Hearts Awakening (17 page)

Ellie walked around the kitchen to make sure she had not left anything undone. She paused and fingered the white ribbons she had laundered for Ethan and hung from one of the shelves to dry, convinced she could find a way for the boy to keep them.

She turned and walked over to the cookstove. Now that the burners on the cookstove were barely warm, she gave them one last swipe with a damp cloth, put her hands to her hips, and stared at her nemesis.

The three-tiered stove, constructed of heavy iron plates, did not look that complicated to use. The highest tier was a bake oven. Four round iron plates of various sizes, used as burners for pots and pans, made up the middle tier. The lowest tier was the narrowest and offered scant room to rest utensils or cookware that needed to cool.

Hinged doors on the top two tiers opened easily to insert the hickory wood used for fuel, porcelain knobs for each of them allowed for the fires to be controlled separately, and smoke escaped by way of a large pipe that came up from the stove and out through the back wall. But the only advantage of using this contraption she could discover was that she did not have to wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for the fire to be hot enough for her to prepare a meal, saving her hours of time each day.

“If I had my way, I’d drag you outside myself and leave you to rust and have a nice hearth built right here in your place. You’re lucky I don’t, you finicky old thing,” she grumbled.

In the end it was a matter of pride, and she was reluctant to spend what little pride she had left by having Caden James teach her how to use it after he checked it out, assuming the day was clear on Sunday.

She glared at the cookstove and tapped her foot. “Maybe Jackson’s right. Maybe it’s not me at all. Maybe it’s you. And maybe all you need is a good cleaning on the inside to make you work,” she said.

She had the time and opportunity. She had the motivation. And she certainly had the wherewithal. After her father had died suddenly, leaving her alone to care for her invalid mother, she had been forced to learn how to handle tasks normally left to men, and she was not daunted by the prospect of cleaning the inside of the cookstove, even if that meant she had to take it apart, plate by plate.

She eyed the stovepipe and decided she would somehow find the strength to take that apart to remove the soot that must have accumulated there, too. After removing her wooden wedding ring and storing it safely on a high shelf, she set straight to the task.

“Go . . . back . . . in . . . to . . . place. Go. Go. Go!”

Several hours later, Ellie used all of the strength she had left to give that detestable stovepipe another shove to get it back into place. Meanwhile she attempted to ignore the pain from the new blisters she had gotten on her hands after discovering the inside of the stove was still a lot hotter than the outside.

That stovepipe did not budge. Not a hairsbreadth.

Before the muscles in her arms twitched themselves into knots that would take a week of Sundays to unravel, she eased down from the seat of the chair she had been standing on. She set the end of the stovepipe down on the floor next to a host of kitchen gadgets she had tried to use as wedges to force it back together and sighed.

Once she was on solid ground again, she blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She did not need to look into a mirror to know she had as much soot on her face again as she did on her gown, which she had used twice already as a wiping cloth after her very last apron got too soiled.

She used the back of her hands to wipe the sweat from her brow before she wiped off most of the soot on her poor hands. She glanced around the room and looked for something else to use to knock that pipe into place. “Nothing,” she grumbled, but a burst of an idea sent her charging out to the side porch and back inside again wielding a piece of firewood that had not been split into smaller pieces to fit inside the cookstove.

She stumbled twice when she tried to get back onto the chair without dropping the wood or the end of the stovepipe she was trying to balance on one of her shoulders. Finally, when she had both feet planted firmly on the seat of the chair, she took a deep breath, lifted the stovepipe to the right height, and banged at it with the firewood.

For her efforts, she was rewarded with a palm of splinters before the end of the stovepipe slipped and went clunking to the floor, landing right on top of that piece of firewood. “Miserable hunk of iron. I hope you . . . you rust,” she hissed and climbed back down again.

“Having a problem?”

She swirled about, saw Jackson standing in the open doorway that led to the side porch, and wished that stovepipe was large enough that she might crawl inside.

“Define problem,” she managed and hid her hands in the folds of her skirts. Why that man had even a hint of a smile on his face was a mystery, and she was in little mood for unraveling anything that complicated when she clearly could not even put a simple stovepipe back into place.

He glanced at the mess of utensils on the floor, as well as the half-hidden piece of wood and the errant stovepipe, and shrugged. “I thought we decided to ask Caden James tomorrow to tackle that cookstove.”

She gulped hard. “You did, but since I had some free time, I . . . I thought I might be able to do it myself. Unfortunately, I think the stovepipe must have warped or something when I scrubbed it clean. It won’t go back into place.”

He shrugged again, walked over, and picked up the end of the stovepipe. “Iron doesn’t warp,” he quipped and snapped it back into place with one hand.

She gasped. He did not even have the courtesy to pretend it took any effort to do it at all.

“Michael agreed to keep an eye on the boys because I needed to come back home. I forgot to tell you that we’re having supper with the Grants tonight at six-thirty,” he said casually. He picked up the hunk of firewood and carried it back with him to the doorway.

“You forgot?” she managed, unable to fathom how she could possibly get herself cleaned up, let alone her gown, in time to go to supper at the Grants’.

He winced. “I’m afraid I did.”

