Sky of Autum Part Three--Beauty
Author's Note: Once again, I disclaim all mistakes as my own, as I have no beta :)
Cold winds can never freeze, nor thunder sour
The cup of cheer that Beauty draws for me
Out of those Azure heavens and this green earth --
I drink and drink, and thirst the more I see.
To see the dewdrops thrill the blades of grass,
Makes my whole body shake; for here's my choice
Of either sun or shade, and both are green --
A Chaffinch laughs in his melodious voice.
The banks are stormed by Speedwell, that blue flower
So like a little heaven with one star out;
I see an amber lake of buttercups,
And Hawthorn foams the hedges round about.
The old Oak tree looks now so green and young,
That even swallows perch awhile and sing:
This is that time of year, so sweet and warm,
When bats wait not for stars ere they take wing.
As long as I love Beauty I am young,
Am young or old as I love more or less;
When Beauty is not heeded or seems stale,
My life's a cheat, let Death end my distress.
"Seeking Beauty" by William Henry Davies
Beauty
Having a goal seemed to perk up Father, in a weird way, and caused him to finally emerge from his study and mingle with us little people. In fact, he planned as much as I did, in that last week. He gathered supplies, scribbled down ideas on scraps of parchment, and generally made himself busy. He felt useful, and all of us were just so relieved that he had finally left his study and seemed interested in something that none of us complained that we were plenty old and clever enough to handle things on our own.
We had missed our father, as little as we truly knew him, and we were just glad that he had torn himself from his pit of despair.
With Anna Maria's help, we procured a wagon in which to carry our few belongings and supplies for our new life. I insisted that Jasper come with, even though he was an expense we almost couldn't afford, but although he was a tall and lanky gelding more suited to hopping fences or carrying a lively prince, he quite gladly set to traces for me and pulled our wagon. It was a small wagon, too small for anyone to actually ride in (it was a wooden box with wheels, truly), and we had to cover it with oiled tarpaulin to protect it from the weather. We traveled slowly--none of us besides Anna Maria had ever walked that far--and let Jasper lead us across the countryside with the squeaky wheels of our sole wagon. Each night we slept on bedrolls on the hard and lumpy ground and as we went, we ceased to gain new blisters and our feet began to callous.
Aelric went with us willingly enough, but he never said a word. He helped heave the wagon out of ruts when Jasper got it stuck, he walked just as quickly as the rest of us (never a single complaint) and helped to make a poor and lumpy porridge whenever it was his turn, but he never spoke. We despaired of him ever recovering Nate's precipitous departure, but all of us were so close to merely surviving that there was little we could offer him in the way of reassurance.
Anna Maria and Darryn seemed to carry a desperate and tenacious hope with them like burdens across their shoulders. They wanted to be happy together, it was obvious to all of us that a single glance shared between them carried whole conversations we weren't a part of, but they despaired being happy when the rest of us were not.
I? I had been book learned. I knew very little in the way of practical application of well...anything. Even my tea had been made for me. I could tack a horse, ride a horse, strap on my own shoes, walk, read, write--that list pretty summed up my capabilities upon our departure. Well, at least very close to our departure. Dear friends of mine taught me how to plant a seed and coax it to the surface, how to gather eggs without getting my fingers pecked, how to milk a cow without getting kicked--but even my brothers were more prepared for the long trek across the countryside. My naive youth thought that walking through the fields would be beautiful, an experience to remember.
One can only see so many cows and sheep before one gets bored.
Roads and lanes become the same, fields of crop and pastures of barn animals merged into a continuous loop that never seemed to end, blisters grew upon blisters upon blisters until my forced cheerfulness about our "adventure" into the real world subsided into weary silence.
That, of course, was when we reached our destination.
The house Anna Maria had procured for us appeared to be in the middle of the village next to the inn. This meant that we were in the thick of things--and that drunks landed on our doorstep. We were lucky, Anna Maria told us, that the village was big enough for an inn at all. Many had not a one and cooked food was hard to come by--unless it was in your own kitchen. Covered in dust, stumbling wearily through the streets, we were less ready to cook than infants.
We walked into the town midday. It was the perfect time, we were told, to trade our wagon for goods. We heaved our belongings into the central room of our new house, disturbing the thick dust, and Darryn and I led Jasper to the inn to inquire where we could take the wagon while Anna Maria, Aelric, and my father attempted to battle the dust in our previously shut up house.
