His hair had grayed and his damp forehead seemed much longer than she remembered. The sight of him—lying still as a corpse—did not move her or upset her in any way, which was just what she’d hoped.
“He’s resting easier at last,” whispered Polly. “He was thrashing all day. Even David took fright.”
“Let him sleep then,” said Judy. “I’ll tend to him after supper.”
While Polly breaded the fish, Judy cradled the baby until Natty could not bear it for another moment and demanded that she put David down and give him the attention he expected from his auntie.
They dined amid familiar happy chatter. Natty babbled about the flowers he’d picked for his mamma, the slate she was going to get him, and the baby’s bad smells. Neither Polly nor Oliver hushed him, and while Judy wondered if Natty would ever learn his manners, the fondness in the house worked upon her like wine, relaxing and warming her straight through. After dinner, Polly thought Judy looked a good ten years younger than when she had walked through the door.
A loud groan interrupted their party, and all heads turned—even the baby’s. It took Cornelius a few moments
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to open his gummy eyelids. Judy turned away, resting her cheek against Natty’s velvety forehead.
“Judy?” he croaked.
The sound of her name sent her to her feet and Natty tumbling to the floor. After a long, stunned, breathless moment the boy opened his mouth and howled.
“I’m sorry, my pet, my sweetkins, my lamb,” Judy apologized breathlessly, and picked him up. “Your old auntie just took a start, is all.” She carried him outside, kissing him all the while.
“Judy?” Cornelius said, naked longing in his voice.
“Have you come to me? Judy? Is it my Judy, for true?”
Oliver and Polly stared.
“How does he know her?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “They both lived in Dogtown.”
But Judy’s distress and Cornelius’s tone of voice signified something more than polite exchanges between neighbors. Polly wondered exactly what they had shared, how it might have started, why it had stopped, and how such a secret could have kept in such a small, gossipy place.
“Poor things,” she said.
Oliver frowned. He had tried to forget his boyish dreams of winning Judy for himself, and thought of her only as his auntie—his and Polly’s, as well as Natty’s and David’s. It was unsettling to think of her in any man’s arms, and for it to have been Cornelius seemed even more out of the natural order of things.
Judy walked Natty around the house a second time.
He’d stopped crying after the first turn. “Put me down,”
he said.
“Put me down, please,” she reminded, and let him go.
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She circled the house once more to compose herself. The sound of her name in Cornelius’s mouth had turned her upside down. If only she could walk away, back to Gloucester and her books. Even Martha’s pain and suffering were preferable to this. But she had to show the Youngers that there was nothing between her and Cornelius. She had to prove it to herself. And to him, too, she supposed.
With shoulders squared and a crooked sort of smile fixed on her mouth, she returned to her friends and headed directly to the cot, where she had so often slept with Natty tucked under her arm.