Choices of the Heart by Laurie Alice Eakes Page B

they slid onto the bench at the far end of the breakfast table.
    “Miss Cherrett got herself a note this morning,” the younger one, Ned, said.
    “It weren’t nice,” Jack added. “Said she was to keep running.”
    “I’m sorry.” Griff met her gaze from across the long table, which was polished and embellished with carving enough to belong in a mansion dining room but handmade by Mr. Tolliver. “I should have warned them not to speak up.”
    “I’m glad you didn’t.” Mrs. Tolliver glanced around the table. “What is this about?”
    “Nothing important,” Esther said at the same time Griff said, “Likely a prank.”
    “But why would someone want her to keep running?” Ned asked. “I ain’t seen her run nowhere.”
    “I haven’t seen her,” Liza corrected him. “You gotta speak good in front of the teacher.”
    Esther would have to tell Liza that one spoke well, not good. At that moment, though, she appreciated the distraction and offered the middle Tolliver daughter a bright smile. “That’s what I’m here to teach, I think.”
    “Only if we want to go to school in a city,” Jack, somewhere around twelve years old, pointed out. “I don’t wanta go to the city. They smell bad and got too many people.”
    “But the ladies wear such pretty clothes.” Liza sighed. “Like your dress, Miss Cherrett. What do you call this stuff?” She touched one finger to Esther’s sleeve.
    “Muslin.” Esther shifted on her chair.
    One didn’t talk about clothes and the like with men seated at the table. At the same time, it stopped them from talking about that note burning a hole through her pocket.
    “Can we have some, Momma?” Liza asked.
    Mrs. Tolliver glanced toward her husband.
    He sat silently in his chair, his shoulders hunched like someone trying to hide. Pain lines etched a face that bore the same spectacular bone structure that had produced his beautiful children—all beautiful except for Bethann. His hair was red like hers, his eyes green. The children’s eyes too. Like Bethann’s, his mouth was thin and pursed.
    He pursed it further. “We didn’t bring her here to give our girls notions about wearing fancy clothes. They can wear those if they get themselves husbands who can afford it.”
    “But Pa,” Brenna whined, “those kind of men don’t go for girls in homespun.”
    “You’re too young anyway.” He pushed back his chair. “I’m going to the workshop.” He stalked from the room, every footfall sending a twitch through his shoulders as though he flinched from the pressure of putting each foot down.
    Perhaps she could persuade him to drink an infusion of white willow bark. Or get him to go to the mineral baths in Bath County or Berkeley Springs. Many people with painful backs enjoyed relief—
    But she was no longer a healer.
    Esther stared down at her half-empty porridge bowl. It was corn porridge, something she wasn’t fond of, but she’d eaten as much as she could to be polite. Sweetened with molasses, it wasn’t too bad, though now that she couldn’t swim, as she’d loved to do in the ocean, she would have to walk a great deal so she didn’t get too plump for her gowns, or she’d be wearing homespun too.
    “Maybe for Christmas,” Mrs. Tolliver was saying.
    “But the Independence Day celebration is coming,” Liza protested. “I’d like something nice for that.”
    “You have something nice for that.” Mrs. Tolliver stood and began to gather up dishes. “Brenna, it’s your turn to wash, then get out there and weed—”
    Griff slammed his coffee mug onto the table hard enough to rattle the flatware on the plates. “We were discussing someone sending Miss Cherrett a note. Since the boys mentioned it, we need to talk about it.”
    “We don’t know nothing about it,” the children chorused in a way that sounded rather too practiced and coordinated not to have been performed before.
    Mrs. Tolliver scowled at them. “I’ve heard that once too often to