I wished them well, as the downstairs area was large (we were told that traditionally it would be meant for the farm animals we were to keep), the kitchen was a good size, and upstairs there were three rooms: Darryn and Anna Maria would share one, Aelric and I another, and Father would have the third.
Of course, Darryn and Anna Maria sleep in the same until they were actually married, but the difference was negligible as they planned to be married immediately.
The point was--the house was a fair size and I held no interest in fighting dust bunnies in dusty corners.
"Will you stay with the horse, brother?" I asked Aelric. A formality, really, as he would be highly inappropriate as a spokesperson inside the inn--usually they are required to actually speak.
He nodded and held onto Jasper's reins.
It now occurs to me that as a sixteen year old I had been shouldering a rather lot of responsibilities for my family. I planned the trip, prepared for it, convinced them to make it, made it happen...I will never know whether my books forced me to grow up, or I was what was known as an old soul. I had never been all that frivolous, however (if you didn't count an absurdly large collection of books as just that) or into girls, so I had a lot of time to think about things like what I wanted to do and how to do it. Of course, whatever plans I had made before we lost our entire life were completely null and void.
A poor son of a merchant does not a college-learned scholar make.
But it seemed natural to me that if my family was unwilling or incapable of making something happen, that I should do so myself.
So, shoulders held back and chin set level, I pushed through the doors into--the very empty inn.
"Well hello there," a boisterous voice greeted.
I looked, and it appeared to come from a red-faced portly man scrubbing one of the many tables in the establishment. I gathered my courage and spoke.
"Yes, uh, hello." Smooth. Just, smooth.
He flipped his wash cloth over his large beefy shoulder and began to dry his hands on his dirty apron, approaching me all the while with a gently curious expression on his face.
"I've never seen you in these parts before," he said. "Can I help you with something? You've missed the mid-day meal but I've probably some bread and maybe a mite of stew left."
"Oh no," I smiled, relieved that he seemed just as friendly as any of the shopkeepers I had known in the city. "My family and I, we've just arrived, we're the ones that bought the shut-up house next to this inn?" I hated how my voice raised at the end of my phrase and malformed it into a question, but I was unsure whether he was the proprietor or not. I had thought to see a woman, for some unknown reason.
His face lit up. "You're with Anna Maria? And you must be the youngest. Beau, was it?"
I flushed in embarrassment. "Ah well, no. It's Beauty, actually."
He nodded and stepped even closer, extending his ham-sized hand for a shake. "Nice to meet you, I'm McHall and this is my inn. McHall's Inn."
I would have never guessed.
I shook his hand gratefully. "Nice to meet you as well, sir. We've just come in, as I said and I was just wondering..."
A raised eyebrow prompted me and I let go of his hand.
"We've got a cart. Is there someplace we can sell it? We will need food, of course...."
"I wouldn't hear of it!" he bellowed.
Involuntarily, I took a step back. "Pardon?"
"If you've just arrived, you must be bushed! Come eat at my inn, leave the cart for tomorrow. You've a horse? He can stay in my stable, of course." As he spoke, he nodded vigorously to himself. Then he turned and yelled to the kitchen. "I'll be out, wife! Man the kitchen if you will!"
"Woman! Woman the kitchen!"
He chuckled and reached around me to lay a hand on my back, turn me, and propel me to the door. "C'mon, lad. Let's get everything all worked out."
McHall turned out to be an extremely generous man. Not only did he feed us supper and house our cart and horse, he insisted that we stay in his inn for the night.
"Naught but dust in your house right now, there is. No need to roll in it," was his pragmatic explanation.
Thanks to him, for the first time in months we slept in proper beds.
Well, my family might have slept, but I slept not a wink. Instead, I sat in the window sill, without an actual glass pane and only kept the wind out by dint of two wooden shutters, and listened to the sounds of the village and the countryside.
All I could hear was the clucking of sleeping chickens, the lowing of lazy cows, the occasional dog barking or cat yowling, and the crickets in the grass.
I desperately wanted the city back.
Living in a small village was a lot like living in the city, and not like living in it at all. For one, gossip was just as prevalent. No sooner did we open our front door and begin to finish cleaning did the first of the busybody neighbors arrive.
