The fact was, Mr. Long didn’t appear as interested in me as he once had. This turn of events occupied my thoughts as I spent the final week of May weaving baskets.
He still passed a great deal of time with us, or at least with the men. Like most farming neighbors, we lent our aid to him to quicken an industry, and he reciprocated. Though Papa and my brothers had handled without assistance the cultivation of the corn—hoeing, weeding, and hilling it—Mr. Long and his cousin Jeb had helped my family with the more arduous task of stump pulling in the field my father wanted widened. In return, my brothers had sharpened their froes and split enough wood shingles for Mr. Long to use to replace his bark roof.
But our neighbor’s recent weeks were not all work and no pleasure. If Betsy could be counted as a reliable source of information, he was also spending a fair share of his time in Middleton with the Goodriches.
I refused to feel betrayed when it came to Mr. Long. If he wanted to bestow his precious person on a pack of silly town girls, that was fine with me. Let them grow bored watching him whittle every handy piece of wood. No doubt, when he got to know them well enough, he’d make them the new objects of his caustic comments and observations. I couldn’t care half a farthing.
My mother, unfortunately, could.
*
June arrived and brought with it bright, cheerful weather. Mama, in contrast, was pure gloom and doom. Betsy, who enjoyed accompanying Papa whenever he had business in town, started bringing back interesting news regarding Mr. Long. The gossip vexed Mama. Her worries made the strawberry season, normally quite a lovely time, a painful period of ominous predictions and gentle scolds.
We began picking the fruit in the middle of the month, and on the first day of this endeavor, Mama sighed, “Those Goodrich girls are very ladylike.” She cast a disapproving frown at my dirty apron.
I shrugged. Given our enterprise, I wasn’t sure how she expected me to preserve an immaculate appearance. We were in the meadow, foraging diligently for the wild berries—or at least Mama and I were. Grace was just eating them.
Betsy, intent on witnessing the mild lecture Mama was dealing me, mostly stalked us.
I gave her a mean look. “Go away, Miss Nosy.”
“I hear the oldest plays the pianoforte,” Mama continued, dropping a handful of sweet red fruits in her bucket. She shook her head slowly and tragically, as though the Goodrich chit’s accomplishment bespoke automatic victory in the matrimonial contest. All hope was lost.
She interspersed the subsequent strawberry-related activities with additional details, all sighed mournfully. “Those girls’ dresses are store-bought,” she moaned through the mashing for jam. “The oldest girl paints—in oils, no less,” she groaned through the strawberry bread mixing.
Halfway through preparing berries for drying and tea making, she stopped and demanded, “Do you know what the Goodriches have in their parlor?”
“A pianoforte?” I was nipping the caps off the berries with vicious pleasure, like a vengeful peasant beheading greedy aristocrats. Indeed, my hands were stained a bloody red.
“Well, yes,” Mama said impatiently, as she arranged another capless strawberry on the clothed table. “But also a sofa. A real sofa!”
As opposed to a fake one, I supposed.
I tried not to let her death-tolling headshakes perturb me.
Her funereal fixation on the supremacy of the Goodrich girls’ upbringing and talents persisted and reached a climax on the day of the strawberry festival. It was held every year during the strawberry moon, but this time, the prosperous Goodrich family had offered to throw open their grand doors and host the evening’s ball.
I dreaded it.
*
After trimming my best gown in new lace, yanking the brush through my snarls, dressing my hair, and smoothing and patting and circling me, Mama took a step back and scrutinized my appearance with the fierceness of a military leader strategizing an ambush. Then she leaned forward and pinched my cheeks.
I jerked back.
She followed me and took hold of my cheeks again. “Just trying to give you a little color, dear.”
“Ow!”
Whether my bruised cheeks maintained their artificial blush all the way to town, I couldn’t say. But the circumstances at the Goodrich house cheered Mama immensely.
At least initially.
Within minutes of our arrival, while I was still gaping in speechless wonder at the six-piece orchestra, the chandelier that sported more blazing candles than the Winter household lit in an entire year, and an actual French dance master liltingly calling out the figures, Mr. Long secured my first dance. He teased me in his usual fashion whenever the cotillion brought us face-to-face. I fired back sharp retorts. We resumed our raillery as though several weeks hadn’t slipped past us with nary a conversation.
But afterward he danced with many others, including the three oldest Goodrich girls. He acted just as politely charming with them as he had with me—and (if their laughter was any indication) equally teasing. In fact, he struck me as shockingly popular with the ladies. Practically a flirt. The official beau of the ball! So busily occupied did the Middleton maidens keep him, he couldn’t bother chatting with members of his own sex. The only man with whom he talked was Mr. Goodrich. I overheard some of this conversation and discovered that Mr. Long was doing work for the older gentleman, specifically helping him harness the mill wheel’s power and improve the business’s efficiency by building additional machines.
My location on the famous Goodrich sofa put me in a position to learn this information. Rachel Welds briefly stopped by and tried to engage me in a nonsensical chat about ribbons before admiring my sprig muslin gown and delivering the dubious compliment that I reminded her of the beautiful, young sunburst locust tree that stood “grandly tall and golden and perfectly straight” outside the front door of her former Massachusetts home. Then she flitted away.
I heaved a sigh of relief. I wasn’t good at girlish gab. Girlish anything, really. Feeling awkward, out of place, grotesquely long, and as wooden as a sunburst locust, I glanced down at myself, wondering how it was that my birth mother had been a famed beauty while her sole child had turned out like a clumsy filly, all skinny legs.
I was sitting hunched over my cup, sipping (gulping) some thankfully potent punch, watching the dancers, and, in the short lulls between the songs, listening to Mr. Long and Mr. Goodrich chat about cogs, hammers, and bellows a few yards away, when Gideon appeared and settled beside me.
He looked happier than usual. I assumed this was because he’d danced twice with Rachel, two times more than Luke, who’d failed so far to outmaneuver the other swains intent on winning her hand. Plus, Rachel had arranged in the topknot of her hair a lush, red flower that looked suspiciously like one of Mama’s peonies. I wondered if Gideon had ridden all the way to the Welds house earlier in the day to give her a bouquet of the June blossoms.
My brother’s eyes followed his love interest’s progress across the floor in the contra dance. I studied the floor for a different reason. Mr. Long had just joined the dance, this time leading the oldest Goodrich daughter. Hadn’t he danced with her once already? Miss Goodrich laughed her little silver-bell-tinkling laugh. I made a face at the couple. Heavens, they were awfully familiar. Perhaps seriously familiar. Maybe they planned to announce their engagement tonight at the end of the festivities. Well, I’d be the first to stand and cheer.
“Strange to think this could be the last civilized event I attend before I leave,” Gid said.