A Promise Kept (FIRST FIVE CHAPTERS)

Prologue

There was a pause, a sigh. My father had snapped. He sought to regain his reason, his composure.

"Margaret," he began, more delicately. "Business has not been as good as it once was. You know that. I'm not so prideful that I cannot allow myself to prepare for a possibility in which we can no longer provide for them."

"And he will? The boy? Oliver Ainsworth? The boy who begs us for work, Henry, the boy whose mother sells herself to the men of the village and still cannot afford to feed her children. How is he to help, Henry? What can he do for her besides trap her into a life only worse than ours?"

"He's a man. And like it or not, that means something in this world. He may be poor, destitute even. He may have grown up rough and had a mother who did what she had to in order to survive but he is a man all the same. Or he will be. One day. And when that day comes, he can own property. He can be granted inheritance. And he can find work. You cannot say the same for our girls and you know it."

"We were supposed to move up, Henry. Forwards, not backwards. We could have found a suitable young man for Avery whose family owns a shop of their own or who may even have some level of education. She's a pretty girl. She could have had other options. But you didn't ask me, did you? You waited until I had gone to the market and you called over that woman and signed away our child's future and for that, Henry Hastings, I cannot forgive you."

"Margaret."

I heard the sounds of my mother's retreating footsteps and the abrupt slamming of a bedroom door as tears fell from the corners of my eyes, falling down into my unkempt hair pooled upon the pillow beneath my head. I remember that I spent a majority of that night crying silent tears in the dark. I was not sure why I was crying then. Only that I was a frightened child with parents who had been driven to bickering because of me.

The next few weeks I find difficult to remember. The days progressed as usual. I woke from my slumber, readied myself for the day, and went to work in my family's bakery. I greeted the typical customers and helped my mother and my sister in the kitchens until such time that my father would call me out, usually in the afternoons, to sweep the shop floor. Then I, because I was the youngest and the smallest and therefore did the least of the most difficult manual labor throughout the day, was charged with closing up for the night and was left alone in the bakery while my family went upstairs to prepare dinner and rest their weary bones. I swept the floors, wiped the counters, straightened that which had become disorganized throughout the regular course of business, and then extinguished the candles and trudged upstairs for another evening of dinner, wash, rinse, and repeat.

News had spread of my arrangement with Oliver Ainsworth, of course, and the children who I saw on my infrequent and brief trips out to the garbage heap ridiculed me mercilessly until my cheeks turned red from embarrassment and I stomped back inside, refusing to tell anyone what had upset me so. Though, the way that Evelyn watched the cruel children jog away from the shop, I imagined she knew. As far as town gossip went, the news of our betrothal was weak at best. Adults in town did not care for whatever arrangement the poor peasants had made to ensure their own survival and so it passed rather quickly and I found myself back in the typical daily grind of the bakery business as though nothing monumental had ever occurred and, in my naive mind, it was easy to pretend that it hadn't.
A few weeks later, Evelyn and I were busy arranging newly baked loaves of bread upon the shelves behind my father's counter when he instructed me to prop open the shop door so that the smell of freshly baked bread might waft down the street and encourage new customers. After a brief jaunt to the front door, I pushed it open, using my foot to keep it secure while I searched for the wedge kicked casually to the side. It was then that I heard them. Hoofbeats. I stood, stepping away from the door into the street just as a column of men in pressed military uniforms made their way, on horseback, into the town. I was not the only one who had noticed the peculiar procession. Other merchants and peasants alike were poking their heads from their shops or stepping out onto the street from their homes to get a look at what was passing them by.