Free Fortune is a Woman by Elizabeth Adler

she who shopped and cooked and kept the house clean, because Martha no longer was able to do so.
    Annie would often pop next door to talk with Mrs. Morris about babies, because Sally Morris had a son just a few weeks older than Josh. They would place the two infants side by side in front of the fire on the clean rag rug made by Mrs. Morris from their old clothes and blankets, watching them crawl around together. "Just look at little Sammy," Mrs. Morris would say, beaming admiringly at her sturdy, dark-haired boy. "Why, he just dotes on Josh." Then she laughed. "Listen to me talk," she exclaimed, "like you're his mother, Annie, not his sister."
    Three months later, when Martha Aysgarth faded from life, Annie became "mother" to her whole family. Her father told her she was finished with school for good and she would take her mother's place. "Your mam taught you well enough," he said gruffly, "and I'll not have any other woman coming into my house and telling me what to do."
    Mrs. Morris felt sorry for Annie, having so much responsibility and still only a child. She often minded Josh while Annie struggled to keep up with the housework and the washing, the marketing and cooking and baking, because Frank Aysgarth expected it all to be just the same as it was when his wife was alive. And Frank became more silent and taciturn; he never ever embraced his children or showed them any affection, but he never took a strap to them either.
    The years moved slowly by with scarcely time for Annie to take a breath, let alone think of herself. Josh and Sammy Morris were such close friends now, they practically lived in each other's pockets. They started Back Road Council School on the same day and moved slowly upward through the classes together, and they were constantly in mischief and constantly in and out of each other's houses, cadging a slice of fresh-baked bread slathered with delicious beef drippings from Annie, and sitting on the steps watching the world go by on Montgomery Street while they ate it. They stole burning-hot jam tarts from the wire tray where Mrs. Morris had left them to cool, or a hunk of feather-light Yorkshire pudding, fresh from the roasting tin. And they were always together for Annie's huge, tasty Sunday dinners of roast pork with crackling and roast potatoes, crisp and golden on the outside and soft as pillows on the inside, and her hot treacle pudding with creamy custard that was enough to melt the coldest heart. She was the best cook on Montgomery Street bar none, though Frank Aysgarth grumbled about her all the time.
    "Treats her just the way he did his wife—like a slave," Sammy's mother said with a disparaging sniff. She didn't like Frank and he didn't like her; she thought he was a selfish old tyrant and he thought she was a lazy slattern who kept a rough-and-ready house and was too often at the Red Lion drinking port and lemon and keeping her husband poor, when she should have been home looking after her bairns.
    "Frank Aysgarth's alius been a man's man," her husband commented. "He's got no time for women."
    "Aye, not even his own daughter," she retorted bitterly. She'd heard him often enough through the adjoining wall, berating the poor girl, and God knows Annie did her best. She was always working. She would be outside first thing in the morning, scrubbing the front steps, rubbing on the bright yellow scouring stone and rinsing down the flagstones with buckets of water so that when Frank stepped out his front door it was as clean outside under his good leather boots as it was inside. She blacked the cast-iron range until it shone and you could fairly see your own face in the fireback. There was always something appetizing in the oven when the boys came home from school at dinnertime, and when she sent them back again in the afternoon, they were clean and with full bellies. Annie's wash would be strung across the street and blowing in the wind before anyone else had even got started, and at six o'clock