"Don't mind me!" she called over her shoulder as she pushed by me for the kitchen. "I've just got eggs, is all. I'll be out in a tick! Oh, and me name's Sarah."
Some were like that--in and out with hurried introductions--some stayed to help clean for a while. One woman chatted for at least an hour before she dusted her hands off and said she had to head home to cook supper.
Most everyone was like that. They were kind, had absolutely nothing holding them back from butting in whenever they wanted, and freely offered advice without realizing what sort of gold it was to us.
We settled in quickly. Darryn and Father procured (and sometimes made) furniture for the house. If it was mismatched, then none of us really noticed or cared--we no longer had to sit upon the floor. Aelric mostly meandered, whether it was around the house or about the village commons, he spent a lot of time watching and listening. Anna Maria and I made the bedding for our beds. I stuffed and she sewed. She really was a professional with the needle. Sometimes I thought that she would finish a seam even before I had stuffed the bed properly.
Without her, we would have been without help. Four men in one house whose idea of manual labor was either writing from dawn to dusk or building a ship from scratch? Without her, we would have had no idea what to do with the brick oven or, well, anything else that had to do with the kitchen.
Behind the house was a small plot that was all ours. As Anna Maria was busy bringing our house up to snuff and attempting to get a start at her business (she already had two friends of her mother's asking for Sunday gowns), I got down to the dirty business of fleshing out our garden. The packets I had faithfully carried with me all the way from the city were opened, germinated in bits of damp cotton on my window sill, and eventually sown in the dirt. That, of course, had to happen after I waged war with all of the weeds. Our "plot" was only a plot in the very roughest of terms. It had no fence, so the chickens from the inn yard had wandered through and eaten whatever they liked (including the grass), a goat or two had done the same (and perhaps a deer), and some of the weeds appeared to be threatening the health and happiness of other neighbor's yards.
Their relief was very apparent when I showed up asking to borrow a trowel and some clippers.
It was a tedious task, but the only one that I thought I could manage. Of my whole family, I was the only one who had not a trade at all, and as I had read of plants well, I thought I could manage it.
I soon grew callouses on my hands to match my feet, sun-browned skin on the backs of my hands and face, and a squint with matching creases around my eyes. The weeds simply didn't want to go. But taming the yard kept me occupied while I very nervously waited for my seeds to sprout--these things don't happen immediately, of course.
While I toiled, Father made connections with other men of the village, learning about the trade in the area and who did what. Anna Maria gained more customers, but mostly sewed whatever they gave her--we hadn't yet the means to procure the supplies she needed to spin and weave, so her spindle and frame sat, empty, in our sitting room until we did. Darryn visited the blacksmith who proved to be very amenable to having my ship-wise brother as an apprentice, and started work right away. His massive frame ended up being perfect from the job and he came home every night sore, weary, but with a bright smile on his face. I had my garden, of course, and also went to the market for our food each day. Anna Maria's work was bringing in enough for that, at least, as well as the proceeds from our cart. Aelric still wandered, but everyone was kind to him, though I often heard young women speaking of his plight.
"I hear his bride-to-be was stolen away from him," one girl said.
"No!" her friend replied in horror. "Truly?"
"Oh yes, by a pirate, at that."
It made him more popular with the young women than he realized, but, of course, he never noticed.
He still hadn't spoken a word.
Father took my two brothers and Anna Maria to church each Sunday, but I always elected to stay home. I was the odd duck in the family in every sense of the word--I saw no need to go to a communal building each day and worship a fictional piece of work. Ironic, I realize. But it was my choice and no one commented on it. Instead, I used that day to go riding on Jasper. He was woefully under-exercised, ensconced in the inn stable and paddock as he was, so Sunday was our day to roam the countryside together. No fence was too high nor a lane too long.
I thought, perhaps, that I would hear mutterings from villagers of how I did woman’s work and that I needed a proper trade, or that I was perhaps dragging my family down by not simply going out and doing something. But, instead, I received nothing but support for my flourishing garden. I built a fence around my plot with chicken wire and stakes, then I had to put in posts and string for my rapidly growing peas. All of my vegetables grew peacefully together and soon I had more zucchini than I knew what to do with.
So I took them to market.
