Stand the Storm by Breena Clarke Page A

cook’s helper and she served at the table. She was the oldest in a family of ten hungry young ones. Her mother had said gently but clearly that Katharine would have to go out to earn her bread. There was no help for it. The second oldest girl would stay and help Mama. Katharine was pushed out. Mother had arranged for her indenture to the Warren family to secure her meals and board and some useful instruction. And the family would receive credit at the Warren stores to get some blankets and mattress ticking.
    Katharine Logan was on her own from that time. She considered herself fortunate. The Warrens were rich people—the richest of the rich from Katharine’s point of view. For the first time in her life she had meals to count on and bedding not wet with the urine of some small child.
    Katharine was brought on to assist the Warren cook, who was Irish like Katharine’s own people. The cook, a stern, uncharitable woman, decided that Katharine was a low-class slacker as soon as she laid eyes on her.
    Katharine was a physically developed girl who had not had the benefit of much advice, attention, or wardrobe. What clothes she had to cover herself were threadbare. Siobhan Clover complained against the poor girl to the mistress and said Katharine stank to high heaven. Mrs. Clover further huffed and snorted that she was above sleeping in the same quarters as this stinking slacker. She took it upon her own authority to banish Katharine from the sleeping quarters meant to be shared by the kitchen workers. The girl was left to hole up in a tiny slip adjoining the pantry.
    As a rule, Mrs. Clover distanced herself from the distasteful supervision of the slaves. So she exercised her supervisory privileges on Katharine. The woman set Katharine to fetching and toting water, peeling vegetables, and carrying supplies. Katharine became skilled at avoiding Mrs. Clover. Eluding the woman was something of a proof against boredom for the girl.
    Esau was a boy who’d been stunned by a blow to his head as a child. His dullness was confirmed by the expression he bore ever since. His face was as if suspended between a dull angry scowl and an attempt to smile. It was a perplexing visage and taken by most as a sign of Esau’s idiocy.
    Katharine kept her condition to herself right up to the time she was ready to deliver. Ellen, who’d been in on the situation from the beginning, pretended she didn’t know about what was coming. Katharine hid herself under wide skirts until Mrs. Clover finally caught sight of her sleeping with her cheek resting in her palm, propped against a small apple tree in the backyard. Her wide skirts had fallen away from her stomach and the outline was plain to view.
    It followed that Siobhan Clover berated Katharine for being an ignorant Irish whore—a slut. She threatened to tell the mistress to turn her out. Katharine mumbled to Mrs. Clover that an itinerant tinker had done the deed and begged to be allowed to stay to work out her term of service.
    Mrs. Clover and the mistress weighed the trouble of discharging this girl and breaking in another hardheaded, redheaded whore of a kitchen worker. Self-interest won out and they allowed Katharine to remain at her job with the proviso that her term of indenture would be extended to cover the period of her lying-in and any expenses related to the inconvenience of the babe.
    Mrs. Clover had doubts about the story of the itinerant tinker. She represented to Mistress that she believed the father of Katharine’s bastard was one of the overseers, Jonas Kelly, a drunken adulterous lout whose manner was not sufficiently respectful toward the cook. Mistress and Mrs. Clover brought forth to Master that Katharine’s pregnancy was evidence of Jonas Kelly’s villainy. He was discharged upon their word.
    Mrs. Clover ruminated on the true paternity of this babe. She didn’t remember a tinker or any such, and figured she would have. She was more observant than the girl suspected. She had