Chapter 4: What We Do With It

By the end of the first week, Willowmere had decided I was theirs.

It showed in small things.

The baker left a loaf on my step every morning and pretended he hadn't.

Children walked past my cottage in twos and threes, pretending to be going somewhere else.

The ferry captain's nephew had carried my bags up the hill on the first day.

After that he kept turning up with firewood.

"I'm not working for you," he said each time. "I'm just passing."

"With a cartload of oak?"

"It's a very heavy passing."

Edith took over the cottage kitchen and ran it with great efficiency.

On the fifth night she put a fish pie in front of me.

"Eat," she said. "Everyone says you've got thin."

"Everyone who?"

"The whole island. They have a committee."

I ate the entire pie.

Biscuit ate half a mackerel off the same plate, which the vet would have forbidden.

Then he went to sleep on the sill, his ribs rising and falling in the lamplight.

He was walking again.

He walked in short, offended steps, but he walked.

The old woman was the eldest of the three elders, and she had never offered me her name.

She came by on the sixth day and sat in my kitchen.

She looked at my father's chair, which had stood in the cottage since before I was born.

"He had a temper," she said. "You'd not know it from the Queen Mother's letters."

"What did she say?"

"That you never raised your voice."

"I never did."

"That's a waste of a good temper."

Then she told me what the island needed.

It needed a new roof for the net store, a doctor once a month and a decision about the east pasture.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Dethroned His Queen, Now He Wants Her Home from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.