After that, I received more than support for my endeavors, I received praise. Mine was the best garden in the village and the fruits of my labor were much wanted. Whenever I had any excess to take to the market, they were gone before the morning was through and I had more coins in my pockets to buy new things to plant. Here and there I bought a book, and I also became known as someone who knew what I was talking about when it came to literature.
The pastor, as it turned out, was very much so into literature. To my complete and utter surprise.
One afternoon, he invited me to tea. Prior to this, he had only visited my place of residence or spoken to me at market or while I was out and about. But as he was an upstanding gentleman, and I was actually a tad flattered, I accepted his invitation and showed up on his doorstep one fine afternoon.
We had a very enjoyable time together, but I left feeling rather dazed.
My father, upon noticing over supper that I had nothing to say about my garden (quite unusual, as I often upheld the nightly conversation with my inane chatter), asked me what was the matter.
"Well," I said hesitantly. "I may be mistaken, but I think the pastor just spent the afternoon feeling out whether or not Aelric would be interested in his daughter."
Everyone at the table blinked.
"Pardon?" Darryn asked. "Did I hear that correctly?"
"No," a voice said, cracked from disuse.
We all turned to look at Aelric. I imagine I looked quite disbelieving with my eyebrows nearly in my hairline and Darryn was practically gaping.
Father merely smiled a smug sort of smile and said not a word.
"I am not interested."
Those were the first words Aelric had said in nearly a year, but they weren't the last by any means. Apparently, he had an awful lot to say. Thanks to this, he gained a position at the inn helping McHall with the actual hall. He became an asset as he was able to speak to anyone and everyone. It was amazing what several months of simply observing had done to give Aelric insider knowledge about the village and its inhabitants. He knew everyone on sight, could ask them about their wife, their dog, and even their children, and uphold a conversation with anyone who approached him. He became known as a very friendly and knowledgeable character. But he made it extremely plain that he was interested in no one's daughters.
Father, in a seamless transition, went from being a merchant to a tradesman. He became known for being able to judge the value of anything presented to him and soon began taking goods from one village to the next for various patrons who wished to trade outside of town. He never traveled very far, upon my horse as he was with a new and much more dapper cart trailing behind, but he soon earned enough money for his own horse and began traveling farther and farther abroad, happy in his endeavors.
Then he got lost in a storm.
| One| Two|Three|
Cold winds can never freeze, nor thunder sour
The cup of cheer that Beauty draws for me
Out of those Azure heavens and this green earth --
I drink and drink, and thirst the more I see.
To see the dewdrops thrill the blades of grass,
Makes my whole body shake; for here's my choice
Of either sun or shade, and both are green --
A Chaffinch laughs in his melodious voice.
The banks are stormed by Speedwell, that blue flower
So like a little heaven with one star out;
I see an amber lake of buttercups,
And Hawthorn foams the hedges round about.
The old Oak tree looks now so green and young,
That even swallows perch awhile and sing:
This is that time of year, so sweet and warm,
When bats wait not for stars ere they take wing.
As long as I love Beauty I am young,
Am young or old as I love more or less;
When Beauty is not heeded or seems stale,
My life's a cheat, let Death end my distress.
"Seeking Beauty" by William Henry Davies
Beauty
Having a goal seemed to perk up Father, in a weird way, and caused him to finally emerge from his study and mingle with us little people. In fact, he planned as much as I did, in that last week. He gathered supplies, scribbled down ideas on scraps of parchment, and generally made himself busy. He felt useful, and all of us were just so relieved that he had finally left his study and seemed interested in something that none of us complained that we were plenty old and clever enough to handle things on our own.
We had missed our father, as little as we truly knew him, and we were just glad that he had torn himself from his pit of despair.
With Anna Maria's help, we procured a wagon in which to carry our few belongings and supplies for our new life. I insisted that Jasper come with, even though he was an expense we almost couldn't afford, but although he was a tall and lanky gelding more suited to hopping fences or carrying a lively prince, he quite gladly set to traces for me and pulled our wagon. It was a small wagon, too small for anyone to actually ride in (it was a wooden box with wheels, truly), and we had to cover it with oiled tarpaulin to protect it from the weather. We traveled slowly--none of us besides Anna Maria had ever walked that far--and let Jasper lead us across the countryside with the squeaky wheels of our sole wagon. Each night we slept on bedrolls on the hard and lumpy ground and as we went, we ceased to gain new blisters and our feet began to callous.
