Taking the Reins by Dayle Campbell Gaetz Page B

Joe seemed to think. After Mam died, didn’t Emma stay clear of the workhouse, like she promised? Didn’t she spend three long months cooped up with all those other poor girls in the hold of a steamship with rats and cockroaches for company? If she survived all that, she positively could take care of her own-self in this wild little colony of Vancouver’s Island.
    Her candle cast an eerie light on the narrow stairway as Emma made her way down. With every step, her right hip ached and her knee felt as if a nail was being driven into it. Emma almost cried, the pain was that sharp. But worse, she was angry to feel it come back on her after all this time. It was the cold, she knew. Cold always made the pain worse.
    Emma limped into the huge kitchen, where she lit a lantern and stoked up the fire in the woodstove. Then she set about making breakfast. By the time Mrs. Douglas ap peared, the kitchen was warm, hot porridge bubbled on the woodstove, and the pain had eased up. Emma’s limp was barely noticeable.
    By mid-afternoon, with the lunch dishes done and the house cleaned until it sparkled, Emma fetched a broom and hurried outside. She started sweeping the long, narrow verandah, where thousands of crisp brown oak leaves collected in great drifts. That cold dry wind still blew, rushing in from the northeast instead of Victoria’s more usual damp but mild southwest wind. Emma smiled as she tackled the leaves. Even if the cold bit at her nose and ears, it didn’t seep through to her bones. It didn’t make her shiver from the inside out, not like back in England, where she lived most days with her stomach so empty it ached and she hadn’t so much as a pair of shoes to warm her feet.
    She might still be thin, but not so half-starved as the day she stepped off that horrible ship. And now she had this lovely warm cloak Mrs. Douglas had given her to replace her thin shawl that never did keep out the wind or rain.
    Emma made a neat pile of leaves on the verandah, then swept them down, one step at a time, to the sidewalk. She had no sooner finished than an extra strong gust whipped into the pile and sent a cloud of leaves twisting and swirling back up to the verandah.
    â€œWell an’ wouldn’t you just know it.” Emma stopped working and leaned on the broom. “All that work an’ what’s the use?”
    â€œIf you ask me, you’re fighting a losing battle here, my girl,” a voice said from close behind.
    Emma froze. She knew that voice. And just like him to come sneaking up, chuckling in his beard, and her talking to herself like she was daft. Emma whirled around. “Well, Tall Joe, an’ just wot’re you doin’ here, then? I gots work to do, don’t you know.”
    Tall Joe winced. Emma knew he hated her talking that way, using the language she picked up on the streets of Manchester, reminding him how much she and her mother had suffered while he was off having his great adventure in the new world. She watched his eyes cloud over with hurt, and her anger grew. There was something inside her, something uncontrollable that built up so strong and fast it had to be set loose or she would burst in two. She leaned on the broom and glared up at the man.
    Joseph Bentley might want her to call him Father, but the word would never pass her lips, not after more than thirteen years of believing he was dead. Still and all, “Mr. Bentley” sounded much too formal. So she had settled on “Tall Joe” whether he liked it or not. That was the name they called him up in the Cariboo where he found himself a fortune in gold. And that’s the name she would call him.
    â€œYou shouldn’t ever come by when I’m workin’, Tall Joe,” she reminded him. “You’ll have me losin’ my job and be stuck with me day and night, like it or not.”
    â€œI wouldn’t mind that, Emma,” he said softly.
    â€œYou can say that well