Elaine Coffman - [MacKinnon 04] by So This is Love

Author:So This is Love
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Adrian did not come home for dinner, so Maggie ate alone. After dinner, she spent some time in the library with her knitting, but soon she grew weary of that. Going to her room, she dressed for bed. Sitting at her dressing table looking through her ribbon box, she came across a raven’s feather Fletcher had given her. She picked the feather up, absently stroking its sleek, glossy surface. How well she remembered the day he had given it to her, along with two plover eggs. The plover eggs were gone now—where, she did not remember—but the feather…

She wrapped her hand tightly around it and clutched it to her breast, feeling her eyes burn with the sudden swirl of recollection. She wanted to cry, and fought the urge by closing her eyes, but not even that could shut out the memory of her beloved children: Barrie sitting in the nursery, toiling over an alphabet sampler she was stitching, the sunlight turning her red hair to flame. Ainsley bouncing on her rocking horse, telling it to go faster. And of course, Fletcher, as sturdy and sensible as the brown color of his hair, a Scot to the core, and so like his father. She couldn’t help wondering if he was still trying to coax his sisters outside to play Harry Racket or hoodman-blind, or if there was even any room to play such games aboard the ship they were now on.

She remembered afternoon tea parties spent with her daughters, sitting in miniature tufted chairs, sipping tea from a tiny china tea service, and the precious, intimate moments during the evening bath, when Fletcher always forgot to wash behind his ears, and the girls made beards for each other from soap bubbles. She recalled Barrie and Ainsley sitting on the kitchen stoop, blowing bubbles in Bruce’s favorite clay pipe, and Fletcher fishing in the fishbowl with a tiny hook tied to the end of a piece of string, Ainsley crying when he told her he was going to eat all of her fish for dinner. There were happy times flooded in sunlight, and crisscross days, when nothing seemed to go right, and convalescent days for sore throats and bowls of steaming leek soup. There were winter afternoons just made for sledding, and warm summer mornings spent riding in a flower-bedecked pony cart, and dreary days when the mist turned to rain, keeping the children indoors to wile away the hours cutting snowflakes from paper and making crumbly oatcakes in the kitchen with Maude. There were sunny spring afternoons spent walking on the moors, gathering mallow blossoms and violets, or lying beneath the cool shade of a rowan tree making gowan chains and finding animal shapes in the clouds overhead.

She opened her hand and smoothed the tiny feather, placing it in the bottom of her ribbon box. Then she picked up a button that she had meant to sew on Barrie’s dress. Putting it back, she picked up a pale blue satin ribbon, seeing a few strands of Ainsley’s red-gold hair still tangled in the knot.

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