Wynna begins to see how happy she will be

Wynna closed her eyes and let the damp heat of the steaming dishwater throb over her cheeks.

Her mother said that there was a reason why the prettiest girls were those who worked a little but did not drudge: they were just active enough to keep their faces and bodies from sagging, yet not so over-​​worked that they became scrawny and sallow; just busy enough that they had neither the scornful sneers of indolent girls nor the scowls of harried housewives. And, her mother said, early morning air and the steam of cooking and cleaning were a more efficient beauty treatment than any of the potions and lotions concocted by the wise woman.

Wynna remembered the early years in the little daub and wattle house near the crossroads. Her mother had been young and pretty then, but there had been much drudgery for her. Wynna could remember seeing her mother scrubbing on her hands and knees while her belly was so heavy with Bedwig that it was practically dragging on the floor.

There would be no such scrubbing for Wynna, for Anson had a girl come in every second day to do the heaviest work. There was only the cooking, which she loved, the cleaning up after meals, and all of the little tasks of dusting and smoothing and folding and straightening that went with caring for a house and a man.

Tidy, industrious little Wynna could not have been happier, except perhaps by having more neighbors, for chatty, friendly little Wynna was sometimes lonely. Now she lived so far from her old crossroads – so far, indeed, from any road at all.

“Why’d you stop singing, Wynnie?” Anson called from the front room. Anson was sitting before the fire as he sat every day after supper, staring into the flames – not thinking, he would have said, but planning.

“I was thinking!” she replied. Wynna sometimes made plans for her baby or for her garden in the spring, but otherwise few of her thoughts were so constructive.

“Can’t you do both at once?” he asked.

“I’m not clever like you, Anson!” she laughed. “I don’t know but I guess I’m done in here anyway.”

She picked up the heavy basin of water and tottered out the back door to dump it in the yard, sending up an enormous plume of steam into the cold January air. Then she dried her hands, smoothed out her dress, and cast one last look around her spotless kitchen.

Housewifely little Wynna could not have been happier, except perhaps if her baby had already lain in her arms.

She snuffed the candles in the kitchen and went out into the cozy front room where Anson still sat in silence.

“What are you doing?” she asked her young husband. “Thinking?”

“Planning,” he said, as she knew he would.

Wynna giggled to herself and turned a chair around so she could sit beside him.

Anson was a planner. He had never spoken to her of his “plans” while they were courting, and it was something of a surprise to her now to find him so intent on their future.

It had also been a surprise to find that for at least some time before their marriage he had been saving his earnings, and with them he had bought three mares of the Earl – old, but good-​​blooded – and those were the beginnings of his plans. Wynna thought he might have bought some pigs, but Anson had no intention of being a pig farmer.

It had even been something of a surprise – and certainly a relief – when Anson had not only acknowledged that her baby was his, but even demanded of her stepfather permission to marry her. Her stepfather, who had been expecting Anson to resist if not deny her outright, was so surprised himself that the entire business had been arranged almost too easily.

It was all very much as it had been for her mother, as Colburga had said, except that she and Anson had begun their married life rather well-​​to-​​do, relatively speaking. She could scarcely have been happier.

“Can’t you sing and plan at the same time?” Wynna teased.

“One or the other would suffer,” he said.

Wynna giggled, and then she began chatting at him. At supper she had already told him about her day and about the baby’s activities throughout it, but Wynna was never short of topics of conversation, provided she was not overshadowed by a person more talkative and more overbearing than she. Anson might have been the latter, but he was not the former.

Suddenly, though, he interrupted her to ask, “Don’t you have some sewing to do?”

“Of course, but I have to wait for my skin to dry.” She held up her white and wrinkled fingers to show him. “I can’t feel my needle to hold it properly until it does.”

He eyed her hands dubiously for a moment, and then he relaxed and said, “I suppose that would be true. You never do shirk your duties, do you, Wynnie?”

“I hope not!”

“I never come home but I find you busy doing something. And I never do lose my things now that you’re here to put them away for me. And my clothes never were so neat, even when I tried.”

Wynna smiled at him.

“And you are a good cook. I’ll grant you that! I never ate so well in my life.”

“You did when my mother invited you,” Wynna said, for she was just as pleased to hear her mother complimented as herself.

“Never for more than one meal at a time, then. A proper meal three times a day: you don’t know what it’s like, Wynn, coming home to that every day after growing up the way I did.”

“Well, I don’t know but I guess I can imagine a little.”

“By God!” Anson cried. “I swear I shall never live like that again, though I have to beg or steal from the devil himself. Me and my brother used to steal bran from the horses and boil it for breakfast sometimes, when my Da forgot to feed us.”

“That’s because you didn’t have a Ma.”

“That’s because she ran out on us. But you won’t do that, will you, Wynnie?”

“No!” Wynna gasped, horrified to think that such things were possible at all.

“You wouldn’t. I guess you’ll be a good mother, too, at that.”

“I shall do my best!” Wynna said, and then she blushed and nearly shivered in delighted anticipation. Four months seemed a very long time to wait.

Anson nodded slowly and turned back to the fire. Wynna wished he would go on. He was not often so complimentary, and sometimes she wondered whether he had not simply married her out of duty after all. But it appeared he was well-​​satisfied with her, and except for that four months’ wait and except for her loneliness in lacking a girlfriend, Wynna was supremely happy.

She began talking again, and Anson nodded from time to time. She did not think he was truly listening, but he did not complain about her prattling, and sometimes he did startle her by mentioning later something she had not believed he had heard.

But this time he proved he was paying attention by interrupting her in mid-​​sentence.

“What do you mean: ‘At the wedding’?” he scowled. “You can’t go to that wedding.”

Wynna was stunned. “But… Colburga is my stepsister,” she murmured.

“I don’t care if she’s your own sister. Look at you.” He waved a hand at her belly.

Wynna’s eyes followed his hand. Her baby seemed to be sleeping now: the gentle rocking of her body as she washed up after supper always seemed to lull him to sleep. But he was growing large indeed inside her small body.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” Anson said.

“But… but it’s only an hour away,” she said softly.

Wynna could feel tears prickling in the corners of her eyes. She had so been looking forward to this wedding as an opportunity to go among her friends again and speak with other girls. Her friends so rarely visited her now, though she told herself it was due to the winter weather. And she had not seen her mother since the Ides of December.

“It is an hour at a trot,” Anson said. “And you would last no more than three paces at a trot with that belly. You shall not ride. Not a trot, not a walk, not a gallop. You shall not walk, you shall not sit in a wagon, you shall not move until that baby is here. Do you hear me?”

He paused as if waiting a reply, so she murmured, “Yes, Anson.”

“And afterwards you will find yourself too busy taking care of it to think about running all over creation. You just had your own wedding hardly a month ago. That ought to be enough for you. You don’t need a second one so quick. You’re not a girl no more, Wynna, you’re a wife and mother. And don’t let me hear you talking like that again, or I’ll think you won’t be such a good mother after all. You have to think about your baby first. And don’t disobey me or I’ll think you aren’t such a good wife either.”

“I won’t.”

“That’s fine. Now, maybe your hands are dry by now, don’t you think? You’re clever enough to talk and sew, aren’t you? And if you aren’t, I guess you ought to rather sew.”