Free A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant

was.
    “To make them uniform, yes.” He picked up the new subject with a will. “I’ve acquired them from all over, and some don’t have frames, as you see. Some have broken frames.” He lifted one to show her. “I shouldn’t want any pupil to have a poorer slate than any other. It may sound like a trifle, but the latest scholarship in the field tells us these things matter.” His hands straightened a pile of short slats cut from his wood strip. He wanted to be working again, clearly.
    “I can see the way it would matter.” Martha stripped off her gloves. “Now how may I be of use?”
    A smile came to his eyes first, and sifted down to his mouth. He looked up from the table. “Have you any practice with a penknife?”
    “Very little. You’d better give me some inconsequential task.”
    “No task is inconsequential. You’re speaking to a churchman, recall.” He picked up a knife from among a little arrangement of tools. “My humble worn slates come with humble worn slate-pencils in need of better points. Would you be so good as to sharpen them?”
    So she pulled up a chair and set to paring one stubby slate-pencil after another, while he measured and marked his wood strip against the slates, sawing off new pieces and arranging them in sets.
    Could any other congress with a man be so agreeable as this? He had his work to do, and she had hers, and nothing stirred the air between them but the soft scrape of her knife, the intermittent rasping of his saw, and a noble shared purpose.
    The curate’s wife would be fortunate, as wives went. She would spend many such hours. And as to marital obligations, likely a churchman would exercise his rights with a becoming modesty. Without so much fuss and fanfare as other men found necessary. Afterward, he and his wife would lie side by side and talk. He might try out bits of the sermon he was making that week, and ask her opinion. She might tell him what she’d observed in visiting the cottagers that day. Together they would confer, and hatch plans for bettering the lives of everyone in the parish.
    Citrus wafted to her nose, as though to remind her she had no right to think of a virtuous man. But citrus could take its counsel elsewhere. She could think, if she chose, of the objective advantages of marriage to a clergyman, particularly an upright and considerate one. One who might come to his wife’s bed some nights with no other purpose than to talk. To know what were her ideas and judgments, and to share his own with her.
    A wife could look forward to those visits. Then, perhaps, to the other visits. He might touch her in different places one night, and chance across the place that governed her satisfaction. Then he would wish to please her, and she might help him discover how.
    Martha shifted in her chair and gave a tiny shake of her head. She, herself, would not do any of these things. She could see Mr. Atkins glance up at her movement, but when she neither spoke nor raised her eyes, he went back to his work. Better that way. This way. Better for a woman to see to her own satisfaction, as necessary, and to keep independent of men as far as she could.
    She lifted her sharpened slate-pencil to blow stray shavings off its tip. “Did you say you’d read studies recommending the uniformity of schoolroom supplies? I’m sure I should like to hear all you can tell of your reading.” Indeed, if her plan succeeded and she kept her position here, she could share ideas and opinions with him whenever she wished. She would have no cause at all to envy the curate’s wife, or, for that matter, any man’s wife.

Chapter Four

    P EOPLE LIVE there?” Theo stared openly at the first of the cottages. “I’ve seen better pigpens.”
    “I don’t doubt it,” Mr. Granville said. “And I have every confidence you’ll take care not to repeat such a remark within earshot of those people who do, in fact, live here.”
    “Well, of course.” The admonition stung, then irked him.