Lynna Banning - Plum Creek Bride

She shuddered and cast a look at the housekeeper. Mrs. Benbow’s gaze followed every motion the physician made, an approving gleam in her eyes. No doubt she considered it her chicken, Erika thought, which she had prepared and offered up as a sort of sacrifice to her employer.

“White meat or dark?” the doctor inquired.

Erika blinked. “What?”

He studied her with quizzical gray eyes, the knife in one hand, a two-pronged silver fork in the other. “Breast or thigh?”

She couldn’t utter a word. She hadn’t the faintest idea. In all her twenty-four years she had never been asked such a question. It was either food or no food, never what kind of food; his question was beyond her understanding. She had so much to learn in America!

One thing she did know, however, was that speaking the word breast out loud in this man’s presence was an impossibility. Already she felt her cheeks flame at the thought of such an intimacy. Thigh was just as bad.

“White,” she choked out at last.

“Breast, then,” he said. His voice was unemotional, but deep in his eyes a light flickered, as if he were secretly amused. “Mrs. Benbow?”

He lifted a generous piece of chicken onto Erika’s plate as he waited for the housekeeper’s reply.

“Chest, thank-ee.”

The doctor chuckled. He served the housekeeper, then himself, taking both thigh and drumstick and a double spoonful of the fluffy whipped potatoes.

Erika mentally inscribed the word chest in her study notebook. She had thought it meant a piece of furniture with drawers, but in English, she was learning, one word could have two meanings. Repeating the word over and over in her head, she watched Mrs. Benbow dip the serving spoon into the oversize vegetable dish.

When it came her turn, she dug in the silver spoon and hesitated. The bowl looked familiar. She plopped the potatoes onto her plate, continuing to study the container.

It was the baby’s bathtub! Erika froze in horror. Not two hours ago, she had used the same bowl to bathe the infant! What would Mrs. Benbow say if she knew?

But she didn’t know, Erika assured herself. The sour-faced woman was totally absorbed in cutting her chicken “chest” into tiny square pieces. The housekeeper would only know about Erika’s earlier use of the bowl if—

Her breath squeezed off. If Dr. Callender told her! Oh, dear God. Would he? Was her employment in America to last just these two magical days before she’d be turned out of this house to fend for herself?

Her heart in her throat, she sneaked a look at the black-haired, elegantly attired gentleman at the head of the table. Calmly he glanced at the vegetable dish and lifted a morsel of chicken past his lips. He chewed for what seemed an eternity, swallowed, then opened his mouth to speak.

Erika flinched as his gaze met hers. Now. He would tell Mrs. Benbow now what she had done with the vegetable bowl.

“Mrs. Benbow?”

The housekeeper bobbed her gray head. “Yes, sir?”

Erika shut her eyes. She didn’t want to see the look on Mrs. Benbow’s face when he told her.

“My compliments. This chicken is excellent.”

“Why, thank you, sir!”

Erika’s lids snapped open. Across the table a pair of gray eyes surveyed her with a keen look. One dark brow rose in a sardonic arch. “Is something wrong, Miss Scharf?” he inquired, his voice bland.

“No,” Erika managed. She stabbed her fork into the potatoes on her plate, nervously moving them into a circle. She kept her eyes glued to the crisscross marks her fork tines made. “Nothing is wrong.”

When at last she raised her head, she found he was still looking at her. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, but his eyes were the same—calm, distant, except for that sudden odd light in their depths.

All at once she felt as if her head was full of sunshine. She couldn’t look away from him.

What was he thinking at this moment? Why had he not told Mrs. Benbow about the vegetable bowl?

Was it possible this stiff, unfriendly man had a glimmer of understanding about how she felt?

No, not possible. He planned to send his baby daughter—his own child—thousands of miles across the sea to Scotland. What kind of man would do that?

Still, he had kept her secret. And he hadn’t objected—well, not too strongly, at least—when she’d spoken up about sending his child away.

Absentmindedly, Erika pressed new patterns into her potatoes while she tried to think about the man who faced her across the table. Dr. Jonathan Callender held her future in the palm of his smooth, aristocratic hand. She had to try to understand him.

More than that, she had to please him!

Erika gave the goat’s lead a determined tug. “Come, Jasmine! Doctor say goat milk good for baby. We will be late for feeding!”

The goat lifted its head from a cluster of pink roses twining over a picket fence and stopped chewing. Two hard black eyes regarded her with curiosity for a full minute before Erika gave another sharp jerk on the rope. The animal trotted after her.

Jubilant, she marched along Chestnut Street with a spring to her step. She had bargained for the goat at the first farm she’d reached on the road out of town, trading the promise of a free consultation with Dr. Callender for the best milk goat of the bemused farmer’s herd. But getting the animal from the farmer’s field to the doctor’s backyard wasn’t so easy.

So far, Jasmine had devoured most of the wild iris blooms scattered along the road back to town, plus a large portion of a purple butterfly bush arching over a neighbor’s fence, and now the roses. Erika sighed. Just a few more blocks, and she could tether the headstrong animal to the plum tree behind Dr. Callender’s stable. With its preference for a diet of flowers, the milk should be extra rich and tasty!

Pleased, she tugged the animal around the corner onto Maple Street and tied it to the plum tree behind the whitewashed barn.

Jonathan lunged into the dusty black buggy, grabbed the reins and flicked them smartly over the mare’s broad back. “Of all the confounded, muddleheaded arrogance,” he muttered. “One of these days, so help me, I will throttle that quack Chilcoate within an inch of his life!”

Daisy leapt forward and trotted down Main Street. When the doctor forgot to signal his intention, the horse turned the corner by habit.

No, Jonathan amended, belatedly pulling on Daisy’s rein. He would not throttle the man. He’d let the fool hang himself with his own rope. Sooner or later it had to happen; one of his noxious elixirs would poison someone. Jonathan prayed nightly for the health of the unwitting townspeople of Plum Creek and carried an extra bottle of ipecac in his medical bag.

Underneath, he knew getting rid of the incompetent old man wasn’t going to change a thing. It was the mayor—that idiot banker, Brumbaugh—and the rest of his town council toadies who were bent on ignoring the situation until it would be too late. An hour ago he’d argued himself blue in the face, ended up shouting at the mayor and telling Rutherford Chilcoate to shut up unless he could speak intelligently or even comprehend the existence of bacteria.

What would it take to convince them he knew what he was talking about? They needed a new water system, one that bypassed contamination sources and had a reservoir and modern filtering equipment. Cholera had been rampant in eastern cities for the past decade; it was only a matter of time before it hit Plum Creek. A sixth sense told him it would be sooner rather than later, since the farms and small ranches upstream continued to let their animal waste matter seep into the town water supply. Summer would be hot. And long.