Chapter 3

The next day Martin announced he and Kit were going to town to get her a dress and Kit some clothes. She wanted to go, but when she picked up her stiff smelly dress, she couldn’t bear to put it back on.

Furthermore she couldn’t bear to be seen in the tattered thing, even if she washed it.

She dropped the dress and turned to find her uncle standing right beside her. “I have to measure you,” he said.

His hands came to her waist, and he saw that his thumbs and fingers touched. His hands slid down to her hips and she jumped. His hands moved forward until his thumbs touched right over her fluff of lower hair. She gasped, but his hands then slid backwards, across her buttocks until his fingers touched in the back.

Her mouth came open and she felt his hands slide up, past her waist. She suddenly knew he was going to touch her breasts, but she couldn’t make herself move to stop him. Her own hands fluttered in the air by her shoulders. His hands slid to her back first, then around to her front. He cupped her breasts through the thin shirt and lifted them, as if he was weighing them with his hands.

“Uncle Martin!“ she croaked.

“Yes?” he asked.

“You’re touching me!” she said. Her breasts tingled from being touched.

“Was I not supposed to touch you? How else can I measure so your dress will fit?”

Laurie remembered her vow not to be so proper. She took a breath and was immediately aware that doing so had caused her breasts to move in his hands.

“Yes, of course. I’m being silly,” she said, a little weakly.

While they were gone, Laurie cleaned and picked up and explored the big room. She went up to the attic room again and stood before the wall of windows, watching the sea. It wasn’t so violent today, or at least it didn’t seem so in the bright sunlight. She picked up the heavy brass tube that was on the table and peered through one end. Everything was blurry. As she handled it, though, part of it slid and it became longer. She examined it and found that it was actually a series of tubes, one inside the other. She looked through it again and, as the length changed, she was able to make the tube focus on things. Lifting her head she looked out to sea.

There! A speck of white, not on the horizon, but just below it.

Carefully she raised the tube and used it to focus on the area of the horizon where she thought that speck might be. She passed by it twice, seeing it, but unable to stop the telescope in time. Then it was there, in the middle of the round view. She focused and a clipper ship leapt into view, it’s four masts full of white sails. She could clearly see black dots in the rigging, dots she knew had to be men, living, breathing men. She watched until her arms ached from holding the heavy viewing device up. She thought about taking the tube up inside the tower, where the light was, but she had never been invited up there yet, and she somehow felt that she shouldn’t go there until her uncle took her. After standing on the boardwalk in the wind for a while, she went back to her chores in the fort.

It seemed they were gone forever. But eventually her heart quickened as she heard the small back door open and then bang closed.

She couldn’t believe the change in Kit. His hair had been cut. He had on a checkered shirt, with sturdy cotton duck pants. Why ... he was handsome!

And when had he grown so much? He seemed taller ... older. She shook her head. Her uncle had a paper wrapped package in his hands. Her dress. She reached for it.

When she tore it open she sighed. It was beautiful. It was made of finely woven cotton, bright red, with white lace on the sleeves and neck.

It buttoned down the back. The neck scooped awfully low, but she supposed that was the fashion here in the East these days. It was long, of course. In another package he had a pair of soft doeskin moccasins. There was yet another package, and in it were linen underthings.

She looked at them with a raised eyebrow. Out on the prairie she’d have thought they were gorgeous ... wonderful ... a luxury. But two days of freedom from the tightness and binding and agony of adjusting stays and ties made her think that, at least while she was on the island, she might just be able to go without them.

“Oh turn around ... turn around!” she cried. Before either man could follow her directions the shirt she was wearing was half undone and both men were treated to a large expanse of smooth pale cleavage. She stepped into the dress and pulled it up, putting her arms through it.

“Uncle Martin? Can you button me up please?” she asked.

He turned and fastened the buttons, which went from the waist to the neck. It fit her like a glove. She whirled in it. “Oh thank you ... it’s beautiful!” She looked at both men and saw identical stares. In those stares she knew that not just the dress was beautiful. She felt like a woman for the first time since her parents had died.

“How on earth did you get one that fits so well?” she asked.

Martin frowned, but Kit laughed out loud. “You should have seen it Miss Laurie. We went into the store and they had this thing, I think they called it a dummy or something like that. Anyway, it looked sort of like the shape of a woman’s body, but it had moving parts. They could make it change shapes and sizes. It was pretty amazing. So Mr. Trumble here, he puts his hands on this thing, sliding his hands all over it and all, just like he did to you. And he moved it until he just said ‘That size’. I tell you that woman in there about had a fit! She was talking about how decent folks would know better and such, but she found a dress that fit on that thing just like it fits on you.”

Martin was still frowning. “They don’t like me in town. I only got this one for now. If it fits well then we can get more.” His eyes flicked to the package of underthings, then back to her face. She leaned close to him and whispered, “I’ll wear those when we go to town.”

