Lynna Banning (2 page)

Mrs. Benbow nodded in agreement. “I canna climb stairs any longer, so we have kept the bairn down here, in doctor’s study. But with my back the way it is.” Her voice trailed off.

The wailing resumed Erika disengaged her forefinger from the baby’s grasp. “May I pick her up?”

“Of course, of course,” the old woman rasped.
“That’s why ye’ve come, isn’t it? Miss Tess had me send for ye. Not that I thought much o’ the idea, but seein’ as how things turned out, perhaps it’s for the best.”

Erika hesitated. She sensed the woman’s resentment. She deduced that Mrs. Benbow had run the Callender household for some time. Erika’s arrival was an obvious intrusion on the crusty housekeeper’s territory.

“Well, go on!” the older woman rasped. “Pick the babe up and get her to stop crying, if ye can.”

Erika reached into the cradle and slid her hands under the blanketed bundle. Lifting her up, she held the infant securely against her body. The tiny creature lay warm and fragrant on her breast. A sweet, soapy fragrance rose from her skin.

Erika’s heart squeezed. The baby was exquisite, like a porcelain doll with her fair skin and rosy cheeks and huge blue eyes. And so tiny! So perfectly formed!

“Mrs. Callender must have very beautiful been,” she murmured.

The doctor turned away abruptly. Erika watched as he bent his head and fingered a framed portrait on his cluttered desk.

“Aye, she was that,” Mrs. Benbow volunteered with a significant look at her employer. “‘Tis a sad
house ye’ve come to, lass. Nothing’s been the same since Miss Tess has been gone.”

Erika saw the doctor turn the photograph face down on his desk, but still he did not turn around. A silence thick as cold molasses descended as Mrs. Benbow dabbed at her eyes with the towel.

Erika waited for someone to speak. After a long minute, she concluded that the conversation had come to an end.

The baby’s comforting weight against her breast reminded her why she had come in the first placeto help with the infant. Now more than ever she wanted to stay and work in this house with its spacious, elegantly arranged rooms and the lacy, private bedroom upstairs. More than that, she realized, she felt an inexorable pull toward the soft bundle snuggled in her arms.

“I presume you will leave in the morning,” the doctor announced. His voice sounded ragged with fatigue. The expression in his face was cold, as if a lifeless mask had been drawn over his features. But in his eyes, Erika saw the agony of a bereaved man and a silent, unconscious cry for help.

She shifted the baby to her shoulder. “I stay for three dollar a week,” she said quietly.

“No,” the physician said. “Mrs. Benbow can manage until—”

Mrs. Benbow slapped the tea towel onto her lap. “I say she’s a gift from God.”

“No,” Dr. Callender repeated.

The housekeeper studied Erika with unsmiling eyes. “She’s young, but she’ll do in a pinch.”

The doctor scowled.

“Just until—Lord preserve us, lass!” the housekeeper cried. “Where are your shoes?”

Erika winced. In her haste, she’d forgotten them.

Fighting back a choking fear, she caught Dr. Callender’s cool, calculating gaze as he awaited her answer. Would he dismiss her on the spot for being a lackwit?

“Well, Miss Scharf?” His tone was silky with derision.

“I—” A warm wetness seeped through the soft blanket. “The baby is needful,” she said, quickly shifting the topic.

She bent over the cradle and laid the infant on its back. Reaching for the diaper folded over the foot of the crib, she spoke over her shoulder. “I stay. Shoes do not matter.”

Erika lifted the square of soft cotton diaper and froze. She knew nothing about babies! She was a cobbler’s daughter, the only child Mama and Papa ever had. She’d never even had any younger cousins to care for. Oh, what was she to do?

- She knew what a diaper was for, but how in the
world was it attached? She’d been engaged to do laundry and ironing, maybe watch over the child when the mama went out. But now she was not the helper—she was the mama!

She felt eyes boring into her back—one pair black and disapproving, one pair gray and distant. Measuring.

Erika closed her eyes and uttered a brief, silent prayer.
Help me, God! Show me about diapers!

When she opened her lids, the room hummed with tension. Summoning her courage, Erika unfolded the diaper and peeked under the infant’s soaked cambric gown.

