Free Afternoons with Emily by Rose MacMurray Page B

does not use lightly. Since Miss Adelaide James
     is evidently one, she can teach you things I never could. And your friend Lettie sounds delightful company.”
    One day Lettie and I went out to the reef. She had warned me that coral was sharp and poisonous, so I was careful when I lay
     down on my towel. We relaxed in the sun and looked back at the dark pointed cedars and our little beach.
    “Lettie,” I decided to ask, “am I your job?”
    “You are both my work and my pleasure, Ara. Miss Adelaide employs me, but we Barbadians are free now. I would be your companion
     for your company, for no wage at all!”
    I was happy Lettie dropped the “Missy” when we were by ourselves.
    “Does Miss Adelaide pay you very much, Lettie?”
    “Enough so I will be a wealthy bride.”
    “And who will you marry?”
    “That will be Elijah, but he is not knowing it.” She laughed and blew seawater, as merry as another child.
    “And when will he know it?”
    “When I am telling him!”
    And she would say no more — so we swam back to shore and worked on our acropolis, which we were building beyond the high-tide
     mark. We had much to teach each other, it turned out. Lettie too had come to delight in the ancients, their feuds and infatuations.
     Her appetite for the Greek myths grew, the bloodier the better.
    “That Hades, that foolish king of Hell,” she fretted. “He should just be choosing a nice girl from his own village. Most girls
     would be happy to be a queen! I would marry Hades myself, except for Elijah.”
    In exchange for my myths, Lettie told me about her secret religion, and its drums and witch doctors and avenging ghosts. There
     were sacrifices too: bleating goats and flapping chickens. I teased her that my snobbish Olympians would never accept these
     barnyard offerings.
    One morning, heading for the beach, we met Miss Adelaide in her shade hat. She had given up trying to make me wear one, and
     I was tanned an even café au lait. Miss Adelaide carried shears and a flat basket, so I knew she was about to make one of
     her flower arrangements. These were in every room of York Stairs. Some were brilliant and dominant; others were small and
     personal. No two were ever the same.
    “I especially like the new one in the dining room,” I told her. “I think you meant it to be a wave.”
    “You guessed!” She was delighted. “Now tell me, Ara — what is in the big copper vat on the gallery, the one from the sugar
     mill?”
    “This week you used branches of cup of gold. Last week’s was hibiscus and African daisies.”
    “How do you know the flower names?”
    “I ask Lettie.”
    Miss Adelaide looked at me, head tipped, unhurried and grave — as if she were choosing or deciding something.
    “Very well. That’s settled. You may watch me work. I have never allowed anyone before now. Come here early on Tuesday and
     Friday mornings, right after you get up. It’s a nice thing for a girl to learn, before she has her own house.”
    So on those mornings, I met Miss Adelaide at her big worktable outside the cookhouse. She rose before me, for the day’s flowers
     had to be cut before the dew dried. She laid sheaves of color, fragrant and moist, by the containers she had chosen: an antique
     bowl, a conch shell, or a Chinese dish. She completed four arrangements a morning.
    Watching, I sensed her working without a definite plan, following the flowers’ intentions. When I was allowed to ask, at the
     end of each arrangement, Miss Adelaide was vague. She offered no rules or maxims when I questioned her.
    “After a while, you’ll know when it’s right,” she promised me. “The flowers will tell you, if you listen.”
    So I observed quietly and tried to guess what she would do next. One morning, I watched her making a golden sunburst (lemon
     lilies, coreopsis, and allamanda). Naomi, the cook, came out with a question about dinner, and Miss Adelaide was briefly distracted.
     She went back to her massed yellow