A Changing Land(24)
The overseer gave a thin-lipped smile.
Lauren Grant lent further over the hessian bags of potato, flour and sugar in the small storeroom and steadied herself against the hard sacks. In between two of the stacked bags closest to the timber wall was a small gap where a brown mouse was sedately nibbling his way through one bag. The mouse tracked from one bag to another and Lauren imagined the little rodent tasting potato and then sugar in a delightful method of belly stuffing that would render him exhausted in the growing heat. Silently she concentrated on the mouse eating his fill as Mr Stevens proceeded to satisfy his own hunger. With her skirts thrown up about her waist, Lauren mentally began counting Mr Stevens’s panting. He was not much on ceremony and could be relied upon to conclude his business with a modicum of fuss.
Mr Stevens, a rangy man with a deep-set brow and a bony, finicky wife who was no doubt the cause of the deeply entrenched furrow between his eyes, gave a series of loud, breathy gasps. Lauren counted and then smelled eight exhalations of onion and the remnants of teeth-rotting food. Once he got to twelve she needed to brace herself against the wall, however today the hessian sacks were stacked in greater numbers and although she extended her arms, her fingers refused to touch the uneven timber wall before her. Instead Lauren found herself staring at the daylight seeping through the cracked timber and then, as her eyes gradually adjusted, into two pairs of eyes. The eyes giggled and kicked the outside wall before running away. ‘You scallywags,’ she berated as she was pushed forward onto the sacks. Mr Stevens gave a long sigh and then farted.
God’s holy trousers, Lauren thought with disgust. If ever a man knew how to ruin a perfectly harmless transaction it was this man with his less than fine personage, only just adequate dick and a voice like a squeaky wagon wheel bumping over a dirt track.
‘Good. Good girl. Take what you need.’
A triangle of light entered and left the storeroom. Lauren heard footsteps travelling the length of the narrow store and then a soft flipping sound, which signified the open/closed for business sign being adjusted. Picking herself up from where she had been so roughly shoved, Lauren patted her skirts down and tidied the wisps of hair that were matted with her sweat and the onion breath of the shopkeeper. She wanted more than potatoes and bread today, if you please. She had a hankering for eggs and a length of calico for a new skirt. Lauren peered around the uneven timber slats of the door. Mr Stevens expected her to leave by the rear window. To actually hitch up her skirts like her tabby cat of a sister Susanna and crawl from his sight. Well not today. Today was the last of such escapades. Though she’d been quite good, for recently only the ugly Scottish boy, McKenzie, and Mr Stevens had been regular.
On her reckoning Luke Gordon could be due in Wangallon Town at any moment. Lauren wiped at the line of sweat on her brow. Despite the morning’s undertakings she felt rather jaunty. The months of waiting were now behind her and she expected better things for her life in the new year. ‘Best be starting now,’ Lauren decided, firming her mouth and straightening her back. ‘Ouch.’ She pressed at the muscle in the small of her back, pinched her cheeks, although she doubted she needed the colour, scooped up a handful of potatoes and walked from the storeroom, her head high.
Hilda Webb and her two daughters were arguing over their account at the long wooden counter, giving Lauren time enough to select a bolt of green material from the shelf. She snatched up a reel of cotton and a length of pink ribbon that she fancied and dropped them down the front of her loose fitting blouse, and then with a cursory glance at the rather cheap-looking shoes on display, she carried the material to the counter. Her presence immediately raised the ire of the women who were of the social conviction that one should not mix with the daughter of a washer woman.
‘Perhaps, Mr Stevens, you wish to serve this person. Then we can complete our business in private.’ Mrs Webb held scented pomade to her nose.
Lauren dumped the potatoes on the counter and rested the material alongside. ‘This person has a name, Mrs Webb,’ Lauren announced, summoning her best toff’s voice that she decided was quite wasted in Wangallon Town, ‘which you know well enough seeing you can’t keep staff for more than a few months due to your own ill-humour and it’s me own mother who washes your dirty smalls.’
Mrs Webb opened her lips only to discover that embarrassment and anger rendered her silent. The older Miss Henrietta Webb took her mother’s arm and, pulling her aside amid whispers and furtive glances, the two women busied themselves examining some handkerchiefs of very poor quality.