The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare [32]
The little hut with its sparsely thatched roof sagged at one corner. It looked as though it could never survive a stiff wind, let alone a flood. Two goats munched at the edges of a small vegetable patch.
"There's a well behind the house," said Hannah. "Draw some water and wash thy face, child."
Kit let the bucket down, leaning over to watch it meet the far-off circle of reflected sky. The water was deliciously cold on her hot face, and she gulped it thirstily straight from the bucket. Then she smoothed her hair and retied her apron, and went into the little house. The one small room the house contained was scoured as a seashell. There was a table, a chest, a bedstead with a faded quilt, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. A few ancient kettles hung about the clean-swept hearth. From a square of sunlight on the floor an enormous yellow cat opened one eye to look at them.
Hannah had set a wooden trencher on the table with a small corncake studded with blueberries, and beside it a gourd filled with yellow goat's milk. She sat watching as Kit ate, taking nothing herself. Probably, Kit thought too late, swallowing the last crumb, that was every bit of dinner she had!
The girl looked about her. "'Tis a pretty room," she said without thinking, and then wondered how that could be, when it was so plain and bare. Perhaps it was only the sunlight on boards that were scrubbed smooth and white, or perhaps it was the feeling of peace that lay across the room as tangibly as the bar of sunshine.
Hannah nodded. "My Thomas built this house. He made it good and snug or it wouldn't have stood all these years."
"How long have you lived here?" Kit asked curiously.
The woman's eyes clouded. "I couldn't rightly tell," she said vaguely. "But I remember well the day we came here. We had walked from Dorchester in Massachusetts, you see. Days on end we'd been, without seeing another human being. Someone had told us there would be room for us in Connecticut. But in the town there was not an inch of land to spare, not after they'd seen the brand on our foreheads. So we walked toward the river, and then we came to the meadow. It put us in mind of the marshes near Hythe. My husband was raised in Kent and 'twas like coming home to him. Here is where he would stay, and nothing could change him."
There were a hundred questions Kit dared not ask. Instead she looked about the room, and noticed with surprise the one ornament it contained. Jumping to her feet, she seized from the shelf the small rough stone and held it in her hand. "Why, 'tis corall" she exclaimed. "How did it get here?"
A small secret smile brightened the wrinkled face. "I have a seafaring friend," Hannah said importantly. "Whenever he comes back from a voyage, he brings me a present."
Kit almost laughed. Of all the unlikely things—a romance! She could imagine him, this seafaring friend, white-haired and weatherbeaten, coming shyly to the door with his small treasures from some distant shore.
"Perhaps this came from my home," she considered, turning the stone in her hand. "I come from Barbados, you know."
"Do tell—from Barbados!" marveled the woman. "Thee seemed different somehow. Is it like paradise, the way he says? Sometimes I mistrust he's just telling tales to an old woman."
"Oh, everything he has told you is true!" answered Kit fervently. "'Tis so beautiful—flowers every day of the year. You can always smell them in the air, even out to sea."
"Thee has been homesick," said Hannah softly.
"Yes," admitted Kit, laying down the stone. "I guess I have. But most of all, I miss my grandfather so much."
"That is the hardest," nodded the woman. "What was thy grandfather like, child?"
Tears sprang into Kit's eyes. No one, since she had come to America, had ever really wanted to hear about grandfather, except Reverend Bulkeley who had only been impressed