Free Choices of the Heart by Laurie Alice Eakes Page B

blue eyes and remnants of dark hair, and a smile shining with warmth even in the flickering lantern light.
    She held out a hand to Esther. “Welcome to Brooks Ridge, Miss Cherrett. So glad you decided to come and civilize these louts of mine.”
    “Thank you.”
    They were all too good-looking for Esther to consider them louts, though their thick accents as they greeted her—a drawling speech with a hint of a twang—and their homespun clothes and bare feet might give others pause when meeting them on a street. Lead mines or not, they didn’t look prosperous.
    “Hannah, Zach,” Mrs. Tolliver called out, “you all want to bide here overnight?”
    “I’d like to get home,” Hannah said. She drooped in her saddle like a flower left too long in a vase.
    Zach frowned, then returned to his waiting horse. “Momma will want to see us. I’ll call soon, find out about the school. Miss Cherrett, I’ll be calling, if I may.”
    No, no, not call that way , Esther cried inside her head.
    She inclined her head. “In a few days. I’ll be occupied with the school right off.”
    “Hear that, girls?” Mrs. Tolliver turned toward her daughters. “Hear how pretty she talks? You can learn to talk that way too.”
    “Why’d I want to?” The younger girl, possibly thirteen or so, turned down the corners of her wide-lipped mouth. “Ain’t nothing wrong with the way I talk.”
    “Except you sound like an ignorant mountain girl, Brenna,” the older sister said. “Kind of like Beth—”
    “That’s enough, Liza.” Griff laid his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “Bethann’s got her troubles.” He looked at his mother. “Too many, it looks like.”
    “Where is she?” Mrs. Tolliver asked.
    “She was right behind me. But there’s—we’ll talk after you get Miss Cherrett settled.” He nodded at Esther. “Momma and the girls will show you your quarters.”
    “My . . . quarters?” Esther glanced around the part of the stockade she could see by the lantern light.
    To one side stood a barn and a small board structure. The door to the latter stood open, and a rustling and muttered clucking inside suggested hens roosted there. A lot of hens. A half-built house of cedar shakes sprouted on the other side of the fenced area. Oiled paper instead of glass filled in most of the windows. With the children leading the way and Griff drawing up the rear with Esther’s luggage, they swept across the yard, past a flourishing garden and the house under construction.
    “You live behind the school,” Mrs. Tolliver said. “You’ll be more comfortable there than in the big house without any windows. We’re hoping the glass comes before winter, but it’s hard to get it up here.”
    Esther dropped the hem of her riding habit and stumbled over the excess fabric. “I—I’m living alone?” She glanced around at the house, the barn and coop, the garden, the stockade fence. “I didn’t realize . . . I never . . .”
    “I’ll trade with you,” the younger of the two boys piped up.
    “No one will trade with her.” Mrs. Tolliver strode to the stoop of another log building. “You can take your meals with us, of course, and we’re only a holler away, but you won’t have no privacy in the house yet.”
    “She means you can’t be in a room on the same floor as Griff,” Brenna added. “Even if she does want him to marry you.”
    “She doesn’t even know her.” Liza’s tone dripped with scorn. She sidled up beside Esther and whispered, “She don’t—doesn’t have any manners.”
    Esther smiled and whispered back, “They rarely do at that age.”
    Liza giggled. “Do you have a younger sister?”
    “No, just know lots of girls that age back—” She stopped before she said home .
    It wasn’t home. Nothing was home. Especially not the log house the Tollivers showed her. Two rooms presented themselves to her, with one window in each. The windows had glass, true, but the building would be dark even on a sunny day.