For Her Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

Matu marched out the back door and across the rear yard toward the kitchens, leaving behind a very bewildered Grace with her tangled wad of colored threads and her poorly executed needlework.

Two
     
    Giles rose from the sturdy oak table filled with supper dishes and began clearing his place. After a month at sea, it was good to eat a home-cooked meal at the Cooper family’s house just outside of Boston. Funny, he hadn’t really thought that he’d missed the warmth of hearth and home. After all, he hadn’t had a home in any real sense since he was a lad and had gone to sea. But after Geoff and Faith had wed, and even more so after he had been named the godfather of their child, he had come to appreciate every moment he spent among real families. He felt fortunate indeed to have come to know Faith’s parents and to be welcomed into their house whenever he was in New England.
    “Nay, nay,” Naomi Cooper chided, shaking her white-capped head. “You are our guest.” She pulled the plate from Giles’s hand and gestured with it for him to sit.
    Jonathan Cooper, seated next to Giles, chuckled. “She wants you to keep talking. Surely there is some tiny detail about our grandson that you have left out.”
    “I am just as anxious to hear about Faith and Geoff,” Naomi protested.
    The Coopers’ sons, fourteen-year-old Isaiah and nine-year-old David, took over the table clearing and dish washing, squabbling briefly over who would do what. The adults moved from the dining section of the keeping room to the sitting section. A cheery fire burned in the huge fireplace, and the trio found seats on the plain but well-built furniture surrounding it.
    “I’ve told you all I can think of,” Giles avowed. “Faith and young Jonathan are well. The business is flourishing, so Geoff is having no trouble providing for them.”
    “Aye,” Jonathan agreed, “a second ship. ‘Tis a good sign, a prosperous business.”
    Giles smiled. Faith’s father was a Puritan, through and through.
    True to form, Jonathan asked for the fifth time that night, “So you really think ‘tis the Quaker faith she’s settled on?”
    “Faith seems to feel that it fits her,” Giles assured him.
    Jonathan shook his head full of long, graying hair. “Quaker. Think you that we gave the girl too much leeway in her youth, Naomi? Mayhap we should have just chosen a husband for her all along.”
    Naomi threw up her hands in a gesture of exasperation. “Let it go, Jonathan. You said yourself, her husband’s prosperity is a sign of God’s grace. And now, they’ve been blessed with a son. Mayhap we could travel back to Jamaica with Giles?”
    “No need,” Giles assured them.
    “He’s right, Naomi, they’ll be here in a few months time. We can wait.”
    Naomi sniffed. “You cannot blame me for wanting to see my grandson.”
    “You’ve two others,” Jonathan reminded her, speaking of their eldest son’s boys.
    “Aye, well, they’re Noah’s, and I see them daily. I long to see Faith’s boy, that’s all.”
    Giles cleared his throat and brought their attention back to him. “Might I ask you two something about Faith, before she met Geoff?”
    They looked at him, their eyebrows raised. Obviously, his request struck them as improper somehow. Lord, how did Geoff ever navigate his relationship with his Puritan in-laws? Still, he knew that the Coopers had done a fine job raising their daughter, and perhaps they had some insight.
    “‘Tis not so much about her, personally, as it is about daughters in general, and courtship, and well, what makes one suitor more favorable than another,” he explained.
    Naomi breathed a sigh of relief, and Jonathan nodded knowingly. “You’ve finally found a likely maid then?” he asked.
    “Perhaps you two would prefer to discuss this alone,” Naomi suggested.
    “Nay!” Giles protested. “I’d like a woman’s views, as well. I think it may be a bit complicated.”
    “More complicated than Geoff and Faith?”