The Courtship of the Vicar's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

shotgun sat propped in the narrow space between a cupboard and a wall. Grabbing the stock with both hands, she hurried over and lifted the tablecloth long enough to lay the gun across the seats of two kitchen chairs. She quickly went to the stove and picked up a wooden stirring spoon just as her father burst through the door.
    “Where did you put it, girl!” he bellowed a second later, wheeling around from the empty corner. Rage stained his already ruddy complexion to the color of the bandana around his neck.
    After casually stirring the pot of cabbage that simmered on a back burner, Mercy turned down the knob a notch. The Durwin oil stove was a luxury that had taken her three years to talk her father into buying. By his way of thinking, she should have been content to continue cooking meals for a father and six brothers over the fireplace for the rest of her life. What else did she have to do—besides wash and sew their clothes, tend the garden, and keep the cottage in some semblance of order? “I’m not telling you, Papa,” she said calmly. “You can’t go shooting people.”
    Her father disappeared into the pantry for a second, then returned to the kitchen to glare at her. “I’m just gonter shoot over their heads. A man has a right to protect his property!”
    “And Constable Reed has the right to lock you up.”
    Her words seemed to give him pause for thought, for as Mercy had heard it, her father had developed more than a nodding acquaintance with the damp old sandstone lockup behind the village hall in his earlier years. How would he oversee the operations of his dairy farm and herd of forty-three Friesian cattle if he were incarcerated? He certainly couldn’t depend upon his sons, who were so lazy that they had to be bullied into work and would run him into ruin if left in charge. Mercy looked across the room through the door he had left open and was relieved to see no sign of the four men.
    But that wasn’t the end of it, she knew. “You’re just going to have to send them to school, Papa,” Mercy told him. “The whole village looks down on us. It’s not right that none of the boys can even write his own name.”
    “Well, what about me ?” he practically whined. “I need help around this place.”
    “They would be home afternoons and weekends. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt the older boys to have to take up the slack. Perhaps if they had a little less idle time, they wouldn’t get into so much trouble.”
    He appeared not to have heard her reply, for his heavy-lidded eyes were still traveling the length of the large room that served as kitchen and parlor in the half-timbered cottage. It was the color of those eyes that one first noticed about him, the restful green of a forest at twilight. Set in a face more disposed to generosity and good will, they would have been considered handsome and thoughtful.
    Sighing, Mercy told him, “Those men are gone, so you might as well give up looking for that gun.”
    Her father hurried to the door and peered outside. When he turned back to her, disappointment had deepened the lines in his perpetually dour face. “I should strap you for thet, Mercy,” he muttered.
    Ten years ago Mercy would have quailed and perhaps even surrendered the shotgun now that the callers appeared to be on their way. But the thirteen-year-old girl she was back then had not yet reconciled herself to the fact that her father was the most selfish man upon the face of the earth. As long as his sons did their share of work, he had no concern that each was almost completely devoid of good character.
    Of late Mercy had begun to wonder if the pneumonia was not what had killed her mother five years ago, but rather the years of living a life with very little appreciation to soften the drudgery. As a believer, Mercy was aware of the obligation upon her to honor her father. But she would leave the house before surrendering to a strapping at the age of twenty-three. Calmly, she told him after