The Bride Price

Chapter Twenty-Four

Six months later...

A groan slipped out of Emily as she stood up. It was the simple things, she found, that became the most difficult the closer one came to childbirth. Sitting down and standing up again, eating a large meal without experiencing discomfort, bending over to pick up something she had dropped on the floor. All the things she would normally have taken for granted became monumental tasks of seemingly mythical proportions.

"Are you all right?" Sarah looked up from her seat beside the fire, her embroidery in her lap.

"A bit tired, nothing more." Emily rubbed at a her lower back. It ached more today, but she'd walked into Crowford with her sisters after breakfast, an excursion she regretted more as the day wore on. "I've been sitting for too long," she said, and dropped her own knitting into a basket beside her chair. "Where is Katie?"

Sarah's eyebrows rose as she tugged at a length of blue thread. "In the kitchen, attempting to make some scones before Miss Barrowe arrives."

Emily grimaced at her sister's use of the word "attempting." Since their arrival in Crowford nearly a month before, her sisters underwent a sudden change in their habits as they adjusted to life without even their servant Harriet to help them with such mundane tasks as the preparation of their food or the washing of their clothes.

It was the same shock Emily herself had experienced several months before, when she and William had arrived here to find a house riddled with mice, spiders, and in great need of repairs. At least now, she was here to guide her sisters every step of the way. And it helped that they weren't required to sift through moth-eaten linens and cushions before making their beds for the first time.

Her sisters had arrived as the weather turned cold for the year, dispatched from their father's home in Cornwall for an indefinite amount of time.

"Of course, father hasn't been at home in weeks," Katie informed her not five minutes after disembarking from the carriage that had brought them across the country. "He's purchased a place in London with the money he made from selling Bexley Hall to that Odious Man," she said, lending capital letters to the title with which she'd knighted Marbley. "He claims we're to have our season in town the year after next, but I'll be shocked if he still has two farthings to rub together by then."

Emily wanted to doubt the veracity of such a statement, but after six weeks away from Cornwall and with no further word from their father, she couldn't help but wonder if he had forsaken his filial duties entirely and left herself and William with the task of seeing her sisters thrust out into the marital world.

And if that were the case, a very small world it would be.

Emily walked into the kitchen, wincing at another twinge in her back. Without a thought, she placed her hand over her belly, grown large enough to make her feel like a ship plowing through the waters as she moved from one place to the next. Her gait had acquired a marked waddle over the last week, as well. Between that and the frequent, and often painful, kicks from the baby, she had begun to lose hope that she would ever feel like herself again.

"How do they look?" Katie announced as she gestured towards two rows of lumpy, uneven wedges of dough laid out on a pan.

"Less flour next time, I think," Emily said after pinching off a corner of the dough and tasting it. "And your butter should be cut into smaller chunks."

Katie blew out a breath. "Should I start over, then?"

Emily looked at her younger sister, this poor girl who had wiled away the majority of her morning in trying to mix up dough for a presentable batch of baked goods for their incoming guest. "They'll do." She gave Katie a smile and reached up to take down the sugar from a shelf. "For the top, hmm?"