Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Twenty-One: In Which Jessie is Caught

The next morning I woke, stiff backed and sore, when Miss Brown came into the kitchen to start breakfast for the household. Shamefaced, I collected up Margaret's papers - some of which had spilled off of my lap and onto the floor - and tried to put them back in order. Dread pulled at my sternum as I skimmed the notes in the margins.

Son of a fuck, I thought, dazedly trying to stretch out the crick in my neck. So much was happening while you weren't paying attention. When you were being smug in your twenty-first century know-it-all-ness... of course just because she's from a different era doesn't make Margaret any less observant, or clever, or feminist.

It's actually what her work is known for. Dumbass.

Right. Okay. So, how the hell was I going handle this? Was I going to handle this? Did I actually have to do anything?

Miss Brown cleared her throat meaningfully as I stood at the table, woolgathering. Okay, well, yeah, I guess the first thing I had to do was get the hell out of the way of breakfast.

Setting the manuscript aside on the tea trolley to make sure it wouldn't get ruined, I splashed my face with water from bucket by the sink and refilled the kettle for tea. Miss Brown showed me carefully, step by step, how to pound bread dough into submission, then took a bowl of risen batter from a pantry cupboard and pulled and cut it into a small loaf for the morning meal. The dough I continued to knead would be for tomorrow. Miss Brown put the first loaf into the bread oven, then turned to cut the rest up into balls for the rest of the day's bread - little tea cake sized rolls for lunch and dinner. We sliced up bacon and I was put in charge of not letting it burn, and between the two of us we had breakfast out on the ladies' parlor table in quicker time than Miss Brown was used to. She smiled then, the first she had shared with me, appreciating the bit of a sit-down with a cup of tea of her own that she got.

"Up late, Miss?" she asked, eyeing the manuscript.

"Reading," I agreed.

Miss Brown's mouth twisted a little and I wasn't sure if that meant that she was unimpressed with my passtime, or unimpressed that I could read at all. She didn't ask more, I didn't offer more, and soon we were at the bottom of our cups and shutting the meal out to the parlor. Unlike the Gales, the Goodenoughs didn't have a whole room dedicated solely to breakfast; the parlour, a lady's domain for casual entertaining in the household, was repurposed here as a breakfast nook, afternoon parlour for seated pass-times, and Margaret's writing. The rest of the house consisted of the one dining room, the day-use parlor and a more formal one that I assumed was for evening shindigs and was strewn with the detritus of Rose's position as a tutor, the kitchen and pantry, the three bedrooms for the five womenfolk, and a small room for Mr. Edwards where he slept, tended leathers and polished silvers, and did whatever else it was that the only dude in a house full of petticoats bothered himself with.

A little bell was rung in the parlor next to the kitchen and Miss brown popped up to push the trolly we'd pre-loaded with breakfast into the next room. Mrs. Goodenough was already seated at the tea-table, wrapped in another fancy housecoat with one of those flimsy bed-caps, Rose coming in the door dressed similarly. Margaret had clearly already been up for hours, hunched as she was in her own bathrobe over her writing desk at the window overlooking the meagre foliage . This house was on the corner, with only one neighbour abutted against it, so there was a bit of space for what saw was a container-garden of just-sprouting flowers, a sad looking trellis vice, and a weather-worn bench.

Once Miss Brown and I had piled the table with the hot bread, some butter, the bacon and hard boiled eggs and tea, I moved to leave the Goodenoughs and go join Miss Brown to break our own fast. Before I could reach the door, Margaret said, "Miss Jessica. Stay, please. Join us." Only then did she stand up, set her pencil down, and start wiping her hands on a filthy ink-stained handkerchief she pulled from her robe pocket.