Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t continue this way or the stock would eventually dwindle down to nothing.
    It was during that second year that she was forced to start borrowing from the bank. As she did, she silently railed at both her husband and her brother, the one for putting her in this position, the other for having the means to help but being so irresponsible that he had disappeared without a trace. She ought to just—
    No, she said to herself. Things hadn’t gotten quite that bad yet, and she would pay off the bank with the next year’s crops.
    Mrs. Clairborne was forced to understand much that she’d heard from her husband for years, and realize why he’d complained about the slaves, the weather, the fences, the constant drain of cash, and a hundred other things. And always more bills appeared than she could manage—where did they all come from? It wasn’t easy managing a plantation, she had heard him say many times. Now that she had to do it for herself, Rosalind Clairborne realized just how hard it really was.
    She vowed that she would roll up her sleeves and go down to the slave quarters every day and get the work started herself . She would supervise them throughout the day too. How many times had she heard her husband say, ‘‘If you don’t stand over their shoulders and make them do what you tell them, nothing will get done.’’
    She had been lax. She had assumed everyone would do just as she said. A lot of what had happened this last season was her own fault. From now on she would watch things more closely, even if it meant getting out in the fields every day and working right along with them. If that’s what it took to keep the cotton hoed and free of weeds, that’s what she would do.
    She would make them work. If her husband could do it, she could. She couldn’t afford another bad year.
    It was a bewildering and lonely time in Katie’s life. At one time she came upon her mother, uncharacteristically exasperated with Beulah or Elvia, another time just sitting and crying from sheer exhaustion. Yet her mother’s attempted explanations made little sense in Katie’s ears.
    And Mrs. Clairborne’s irritation with Katie’s innocence occasionally boiled over.
    Katie was out next to the pasture one day, playing with a doll and talking to a cow grazing on the other side of the fence. Rusty lay curled up asleep at her side. Mrs. Clairborne hurried up to them.
    ‘‘Kathleen, what are you doing!’’ exclaimed her mother in frustration. ‘‘Do I have to do everything around here myself? What am I going to do with you if you’re always in your own little dreamworld?’’
    Katie was confused at her mother’s outburst.
    ‘‘The dream is over, Kathleen,’’ Mrs. Clairborne went on, hands on her hips. ‘‘You’re going to have to be in charge of your own home someday. It’s time you learned to do some things. And I need help around here. So we’re going to start right now. I’m going to teach you to handle a team of horses. It will be a big help to me if you can go down to the slave quarters with a wagon of food now and then. Come with me while I hitch up the horses.’’
    Katie complied and learned to do whatever she was told, though at the end of this day, when the lesson with the team and wagon was done, she went to her room, sat down with Rebecca and Peg and Sarah in her lap, and started to cry.
    Why was her mother so irritable? Why had she said those things today?
    Her mother never read to her now, and hardly ever smiled. There used to be music in the house all the time, and they used to go to concerts. The war had made everything so dreary. She didn’t feel like playing her violin or the piano all by herself, and her mother never sat down at the piano anymore either.

T WISTER
6

    R OSALIND C LAIRBORNE READ ABOUT M R. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the Greens Crossing Clarion in January of 1863, and it didn’t help matters for her. Though only a few of the Rosewood slaves knew how to read,