Katie MacAlister: The Trouble With Harry

“I am not a trollop,” Plum said softly, moving the pot slightly, so as to give her a longer backswing. “I have no idea how this Miss Stone — whoever she might be — found out about my marriage, but I can assure you that I am innocent of her charges. Now please release me, or I shall do you a bodily injury.”

He rubbed his chest against hers, his hands on her upper arms, holding her in place. “Everyone knows that ye’ll spread yer legs for any man what gives ye a taste of his manflesh.” He slid one hand up, grabbing a handful of her hair, jerking her head back. “I told ye to give us a kiss. I’m not of a mind to tell ye again!”

“Mr. Snaffle?” Plum swung the pot as far back as she could.

“Aye?” His repulsive lips were descending on hers.

“This is for your cods.” She brought the pot forward as hard as she could, striking him right at the junction of his legs. He screamed and fell backward, clutching at himself, spitting curses and profanities as he rolled over into a ball. Plum took a deep breath of relatively clean air, and stepped forward to stand over the writhing man.

“Henceforth I shall take my smithy business elsewhere,” she said, and gave him a swift kick in the kidneys just because she felt like it. “You’re lucky I’m a lady and not given to spite!”

With her head held high she left the smithy, a stubborn, brittle smile on her face, the eyes of what felt like the entire village scoring her flesh as she hurried home, clinging to the hope that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as Mr. Snaffle made out, but knowing it was much, much worse. She would have to move again, leave Ram’s Bottom, and how was she to accomplish that with only five shillings and no friends but Cordelia?

“Blessed St. Genevieve,” Plum all but sobbed as she stumbled into the tiny cottage she shared with Thom. “I’m going to have to marry Mr. T. Harris, no matter what sort of man he is. With luck, no one in Raving will know about me until I can marry him.”

“Marry who?” a low, disinterested voice asked.

Plum clutched the wall and fought to regain her breath as well as swallow her tears of self-pity. “Oh, Thom, I didn’t see you. What are you doing down there by the coal scuttle?”

Thom’s golden brown eyes considered her aunt for a moment before her head dipped below the roughplanked table in front of her, returning a moment later when she stood up, a tiny kitten cupped in her hand. “Maple has had her litter. Only three, but one was born dead. I was just making sure the two kittens were all right. Who do you have to marry?”

“Whom,” Plum corrected absently, her heart still pounding from the scene in the blacksmith’s. “I am going to marry — hope to marry — a Mr. T. Harris. If he’ll have me, that is.”

“Oh,” Thom said, and bent down to return the kitten to the nest she had made for Maple and her babies.

“Oh? Is that it? You’re not going to ask me who Mr. T. Harris is, nor why I am going to marry him?”

Thom rose and dusted her sooty hands off on her lavender gown, Plum noted with a mental sigh. It wasn’t the soiling of the gown she regretted, it was the tomboy nature of her niece. Thom was twenty years old, a young woman of intelligence and high spirits, of a good, if impoverished, family, and if she wasn’t the loveliest woman on the face of the earth, she was very pretty, with cropped chestnut curls, large dark gray eyes, and a very sweet smile. When she smiled, which Plum had to admit wasn’t often, Thom being a serious, takes-everything-literally sort who would rather spend time with the various animals she had collected than with the two-legged variety most young women preferred.

“Although how you are to catch a husband with no dowry, and a notorious aunt, is beyond me.” Plum sighed again, this time aloud.

Thom cocked her head and watched as Plum plucked her bonnet off and sank down into the rickety chair next to the fire. “I thought it was you who were planning to marry? I’ve told you before that I have no desire to marry. Men are so”—she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled cabbage cooking—“silly. Stupid. Mindless. I have yet to meet one who makes any sort of sense. To tell you the truth, I don’t think there are any. I will do quite well without one of my own, thank you.”

“Oh, Thom,” Plum said, on the verge of tears, but unable to keep from smiling at her niece’s dismissal of men as a whole. “What would I do without you?”

“Well, I imagine just what you are doing now,” Thom replied. “You do seem to have the habit of talking to yourself, Aunt Plum, so if I weren’t here, you’d probably be right where you are, telling the room that you’re going to marry Mr. Harris. Who is Mr. Harris?”

Plum blessed the day Thom came to her. If anyone could make her laugh at herself, it was her niece. “Mr. T. Harris is a man in search of a wife, and as I am a woman in search of a husband, I am hoping that we will suit one another. You wouldn’t mind me marrying, would you Thom? You know I wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t keep you, as well.”

Thom shrugged and filled a small cracked saucer with the last of the milk, setting it down next to the new mother. “If it will make you happy, I don’t mind in the least, as long as Mr. Harris won’t mind me bringing my animals. I couldn’t leave them behind.”

“No, of course not,” Plum said, trying to envision just how she was going to tell her prospective husband that not only was he gaining a wife and a niece but three cats, six dogs, two goats, four tame mice, and a pheasant that thought it was a rooster. Her mind boggled at that thought. She shook her head, clearing it of the morose thought that she was doomed, and rose to find a relatively clean scrap of paper before settling down at the table to write a letter so dazzling, it would be sure to capture Mr. Harris’s attention. “I pray he is an honest, likeable man with no secrets that will come back to haunt me. I just don’t think I could stand another husband with secrets.”

“How many applicants remain, Temple?” Harry asked, wearily pushing up his spectacles as he leaned back in the private room bespoken at the local inn for the purpose of conducting interviews.

Temple consulted his list. “Let me see, applicant number fourteen was reported too ill to travel…”

“Strike her from the list. If she is of frail health, she won’t be able to stand up to the strain of the children. It takes a strong woman, in full possession of her faculties — both mental and physical — to deal with my brood.”

“…and number twenty-three changed her mind at the door…”

“Shy. Shy won’t do either. My wife has to have a firm sense of purpose. Determination, too. Grit wouldn’t hurt, either.”

“…and numbers thirty and thirty-one appear to have run off together…”

Harry raised both eyebrows and forbore to comment.

“…and number thirty-three, the last applicant, appears to have decided not to meet with you.” Temple looked up. “There are no more, sir.”

Harry stood and stretched, rubbing the back of his neck and collecting his hat. “Well, that was six hours wasted. I hope to God I never have to meet so many women again.”

Temple trotted alongside Harry as he strode out of the inn, pausing to pass a few coins to the innkeeper before heading for the small stable block. “Were there none that meet with your specifications, my lord?”

“Shhh!” Harry waved Temple’s words away as he waited for Thor to be brought out. “No my lording , Temple. The fewer people who know my true identity, the better. At least until I find a wife.”

“My apologies, sir. Were there no women—”