Nicky stepped from the bath to be dried. He stood stiffly, knowing his bad leg was visible to all in the room, making no sign that he cared.
Callie moved to shield him. She rubbed the small frame with rough towels, feeling defensive and angry, even though nobody had said a word. Just let them dare, that was all!
“Here y’are, lovie, he can wear these.” Mrs. Barrow passed her a set of clothes from a small tin trunk.
Gabriel eyed the trunk. “Does that contain what I think it does?”
Mrs. Barrow didn’t meet his eyes. “Just a few of Harry’s old clothes.”
“You’ve got a trunk full of Harry’s old clothes? Small enough to fit these boys? How long have you been keeping them?”
“They were too good to throw out!” she said defensively.
“You could have given them away.” He explained to Callie, “Harry’s as tall as me.”
“Well, I’m giving them away now,” Mrs. Barrow retorted. “Now that our Harry’s back, safe from the war—and if you want your coffee good and hot, you won’t be saying another word, Mr. Gabe!”
“Not a word,” he promised hastily.
Callie repressed a smile. It seemed Mrs. Barrow’s threats worked as well on grown men as they did on small boys.
“Oh, but our portmanteau is here now. I don’t know yet how much seawater got in—Nicky may have dry clothes of his own.” She looked around, but could not see the portmanteau.
“Barrow has taken it up to your bedchamber,” Mrs. Barrow told her. “Why not use Harry’s clothes for the moment?” She scooped up the muddy pile of clothes from the floor and headed for the scullery.
Callie nodded and dressed her son in the clean, worn clothes of another boy. Never in his life had Nicky worn such shabby clothes, but he seemed quite happy about it, and beggars could not be choosers.
“Lady, everything in that bag is wet,” the boy, Jim, said.
“How do you know?” she said, as she slipped a shirt over Nicky’s head.
“Jim, er, rescued the portmanteau for us, Mama,” Nicky said. His eyes met Jim’s. “He brought it all the way up from the beach. It was a very difficult and dangerous thing to do. The rain made mud slides over the path.”
“Thank you, Jim,” she said.
Jim scuffed his bare toes in embarrassment. “I didn’t exactly rescue—”
Nicky interrupted, with a fierce look at Jim. “He did, Mama. He’s very strong and clever.”
Callie finished dressing Nicky and gave him a kiss on the forehead. She had a very good idea what a boy like Jim would be doing with her portmanteau, but Nicky’s eyes were pleading with her to accept his new friend. He’d never had a friend. He had no relations his own age and his father hadn’t thought it proper for him to play with common children. Callie knew what that was like. She’d grown up lonely, too.
“Thank you, Jim.” On impulse she gave the fisher boy a kiss on the forehead as well. The boy squirmed and the tips of his sticking-out ears went red, but he tried not to grin. In Callie’s head Papa and Rupert roared with outrage. Callie smiled. She was her own woman now, subject to nobody’s rules.
There was a short silence, then the sound of a throat being noisily cleared from the doorway, where Gabriel had been lounging against the doorjamb, observing. “Don’t I get a kiss, too?” he said.
She raised her brows.
“I fetched the portmanteau from the cliffs,” he reminded her and puckered his lips suggestively.
“Thank you, Mr. Renfrew, but a good deed is its own reward,” she said sweetly. To Mrs. Barrow she said, “I shall go upstairs and discover the condition of the things in my portmanteau.”
“Won’t you be wanting any breakfast, ma’am?”
“Oh, yes, a cup of tea and some toast would be lovely, thank you.”
“And what about a nice bit o’ bacon, ma’am?”
Callie hesitated. Bacon. How long had it been since she’d eaten bacon? Rupert had forbidden it to her.
