Page 40 of Guardian
“James isn’t harebrainedorfickle,” Sarah said firmly.
But I wasn’t thinking of James at that moment. I was looking at Sarah with a feeling of wonder and a dawning sense of gratitude.
When I didn’t reply, Sarah rolled her eyes as if I was hopeless. “Suit yourself in a set of fool’s clothes. I wash my hands of you.”
Chapter 14
Monday morning at Emma’s shop, I was bent over a man’s shirt making buttonholes, one part of my mind counting twenty stitches for each side and the other combing back over the previous year with Sarah and wondering what other sorts of things she’d been thinking of. Dan Wist? For God’s sake, I hadn’t thought of him in years—in fact, I might have been hard-pressed to give his last name. What else did she recall that I’d let drop away, out of my thoughts?
“What d’you think o’ Maggie?” Emma’s voice was casual.
I looked up in surprise, pulling my thoughts back from where they’d wandered. Emma’s eyes were on an organza ruffle that she was basting onto a skirt near the hem. The fabric shushed across the narrow sewing table as she kept the section she was working on under her hands.
My needle paused as I considered what I might say, for I wasn’t about to share the alarming conclusions James and I had reached. “Honestly, I don’t trust her. There’s talk that she’s pushing some of us out, which is rotten after she promised she wouldn’t change anything. On the other hand, she’s been pleasant enough to me. But she was an actress. There’s no way to know if she means any of it.”
“Or what her intention is, in being pleasing,” Emma said. “I ’magine twenty years in Swan River has toughened her, made her hard.”
“I know.” I bent over the buttonhole again. “Part of me feels sorry for her. That penal colony sounds like hell, with her marriage the worst part of it. He tried to kill her and burned her hand on the stove.”
“Agh.” She brought the cloth to her mouth to bite the thread. “The things folks do to each other.”
“I know. But she shouldn’t be ruthless to us because of it.”
“No,” Emma said. “There. Ruffle’s done.”
It seemed a good moment to ask the question that had been nagging at me, though even as I spoke, I wondered if I shouldn’t. “Did James ask you to take me on here at the shop? After my mother died?” I wanted to see her face as she replied, so I paused in my work, keeping hold of the needle with one hand and my place on the buttonhole with the other.
Her eyes were clear, frank. “Aye. Why?”
Heat crept up my neck. The thought of people knowing how desperate we’d been made me squirm. “I didn’t want charity.”
“Oh, it wasn’t charity,” she replied. “He knew I could use the help.” She eyed me for a moment, and when I didn’t reply, a sharp note crept into her voice. “It’s naught to be ashamed of. He was only looking out for you. Some folks might be grateful.”
“Oh, I know. I mean, I am.” I bent over my work to hide my shame at the thought of how that conversation had gone: James pitying me because Ma had died, telling his sister how we might be thrown out on the street. Emma sighing and saying she supposed she could pay me a wage of some sort—
“He’s had your name stitched on his heart since the badger days,” Emma said, more gently.
I felt a second wave of heat rising to my cheeks.
“I was the one who told him to wait,” she said. “You were too young, both o’ you. And you’d just lost your mum and had Sarah to take care of.”
I dropped the sewing into my lap, surprised that she’d spent time thinking of me at all.
Emma’s mouth twitched. “Honestly? You’d no idea?”
She had misinterpreted the reason for my surprise. But I answered the question she asked. “No. I didn’t.” Into my mind came recent moments, like photographs: James’s hand resting on Mr. Yellen’s shoulder, pushing coins into Pat’s till. “He ... he likes most everyone.”
Her expression softened, and something like pride lit her face. “True.”
I forced a smile and returned to my sewing, thinking she was satisfied. But I’d only made one stitch when she said, “I’m not saying you ought to care for him.” Her voice had sharpened again. “But you should tell him if you don’t, so he doesn’t think otherwise.”
I had the sensation of stumbling backward faster than my feet could manage. “No—that’s not it. It’s not that I don’t like him. Of course I do. But for years, he never said anything, so I thought ...” I was doing badly at this. “Everything’s always been a laugh with him. Even the way he asked me to go to dinner. He did it by tricking me in a game.” I drew a breath. “I didn’t know he’d been looking out for me.”
“I see,” was all Emma said, but I could see I’d mollified her. “As for you being here on charity, put it out o’ your head. Many a time, I’ve been glad it’s you working here, not someone else.” Her voice was as practical as Amelia’s. “You come when you say you will, you don’t shirk, and you don’t pilfer ribbon or lace. You don’t run a stitch long when it needs short ones, and you stay late if I’m needing the help.” She darted her chin toward the garment in my lap. “And your buttonholes are better’n mine.”
The last line, and her wry smile, softened my discomfort.
“I don’t mind you and James keeping company, providing you can keep this”—she pointed toward the sewing in my lap—“separate from that.”
