegant. She caught Lyddie’s eyes and smiled. It was a very nice smile, not at all haughty. Lyddie realized that she had been staring. She closed her mouth and quickly looked away.
Then the encounter was over, for the stout woman who had come out of the kitchen door was hustling the lady, her escort, and two other passengers through the low gate and around to the main door at the north end of the tavern.
Suddenly she saw Lyddie. She came over to the wall and whispered hoarsely across it to her. “What are you doing here?” She was looking Lyddie up and down as she asked, as though Lyddie were a stray dog who had wandered too close to her house.
Lyddie was aware, as she might not have been minutes before, that she had no bonnet and that her hair and braids were dusty from the road. She crossed her arms, trying to cover her worn brown homespun with the gunnysack. The dress was tight across her newly budding chest, and it hung unevenly to just above her ankles in a ragged hem. Her brown feet were bare, her outgrown boots still slung over her shoulder. She should have remembered to put them on before she got off Luke’s wagon.
Self-consciously, she raised her sleeve and wiped her nose and mouth under the woman’s unforgiving stare. “Go along,” the woman was saying. “This is a respectable tavern, not the township poor farm.”
Lyddie could feel the rage oozing up like sap on a March morning. She cleared her throat and stood up straight. “I’m Lydia Worthen,” she said. “I got a letter from my mother …”
The woman looked horrified. “You’re the new girl?”
“I reckon I am,” Lyddie said, clutching her gunnysack more tightly.
“Well, I’ve no time to bother with you now,” the woman said. “Go into the kitchen and ask Triphena to tell you where you can wash. We keep a clean place here.”
Lyddie bit her lip to keep from answering back. She looked straight into the woman’s face until the woman blinked and turned, running a little to catch up with the guests who were waiting for her at the main door.
The cook was as busy as the mistress and not eager to involve herself with a dirty new servant just when she was putting the meal on the table. “Sit over there.” Triphena shook her head at a low stool near the huge fireplace. Lyddie would rather have stood after the long, bumpy ride in the Stevenses’ wagon, but she chose not to cause a problem with the cook as well as with the mistress in the first ten minutes of her employment.
The kitchen was three times the size of the whole Worthen cabin. Its center was the huge fireplace. Lyddie could have stretched out full length in front of it and her head and toes would have remained on the hearth with room to spare.
Built into the right side of the brick chimney was a huge beehive-shaped oven, and the smell of fresh-baked loaves made Lyddie forget the generous dinner she’d shared noontime. The trouble with eating good, she thought later, is you get too used to it. You think you ought to have it regular, not just for a treat.
Over the fire hung a kettle so large that both the babies could have bathed in it together. It was bubbling with a meat stew chock-full of carrots and onions and beans and potatoes in a thick brown broth. There were chickens turning on a spit, which seemed to be magically going round and round on its own. But as Lyddie’s eyes followed a leather strap upward, she saw, above the fireplace, the mechanism from which hung a huge metal pendulum. She wished her father could see it. He could make one perhaps from wood and then no one would have to tediously turn the spit by hand. But perhaps it was something you’d have to order from the blacksmith—in which case it was likely to be so dear that only the rich could afford one. She couldn’t remember seeing one at the Stevenses’, and they were rich enough to own their own loom.