Plum Creek Bride

“Water is hot,” Erika said as she stepped off the stool. She set the china basin on the sideboard.

His gaze followed her, the expression on his face changing as he spied the infant. “What, may I ask, is the baby doing in the sink?”

“Oh, I bath baby now.” Erika gestured at the covered dish. “I find, how you say, bath-ing tub, on shelf. You use first hot water in kettle to make tea, then I wash baby.”

The eloquent, dark brows drew together. “You’re going to bathe my daughter in that?”

“Is what Mrs. Benbow uses, ja?”

“Certainly not. This, young woman—” he tapped a deliberate forefinger on the dish cover “—is a soup tureen. A wedding gift from my wife’s uncle in Savannah.”

“Ah. I see.”

Jonathan saw a sheepish smile curve the corners of her mouth.

“I make mistake.”

He watched her hand dive into her apron pocket and withdraw a small notebook and a chewed pencil stub.

“How you spell, please?”

He spelled out the words slowly as she scribbled on the pad. “Toor-een,” she pronounced. “For Suppe, ja?”

“For soup, yes. Not for bathing.”

“Ah.” The blue eyes sparkled with the joy of comprehension. “What for baby, then?”

Jonathan opened his mouth to reply, then snapped his jaw shut. He hadn’t the faintest idea. To his surprise, it annoyed him, not knowing. He liked to have answers—remedies—for the problems that came his way. His lack of a ready solution in this area made him uneasy, as if a part of his life were drifting out of his control. What would one use to bathe the infant?

When he’d delivered newborns in other households, particularly those far from town, he’d used a bucket or a small washtub, whatever was handy and reasonably clean. He realized suddenly that after Tess’s death he hadn’t been interested enough in the child to wonder about her care.

The child’s birth had cost him his wife. He had wanted nothing to do with Tess’s child. He knew he should feel ashamed of such antipathy toward his own flesh and blood, but what he felt was not shame but rage. His soul was dead. His heart was fired not by love but by fury.

What a reprehensible man he must be underneath the veneer of good manners and education! He wasn’t fit to lick the boots of the poorest, most illiterate farmer in Jackson County.

He wondered about himself, about his sanity. Because of Erika Scharf’s question, because of her very presence in his kitchen at this moment, he felt himself jolted into a different awareness, as if he’d been sleeping and she had shaken him awake. Their roles were reversed. She belonged; he did not.

Great Scott, he was a stranger in his own house!

Erika pointed to the top shelf of a glass-fronted cabinet. “That one,” she said, satisfaction tingeing her voice. “Reach for me, please?”

Jonathan eyed the stack of china plates and bowls. Extending one arm above her head, he opened the cabinet door and lifted down the indicated bowl. Tess’s best Haviland vegetable dish. With suppressed amusement he handed the dish to the young woman who waited, arms outstretched.

He watched Erika run her fingers over the dish and bit back a chuckle. Mrs. Benbow prepared dinner each Sunday evening; tonight’s meal might prove more interesting than usual. What would his housekeeper say when she discovered Erika’s use for her favorite serving dish?

* * *

Erika smoothed her hands over the material of her best skirt, a simple gored blue percale that had seen many washings. It was her only other garment besides a serviceable denim work skirt and her black travel ensemble. She’d ironed out the creases earlier that afternoon, after the baby’s bath and afternoon feeding, heating up the sadiron on the kitchen stove while she washed and dried the flowered china bowl she’d used for the baby’s bath.

Now, with the infant sleeping soundly in the next room, she tucked the stray wisps of hair into the crown of braids she’d wound on top of her head, keeping one ear attuned to the nursery. She had purposely left the door ajar to hear if the child cried.

Her hand stilled. She had actually been invited to join the doctor and Mrs. Benbow in the dining room—not as a servant, but as if she were a member of the family. Once each week, the housekeeper had instructed, on the Lord’s Day, Dr. Callender and his wife insisted the housekeeper join them at the formal Sunday meal. Now that his wife had “passed over,” as the older woman put it, Dr. Callender wished to carry on the tradition. Erika would join them at the table.

