Thomas looked back at Clare. The second one he said I suppose. Clare nodded. Then I'll take the job. She moved in that afternoon.
There was not much to move. The cloth bag with the two dresses, the small purse, the photograph of her mother, which she sat on the windowsill of the room off the kitchen, a room that was, as promised, clean, narrow bed, wool blanket, a hook on the wall for her coat, a window that looked out over the back garden, or what remained of the back garden, which was mostly bare earth, and the skeletal shapes of what had once been growing. She stood at that window for a moment before she went back out. She was giving herself a moment. A deliberate private moment in which she said to herself very clearly, "This is a job.
You are here to work. You will do the work well and you will not become attached to these people because you cannot afford to become attached and then have it end." She believed herself in that moment. She was wrong, of course, but she believed herself. The first evening was clarifying.
Emily had been cooking supper when Clare came back out and the older girl moved around the kitchen with the grim efficiency of someone doing a necessary task rather than making a meal. The stew was adequate. The bread was a little dense. The table was set with the mechanical precision of someone who has made a ritual out of something that used to be warm. The children came down Lily first, a bright-eyed girl of nine with her mother's dark hair and enough restless energy that she vibrated slightly even when sitting still.
Noah behind her, 7 years old and serious, watching everything with the cautious attention of a child who has learned that the world changes without warning. Jacob Last, who washed his hands at the basin and sat without being told, and then Emily went and came back with Ben. The four-year-old had just woken from his nap, and his hair was flattened on one side, and his eyes were still soft with sleep. He looked at Clare from across the kitchen with a gaze that was entirely direct and entirely unreadable. He did not speak.
He sat in the chair Emily put him in and looked at his bowl and then looked at Clare again. Clare smiled at him. He looked at his bowl. Thomas came in from washing up outside and sat at the head of the table and said a short grace, the kind of grace that was habit more than prayer, and they ate. The conversation at the table was sparse.
Thomas asked Jacob about the feed numbers. Jacob reported, "Lily asked if she could go to Ruth Hadley's house on Saturday, and Thomas said, "Maybe." Noah ate steadily and said nothing. Ben ate two spoonfuls of stew and then stopped and sat with his hands in his lap. "Bunclaire," Emily said quietly.
"You need to eat more than that." Ben said nothing. "He doesn't talk much," Lily said to Clare matterofactly as though reporting a feature of the house, like the broken porch board or the drafty window. "He used to. Before Mama died, he talked all the time.
Now he mostly doesn't." Lily, Thomas said, just her name. A quiet correction. Lily subsided, but she looked at Clare as though she had said something important and wanted to make sure it had been heard. It had been heard.
Clare looked at Ben. The little boy was looking at his bowl again. She said nothing. She did not try to coax him or charm him or make a moment of it. She simply looked at him with the same gentleness she would have given anyone and then went back to her stew and let him be.