W
ith grudging admiration, Jonathan watched as Erika bent over the wicker cradle. She wasn’t the first serving girl to be subjected to Adeline Benbow’s assessing eye and pointed questions, but she was the first to stay more than five minutes after the experience.

How long Miss Scharf would last under his housekeeper’s exacting rule was another matter entirely, but at the moment the prospect solved the problem of what to do with the young woman. Since Mrs. Benbow expressed a preference for the girl’s help, however temporary, he couldn’t simply turn her out.

He’d lay odds she’d last less than a week. Mrs. Benbow could be a stem taskmaster, and now that she was too old to climb the stairs more than once a day, she bore an extra grudge against life in general and young women in particular. If Miss Scharf lasted
more than the week, he’d try to find her another position. But she would need the hide of a rhinoceros to survive even one day under Mrs. Benbow.

He watched Erika gently lift the folds of the cambric sacque away from the baby’s body with capable, graceful hands. The look on her face when she touched his daughter told him she had a sentimental nature. And sentiment meant vulnerability. If he knew anything about women, Miss Scharf had a soft heart, and because of it, she would suffer. In spite of himself, he felt a twinge of sympathy for the eager, rosy-cheeked woman.

Erika smoothed out the diaper and draped it over the edge of the wicker cradle. Moving very deliberately, she unsnapped the safety pins holding the wet garment in place. As she did so, she studied the arrangement of folds in the material, the position of the fasteners, how they were attached. With care, she lifted away the wet diaper.

The housekeeper watched her every move, then tossed the tea towel she’d been fanning herself with into the cradle. Erika’s toes curled. What was she supposed to do with
that?

“Cornstarch is in the candy dish,” the older woman offered in a dry tone. She pointed to a fluted glass bowl on a side table.

Cornstarch?
Why would she need cornstarch?

As if in answer to her unspoken question, Dr. Callender
spoke in a low, controlled voice. “It is much superior to nursery powder.”

Powder! Of course. With an inward sigh of relief, she rolled the wet diaper into a wad and deposited it on an empty corner of the doctor’s desk. She heard Mrs. Benbow’s snort of disapproval and the physician’s quick intake of breath, but she was too distracted to care. Cornstarch must be for the baby’s moist skin. She eyed the huck tea towel.

That was it! She must dry the infant’s tender skin, then dust on the fine white powder.
Oh, thank you, God, for showing me how to proceed

She snatched up the wrinkled towel and just as quickly discarded it. “Is soiled,” she said as calmly as she could. “May I have clean one?”

The housekeeper rose and drew herself up with an air of superiority. The stiff bombazine dress rustled in the quiet room, and Erika had a quick vision of a peacock displaying its feathers.

“Certainly,” the woman snapped. The door clicked shut behind her.

Left alone with the doctor, Erika experienced a moment of panic. Would he notice her inexperience?

She kept her back to him as she folded the dry material into what she judged to be a diaper-shaped rectangle. The door opened and in swept Mrs. Benbow, a clean towel in her hand. Erika accepted it, then reached for the dish of cornstarch. She patted
the baby’s damp skin with the towel, then dusted on the powder with the cotton ball in the dish cover.

As she lifted the folded diaper she managed a surreptitious glance behind her. Both Dr. Callender and his housekeeper had their attention riveted on her. She could block out one person’s view with her body, but not both. One of them would just have to witness her first fumbling attempt at changing an infant’s diaper. Which one should it be?

She chose the housekeeper. The physician would dismiss her at once if he suspected how inexperienced she was. Mrs. Benbow might disapprove, but she would not complain, since she obviously regarded caring for the infant herself with some distaste.

Keeping her back toward. Dr. Callender, Erika lifted the baby’s tiny legs and slid the material beneath her rump. She wished her hands would stop shaking! Slowly she brought the material up between the kicking limbs. Praying she would not stab the infant with the pin, she forced the point through thicknesses of cotton material and, using her finger as a guide, snapped the device securely in place. When the second pin closed, Erika breathed in relief. She’d done it!

“Humph!” Mrs. Benbow sniffed behind her. “Now I s’pose you’ll need that milk heated up. I’ll
have to go poke up my stove.” With a sour look on her face, the woman yanked open the study door.

“Please,” Erika was amazed to hear herself say. “Pour out old milk. Use fresh.”

The housekeeper stiffened, and Erika held her breath.

