Chapter Nine
Runa groaned and smuggled closer to her hot water bottle as she felt someone shake her lightly. It must be morning, she thought groggily, not quite ready to wake. She was so exhausted her bones hurt, and had been in a deep sleep. So deep she couldn’t even remember her dreams.
“Runa. We need to get up.” A warm voice murmured in her ear. She frowned. That didn’t sound like Titus, and he would never come into her room to wake her as it was. The bed was different than she was used to as well, softer, warmer.
Then she recalled the events of the previous day, and realized she was not curled up against a hot water bottle, but her husband. She pried open heavy eyes that did not want to open, and started to raise her head.
“I wish I could let you sleep longer, but Happy Sam should be in soon with the eggs and the milk.” Steve said regretfully.
“I’ll be up in a few minutes.” She managed, reaching to rub sleep from her eyes.
“I’ll get dressed and head out if you want to rest another few minutes.” He offered.
She managed a nod, and wanted to protest when he left the bed, taking his warmth with him. It had been a warm night and he gave off a great deal of heat, but his heat had been welcome, even comforting. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling in the darkness, thinking on that as Steve dressed, a part of her wanting to peek at her husband, but the rest of her willing to give him the same privacy he was offering her. A privacy she appreciated. She wasn’t quite ready for him to see her undressed yet.
Once Steve had left the room, Runa rose and washed quickly in the basin and then dressed in the calico she had worn the day before, beginning to feel the nagging of her body’s needs. She stepped out of the bedroom and then hurried outside to the privy Steve had shown her during the tour the night before. She washed up once more at the pump as Steve came out with two tin pails to fill with water. She managed a smile in the pre-dawn gloom, and he smiled slightly in return. She hurried to the kitchen, just as Happy Sam was coming in through the kitchen door with a pail of milk, what looked like a half-sized bushel basket on the worn wood countertop, the basket nearly full of eggs.
“Brought in a pail of milk for you to use with breakfast, Missus Rogers. I put the rest of it in the spring house. I started the fire in the stove when I brought the eggs in. Usually do in the mornings.”
“Thank you.” Runa said gratefully, “I’ll get coffee started right away.” She promised, earning a grin in return.
“That would be appreciated, ma’am. I have to admit, coffee and eggs might be the only things any of us are anywhere close to good at fixing, but we still have a lot to learn.”
“Well, hopefully my coffee is to everyone’s liking. There were no complaints when I made it at the Rumlows, but Missus Rumlow drank tea more than coffee.” She confessed, smiling over at Steve as he brought in the water pails. “Thank you.” She said, before starting to get the coffee ready with a few false starts. “Steve said you want to learn to be a better cook so you can cook on the trail?” She ventured as she started the coffee going in the massive coffee pot on the back of the stove.
“Yes, ma’am. I can’t ride very well these days because of my accident, but I can drive a chuck wagon. I’m generally the trail cook, but I’m not very good at it.”
“Well, we can fix that. We’ll start with gravy this morning. Steve, would anyone mind if I rearranged the kitchen and pantry a bit?” She asked, not looking up as she headed towards the pantry. “I know you probably have a system somewhere in here, but…”
“No system. Things just… Go where we had room to put them. It’s your kitchen now. No one should mind too much if you want to arrange things so they make sense to you.” Steve pointed out.
“Still, no harm in asking.” She said quietly. “I was planning on washing today. Could you tell everyone to leave out their dirty things?”
Steve hesitated. “Do you think you can manage it?”
Runa’s pressed her lips together in a thin line. She knew she didn’t look like much, but he didn’t need to question her. “I’ve done the wash for the family I worked for and all the servants boarding in the house every Monday for the past nine years. I think I can manage. Since there are more of us I might need to break it into two days, but I can manage.”
“I’ll go and let the others know.” Happy Sam said, giving Steve a look that wished him luck as he hurried from the room while Runa stepped into the pantry.
“I’m sorry.” Steve said as Runa sifted dry ingredients into a large bowl. “It just seems like a lot of work for…” He was searching for words that wouldn’t offend, and was failing.
“Someone of my stature?” She asked tartly as she added a lump of lard to the bowl and began mixing. “I am not a stranger to hard work, and I knew there would be plenty of that before I came out here.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded her head once. “Breakfast won’t be long. I’ll have something within half an hour. Is that all right?”
“That will be just fine.” Steve said, before making a hasty escape from the kitchen and then the house. He went around to the stable to see to the horses, but saw Bucky heading towards the house. He changed direction so he could meet up with Bucky. “Morning.”
Bucky eyed him in confusion. “Why aren’t you inside? Spending time with your wife?”
“I said something stupid and she kicked me out of the kitchen.” Steve sighed.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Bucky asked with a sigh, raking a hand through his hair, “I expected you two to be all shy smiles and blushes this morning, and you manage to go and get kicked out of the kitchen.”
Steve looked down at the ground. “She’d had a long trip, so I-”
Bucky tilted his head back, looking up at the heavens in a gesture Steve would be all too familiar with. It was a look Mary Barnes wore often when she was seeking help from the heavens regarding the behavior of either her offspring or Steve. “You told her to get some rest. Why did I expect anything different?”
