Page 55 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
“I finished!” Hannah wriggled into her chair at the kitchen table and dangled a handkerchief before Diana’s eyes. “It wasverydifficult,” she said. “But I sketched a pattern—like you said—and look!”
Diana took the handkerchief and smoothed her fingers over the soft cloth. Her initials had been embroidered there in a corner, just as Hannah had said she would do. But so had the outline of the cottage, and the blocky figures of three people—a man, a woman, and a little girl. While the man and the woman had hair stitched in brown and black, the little girl’s hair was rendered in a bright, buttery yellow thread, and she had been given a slightly crooked pink grin.
“There,” Hannah said, gesturing to each of the figures in turn. “That’s Papa. And that’s you. And this one is me. It’s so—it’s so you don’t forget uswhen you have to leave.”
“Oh, darling.” Diana cupped Hannah’s cheek in one hand and pressed a fierce kiss to the girl’s forehead. “I could never forget you. But I’m so glad to have this. You’ve done just beautiful work here. I’m very proud.”
Hannah brightened at the praise. “Have you finished mine?” she asked.
“Not just yet. I’m afraid I’m a little slower than you are.” And she had been attempting to work some fancy stitchery along the borders; a bit of a sampler in and of itself that Hannah might learn to copy as she grew older to advance her own skills in needlework. “But you’ll have it as soon as I’m finished.”
“I am going to make one for Papa, too,” Hannah confessed. “To make certain he remembers you.”
Probably, Diana thought, Ben would have no trouble remembering her. But she liked the thought of him carrying around a clumsily-stitched handkerchief with a child’s approximation of her features nonetheless.Theirfeatures; all three of them together in what anyone would have taken for a child’s crude representation of her family.
That silly pink grin, a permanent testament to Hannah’s happiness. She hoped it would last forever in reality just as it would stitched upon the handkerchief. “Could I ask you to make a minor adjustment to mine first?” Diana asked.
Hannah’s face fell. “I thought you liked it.”
“I love it,” Diana said. “But—would you give me a smile just like yours? And your papa, too?”
“Oh.” Hannah took back the handkerchief. “I suppose I forgot.” She slipped out of her chair and scampered to the drawer where Diana kept the thread in search of a spool of pink. In a few minutes she had produced matching grins and laid the handkerchief back into Diana’s hand.
“Perfect,” Diana enthused to the beaming girl. And there they were, all three of them. A family, stitched safely within the lacy borders of the handkerchief, forever happy.
∞∞∞
“Hannah made a handkerchief for me,” Ben said as he pulled his shirt over his head. “Did you know?”
Diana smiled as she poured one last bucket of water into the washing tub, reserving just a little for rinsing. Ben had carted them upstairs for her, one after another, because they were frightfully heavy and the handle of the bucket had cut into the soft skin of her palms. But she had done this last bit on her own, because it had made her feel at least a little useful. “Yes,” she said. “She made one for me, too.” It was tucked safely away in her trunk even now; the one thing she would absolutely not risk leaving behind.
“She’s going to miss you so,” he said as he worked the buttons of his trousers. “Those little figures she stitched, they looked like—”
“A family,” she said softly. The one they might have been. Hannah there between them, as it should have been.
“Yes,” he said, and blew out a breath. “I thought I was going to cry when she presented it to me—but I’m glad to have it all the same.” He scraped one hand across his mouth and muttered, “What in the world are we going to do without you?”
“Just as you please, I expect.” They would have a good life, she knew that much. They would have each other, just as they always had. “You’d best hurry. The water won’t stay hot forever.”
“Are you going to scrub my back for me?” he asked as he shoved his trousers over his hips and kicked them off his feet.
“Are you going to let me?” she returned archly, collecting a jar of soap, a washcloth, and a length of toweling. “I seem to recall some sort of disagreement on that.”
Ben groaned as he sank into washing tub as far as it would allow—which was not very, given its depth. Probably it would do his sore muscles at least some small amount of good to have a hot bath for once. “I was a fool. I should havebeggedyou to scrub my back for me,” he said.
“Yes, you should have.” The warped wooden floorboards made her knees ache even with the padding of her nightgown and wrapper as she knelt behind him. “I would have done it every night if you had asked.” She dunked the washcloth in the water, which had already gone a bit grey with the collected dust and dirt of his labors, and scrubbed at the bunched muscles of his back.
“God, that feels so damned good.” His hands gripped the sides of the washing tub, and he bent forward just a little to allow her better access. “I was so bloody stubborn. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
Objectively, he had been. No one could say otherwise, not even her. But sometimes, she thought, beingrightwas not so important asseizing joy where one could find it. For however long one could manage to hold on to it.
The soap had a faint minty scent to it, and it washed away the traces of grime and sweat that clung to him still. “How much longer, do you think?” she asked lightly.
He stilled, his muscles tensing beneath the idle strokes of her hands. At last he admitted, however reluctantly, “Days, probably.”
Days. Strange to think that her happiness could be measured in them. “Oh?”
“Today I hit upon a minor vein,” he said. “Most likely it’s the very outer edge of a larger one.Muchlarger, if what I happened on today is anything to go by. Now I have only to find the rest of it. Once it is uncovered, graphite is quite simple to mine. It comes away in chunks, and it’s so light, so soft. It likely won’t take more than a few hours to deplete the vein once it is revealed to me.” His knuckles went white where they tightened around the rim of the washing tub. “Days,” he repeated, and there was something of futility in it. The foreshadowing of an ending that was soon to be upon them, she thought.
