Change of Command - Heris Serrano 06 Read online

  Ruth Ann looked around for a worktable-none. It would have to be the counter, where Shelley swept aside the clutter to make room for her, then began rummaging in drawers for the knife she knew Ruth Ann would want. “We’re going to need a worktable,” she told Benji. “They said they had plenty of wood, so that’s something to start planning.”

  “Cecelia, I feel terrible-but the twins kept me up last night-”

  “You haven’t found anyone to take them-?”

  “No.” Raffa blushed, a becoming color, Cecelia noted. “I-we-we sort of-decided to keep them ourselves. And one of the nursemaids ran off with a farmer, and the one with children wanted to start a school, and besides she has her own children to care for . . .”

  “You?” This was an unexpected complication. “Er . . . do you think that’s wise?”

  “You mean, will Brun mind when she finds out?” Raffa had always been too sharp. “I don’t think she will, but if she does, too bad. I quite understand her not wanting to keep them. It must have been horrible, and I wish it had never happened. But I like-no, I love the boys, and I even love it that they’re part of her. The way things are, Ronnie and I may never get off this planet again-and that’s all right, but I do miss some things-”

  “My dear-you don’t have to stay here-”

  “Yes, we do, and don’t argue. We wanted a life of our own, and we’re getting it. It’s not anything I imagined, but-whether you believe it or not-we’re happy. But the thing is, children . . . it’ll be years, because . . . well . . . I don’t fancy having babies without modern medical support. This way, we’re helping Brun. And ourselves.”

  Clearly it would do no good to argue. “What did you name them?” Cecelia asked.

  “The redhead’s Peter, for Ronnie’s great-uncle, and the brown-haired one’s Salomar, for my mother’s brother.”

  Cecelia felt her eyes stinging unexpectedly. Family names-and names she must know were in Brun’s family line as well. “So-when do I see the little demons?”

  “They’re napping. They’ve had some illness-I know it’s only a childhood thing, and all children do this . . . out here, I mean.”

  “Well, we’d better set the table then. One thing I’ve found out about Ruth Ann, when she makes up her mind, things get done.”

  “Was she one of the-one of the ones who hurt Brun?”

  “No. Her husband was, but she knew nothing about it until long afterwards. Where’s your table linen?”

  “Used it for crib sheets,” Raffa said. “All we can do is dust this off.” This had been an elegant dining table when Raffa and Ronnie brought it downside, but it had spent several years as a work surface, and looked it. Cecelia forbore to comment on the state of the floor-with no glass in the windows, let alone any household machinery, how could Raffa keep dust off the floor?-and helped wipe down the scarred tabletop.

  “I still have most of the china,” Raffa said. She unlocked the big cupboard in the corner, and took down stacks of plates. “Even if they look a bit silly on this bare wood.”

  Incongruous was the right word, but Cecelia said nothing, laying out Pierce & Samuelson’s famous “Coronation” pattern, with the gold wavy rim. Partway through, she noticed that the smell from the kitchen had changed from singed meat and something sour to a delicious blend of roast and something that almost smelled like bread.

  Suddenly Ruth Ann appeared in the doorway. “Oh-you don’t use tablecloths?”

  “We don’t have any left,” Raffa said. “We had to use them for the beds-”

  “Deary me! And us with all more than enough in the luggage. Cecelia, where are the boxes, do you know?”

  “No, but I’ll find out. Which box?”

  “The one with the table and chair on the side.”

  Cecelia headed for the shuttle and, from the piles of boxes being unloaded, located the one with the table and chair on the side. One of the crew carried it back for her; she set it on the table and opened it carefully. Inside, it was stacked full of folded linens, brilliant with hand embroidery.

  Cecelia lifted out the folded cloth. “However did you have time to weave this?”

  “Oh, that’s not our weave,” Terry said. “We had no space for looms. But Prima-Ruth-says we mustn’t be idle. She got that Miss Waltraude to get us some cloth, and we embroidered it. Do you think it’s good enough?”