“Miss Scharf is right,” the doctor said in a low, even voice. “In this hot weather, milk clabbers readily.”

“Harrumph!” The housekeeper huf—fed and swished away, an angry set to her thin, hunched shoulders.

Milk,
Erika thought desperately. Babies needed milk, of course, but how much? How warm? And if not from a mother’s breast, how was it to be drunk?

“Boil the nursing flask, too, Mrs. Benbow,” the physician called through the open door.

Ah, that was it-a bottle of some sort! Erika covered her relief by lifting the infant into her arms. Except for a single blanket over the mattress, no other bedding softened the bare wicker.

She stared down at the starkly appointed cradle, then pivoted toward the doctor. “Where is kept baby’s clothes and…bed makings?”

“Tess…” A momentary flash of anguish twisted the physician’s regular features. He swallowed, then continued. “My wife stored the baby’s things in the nursery.”

“Nursery? Where is nursery?”

“Upstairs. Mrs. Benbow cannot manage the stairs, so she moved the cradle into my study until.for the time being.”

“I move back to nursery,” Erika announced. “I can go up and down stairs. I t’ink is why missus send for me.”

Jonathan said nothing. He strode to the laceshrouded window, drew the panel to one side and stared out. He would be glad to have the child ensconced out of earshot in the special room Tess had insisted on when she had finally confessed her pregnancy. Every sound the baby made reminded him of his wife’s untimely death. Even so, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be left alone with himself in the sanctuary of his study.

But life could not stop because Tess was gone. It was time for him to see patients again. He had to resume his practice, or that quack Chilcoate would kill off half the town.

“Yes, move the babe upstairs,” he said, clipping his words short.
And as for you, Erika Scharf, stay out of my sight.

To be honest, he wanted nothing to do with Tess’s child, or the young woman she had engaged without telling him. Women, he had learned, were devious and dishonest. Never again, he resolved, would he
allow himself to love one. No woman would ever again enchain his heart.

And no child, either.

Erika frowned as she inspected the nursery. The small, stifling room next to her own chamber smelled of dust and dried lavender and obviously had never been used. A stack of clean diapers filled the laceruffled bassinet; on top of the broad, waist-high chest on the opposite wall lay a folded blue knit shawl. A cobweb looped from the garment to one drawer pull.

A rocking chair stood next to the single window. Erika noticed the layer of dust between the dark walnut slats. It looked as if no one had ever sat in it.

She lifted the diapers off the striped ticking mattress and set them on top of the chest. God in heaven, the infant’s bed had not even been made up!

Erika cocked her head to one side. The untouched state of the room answered her questions about the odd situation she’d stepped into. From birth, the child had evidently been cared for by the housekeeperfed and tended to in the wicker cradle downstairs in the doctor’s study. Considering Mrs. Benbow’s spare, bent frame, her inability to climb the stairs and her obvious reticence about picking up the baby even when it wailed, Erika surmised the child had received attention only out of duty. Even the papa, Dr. Callender, seemed uninterested. Remote.

Had he delivered the infant and immediately relegated her to the care of his dour housekeeper as his wife lay dying? Poor man.

And the poor
Liebchen!
What a sad beginning for a child. No one to hold or comfort her, no warm mama’s body to nestle against, no breast to suckle. Erika knew instinctively what the child needed. Love.

And that silent, enigmatic man whose house this was planned to send his own child to Scotland? Erika would die first. The instant those tiny, perfect pink fingers had curled around her thumb, Erika’s heart had contracted. Now the child lay downstairs, looked after but not loved. It was not good enough.

She plucked the handerchief from her apron pocket and whisked it over the dusty chair and bureau top, shook out the shawl and folded the mound of diapers and laid them in an empty drawer. In the middle drawer she found a set of infant-sized sheets and a tiny pillowcase with embroidered pink and gold flowers twining around the edge. She made up the bassinet, laid a rose-edged crocheted baby blanket over the top sheet and opened the window to air the room. A warm, sweet-scented breeze washed over her perspiring face.

Erika pressed her forefinger against the smooth rocker back, setting it in motion.
Forgive me if I not
know everything, Mrs. Callender, but I learn quick. I will take good care of your beautiful baby girl.

She watched the chair tip slowly forward and then back on its long, curved runners, as if nodding in silent agreement.