The Dowry of Miss Lydia Clark Read Free Page A

a wedding gift last June. The couple could have lived in the Larkspur ’s vacant family quarters free of charge, but Julia could well understand their desire for a home of their own.
    As Julia entered the kitchen, the cook was seated at the worktable peeling potatoes over a dishpan. “Keep your seat, Mrs. Littlejohn,” Julia told her when she made a move to push out her chair. “I’ll just leave this on the cupboard shelf. How are you keeping?”
    “Right well, Mrs. Phelps,” the older woman replied with a smile. She had a squarely proportioned face under a topknot of dark brown hair that resembled one of the unpeeled potatoes. For some twelve years she had worked in the squire’s scullery, until Mrs. Bartley—formerly Mrs. Kingston—recommended her for the position with Elizabeth and Jonathan. “Won’t you be wantin’ to return the towel to the vicarage?”
    “I’ll just collect it on my way home after the meeting.”
    “No use in going to all that fuss. Just pull out that drawer behind you and take a clean one. Every kitchen in Gresham has the same ones anyway—threepence a bundle at Trumbles .”
    Julia did as she was told. When she turned around again, the cook nodded toward the door she had entered. “Mrs. Raleigh’s still going with you?”
    “Why, yes. As soon as she comes downstairs.”
    “Oh. Well, a little sunlight is good for a body.”
    Mrs. Littlejohn began peeling potatoes again, but her preoccupied expression worried Julia. Stepping closer to rest a hand on the back of a chair, she asked, “Is there something wrong with Elizabeth, Mrs. Littlejohn?”
    “Well…”
    “Please tell me if there is.”
    The cook darted a glance up at the ceiling, as if she could see Elizabeth moving about upstairs, before saying, “Hilda heard her being sick a little while ago. And it weren’t the first time.”
    “Being sick?”
    She touched her lips. “Heaving up her breakfast.”
    “Oh dear.” Julia glanced at the ceiling as well. “Is there any stomach powder in the house? I could dash over to Trumbles …”
    An enigmatic smile curved the corners of the cook’s lips. “I don’t believe stomach medicine will be of any use to the missus.”
    It took Julia a second before the meaning of the cook’s observation sunk in. Pulling out the chair, she sank into it. Is it possible? Even though Elizabeth was a woman of twenty-two, it was so easy to forget that she wasn’t still the insecure girl she had first met weeping in the vicarage garden three years ago. “Are you positive?”
    “Fairly. She’s gotten sick a couple of other mornings lately.”
    “Have you asked her about it?”
    Mrs. Littlejohn shook her head. “I didn’t know if it was my place to, Mrs. Phelps. Seems that if she wanted me and Hilda to know, she would have told us.”
    “I wonder if she knows it herself?” Julia wondered out loud. She didn’t have a mother for so long. And the subject of childbearing wasn’t considered appropriate conversation for polite society, so she could understand how Elizabeth could be in the dark about it. You should have prepared her better , she chided herself. Beyond a private talk on the eve of Elizabeth’s wedding, when she answered her stepdaughter’s timidly stated questions as forthrightly as possible, she had not thought of the months beyond the honeymoon. She thanked Mrs. Littlejohn for confiding in her, rose from the table, and returned to the parlor. Elizabeth was just coming down the staircase.
    “Julia! Thank you for waiting,” she said, a smile dimpling both cheeks. She looked quite becoming, her slender frame draped in a silk gown of blue and sage green. From under her Maltese lace morning cap the wheat-colored hair fell upon her neck in looped braids, and her fringe had been given the attention of a curling iron. She did not address Julia as Mother, as did Laurel—not from any lack of affection but simply because she was twenty years old when Julia married her father. “We