  Cecelia shook out the folds. On plain white cloth, the women had embroidered a broad band of flowers, trees, birds, stars, and what she supposed were religious symbols. “It’s . . . more than good enough.” It was splendid, and the Coronation pattern looked even better that in had before.

  By this time the kitchen smells had attracted the twins from upstairs. The twins were much more mobile than before, and although they might have been sick the day before, they were full of life now. They made straight for the table, and Raffaele tried to intercept them. Terry grabbed Salomar just as Raffa caught Peter.

  “What big boys!” Terry cooed. “Yours, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” Raffa said. “But I’m not ma’am-just call me Raffa. If you could help keep them out of the dinner table-”

  “I’ll take them out in the garden, and help Simplicity keep an eye on them.”

  When she’d gone, Cecelia cocked an eye at Raffa. “They’ll never believe you bore those children, you know. They’ll realize they’re adopted.”

  “Yes, but not from whom,” Raffa said firmly.

  Cecelia dared a peek into the kitchen. The floor could not gleam, being what it was, but it had the look of a floor that would gleam if only it were smooth enough. Ruth Ann worked a great lump of dough on the counter, which did gleam except where she worked. One of the women was washing dishes; another was chopping something that smelled good. Older children were moving in and out, bringing bits of fresh greenery from the garden, carrying out trash, and-as soon as Raffa agreed-mopping the dining room floor.

  The lights came back on just before Ronnie came home.

  “My God,” Ronnie said as he came through the door. The women bowed their heads and waited. “I mean-er-it’s a surprise.”

  Ruth Ann looked up. “We don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said. “I thought you were going to pray.”

  “I know-I just . . . what did you do? Where did all this come from?”

  “It’s just food,” Ruth Ann said.

  “It’s not just food,” Ronnie said. “It’s a feast.”

  “Then you can say thanks to God for it,” Ruth Ann said. She looked hard at Ronnie, who reddened and stumbled through a child’s grace Cecelia was sure he had not uttered in over a decade. The NewTex women added a hearty “Amen.”

  The roast fell into even slices, perfectly cooked. Puffy rolls as light as clouds. Potatoes, crisp outside and mealy inside. Fresh greens that weren’t bitter or too sour.

  “Truly a feast,” Raffa said. “I can’t imagine how you got that horrid old stove to work. Ever since the electric went bad, we’ve all been stuck. The bread machines don’t work-”

  “You don’t need machines to make bread,” Ruth Ann said.

  “I do,” Raffa said, with a smile that took the sting out of the contradiction. “I don’t know how to make it otherwise. I tried to put the ingredients in a bowl that the directions say to put in a bread machine, but it came out the most horrible sour lump-”

  “Did you knead it enough?”

  “Knead? What’s that? I mixed it up, isn’t that what the machine does?”

  Terry snorted, and Ruth Ann shot her a look. “I don’t mean to make fun,” she began.

  “You can make all the fun you want, if you’ll teach me how to cook the way you do,” Raffaele said. “If I could make an edible loaf of bread, just once-”

  “You don’t make good bread by making it once,” Ruth Ann said, feeling more secure every moment. Cecelia had been right. Clearly this household needed her, needed the knowledge she had. “You make good bread by making a lot of bread.”

  “Well, here I
am,” Raffa said. “Ready to learn.”

  Ruth Ann remembered Hazel, and had her doubts. This woman was much older than Hazel, and unless she had a natural knack, she might never be very good. Still . . . she could certainly learn not to stuff too much fuel in a leaky oven, and burn a roast on one side.

  After dinner, the junior wives organized cleanup without even being told, and Ruth Ann discussed with Raffaele why they’d come, and what they wanted to do.

  “We can use all the instruction you give us,” Raffa said. “I told Lady Cecelia last time she was here . . . we have good, hard-working people, but none of us have ever done without electricity, or running water, or all the other things that we have on developed worlds. It’s not just me-it’s all of us, just about. We can’t learn all this out of books or teaching cubes.”

  “Let’s start with you, then. There’s room in this house; we can experiment-” She was proud of using that new word, of being able to think of it. “When we know what you need, we’ll know what the others need.”

