Free B000XUBEHA EBOK by Maggie Osborne Page B

one before had looked at her in that way.
    “I’d rather you hadn’t done it, but thank you.”
    “It was my pleasure,” she said, meaning it. The novelty of doing up a man’s wash had made an onerous chore speed by.
    “You were whistling when I came inside . . .”
    His comment made her smile. “See how far my manners have deteriorated? Would you like more coffee?”
    “Please. Where did you learn to whistle?”
    “A neighbor boy taught me. My mother was appalled.” Lord, she’d smiled more since Cameron arrived than she had in a decade. “I’ve never regretted learning. It’s nice to have music whenever I like.”
    “Mrs. Ward, I’ll be leaving soon . . .”
    The words hung between them, spoiling a pleasant mood. Della turned toward the pool of darkness gathering in the yard beyond the reach of the porch lamp.
    She would miss him. It shocked her to realize how quickly they had established habits and routines. After he left, she wouldn’t dress the table on the porch. She’d eat her meals standing at the sink. She’d return to not speaking for days on end. The dream would return to haunt her. And the loneliness would seem worse for having been interrupted.
    “Before I go, there’s a question . . . something I’ve wondered about for years.”
    Here it came. The question she had expected and dreaded. Dropping her head, she looked at her hands twisting across her lap. “I know what you want to ask.”
    “What happened to your child?”
    All the pleasure of the evening vanished with her next breath as if a tight band squeezed her chest. As always when she thought of Claire, her eyes felt hot and scratchy and the back of her throat went dry as if she’d swallowed sand.
    Cameron must have seen the color drain from her face because his voice was gentle when he spoke again. “I figure the child died. If you can bear to confirm it, we’ll leave it at that.”
    “Her name is Claire. After my mother.”
    He hesitated. “Did she die recently?”
    “I guess by now you know I can’t answer without explaining.” She drank the last of her coffee to moisten her throat. “After my last letter to Clarence, Clarence died, we fled to Atlanta after the plantation was burned, and I gave birth to my daughter.”
    She couldn’t sit still while she told the story. Standing, she moved to the rail and walked back and forth across the porch. “Mrs. Ward lost her home, all her belongings, and her servants. Then she lost her son. The Yankees did this to her. The Yankees destroyed everything she valued. And there I was, every time she turned around. After Clarence was killed, Mrs. Ward started attacking me verbally. This wasn’t new, but it got a lot worse. When I didn’t go away, she shut herself in the bedroom of the Peachside house rather than look at me or talk to me. She didn’t come out of her room until the night Claire was born.”
    Della hadn’t seen her mother-in-law during her long difficult labor, but she’d heard Mrs. Ward in the hallway issuing orders to the midwife. And Mrs. Ward had taken charge of the nursery after Claire’s birth.
    “This part is hard,” she said, drawing a deep breath. She gripped the railing and stared blindly into the darkness.
    “A week or so after Claire’s birth, I went to fetch her to feed her. She wasn’t in the nursery. I looked everywhere. Finally I ran into the parlor where Mr. Ward liked to sit in the mornings and read the day’s news.”
    Nothing in her voice conveyed how frantic she had been, how terrified that something unthinkable had happened. Her voice was flat, unemotional, the words tumbling out in a rush to reach the end of the story.
    “I told him that Claire was missing. And Mr. Ward said no she was not. He had a speech prepared. It was a long speech, which said, in essence, that Claire was all the Wards had left of their son, and the Wards would raise her. But I had to leave at once. Mrs. Ward would never recover her health as long as I was