Aelric went with us willingly enough, but he never said a word. He helped heave the wagon out of ruts when Jasper got it stuck, he walked just as quickly as the rest of us (never a single complaint) and helped to make a poor and lumpy porridge whenever it was his turn, but he never spoke. We despaired of him ever recovering Nate's precipitous departure, but all of us were so close to merely surviving that there was little we could offer him in the way of reassurance.
Anna Maria and Darryn seemed to carry a desperate and tenacious hope with them like burdens across their shoulders. They wanted to be happy together, it was obvious to all of us that a single glance shared between them carried whole conversations we weren't a part of, but they despaired being happy when the rest of us were not.
I? I had been book learned. I knew very little in the way of practical application of well...anything. Even my tea had been made for me. I could tack a horse, ride a horse, strap on my own shoes, walk, read, write--that list pretty summed up my capabilities upon our departure. Well, at least very close to our departure. Dear friends of mine taught me how to plant a seed and coax it to the surface, how to gather eggs without getting my fingers pecked, how to milk a cow without getting kicked--but even my brothers were more prepared for the long trek across the countryside. My naive youth thought that walking through the fields would be beautiful, an experience to remember.
One can only see so many cows and sheep before one gets bored.
Roads and lanes become the same, fields of crop and pastures of barn animals merged into a continuous loop that never seemed to end, blisters grew upon blisters upon blisters until my forced cheerfulness about our "adventure" into the real world subsided into weary silence.
That, of course, was when we reached our destination.
The house Anna Maria had procured for us appeared to be in the middle of the village next to the inn. This meant that we were in the thick of things--and that drunks landed on our doorstep. We were lucky, Anna Maria told us, that the village was big enough for an inn at all. Many had not a one and cooked food was hard to come by--unless it was in your own kitchen. Covered in dust, stumbling wearily through the streets, we were less ready to cook than infants.
We walked into the town midday. It was the perfect time, we were told, to trade our wagon for goods. We heaved our belongings into the central room of our new house, disturbing the thick dust, and Darryn and I led Jasper to the inn to inquire where we could take the wagon while Anna Maria, Aelric, and my father attempted to battle the dust in our previously shut up house.
I wished them well, as the downstairs area was large (we were told that traditionally it would be meant for the farm animals we were to keep), the kitchen was a good size, and upstairs there were three rooms: Darryn and Anna Maria would share one, Aelric and I another, and Father would have the third.
Of course, Darryn and Anna Maria sleep in the same until they were actually married, but the difference was negligible as they planned to be married immediately.
The point was--the house was a fair size and I held no interest in fighting dust bunnies in dusty corners.
"Will you stay with the horse, brother?" I asked Aelric. A formality, really, as he would be highly inappropriate as a spokesperson inside the inn--usually they are required to actually speak.
He nodded and held onto Jasper's reins.
It now occurs to me that as a sixteen year old I had been shouldering a rather lot of responsibilities for my family. I planned the trip, prepared for it, convinced them to make it, made it happen...I will never know whether my books forced me to grow up, or I was what was known as an old soul. I had never been all that frivolous, however (if you didn't count an absurdly large collection of books as just that) or into girls, so I had a lot of time to think about things like what I wanted to do and how to do it. Of course, whatever plans I had made before we lost our entire life were completely null and void.
A poor son of a merchant does not a college-learned scholar make.
But it seemed natural to me that if my family was unwilling or incapable of making something happen, that I should do so myself.
So, shoulders held back and chin set level, I pushed through the doors into--the very empty inn.
"Well hello there," a boisterous voice greeted.
I looked, and it appeared to come from a red-faced portly man scrubbing one of the many tables in the establishment. I gathered my courage and spoke.
"Yes, uh, hello." Smooth. Just, smooth.
He flipped his wash cloth over his large beefy shoulder and began to dry his hands on his dirty apron, approaching me all the while with a gently curious expression on his face.
"I've never seen you in these parts before," he said. "Can I help you with something? You've missed the mid-day meal but I've probably some bread and maybe a mite of stew left."
"Oh no," I smiled, relieved that he seemed just as friendly as any of the shopkeepers I had known in the city. "My family and I, we've just arrived, we're the ones that bought the shut-up house next to this inn?" I hated how my voice raised at the end of my phrase and malformed it into a question, but I was unsure whether he was the proprietor or not. I had thought to see a woman, for some unknown reason.