  The next day, work began in earnest. Ruth Ann had a clear picture in her mind of what the kitchen needed to be, so she and the others could work there without falling all over each other. She couldn’t believe it . . . she was directing men. “Make the counter this long,” she’d said, and they were making it that long. They didn’t seem to mind, and she was enjoying it. So were the others. All those months of being told how backward they were, all those months of being confused by the humming machines, feeling awkward and uncertain. And now-

  “If you arrange your beds so the tall plants don’t shade the low ones, you’ll get more yield,” Becky was telling Raffaele. “See, you’ve got them crossways . . . if the plant rows went the other direction-”

  “Oh . . . well . . . look, Becky, why don’t you tell me how it should be, and I’ll draw a plot of it for next season’s planting.”

  “Fine-”

  Terry had gone upstairs to work on the bedrooms-although they’d slept last night, Ruth Ann had been very aware of the clutter and dust. The boys were at work in the front courtyard on simple furniture: rope-strung bunks to get them all up off the floor. When Ruth Ann looked out the tall dining room windows, she saw a crowd of men standing watching. It was backwards, men learning from boys, but it was right that the boys and men were together. She carefully ignored the two women wearing pants in the same group.

  By dinnertime that day, the shuttle had brought the rest of their things down from the spaceship, including the pop-up cots Lady Cecelia had bought. The whole house smelled different, and Ronnie had the expression Ruth Ann liked to see on the head of a household. Of course, he wasn’t her husband-she kept reminding herself of that-but she did enjoy watching a man eat with relish.

  Cecelia left a few days later. Ruth Ann hardly noticed; she had her worktable in the expanded kitchen, and had also set up a summer stove outside, for preserving.

  “What we need is a school,” Raffa said, watching the crowd around the stove as Shelley demonstrated jelly testing. “A really big kitchen, where everybody could come to learn cooking, and maybe a sewing room where they could learn sewing.”

  “A weaving shed,” Ruth Ann said. “That fabricator cloth is too harsh. And a really big bread oven.”

  Raffa looked around. “This would almost work, if Ronnie and I moved into one of the smaller houses.”

  “No,” Ruth Ann said firmly. “Your husband’s the governor; you need this house. We’ll build one.”

  More quickly than even she had hoped, the school went up. The engineering cubes Cecelia had brought, and the bundles of reinforcing whiskers, made it possible to pour solid walls quickly. One of the other colonists, who had been a hobby potter on her home world, found a lens of good clay in the riverbank, and knew how to make tiles.

  “Not really good ones yet,” she admitted. “We don’t have a kiln hot enough. But for starters, better than plain concrete or dirt.” The school was the first building to have locally made tile floors.

  A proper school for proper women, with a kitchen in which they could all learn the way she had learned-from watching and doing and being knocked on the knuckles with a wooden spoon when they needed it. A big outdoor oven to handle dozens of loaves of bread at once. A weaving shed-she regretted the loss of the captive women, who had been such talented weavers, but Tertia Crockett-she used Anna now-was almost as good. Sunrooms for embroidery. Gardens for the children.

  The gardens for the children produced another benefit-everyone in the colony wanted their youngest children there, under Simplicity’s gentle guidance, for part of the day. Raffaele brought her twins when she came to learn cooking, and the other women copied her. As Ruth Ann had suspected, Raffaele would never be more than a middling baker. Her hand was too heavy for pastry, and not firm enough for yeast dough, though both her pie crusts and bread were now at least edible. But the other women followed her lead, and the gardens were full of busy little children.

  Raffaele’s twins, though-the twins gave Ruth Ann a funny feeling in the chest. Salomar, in particular, was all too familiar . . . she had seen that quirk of mouth, that shape of eyebrow and set of eye, before. She looked again and again at Raffaele and Ronnie, trying to trace in their faces the source of those details of Salomar’s. What kept nagging at her had to be impossible. She had to be imagining it. Didn’t she?