She peeked into the nursery to satisfy herself that the baby still slept. At the sight of the delicate, perfect fingers curled outside the rose coverlet, her heart lifted in her chest like a balloon. At any moment she expected to float up off the floor. A baby was a miracle from another world, so small and beautifully formed. She shook her head in wonder.

Downstairs, an ivory damask cloth covered the walnut table, which was laden with sparkling crystal and gleaming plates and bowls. Erika quailed at the sight. All those shiny forks and spoons, and glasses and plates on top of plates. How would she ever know which to use?

At the head of the table Dr. Callender sat, tapping a well-manicured forefinger against his crystal wineglass. Instead of the rumpled white shirt, the physician wore dark trousers and a black jacket, a silvergray silk cravat loosely knotted under his chin. He looked every inch a prince, or even a king. And he was not smiling.

At his right, Mrs. Benbow perched stiffly in the high-backed chair like a black sparrow with sharp, unblinking eyes.

Erika’s throat constricted. She hadn’t the slightest notion what to say to the doctor, or to the formidable woman who stared at her with obvious disapproval.

“Miss Scharf.” The doctor’s low, unemotional voice sent a butterfly skittering into her stomach.

“In this house, meals are attended with unfailing punctuality.”

Erika shifted her gaze from the housekeeper to the dark-haired man at the head of the table. “What means that, unfailing punc—punctu.?”

“You’re late,” snapped the housekeeper. “That’s what it means. My mashed potatoes will be stonecold.” She gestured at the mounded bowl on which a chunk of butter the size of a hen’s egg melted.

“So sorry,” Erika murmured as she slipped into the empty chair across from the stern-faced woman. “Baby cry and cry after the milk I give her. I could not sooner come.”

“Quieting a crying child is a labor of Sisyphus,” the doctor observed. “It never stops.”

“I stop it,” Erika said softly. “I rock her until crying stops, and she falls asleep. Cannot be very good mama if not have—how you say?—waiting. No, patience—that is the word! Patience.”

The flicker of a smile twitched across the doctor’s finely proportioned lips. “Patience,” he echoed. He pushed back his chair and rose. “Cow’s milk often does not agree with infants. Goat’s milk might be better. Mrs. Benbow, help yourself to the vegetables while I carve.”

Goat’s milk! Where in the world would she find a goat? Erika opened her mouth to ask, but Dr. Callender lifted the cover off the serving platter and busied himself with a wickedly sharp-looking knife.

A tingle of apprehension danced up Erika’s spine as she watched the physician’s long, capable fingers expertly pare thin slices of roast chicken into a neat fan-shaped pile on the china platter. His quick, purposeful movements made her breath catch. He made cutting up the fowl look so simple, even graceful, as if he enjoyed slicing into the succulent flesh of a once-living creature.

Her heartbeat hiccuped. Of course, she reminded herself. He was Dr. Callender. Maybe he was also a surgeon, used to cutting into.things.

She shuddered and cast a look at the housekeeper. Mrs. Benbow’s gaze followed every motion the physician made, an approving gleam in her eyes. No doubt she considered it her chicken, Erika thought, which she had prepared and offered up as a sort of sacrifice to her employer.

“White meat or dark?” the doctor inquired.

Erika blinked. “What?”

He studied her with quizzical gray eyes, the knife in one hand, a two-pronged silver fork in the other. “Breast or thigh?”

She couldn’t utter a word. She hadn’t the faintest idea. In all her twenty-four years she had never been asked such a question. It was either food or no food, never what kind of food; his question was beyond her understanding. She had so much to learn in America!

One thing she did know, however, was that speaking the word breast out loud in this man’s presence was an impossibility. Already she felt her cheeks flame at the thought of such an intimacy. Thigh was just as bad.

“White,” she choked out at last.