“He took a dislike to me right away.” Cay was eating some vegetable she’d never seen before, but it was delicious. She wondered if it would grow in Virginia. Maybe in her mother’s orangery.
“I think he was jealous,” Thankfull said. “He was to be the youngest one on the journey, but there you were with your youth and handsomeness and your education, and—”
“Education?” Cay didn’t like for this woman to guess too much about her.
Thankfull smiled. “According to young Tim you sound like an English professor. Not that he’s ever met one, but he had a lot to say about your ‘uppity ways.’”
Cay was pleased that the woman seemed to understand the boy so well, and she was beginning to think she liked her. That was a good thing if she was going to have to spend a lot of time with her. “Have you lived here long?”
Thankfull went to the sideboard to get a pottery bowl. From the little Cay had seen, the house was sparsely furnished with what looked to be locally made furniture, and it was clean and neat.
“A lifetime,” Thankfull said as she spooned sliced fruit into the bowl and put it before Cay. “Not really, but it seems like it’s been a very long time.”
Cay knew that she shouldn’t ask for more of the woman’s story because that was a female trait. Her father had often said that he could know a man for twenty years and not find out as much about him as his wife learned in twenty minutes.
But Cay couldn’t help it. She was in a strange place among strangers and she wanted to hear about the woman’s life. “And why is that?” she asked.
Thankfull didn’t say anything for a while, but Cay’s expression encouraged her. Thankfull didn’t say so, but nearly all their boarders were older men, and all they wanted to talk about was business of one sort or another. They didn’t take the time to sit and talk with a woman who ran a boardinghouse. “My mother died when I was born, so for many years it was just my father and me. He liked to move around, so I never got to really know many people, but there was one young man . . .” She waved her hand in dismissal. “Anyway, my father heard that there were better jobs and better, well, everything farther down south, so we moved again and again. He remarried when I was seventeen, and his new wife had the twins, Jane and Alice. She wasn’t a woman who took easily to motherhood and the domestic life.”
“You mean she took advantage of having an older stepdaughter and gave the children and the house to you to take care of?”
Thankfull smiled, and when she did, Cay thought she looked much younger and prettier. “More or less. After all, she was only six months older than I was. She wanted to enjoy her life.”
“But you . . .”
Thankfull shrugged. “She died when the girls were ten, and my father died the next year, so it was a good thing that I was still at home to take care of them.”
“So you were a mother without being a wife.”
“A person does what she has to.”
“Yes, she does,” Cay said as she picked up the bowl of fruit and looked at it. She was thinking about all that had happened with her and Alex. She’d indeed done what she’d had to.
“So you’re going to stay here and wait for your brother to return from Mr. Grady’s expedition?”
“Actually, my brother wants me to stay here a few weeks, then return home.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes,” Cay said. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“You’re awfully young to travel alone.”
“I’m twenty.”
Thankfull’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. “Please don’t tell my half sisters that. I told them you were only sixteen. If they know you’re twenty, they’ll have you married to one of them in two weeks.”
Cay smiled. “I hardly think so.”
“Yes, they will,” Thankfull said seriously. “You don’t know how bad they want to get out of here. Alice says she’s going to become an actress, but Jane wants to get married and have children.”
“But they couldn’t be more than . . . What?”
“Fourteen, almost fifteen. But they’ve been exposed to a lot in their short lives, so it makes them think they’re older. I was hoping that maybe you’d like one of them and . . . and . . .”
“Take her off your hands?”
“Yes,” Thankfull said, smiling.