  She put her mind firmly back on the school. A few of the other former wives were being courted by men whose wives had died, but enough of the women wanted no part of remar­riage that she was sure of enough teachers for years to come. Her daughters had suitors, too, the older ones.

  And her sons, about whose acceptance she had been so worried, were every one of them more expert at tool use than these city folks, for all that those men had taken courses and been passed as expert enough. They may’ve been, Ruth Ann thought, with the fancy electric tools they’d trained on, but few of them knew anything of unpowered tools.

  Everything from beds and tables to bowls poured out of the boys’ workshop. Nobody minded that it was plain stuff, though one of the other colonists began making stains out of local plants to give the wood different tones of soft red and ­yellow. And nobody here minded if a few girls took up wood­crafting. All through the rest of that spring, and into this new world’s long summer, Ruth Ann blessed the long series of chances that had brought them here.

  “I never thought nineteen women and a bunch of children could make this much difference,” Ronnie said one hot after­noon. He’d taken to coming by to fetch the twins, and he often stopped to chat, leaning on one of the planters. “You’ve galvanized the colony, is what you’ve done. The extra supplies helped, but it’s you, Ruth Ann, you and the rest of them, who’ve waked us up and gotten us moving.”

  She glanced sideways at him, thinking that he hadn’t learned it all yet, even so. Greatly daring, but also confident, she reached to the basket of hand tools. “While you’re resting,” she said, handing him a weeder and nodding to the planter he leaned on.

  He grinned at her. “You never do stop working, do you?”

  “You don’t have to rush if you don’t get behind,” she pointed out. “Those stickery ones are the weeds.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He grinned at her. “I’ll learn in the end.”

  “By the way,” she said, finding it easier to bring this up when he was bending over the tangled growth, weeding. “Those twins of yours . . . I can’t believe your Raffaele bore them-she’s so tiny.”

  Ronnie’s ears turned redder. “She didn’t,” he said shortly. “They’re adopted.”

  “It doesn’t matter to God,” Ruth Ann said. “What it is, though-and I know I’m being presumptuous, but-that Salomar. He reminds me of someone.”

  The back of Ronnie’s neck went three shades darker, not counting the sunburn. “Who?” he asked, more coolly than Ruth Ann expected.

  “I’m thinking,” Ruth Ann said, folding her needle away, because her hand had started shaking. “I’m thinking he
minds me of my-of Mitch. And I’m thinking, if there’s any reason he should mind me of Mitch, that you might be worrying that I’d notice. You’ve been awful good to us, and I don’t want to worry you. So if-if it is that, what I’m thinking of, then-then I want you to know that I don’t mind, and I’m glad to have the boy around. Both of them.”

  Ronnie said nothing; his shoulders bunched, and the dirt flew.

  “I won’t say any more,” Ruth Ann said.

  “It’s . . . all right.” He turned around; his eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I-we didn’t know you were coming, or-but- Oh, I’m making a mess of this, Raffa will kill me. But if you’ve guessed, you’ve guessed-”

  “I bore nine of that man’s children; I know their stamp,” Ruth Ann said. She said nothing of Peter’s father, though she knew exactly who that red hair reminded her of.

  “Brun wanted a good home for them; she was afraid they might be stolen away and used against her.”

  “You don’t have to defend her to me,” Ruth Ann said. She still could not understand a woman not clinging to her own flesh and blood, but she wasn’t going to argue that now. If their mother had been a natural mother, she herself wouldn’t have this chance. “You don’t know what a blessing it is, to have those children here,” she said. “I’ve worried and worried-that’s the last bit of Mitch I’ll ever see; I wanted to know the children were safe. Will Raffaele mind? I’m not going to interfere, I promise you.”

  “She’ll skin me, but she’ll hug you,” Ronnie said. “Ruth Ann-you are a very, very unusual lady.”

  “I try to be a good woman,” Ruth Ann said, but a bubble of delight rose and would not be denied. She stood up, and let her head fall back. “Praise God, you aren’t angry with me for seeing what I saw, and you won’t keep me from him. I never thought to be happy again, and here I am happier than I’ve ever been.”

  Chapter Thirteen