Free Love by the Morning Star by Laura L. Sullivan Page B

as you like, though. Sup now, and you’ll set out the kitchen table in preparation for dinner afterward. Tomorrow your work begins in earnest.”
    Feeling like a cad, Sally immediately turned to chat with the housekeeper, who usually deigned to eat with them. When one of the kitchen maids served them and Sally saw the chubby, still-sizzling pork sausages she had prepared not ten minutes earlier, she felt a terrible urge to leap up and make Hannah a special omelet all for herself, but she manfully controlled that impulse.
Best the girl get used to it now
, she thought.
    Hannah, who had dined lightly the night before and breakfasted not at all, almost drooled at the fragrant, fatty smell of sausages.
No
, she told her salivary glands sternly.
People are being persecuted for having Jewish blood. I have never been particularly Jewish, but I will do my best. It is the least I can do
.
    She reached for the potatoes and ate them in silence under heavy stares.

Hannah, Who Tried to Be Helpful
    â€œI INTEND TO MAKE MYSELF as helpful as possible,” Hannah said after the servants had dispersed to their varied duties and the lunch table was cleared. “I know very little of cookery but I can make a few things.
Pfannkuchen
, of course. Crepes. No, that is French. I’m sorry, my English sometimes runs away from me here and there. Pancakes!” She laughed. “The word might run but I always catch it. My legs are short, but fast. I do not care for the sweet
pfannkuchen
so much but rather the ones you eat for a meal, with bits of bacon and cheese and scallions. And when they are in season the plump white asparaguses. Asparageese? No, one asparagus, many asparagus. They are like fish and sheep.”
    Sally could not see at all how asparagus were like fish or sheep, so she only said, “Can you lay out a table for dinner preparation?”
    â€œI have laid out many tables,” Hannah said, thinking of the napkins she’d coaxed into the shape of swans or crabs or Viking longboats every night at Der Teufel.
    â€œI’m going to run to the village to get a few ducks. Herself changed her mind and needs roasted mallard tonight, and if I let one of the girls pick them out they’ll take whatever they’re given and never ask how long they’ve hung. Himself won’t eat a duck that’s hung less than a week.” Sally stopped short in her bustling, amazed at her own jibber-jabber. The foreign girl was getting to her. Could it be that Trapp was wrong? Maybe talking didn’t get in the way of an efficiently run kitchen. It felt rather nice.
    â€œYou have the cook’s table set out for me,” Sally went on, “and while the girls and I make dinner you can watch and learn. The most important things are to do what you’re told and stay out of the way. And see Judy or Glenda about a few more hairpins.”
    Sally reached for Hannah, and for one tender instant the girl felt loved as the older woman adjusted the unsightly white construct perched on her head. She caught Sally’s hand. “They won’t say anything, will they? I can bear it. I
have
to bear it. But they won’t be so unkind as to tease me about it, will they?”
    â€œWhat, about where you come from? Who you are? Oh, they’ll tease you without mercy. You just give as good as you get.” As she looked down at the dark-eyed little morsel of a girl, she felt more of Trapp slip away.
This is my kitchen now
, she thought.
I can be kind if I want
.
    But when Sally came home with a basketful of perfectly hung ducks she was not inclined to kindness. Hannah, her cap askew again, was standing beside the vast cook’s table with a pleased expression, while Judy and Glenda smirked in the background. “I told you to have my table set up!” Sally thundered. “I have to start dinner now. Not in five minutes,
now
, for if it’s not ready the instant Lord Liripip sits down, the entire lot of us