The yeasty scent of fresh baking lures the two girls inside, into their grandmother's kitchen, a haphazard space with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, where pastries and pots share workspace with any number of more improbable items -- buttons, string, pins. Supplies lie where their grandmother last laid them, rather than where a more orderly person might put the same items. Squat, reflective jars of canned goods sit like colourful lanterns on the floor along one wall. A green towel dries over a chair, and a papery gold onion glints on the windowsill, atop a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It is mid-afternoon, but here the sun filters through windows surrounded by ivy, giving the room a cool aquatic quality despite the heat and welcoming aromas.
Mabel emerges, blinking, into the kitchen and drops Honora's hand to begin a separate exploration of floured countertops and painted, freestanding tables. The two girls exchange a glance. Is it here? Or here?
Grandmother Castle's cottony head lifts as they enter, and her smile contains just enough hint of impatience that they keep their distance -- until she beckons both girls over to where she has sugar cookies cooling on a rack. As hot as it is, three loaves of fresh-baked bread also rest on the counter, and alongside them, a pan of cinnamon rolls.
She has shaped the largest cookies into numbers. Last year she baked threes, sixes, and eights; today she passes a seven to Mabel. "Careful of that pan now. It's still warm." She slides the hot tray farther back on the countertop and selects the number nine from the rack for Honora. She calls her by her pet name. "Your last single digit, Honey. And when William wakes, I have a four for him." She scoots both children aside. "Now, out from under me so I don't step all over you."
She no longer cuts and bakes the ages of Mabel's four elder brothers into cookies. They are past all that, but hidden amongst more mundane shapes on a plate of circles, diamonds, or crosses, they'll still discover a boot, a hat, a moustache -- any of the rich possibilities their grandmother sees as she slices through the dough.
"You're almost ten." Mabel latches on to her sister's freckled arm, a look of awe on her narrow face. "And there are ten of us."
"Imagine that," Grandmother says. "Ten already."
Honora has crammed her mouth full. She pops the last bit of cookie between her lips just as their mother opens the kitchen door and pushes through, her face damp, her expression hazy.
The two girls rush over.
"You're a welcoming sight." Margaret Rowbotham drops her shopping sack on the floor and stumbles as her daughters throw their arms around her waist. "Let me put this down before it tears open." She carries another package, brown-wrapped and tied with hempen yarn, which she sets securely on a wooden chair, and then she stoops to give her daughters a joint hug. As they pull away, she glances around. "Where's little William? Still asleep?"
The girls nod, and Honora accepts her mother's hat and hangs it on a peg next to the back door.
"I'd better check on him."
Honora's face has flushed petal-pink, and their mother hardly leaves the room before she nudges Mabel. "Do you think that's it?" Her eyes go to the parcel on the chair.
"Let's feel it," says Mabel.
All summer they have admired the new child-doll propped in the shop window two doors down from their father's pawnshop. It has younger features than most dolls, with blue sleep eyes that open and close, curled fingers, and two tiny, rounded teeth between parted lips. They each have a rag doll already, simple stuffed figures their grandmother sewed for them in their infancy. Maggie belongs to Mabel and Holly to Honora, but they're nothing compared to the beautiful, bisque-headed child in the window. They pleaded for her, just the one doll to share.
"Look at her." Their mother gazed through the window with open admiration when they showed her. "Skin finer than an eggshell. Even if we could afford her, she'd be in pieces in a minute."
No amount of begging or cajoling has changed her mind since, but Honora wants nothing else for her birthday. Not a new dress, or shoes, or a satin ribbon. Only the girl with the two darling white front teeth, the pouty pink mouth, the fine painted brows.
"Oh no you don't." Grandmother heads them off as they move toward the chair. She shoos them away with a mock frown. "I heard that. Both of you, out of my kitchen now."
"But, Gram. Is it? Is it the doll?" Honora looks covetously at the package.
Grandmother Castle rubs her nose with the back of her hand and then secures a few loose tufts of grey hair into the distracted knot on the back of her head. "I honestly don't know. You'll have to wait until tomorrow. Now out with you both. Play with William, or I'll set you to washing up."
She softens the brusque words with a quick peck to the tops of their heads, and sets them free. As an afterthought, she touches her hand to Honora's forehead. "If Billy's awake, play with him in the shade, why don't you. It's too hot in the sun."
From Madame Zee. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright (c) 2007 by Pearl Luke. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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