Lake in the Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page A

his family unsuitable for her own. A bigger and grander house had been built away from the noise of waterwheels, perched on the hillside that overlooked her property, as well as the lake, the river, the bridge that spanned it, and the village. From that vantage point nothing would escape her notice, not the names of the men who stood spitting tobacco juice into the bushes outside the trading post, nor the fact that Mr. Gathercole was still deep in conversation with Anna Hauptmann and Jed McGarrity on the church step. They might forget who watched them from the house on the hill, but Jemima could not.
    If not for the widow Kuick, Jemima would have ended upmilking cows or serving ale when she lost her mother and brothers to the putrid sore throat. Instead she had a mistress who sat in the front pew at church services and went home to take up embroidery, as a lady was supposed to do. Jemima counted herself fortunate to have come into the service of a wealthy mistress, especially as the widow had two passions that Jemima shared: her unmarried son, and gossip.
    Born and raised in Paradise, there was little Jemima did not know or could not find out, and nothing she scrupled to share. She was rewarded well for this skill. Of the three maidservants—she had begun service at the mill on the same day as Dolly Smythe and Becca Kaes—only Jemima had a tiny chamber to herself.
    Now she came into the dim, warm kitchen and hung her cape on a peg near the door. She took off her pattens and left them there for Reuben to scrape clean of mud. There were some advantages for a servant in a household with slaves. Some advantages, and many disadvantages, most of them having to do with the woman crouched before the hearth, ladling cider over a ham.
    Cookie, small and lean and skeptical in all things, was the only one of the seven slaves who was allowed to stay in the house overnight, sleeping on a pallet next to the kitchen hearth. Her Reuben went up to the mill to sleep and came back at dawn. The other men—her older sons Levi and Zeke among them—had been sent to Johnstown for the winter, hired out as laborers while the mill stood idle over the winter.
    Cookie spoke without ever looking in Jemima’s direction.
    “You took your time.”
    Jemima came to the hearth to examine the pots of squash and yams drizzled with molasses. In another deep kettle, beans simmered in sauce glistening with pork fat. Cookie might be an irritation, but Jemima could find nothing to criticize in the food she put on the table. Her stomach growled loudly.
    “Better get up there now, or you’ll go without no matter what your belly have to say about it.”
    “You tend to your work and I’ll attend to my own.” Jemima left the kitchen at a comfortable pace devised to make Cookie understand that she had no authority over a free white woman, even one who happened to be a servant.
    By the time she reached the parlor door Jemima’s calm hadfled. She paused to set her muslin cap right and smooth her skirt and saw—too late—flecks of mud on the hem. It would not go unnoticed, but right now the greater sin would be to make the mistress wait.
    Lucy Kuick looked up from her needlework only long enough to examine Jemima as she curtsied, one corner of her mouth turning down. The widow had a soft voice with a crackling edge to it, each word bitten off like a wayward thread. “Took you long enough, missy. What news?”
    Jemima kept her eyes fixed on the widow’s mourning brooch: gray hair woven into a knot and captured under crystal. She used the brooch with its black-and-white enameled lilies to keep her mind off Isaiah Kuick, who sat behind her in the corner. It was the widow’s pleasure to have her son read aloud from the bible while she worked on her tapestry. Jemima felt Isaiah’s eyes on her back as insistent as a hand; she focused harder on the brooch as she began to relate her news.
    She was a good storyteller, with an understanding of how long she could hold off