Free The Bride's House by Sandra Dallas

good, we’ll hunt for mushrooms. They ought to grow around here.”
    “I never ate a mushroom, but I’d be glad for one right now. We ought to have brought our dinner with us.”
    “Climbing builds an appetite, all right.” Will stood suddenly. “Come with me. I know where we can get a bite to eat.” He helped Nealie off the rocks, and she followed him down the trail to a cutoff that led to a short street in Georgetown with no more than two or three houses on it, one of them deserted, an old coat hanging in the doorway in place of a door. The street had no sidewalk, and Will walked carefully through the dirt, slick with rain from the morning, telling Nealie to step in his footprints. He stopped in front of a tiny unpainted house set so far back on the property that she almost failed to see it. “This is my cottage. I have some cheese and crackers and tinned meat. Nothing fancy, but it will do if you’re hungry enough,” he said. He stood aside and bowed, as Nealie turned in at the gate. “You don’t mind, do you? You can trust me. But if you’d rather, I’ll take you home.”
    “I don’t mind,” Nealie said. She’d read in a Peterson’s Magazine story about a young girl going to a boy’s room and being disgraced and wondered if visiting a man’s house was the proper thing to do. She wouldn’t have gone to Charlie’s cabin unless they’d been engaged—which meant she’d never go there. But Will was different. He was proper and wouldn’t ask her to do a thing that was wrong.
    The one-room cottage was tidy, but sparsely furnished, with only an iron bed and a table and a wooden stool. Boxes were nailed to the wall to serve as cupboards. There were a trunk and hooks where Will hung his work clothes. A lap writing desk stood on the table, next to a whiskey bottle that held dried grasses. A half-finished letter rested on the desk’s slanted surface, and Will put it inside the desk, along with a pen and bottle of ink. “I can make us tea,” he said, adding kindling to the banked fire in the stove. He dipped water from a bucket and poured it into the kettle, setting it on the stove. Then he removed food from metal boxes with tight-fitting lids and rummaged through the cupboards, looking at the tins. “I guess all I’ve got is oysters. No sardines.”
    “I don’t prefer oysters,” Nealie told him. “I surely do not.”
    “Oh, these aren’t fresh ones. They’re smoked. They won’t come back up on you. I’ll open the tin, and you’ll try one, won’t you? You said you had pluck.”
    Nealie nodded, although she didn’t know that pluck meant eating oysters.
    While Will puttered about, Nealie looked around the cabin. She liked the wallpaper, a pattern of red roses on brown vines. It had been glued to cheesecloth that was tacked onto the board walls, and it sagged in the corners, but it was elegant. She admired the leather-bound books stacked on the table and the silver frame containing a picture of a man and woman. “Your folks?” she asked. Will nodded, and she asked again, “Is there any more of you at home?”
    “You mean brothers and sisters? I have one sister. She’s a little older than you.”
    “Is that her?” Nealie nodded at another framed photograph, this one of a dark-haired girl dressed in furs, who looked a little like Will.
    He nodded.
    “Do you like your folks?”
    “Of course.” Will looked up at Nealie. “Don’t you like yours? Is that why you left home?”
    Nealie did not want to talk about her parents, could not stand for Will to know how she’d been shamed by her father, so she said, “Ma’s passed, and my pa is disagreeable.”
    Will didn’t pursue the conversation. He poured hot water into a china teapot, then indicated a spread of cheese, crackers, dried apples, and smoked oysters that he’d placed on the table. “It’s not the Hotel de Paris or even Mrs. Travers’s boardinghouse, but I think we’re hungry enough to do it justice.”
    “Why, it’s a fine