“Oh, dear,” Fanny said, and began determinedly squeezing the embedded quail. I drew breath and rubbed two fingers between my brows.
“Have you a headache?” Fanny asked, brightening. “There’s fresh willow bark; I could brew you some tea in a moment!”
I smiled at her. She was fascinated by herbs and adored all the grinding, boiling, and steeping.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m fine. Just trying to think what the devil to eat with the quail.” Meals were the daily bane of my existence; not so much the constant work of picking, cleaning, chopping, cooking—though those activities were fairly baneful in themselves—but primarily the never-ending chore of remembering what we had on hand, and balancing the effort required to make it edible against the knowledge of what might spoil if we didn’t eat it right away. Bother nutrition; I crammed apples, raisins, and nuts into people more or less constantly, and poked green stuff down their reluctant gullets whenever I got the chance, and no one had died of scurvy yet.
“We have lots of beans,” Fanny said dubiously. “Or rice, I suppose … or maybe turnips? Er … neeps, I mean.”
“That’s a thought. Bashed neeps aren’t bad, so long as there’s butter and salt, and I know we have salt.” Two hundred and fifty pounds of it sheltering in the smoking shed, as a matter of fact. Tom MacLeod had brought it by wagon from Cross Creek last week—the year’s supply for the entire Ridge, in time for the hunting, butchering, and preserving. A meager eighty pounds of sugar, but I did have honey …
“Right. Baked quail with buttered bashed neeps, and—dried peas boiled with onion? Maybe a little cream?”
In the end, the three of us sat down an hour later to a very reasonable dinner—only one of the quails had exploded, and in fact, the smoky meat was very tasty, and the slightly burnt onions actually improved the creamed peas, I thought. There wasn’t much conversation, though; Fanny and I were tired to the bone and Elspeth Cunningham was old, tired, and in pain.
Still, she made an effort to be civil.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, looking round the enormous kitchen, “that there are only the two of you left to run this house?”
“The house and the livestock and garden,” I agreed, stifling a yawn with a jam-spread bannock. “And the butchering.”
“And the bees,” Fanny put in helpfully. “And all of Mrs. Fraser’s medicines to be made, and all the people she puts back togeth … Er … all the people she helps,” she ended, rather more tactfully than she’d begun.
“And the cleaning, too, of course,” Elspeth added, looking thoughtfully at the expanse of foot-marked wooden flooring that disappeared into shadow at the far end of the room. She glanced at me in a way I recognized at once: diagnosis.
Whatever she saw, she was tactful enough to keep it to herself, but she took the whisky bottle I pushed in her direction, nodded her thanks, and said, “I owe you a great deal, Mrs. Fraser. Please allow me to repay you—in part—by sending down one of my son’s lieutenants to take care of the more … manly chores, while your husband is away. Two of them will be coming next week, to stay with us for a time.”
I opened my mouth to refuse politely, but then met her eye—firm, but kindly—and then Fanny’s, pleading and hopeful.
“Thank you,” I said, and topped up her cup.
TALK WAS SMALL and desultory, and within half an hour Fanny had begun to yawn, and so had Bluebell, making a loud creaking noise when she did so.
“I think the dog wants to go to bed, Fanny,” I said, clenching my jaw to contain my own contagious yawn.
“Yes’m,” she murmured, and taking the candlestick I shoved into her hand, she wobbled slowly off to bed, Bluebell trudging in her wake with drowsy determination.
Elspeth made no move to go to bed, though I thought she must be dropping with weariness. I certainly was; too stupid with fatigue to think of any sort of conversational gambit. Luckily, none seemed to be needed. We just sat peacefully by the fire, watching the flames and listening to the wind howl through the empty attics overhead.
Suddenly, a door slammed, and we both jerked upright.
No other noise came down the stairs, though, and after a moment, my heart quit pounding.
“It’s all right,” I said.
Elspeth looked at me sharply. “Patrice MacDonald told me your third floor was unfinished. Her husband was intending to come and work on it this Friday.”