He smiled.

When Martin came down from the tower in the mornings she always asked that he help her dress. This wasn’t an effort to tease him, though it always made her feel deliciously naughty when she knew he could see her naked back as he buttoned up her dress. It was more an effort to ... domesticate him. She didn’t want to rule him, but she did want him to be amenable to whatever requests she might make in the future. She also wanted him to know she wasn’t as fussy about him seeing her like that as she had been when she first arrived.

As the days went by, filled with various domestic chores, and the pleasure those chores can bring when a routine job is done well, Laurie realized she was happy. As best she could tell, her life was as good as or better than it had ever been, not counting the loss of her parents, who she still missed horribly. Mornings she spent with Kit while Uncle Martin slept. In the afternoons Martin taught Kit the tasks he would be responsible for in exchange for his room and board.

She bathed frequently ... much more frequently than she ever had out on the prairie. The plentiful supply of water, and a tub with real imported soap at her disposal, was too much to resist.

Initially she waited until Uncle Martin had gone up to the tower for the night, and then she ran her bath and soaked, for hours even, once falling asleep in the big tub. She did that only once, though, as she woke up cold and got even colder when she had to get out into the cool night air.

But as time went on she grew less and less shy about her uncle seeing her and, by the time she’d been there two months, she often bathed right after supper. Uncle Martin always offered to wash her hair for her, and, as she remembered the lack of modesty her parents had displayed, she decided it was nice to have his big rough hands massaging her scalp. When it came time to dunk her head, she got less and less nervous about the fact that her breasts invariably broke the surface of the water as her body floated up. She knew he was looking at them...

But now, somehow, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing anymore.

One night, as his soapy hands stroked her head, she said, “Could you wash my back for me Uncle Martin?” One of his hands immediately went down her back as she leaned forward. It felt wonderful. His rough hands scraped her skin lightly, almost like hundreds of sharp fingernails all at the same time. She ooooed and ahhhed and thanked him profusely when he was done. Then she lay back so he could get the soap out of her hair.

When she came back up he said, “I could help you wash your front too?” She darted a look at him, and saw he was smiling. “A joke ... a joke child ... uh woman!“ he corrected himself as he saw her take in a breath to yell at him.

She would never know exactly why she asked the question, or where it even came from. But her mouth blurted, “If I allowed it ... would you really wash my whole body?”

She would also never forget his instantaneous response. “Ahhhhh yes! I would be such a happy man. You look so much like your mother that sometimes my heart is ready to burst. I have such wonderful memories of her.”

His meaning was clear. “You ... washed my mother? When you were my age?”

He nodded. “Did I not tell you we shared bed and bath until she married?”

“Yes, but I thought...” She had started out to say she thought that would have stopped when they reached puberty. But obviously that was not what had happened. That meant he had run his hands all over her mother’s body...

All over her mother’s body ... while they bathed together. After her mother’s body had developed into that of a woman!

She thought about her parents’ anniversary. They had been married nineteen years when they were killed. Her mother had been thirty-five that year. That meant this man and her mother had bathed together when her mother was... seventeen! Shocked, she sat up in the tub, completely unaware that her breasts were now above water.

“I was sixteen two weeks ago!” she gasped. She had completely forgotten her birthday. “I forgot my birthday!” She looked up at her uncle, who was staring at her chest. She looked down to see her rosy nipples exposed. Her hands came up to cover them immediately.

“Such a shame, to cover something so beautiful,” he sighed.

“Uncle Martin!“ she moaned. “You are so impertinent!”

“Not at all,” he said, grinning. “I am simply a man. Your mother had beautiful breasts too. I loved touching them.”

“I can’t believe you said that!” she gasped. “I can’t believe you did that!”

He knelt beside the tub.

“Laurie, darling Laurie, you must understand that this was the way our family was. It was not a bad thing, a thing that hurt anyone. It was just the way things were. Nowadays we would be hung as witches or some such thing. But the times your mother and I ... loved each other ... those were our favorite times. I wanted to marry her, to be with her forever, but for a brother to want such was forbidden. Had we been cousins, it might have been possible. And your father loved her too, so he was given permission to marry her.”

“And what happened to you?” she asked.

“Your mother loved us both, and we were friends. It was hard for us all, because they lived with our parents at first. She didn’t want to give up what we did together, but I knew Richard would not understand. So I left, and went to the Army, to protect settlers on their way west. She got pregnant with you, and when my time in the Army was finished, I stopped and saw them ... and you ... on my way here, where I had been offered this job.”

“But you still loved her,” sighed Laurie, her heart full of romantic notions.

“Sometimes, to love someone, you must be willing to deny yourself, to give them what is best for them,” he said. “She had given me many years of joy. How could I complain? And now she has even given me you.”