AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(14)
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Evangeline understood what was uppermost in Gertrude’s mind when the middle-aged woman forsook the kitchen to greet her with alacrity in the surgery. “Allt v?l?” plump and peach-colored Gertrude asked.
Barely had Evangeline assured her in English mixed with the smattering of Swedish words Evangeline knew that all had gone well at the market, than the ample-busted woman, not that much taller than Evangeline’s own five feet, declared, “You meet Peter Erichsson, ja?”
The young man in the chair plucked the damp cloth from his uptilted face. He turned on her an eager smile and apple-red cheeks that framed a porcine nose. He could not have been much past eighteen. “God dag, F?kenWainwright. Jag har h?rt s? mycket om dig.”
She glanced inquiringly at Gertrude and John, who grumpily interpreted, “Peter here says he has heard much about you.”
At her puzzled looked, John added, “A young woman who owns a tavern makes for good gossip.”
She supposed she should have expected that, in the intervening four years since her arrival in the New World and the intervening twenty miles between her inn and Fort Christina, word of her would filter back to the Swedish colony. Gertrude, who grudgingly acknowledged her husband’s business had increased three-fold in the fortnight since Evangeline had come to work for them, doubtless had helped spread the gossip in the past two weeks.
Evangeline dipped Peter a curtsey. “God dag.”
Hanging her gray woolen cloak on a wall peg, she slipped past the three to the kitchen, where she discarded her gloves and unloaded her basket of herbs. As anxious as Gertrude was to see her married off and out of the cabin and away from her husband’s assessing eye, Evangeline was equally anxious. She was not destitute. Yet. But vulnerable, aye. She could not afford to alienate the Croxtons.
With the large number of available males at Fort Christina, outnumbering the females by five to one, male customers were flocking to the barber-surgeon suddenly
But she was not predisposed toward marriage. She was too accustomed to the autonomy accorded by an indulgent father and brother and later by The Virgin Queen’s three derelict males.
Those three put up with her periodic emotional outbursts that would leave them glancing from one to the other with brows raised, then shrug off their bewilderment and shuffle off to safer locales, such as the outhouse, stable, barn, orchard, or scullery.
She grabbed a bucket and brush and attacked the Croxton kitchen’s grime and dirt. Fifteen minutes late, from behind her, Gertrude cleared her throat.
On all fours, Evangeline looked over her shoulder. “Aye?”
The Swedish woman’s expression was as soft as a freshly-plumped goose down pillow. “St. Knut’s Day . . . tomorrow . . . you dance? Peter, a good boy he is. A chandler’s apprentice, he wears the blue apron. Soon, he has his own candle shop.”
Evangeline smiled and shrugged her shoulders, as if she did not fully understand. The rest of the day and that night, her mind hopped into a squirrel cage, spinning frenziedly. How long could she stall? If not, where to next? And what about Rasannock, Gantu, and Bonnie Charlie?
As if in answer to the last, Bonnie Charlie, his bushy hair contained by a coonskin cap, appeared at her side the next morning at the fort’s trading post. She was looking over the collection of iron spoons, spread on the knife-notched counter. Wooden spoons did not do justice to exact medication measurements like the iron ones.
“Got yew a good price for Molly,” he muttered. “A fellow up Turtle Falls Creek shelled out twenty-eight riksdalers for the cantankerous mule.”
Mild relief took the edge off her worry. Since leaving her at the Swedish fort, Bonnie Charlie had taken to the woods, appearing at the trading post every couple of days to sell furs he had trapped– and to keep tabs on her. “Good,” she murmured, not wishing to attract the attention of gray-bearded old Larss, who was folding a horse blanket at the end of the counter. “We may need it, sooner than I thought.”
“How’s that?”
“Gertrude Croxton wants me out of her cabin as early as possible. She is endeavoring to pair me off at dance tomorrow. With a Peter Erichsson.”
“St. Knut’s celebration – the Thirteenth Day of Christmas. And young Peter Erichsson – that’s enough to make yewr innards crawl.” Bonnie Charlie scratched the back of his sun-cooked neck. “I say we bide our time. Word is that an English galleon has sent scouting parties ashore up and down the Large Potato Creek. Mayhap, we’uns be safer here, at the fort, for a bit more.”
Was there such a feeling as safe?
*
Feet spread, Baron William Craven braced his body, thick in arms and shoulders, against both the bobbing of the poop deck and the buffeting wind, loudly whipping the sails. He brought the Swedish settlement into the view of his telescope.
Four score or more of log farmsteads were scattered around the fort – guarded by the breastworks and palisades with what looked to be a couple of twelve-pounder cast iron cannons and several three-pounder brass guns. But with the Swedes and English on good terms, there would be no need for a show of force here.
“Take a sounding,” he told the leadsman.
The man bobbed his red Monmouth-capped head. “Aye aye, General,” he said with a tone that approached surliness and ambled off
“And shake a leg.” It was William’s ironbound regard for discipline that had propelled him to the top of Cromwell’s regime. The Sovereign’s scurvy crew with its lax morale could use a taste of the cat-o’-nine tails.