Steve raised his head to look at Bucky with an aw shucks grin, “Because you’re an optimist, Buck.”
“I don’t think ‘optimist’ is the right word for it.” Bucky grumbled, heading for the house. “Come on. I want to get my laundry ready before breakfast. You should to the same.”
~*~
The men started trickling into the house for coffee early on, and Runa made certain to serve plenty of the dark brew. There were no complaints, so she assumed she had done all right. They milled around the kitchen, occasionally offering to help. Runa showed Happy Sam how she made the gravy when he came back in, and he helped crack eggs into a bowl for her as she pulled the first pan of biscuits out of the oven.
“I don’t think I’ve seen biscuits like that since my Mama died.” Junior said quietly, earning a few murmurs of agreement.
“So… it’s a good thing I made a double batch?” Runa ventured as she slipped the pans of biscuits into the warmer so she could start on the eggs.
“Double batch might not be enough, Missus Rogers. We haven’t had good bread or biscuits in a while.” Happy Sam ventured. “I can cook the eggs if you want to start another batch, ma’am. Eggs is the one thing I’m good at cooking.”
“I’ll start mixing up a new batch. Keep an eye on the gravy?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I don’t know why you insist on calling scones biscuits, but they do look excellent.” Pinky said as he sipped at his coffee.
“Because scones are sweet, aren’t they? And hard to make. I’ve never been able to make a good batch of scones.” Runa said from the pantry where she was sifting more dry ingredients into a large bowl.
“Biscuits or scones, I’ll gladly take them over cornbread.” Falsworth muttered. “Well, not your cornbread, ma’am. I mean the stuff we were eating before your arrival. It was terrible.”
“Corn meal, water, a bit of salt. Might not taste the best, but it was filling.” Dum Dum explained to Runa, who looked out of the pantry in horror.
“What?” She demanded. “That sounds awful.”
“It was how we made do during the war.” He shrugged.
“Well now you don’t need to make do, and I promise the rest of the cornbread will be like what I made last night.” She said firmly, managing a cheery smile as she said it.
During breakfast itself, she tried not to look up at Steve, even though he looked at her a few times wearing the look similar to that of a wounded puppy on the few occasions when their eyes met. Runa knew that she was being unkind snubbing him so, but she was still annoyed that he had doubted her. She didn’t know what Missus Rumlow had written to him about her, but she highly doubted she had said anything about Runa not being able to do hard work.
After breakfast, Steve lingered after the other men had filed out, looking as if he wanted to say something.
“Yes?” Runa asked as she gathered up plates to take back into the kitchen.
“I wanted to apologize. Again. I should know that how you look doesn’t have any bearing on what you can do.”
“Apology accepted.” She sighed. “I’m sorry as well, I just…”
“You don’t need to prove yourself.” Steve said gently.
“Yes I do, or you and everyone else are going to keep making assumptions.” She pointed out. “I’ll have lunch ready around noon. I know you’re not fond of beans, but I think I have a way to change the recipe a bit so it won’t be as bad.”
“As long as you don’t make beans more than one or two meals a week, I think we can suffer through it.” Steve grinned. She laughed softly. “I promise. I won’t serve beans more often than that. Maybe some baked beans in molasses as a side, but I promise it won’t be every night.”
He smiled. “I think we’d be fine with that.”
“All right. I’ll try to have fresh bread for supper tonight. I can’t make promises about butter today, but I’ll try.”
“That’s all we can ask.” Steve stood awkwardly a moment, before leaning down and placing a kiss on her cheek, but it felt awkward, almost forced. It still made her smile.
“Go and catch up to the others. I’ll see you at lunch.” She promised him. Steve nodded and headed out after the rest of the men. Runa raised a hand to touch where he had kissed her lightly, a faint smile on her lips. Well, it was a start, at least. And their first argument hadn’t been an explosive one. That was a plus. Although she wondered if it could even count as an argument, or if it was more of a disagreement.
Either way, it had ended well, and the smile remained on her face as she did dishes, started bread to rising, and worked on the laundry.
By ten in the morning her smile had faded as she struggled for hours with the laundry. She returned to the kitchen to start beans cooking for lunch, having managed to wash nearly every bit of cloth on the ranch and get it hung on the lines to dry. Thankfully, the men on the ranch only had a few changes of clothes to wash unlike the Rumlows, who wore clothes only once before deciding the clothes needed washing or sponging. Still, she was beginning to wish she hadn’t protested so much against Steve’s doubts. She never liked doing the laundry, and the mountain she had just faced was exhausting, grueling work.
She would never tell him that, of course.
Well. Next on the list was scrubbing the house so it would be as clean as the laundry. She groaned at the thought of it, but knew that once the cleaning and scrubbing was done with, she wouldn’t need to work nearly so hard to manage the day to day cleaning.
And maybe she would have enough time after dinner to write the letters she had promised to Titus and Iris before she collapsed from exhaustion.
She sighed, and went back outside to see if Happy Sam wanted to learn how to cook beans and rice the way Iris had taught her, remembering that she had agreed to teach him how to cook for the men on the trail. They were going to have to work out some sort of schedule between them.
Still, as hard as everything was… She was beginning to like the ranch far more than the Rumlows’ house in Washington D.C.