Chapter 23

During the next week Anne made an inventory of what was in her smoke house, pantry and root cellar, which proved to be very little, and gathered a lot of eggs with the help of Miranda and got to know her two nameless nanny goats who supplied the house with milk. She had been warned that they would have to be penned once her kitchen garden was sprouting.

Then she made a list of the repairs the old house and its row of outbuildings needed, especially the privy, decided to have one crooked wing of the house torn down, and on Saturday hitched up her dray horse and went to market, trading her hen and duck eggs for cut nails, salt, turnips, carrots and potatoes and bargaining with a local farmer to provide her with some hams, sausage and bacon when he did his hog killing. He suggested that she let him take deadfalls out of what was left of her woodlot for at least partial payment, and she agreed. He was not interested in her eggs.

With that done and almost all her outstanding accounts from the auction now settled and bills paid, on Monday she found passage on a wide-beamed fishing boat crossing the Bay and went to Annapolis carrying the proceeds of the sale, less her meager share of the total since she was keeping the old house at its tax-assessed value and abjuring the proceeds from the new one, if any. At the large, fancy home on State Street she found that most of the downstairs furniture had been sold, even her father's desk, and that the house itself was being put on the block the next Monday.

She salvaged a few things from her room, packed up her books, André's silhouette, two ragdolls, the clothes and shoes she wanted to keep, gave her stepmother's attorney the money and the accounting wordlessly, and, after a brief visit with her sister, returned to the Eastern Shore the same afternoon on the same blunt-nosed boat, feeling as if she had just been permanently rejected by polite society. For the first time, she realized she was an orphan and found herself praying, something she seldom did, praying for guidance, for forgiveness. It made her throat ache. My soul, she managed to remember, doth magnify the Lord. She wondered what it meant. It was the only prayer, other than the Lord's Prayer and that bless this bed verse, that she could recall.

The fisherman took her to her own rickety dock, and she paid and thanked him after he helped pile her goods on the worn planking. She sat on her dome-topped trunk and watched him tack out toward the sluggish Chester River and straighten his wide rudder. Now, she decided, I am really on my own. She sought a word, a term for it, and decided that "transformation" was a pretty good fit. I am transformed; becoming something new; no longer a daughter, no longer a girl but, of course, still a maiden. That made her smile. It was kind of frightening. She was still smiling as she dragged her trunk up to the house and sent Miranda back with a wheelbarrow for the other goods.

After a cold supper, she sat at the dining room table with the cook, who was called Lucy, and the young black girl who was about her age. "I have three people coming over this week," she said. "A cook and her daughter and a very old man. I do not need two cooks. Nor two maids or kitchen helpers. What shall we do?"

"I'd like to stay and be your maid," said Miranda. "Your momma had her own maid, didn't she?"

Anne nodded. "She did, but things were different then, trade was good, and I do not think I can afford it now. Is there anyone in the area you'd like to work for, either of you?"

The older woman nodded and smiled. "There's a blacksmith on the Riley farm, good fellow, he and I, well, we knows each other. I don' think they's got a reg'lar cook over there ri'now."

"I'll look into it. I know one of the Rileys, at least I did," Anne said, recalling a gawky boy she had fished and played games with ten years before, one of a family with many males.

Miranda was sniffing rather theatrically. "Don' sell me, Miss Anne. Please don't."

"Can you tend a kitchen garden, hoe and pull weeds?" Anne asked, trying to look resolute.

"Ah can learn, yes'm. I surely can learn." Miranda smiled and bobbed her head vigorously.

Moses, Bess and Phillipa arrived on Wednesday afternoon, full of stories about how the big house and everything in it was sold and how Louise ran off with some man. "Even my pots an' pans," said the mournful-looking Bess. "My own pots and pans, d'iron spider right out'a the hearth, even d'hooks. Ever'thing but the cat. Cat ran off like tha' girl did, stole hersef."

By then the home's old cook was happily ensconced at another farm, in trade for several bushels of shelled corn, a slab of bacon and two very elderly-looking hams plus five days of work on the house and sheds by the Riley boys, who claimed to be first-rate carpenters.