Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink Read Online Free PDF

disbelief.
    â€œShhh!” She shushed me merrily. “Now, you’ll want to keep these in the linen press upstairs at the Bromleigh Homestead. Wear your Camden Harbor uniform over in the mornings and change in the homestead. The dresses will be waiting in the linen press for you tomorrow morning.”
    â€œGot it.”
    Tomorrow was looking better and better. I whistled as I made my way home from the costume shack. I knew, once back at the house, I had to face two of my least favorite things: unpacking and dealing with Ashling. Both of these activities required my full attention, so at the end of an evening full of both, I was more than happy to collapse into bed and read. I hadn’t brought that many books, which after seeing the “library” in the living room, I was beginning to think was a fatal error. I picked up my well-read copy of
Northanger Abbey,
happily turning its familiar pages. I’d always thought Henry Tilney was one of Austen’s most underappreciated heroes. So witty and intelligent and funny, and he and Catherine are so perfect for each other, and—
    â€œI go to sleep at ten,” Ashling said, then abruptly turned out the lights, plunging the room into darkness.
    â€œActually, um, I was gonna read for a bit, and—”
    â€œGood night.”
    Well, if nothing else, come August—if I survived—I’d sure be well rested.

Two
    I really was wearing pants, but no one believed me. On the walk to the museum grounds, four cars rolled down their windows to whistle, two different mothers covered their sons’ eyes, and Ashling kept huffing something that sounded suspiciously like “skank.” I really wasn’t pantsless. I only looked like it. My standard-issue blue polo shirt just happened to be longer than the only pair of khaki shorts I owned. Ah, the perils of being short.
    I had never thought I’d be so relieved to don something that reached down to my ankles, but after my pants-free walk of shame, I wriggled gratefully into my layers of petticoats and the blue linsey-woolsey dress. There was an apron in there too, which I tied on—who knew how messy things were going to get.
    Downstairs, a capable-looking woman in her early sixties was waiting for me in the kitchen. She looked like she could help a cow give birth. Or had maybe worked as a park ranger.
    â€œI’m Ruth,” she said as she grasped my hand firmly. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, kid.”
    Ruth wasn’t kidding. Back before kitchen stoves became widespread in the nineteenth century, Americans cooked on an open hearth, either hanging things above the flames to roast or heating things by burying them in the warmth of the ashes. The one here looked a bit like something out of a brick-oven pizza restaurant. We swept the ashes into the center of the hearth and built up the fire using wood stacked by the back door. Ruth selected different cast-iron pots, nestling two lidded ones into the ashes, hanging another from one of many hooks dangling above the fire, and setting a frying pan on a trivet. All of the pots were ridiculously heavy and left midnight black streaks on my hands. As the fire heated up, Ruth led me down a narrow staircase into the cellar.
    â€œNo one comes down here but you. You hear? No one,” she said seriously. “This”—she gestured to a refrigerator—“is the only modern appliance in the house. Here’s where you’ll get all the cooking supplies that don’t come from the garden and aren’t upstairs in jars, like flour, sugar, molasses, et cetera.”
    And those supplies turned out to be . . . lard. Ruth opened the refrigerator to reveal a solid wall of boxed snow-capped lard. More lard than I had thought existed in the continental United States.
    â€œEggs are on the side”—she flipped open the egg holder—“and milk is on the bottom inside the door. All the meat’s in