“What a pretty, gay tune it is,” she said, tapping her foot and humming after him. “I do like to hear a new tune now and then. Be sure you bring me one from the town, Ezra.”
He laughed kindly. “Eh, you’ve the gay heart, and the dancing foot still, I’ll be bound, spite of the rheumatics! I wouldn’t trust you at a wedding or a roof-raising. Thank you, my love,” he added, as Polly, still in silence, handed him his musket. “Now the bullet pouch, though I protest it goes against my nature to have you always waiting on me so, for all the world like one of those savage females⸺”
Granny interrupted. “Let be! A woman likes to wait on her man, son, especially so fine and proper and upstanding a man as you.”
He chuckled. “’Tis easy to see how you managed to capture four husbands for yourself, Mistress Estill! But I did not marry a wife to be a servant to me. I buy my servants,” he added, proudly, “or at least I shall be buying them as I sell the crops. Here in this rough life you women have your full share of the work, without mollycoddling an able-bodied husband into the bargain. I cannot make of our Polly a fine lady—not yet. But I can keep her from wearing herself to the bone in service of mine. Look how thin she is growing! It shames me, Granny. Can you not make her mind her food? I’ve been watching her the past few days, and I declare she does not eat enough to keep a robin alive.”
“’Tis true she eats too little—but no man can say that of your son, Ezra! Nursing mothers are always thin, be they dog, or cat, or mare, you know that. It may be she is wise to start him on the bottle, though I do not hold with these newfangled notions myself.”
Ezra’s face softened tenderly. “Polly must do as she thinks best there—though a nursing mother should have special reasons for learning to eat.” He waited a moment for Polly to speak, but as she did not do so, he murmured to her in a lower voice, “Barefoot again? Do you not like the pretty shoon I had the cobbler make to your measure? The buckles are of pure silver, lass; I had them from a French trader.”
Polly looked at her feet in embarrassment, trying to hide one with the other, and spoke for the first time.
“I—I forgot!” Her voice was musical, but shy and hesitating, as if she had not the habit of using it.
“Ah, let be!” said Granny again, protectively. “’Tis cruel to try to make a child into a woman all at once. Dearie me! How well I mind that I used to slip away to play with my wooden doll-baby weeks after I wore the cap and shawl myself—till my husband caught me and teased me out of it, because a live one was coming. Polly has had so little childhood, poor lamb! She was but ten when they took her, remember. And for that matter, ’tis a comfort sometimes to feet more broke to shoon than Polly’s to be free of the cramp of sole leather—” She glanced down comically at her own.
“If you spoil her so,” frowned Ezra, “if you encourage her wild ways, how am I ever to make a staid and proper matron of my wife?”