“W-when did they invite us? This morning?” she asked as her mind raced for a reason to politely decline.

“No. Actually, it’s not an invitation at all. It’s more of a tradition during harvest season my father-in-law started, but I forgot you haven’t been here to celebrate it until Michael mentioned it to me today.”

“Tradition? What tradition?”

“There’s a full moon tonight,” he answered, as if she knew what that meant. “I stopped working so I could come back to tell you now instead of waiting until we finish working this afternoon so you would have time to get ready. Obviously, that was a good idea,” he teased.

She looked down at her filthy gown and rolled her eyes. “Obviously.”

“I thought I’d meet you at the Grants’, since it’s closer than coming back here. You can’t miss their cabin. Just follow the road to the landing and bear left.”

“I’ll find it,” she gritted. “Did you say six-thirty?”

“I did. Why? Is it a problem?” he asked innocently.

“Define problem,” she whispered in return, but he only grinned and waved before hurrying back to the orchards.

She stared at the open doorway for several long moments before she sighed. “The problem, dear man, is that you have no idea of how inept you just made me feel,” she said.

She was not prepared, however, to pose the question of why she also found his grin so irresistible or his dark blue eyes so intriguing or his opinion of her so important, for fear the answer might make this marriage of hers far more complicated than she dared to think.

She had more pressing concerns.

She had no idea if she could actually remove all the dirt and soot from her face and hands, or under her fingernails, for that matter, in the space of an hour or two, but she was quite certain there was nothing at all she could do to salvage her gown to make it presentable.

Especially with a full moon outside.

“Of course there’s a full moon tonight. Why shouldn’t there be a full moon?” she griped. “That way, everyone will be sure to see what a mess I made of my gown and then they’ll all have a good laugh when Jackson tells them how easily he put that stovepipe back into place.”

She turned and glared at the cookstove. “Mark my words. One day I will drag you out of this house, and I won’t need his help to do it,” she promised, tilted up her chin, and marched straight to her room.

Sixteen

With one large great room, three doors leading to bedrooms, and supper bubbling on an open hearth, the Grant cabin looked and smelled just like her childhood home.

The moment Ellie stepped inside, she forgot all about the two new blisters on her one hand and the one stubborn splinter on the other that was lodged too deep to remove quickly. The unease she felt at wearing her Sunday gown slipped off as easily as the cape she gingerly handed to Mr. Grant.

But it was seeing what was left of the intricate design winding three feet wide around the perimeter of the packed dirt floor that made her heart beat a little bit faster.

Mesmerized, she studied the design at her feet and embraced the memories it inspired. Growing up as an only child, Ellie had spent years watching her mother, before she was old enough to help her, etch designs on their dirt floor with sticks her father had sharpened for that very purpose. Every holiday or special occasion demanded a design of its own. No design lasted intact more than an hour or so once guests arrived, either, and this design was no exception.

Still, she could see enough to know that Alice and her daughter had created a design quite unlike any she had ever seen before, and she wished she had not been the last to arrive.

“We’re glad you’re finally here,” Michael offered as he hung up her cape on a peg next to the others.

Standing at the long planked table, Alice smiled and waved her knife over the platters of food she had already set out while her daughter tended to the large kettle in the hearth. “You’re just in time. Supper won’t be but a few more minutes. Michael, why don’t you try to convince your companions over there it’s time to end that game of yours?”

He grinned and left to join Jackson and the boys at the opposite end of the room. To her surprise, they were sprawled on the floor playing jackstraw. They were so engrossed in the game they had not noticed she had arrived, but she did not feel slighted. She once had lost all sense of time playing the game with her father. One time they played, Ellie had been concentrating so hard, trying to remove a stick from the bottom of the pile without disturbing the others, she had not even realized her father had teasingly slipped a barrette out of her hair.

“Don’t bother tiptoeing around,” Alice suggested. “As you can see, the design’s already gotten plenty of footsteps traipsed all over it.”

Ellie sidestepped as best she could through the design, if only to get a better sense of it. “I haven’t seen a decorated floor for many years, and I must admit I’ve never seen one quite like this,” she murmured. She approached the opposite side of the table from Alice, who was slicing bread—beautifully browned, perfectly shaped bread, just like Ellie used to make every day, almost without fail, before she met that cookstove.

Alice nodded over her shoulder. “Take a peek over there. Grizel, show Mrs. Smith that one section nobody’s trampled yet.”

Grizel stopped stirring the pot of chicken bubbling on the hearth, paused to wipe the steam from her eyeglasses, and motioned for Ellie to join her.

When she did, she took one glimpse of the perfect design and caught her breath. Set between two thick lines, a single scene stretched for four or five feet in a straight line before it repeated itself over and over again. A full moon, surrounded by a halo of stars, shined above a majestic apple tree, its limbs bent beneath the weight of the fruit. Etched in the trunk of the tree, a simple cross. “It’s incredibly lovely, and very time-consuming to create,” she murmured.

“We enjoy making it, but it was Mr. Gladson’s idea,” the girl replied.

Ellie furrowed her brow for a moment, then remembered the name belonged to Jackson’s father-in-law. “He asked you to do this?”