His face lit up. "You're with Anna Maria? And you must be the youngest. Beau, was it?"
I flushed in embarrassment. "Ah well, no. It's Beauty, actually."
He nodded and stepped even closer, extending his ham-sized hand for a shake. "Nice to meet you, I'm McHall and this is my inn. McHall's Inn."
I would have never guessed.
I shook his hand gratefully. "Nice to meet you as well, sir. We've just come in, as I said and I was just wondering..."
A raised eyebrow prompted me and I let go of his hand.
"We've got a cart. Is there someplace we can sell it? We will need food, of course...."
"I wouldn't hear of it!" he bellowed.
Involuntarily, I took a step back. "Pardon?"
"If you've just arrived, you must be bushed! Come eat at my inn, leave the cart for tomorrow. You've a horse? He can stay in my stable, of course." As he spoke, he nodded vigorously to himself. Then he turned and yelled to the kitchen. "I'll be out, wife! Man the kitchen if you will!"
"Woman! Woman the kitchen!"
He chuckled and reached around me to lay a hand on my back, turn me, and propel me to the door. "C'mon, lad. Let's get everything all worked out."
McHall turned out to be an extremely generous man. Not only did he feed us supper and house our cart and horse, he insisted that we stay in his inn for the night.
"Naught but dust in your house right now, there is. No need to roll in it," was his pragmatic explanation.
Thanks to him, for the first time in months we slept in proper beds.
Well, my family might have slept, but I slept not a wink. Instead, I sat in the window sill, without an actual glass pane and only kept the wind out by dint of two wooden shutters, and listened to the sounds of the village and the countryside.
All I could hear was the clucking of sleeping chickens, the lowing of lazy cows, the occasional dog barking or cat yowling, and the crickets in the grass.
I desperately wanted the city back.
Living in a small village was a lot like living in the city, and not like living in it at all. For one, gossip was just as prevalent. No sooner did we open our front door and begin to finish cleaning did the first of the busybody neighbors arrive.
"Don't mind me!" she called over her shoulder as she pushed by me for the kitchen. "I've just got eggs, is all. I'll be out in a tick! Oh, and me name's Sarah."
Some were like that--in and out with hurried introductions--some stayed to help clean for a while. One woman chatted for at least an hour before she dusted her hands off and said she had to head home to cook supper.
Most everyone was like that. They were kind, had absolutely nothing holding them back from butting in whenever they wanted, and freely offered advice without realizing what sort of gold it was to us.
We settled in quickly. Darryn and Father procured (and sometimes made) furniture for the house. If it was mismatched, then none of us really noticed or cared--we no longer had to sit upon the floor. Aelric mostly meandered, whether it was around the house or about the village commons, he spent a lot of time watching and listening. Anna Maria and I made the bedding for our beds. I stuffed and she sewed. She really was a professional with the needle. Sometimes I thought that she would finish a seam even before I had stuffed the bed properly.
Without her, we would have been without help. Four men in one house whose idea of manual labor was either writing from dawn to dusk or building a ship from scratch? Without her, we would have had no idea what to do with the brick oven or, well, anything else that had to do with the kitchen.
Behind the house was a small plot that was all ours. As Anna Maria was busy bringing our house up to snuff and attempting to get a start at her business (she already had two friends of her mother's asking for Sunday gowns), I got down to the dirty business of fleshing out our garden. The packets I had faithfully carried with me all the way from the city were opened, germinated in bits of damp cotton on my window sill, and eventually sown in the dirt. That, of course, had to happen after I waged war with all of the weeds. Our "plot" was only a plot in the very roughest of terms. It had no fence, so the chickens from the inn yard had wandered through and eaten whatever they liked (including the grass), a goat or two had done the same (and perhaps a deer), and some of the weeds appeared to be threatening the health and happiness of other neighbor's yards.
Their relief was very apparent when I showed up asking to borrow a trowel and some clippers.
It was a tedious task, but the only one that I thought I could manage. Of my whole family, I was the only one who had not a trade at all, and as I had read of plants well, I thought I could manage it.
