“I could do with a kiss. Will I find one of those in the cabinets?”
“That I have right here.” He tilted his head and gave her a brief, yet exhilarating, kiss.
She clutched the scoop of glowing coals. “I’ll be just fine, you’ll see. Now back to work with you.”
She turned and headed toward the rear door of the forge. Beyond it, a narrow yard separated the smithy from his cottage.
“Diana?”
At the sound of her Christian name spoken in that intimate, low baritone, a thrill went through her. She nearly spilled the coals. “Yes?”
“If you need anything, you will ask?”
“Oh, of course I will,” she assured him. “Don’t look so worried. It’s not as though I’ve never done this before.”
Diana had never done this before.
Any of it.
Not light a fire, not clean a fish . . . and most certainly not cook a meal. But she was going to do all this today, and she was going to do it well.
She entered the cottage kitchen. It was a sparely furnished room, but orderly and clean. There was no denying it could do with a woman’s touch—the curtains hanging in the window were recently laundered, but faded.
In a covered basin on the table lay, she assumed, the fish. Most likely sole or plaice, she imagined. A flat, muddy footprint of a fish that Diana would somehow need to behead. And gut. And scale and fillet and . . .
She swallowed hard.
That part could wait. She’d pare the vegetables first.
The fire, she suddenly realized. Goodness. She couldn’t cook anything without a fire.
By habit, she’d never strayed too near a fireplace or stove—not only because her mother had insisted gentlewomen didn’t dirty their hands with such tasks but also because Diana had feared that inhaling smoke or ash could trigger a breathing crisis.
Those worries were in the past now. She faced a different challenge today.
She cautiously carried the scoop of glowing coals to the kitchen hearth. A nearby box held some straws and dried moss. Crouching on the hearthstones, she heaped the tinder in the grate, then lifted the scoop and gently sifted a few embers atop it.
A fizzling curl of smoke rose up.
And promptly died, taking all her excitement with it.
What was she doing wrong? She thought of Aaron stoking the fire in the smithy, raking and turning the coals . . . pumping the bellows.
The bellows. That was it. A fire needed air.
She scattered another few embers over the tinder, then lowered herself almost to her belly, pursed her lips, and blew. A flurry of sparks resulted. Encouraged, she inhaled slowly, then exhaled again, careful not to overtax her lungs. This time, the little sparks swelled and caught the tinder, resulting in a few lapping tongues of flame.
Diana rose to her knees and cheered—quietly—while brushing the dust from her hands and skirts. A small triumph, perhaps, but a promising start.
Her sense of triumph quickly dampened, however, when the tinder began to flame out and she realized she had no split logs to keep the fire going. She looked around. Nothing, to either side of the hearth. Then she recalled the well-stocked woodpile outside the smithy, under the overhang.
After another slow, loving exhalation to nourish her small flames, she rose and dashed outside, gathering an armful of splits from the pile before hurrying back, all the while praying the fire wouldn’t die in her absence.
She knelt before the hearth—no more care for her skirts this time—and placed the thinnest of the logs atop the burning tinder.
The flames were immediately smothered, dying in a thin plume of white, elegiac smoke.
“No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”
She flattened herself to the hearthstones and huffed desperately, trying to rekindle the flame.
She couldn’t go back to Aaron and ask for more coals. He would know she’d failed before she’d even begun, and that she couldn’t perform the most basic of household tasks. What use could she ever be to him? It wasn’t as though they’d talked about marriage, but she wasn’t ready to foreclose the possibility.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, please. Don’t go out.”
And as if some pagan god of fire heard her petition, a small flame caught a notch on the underside of the wood. The fire began to gnaw at it, dripping morsels of ash.
Hosanna.
She fed the fire carefully, not daring to stray a pace from the hearth until she had a tall, respectable blaze.
When she felt it safe to rise, she gave the basin on the table a wary glance. She wasn’t ready for that fish just yet.
Instead, she found a knife and set about paring vegetables and adding them to a kettle of salted water. She managed three potatoes, two carrots, and an onion with only one slice to her finger. She bound her wound with a strip of linen torn from her handkerchief. The onion made a useful scapegoat for her silly tears.
After hanging the kettle on a hook and swiveling it over the fire to boil, she could no longer postpone the inevitable.
Time to gut the fish.