I soon grew callouses on my hands to match my feet, sun-browned skin on the backs of my hands and face, and a squint with matching creases around my eyes. The weeds simply didn't want to go. But taming the yard kept me occupied while I very nervously waited for my seeds to sprout--these things don't happen immediately, of course.
While I toiled, Father made connections with other men of the village, learning about the trade in the area and who did what. Anna Maria gained more customers, but mostly sewed whatever they gave her--we hadn't yet the means to procure the supplies she needed to spin and weave, so her spindle and frame sat, empty, in our sitting room until we did. Darryn visited the blacksmith who proved to be very amenable to having my ship-wise brother as an apprentice, and started work right away. His massive frame ended up being perfect from the job and he came home every night sore, weary, but with a bright smile on his face. I had my garden, of course, and also went to the market for our food each day. Anna Maria's work was bringing in enough for that, at least, as well as the proceeds from our cart. Aelric still wandered, but everyone was kind to him, though I often heard young women speaking of his plight.
"I hear his bride-to-be was stolen away from him," one girl said.
"No!" her friend replied in horror. "Truly?"
"Oh yes, by a pirate, at that."
It made him more popular with the young women than he realized, but, of course, he never noticed.
He still hadn't spoken a word.
Father took my two brothers and Anna Maria to church each Sunday, but I always elected to stay home. I was the odd duck in the family in every sense of the word--I saw no need to go to a communal building each day and worship a fictional piece of work. Ironic, I realize. But it was my choice and no one commented on it. Instead, I used that day to go riding on Jasper. He was woefully under-exercised, ensconced in the inn stable and paddock as he was, so Sunday was our day to roam the countryside together. No fence was too high nor a lane too long.
I thought, perhaps, that I would hear mutterings from villagers of how I did woman’s work and that I needed a proper trade, or that I was perhaps dragging my family down by not simply going out and doing something. But, instead, I received nothing but support for my flourishing garden. I built a fence around my plot with chicken wire and stakes, then I had to put in posts and string for my rapidly growing peas. All of my vegetables grew peacefully together and soon I had more zucchini than I knew what to do with.
So I took them to market.
After that, I received more than support for my endeavors, I received praise. Mine was the best garden in the village and the fruits of my labor were much wanted. Whenever I had any excess to take to the market, they were gone before the morning was through and I had more coins in my pockets to buy new things to plant. Here and there I bought a book, and I also became known as someone who knew what I was talking about when it came to literature.
The pastor, as it turned out, was very much so into literature. To my complete and utter surprise.
One afternoon, he invited me to tea. Prior to this, he had only visited my place of residence or spoken to me at market or while I was out and about. But as he was an upstanding gentleman, and I was actually a tad flattered, I accepted his invitation and showed up on his doorstep one fine afternoon.
We had a very enjoyable time together, but I left feeling rather dazed.
My father, upon noticing over supper that I had nothing to say about my garden (quite unusual, as I often upheld the nightly conversation with my inane chatter), asked me what was the matter.
"Well," I said hesitantly. "I may be mistaken, but I think the pastor just spent the afternoon feeling out whether or not Aelric would be interested in his daughter."
Everyone at the table blinked.
"Pardon?" Darryn asked. "Did I hear that correctly?"
"No," a voice said, cracked from disuse.
We all turned to look at Aelric. I imagine I looked quite disbelieving with my eyebrows nearly in my hairline and Darryn was practically gaping.
Father merely smiled a smug sort of smile and said not a word.
"I am not interested."
Those were the first words Aelric had said in nearly a year, but they weren't the last by any means. Apparently, he had an awful lot to say. Thanks to this, he gained a position at the inn helping McHall with the actual hall. He became an asset as he was able to speak to anyone and everyone. It was amazing what several months of simply observing had done to give Aelric insider knowledge about the village and its inhabitants. He knew everyone on sight, could ask them about their wife, their dog, and even their children, and uphold a conversation with anyone who approached him. He became known as a very friendly and knowledgeable character. But he made it extremely plain that he was interested in no one's daughters.
Father, in a seamless transition, went from being a merchant to a tradesman. He became known for being able to judge the value of anything presented to him and soon began taking goods from one village to the next for various patrons who wished to trade outside of town. He never traveled very far, upon my horse as he was with a new and much more dapper cart trailing behind, but he soon earned enough money for his own horse and began traveling farther and farther abroad, happy in his endeavors.
Then he got lost in a storm.
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