By this time the kitchen smells had attracted the twins from upstairs. The twins were much more mobile than before, and although they might have been sick the day before, they were full of life now. They made straight for the table, and Raffaele tried to intercept them. Terry grabbed Salomar just as Raffa caught Peter.
“What big boys!” Terry cooed. “Yours, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Raffa said. “But I’m not ma’am—just call me Raffa. If you could help keep them out of the dinner table—”
“I’ll take them out in the garden, and help Simplicity keep an eye on them.”
When she’d gone, Cecelia cocked an eye at Raffa. “They’ll never believe you bore those children, you know. They’ll realize they’re adopted.”
“Yes, but not from whom,” Raffa said firmly.
Cecelia dared a peek into the kitchen. The floor could not gleam, being what it was, but it had the look of a floor that would gleam if only it were smooth enough. Ruth Ann worked a great lump of dough on the counter, which did gleam except where she worked. One of the women was washing dishes; another was chopping something that smelled good. Older children were moving in and out, bringing bits of fresh greenery from the garden, carrying out trash, and—as soon as Raffa agreed—mopping the dining room floor.
The lights came back on just before Ronnie came home.
“My God,” Ronnie said as he came through the door. The women bowed their heads and waited. “I mean—er—it’s a surprise.”
Ruth Ann looked up. “We don’t take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said. “I thought you were going to pray.”
“I know—I just . . . what did you do? Where did all this come from?”
“It’s just food,” Ruth Ann said.
“It’s not just food,” Ronnie said. “It’s a feast.”
“Then you can say thanks to God for it,” Ruth Ann said. She looked hard at Ronnie, who reddened and stumbled through a child’s grace Cecelia was sure he had not uttered in over a decade. The NewTex women added a hearty “Amen.”
The roast fell into even slices, perfectly cooked. Puffy rolls as light as clouds. Potatoes, crisp outside and mealy inside. Fresh greens that weren’t bitter or too sour.
“Truly a feast,” Raffa said. “I can’t imagine how you got that horrid old stove to work. Ever since the electric went bad, we’ve all been stuck. The bread machines don’t work—”
“You don’t need machines to make bread,” Ruth Ann said.
“I do,” Raffa said, with a smile that took the sting out of the contradiction. “I don’t know how to make it otherwise. I tried to put the ingredients in a bowl that the directions say to put in a bread machine, but it came out the most horrible sour lump—”
“Did you knead it enough?”
“Knead? What’s that? I mixed it up, isn’t that what the machine does?”
Terry snorted, and Ruth Ann shot her a look. “I don’t mean to make fun,” she began.
“You can make all the fun you want, if you’ll teach me how to cook the way you do,” Raffaele said. “If I could make an edible loaf of bread, just once—”
“You don’t make good bread by making it once,” Ruth Ann said, feeling more secure every moment. Cecelia had been right. Clearly this household needed her, needed the knowledge she had. “You make good bread by making a lot of bread.”
“Well, here I am,” Raffa said. “Ready to learn.”
Ruth Ann remembered Hazel, and had her doubts. This woman was much older than Hazel, and unless she had a natural knack, she might never be very good. Still . . . she could certainly learn not to stuff too much fuel in a leaky oven, and burn a roast on one side.
After dinner, the junior wives organized cleanup without even being told, and Ruth Ann discussed with Raffaele why they’d come, and what they wanted to do.
“We can use all the instruction you give us,” Raffa said. “I told Lady Cecelia last time she was here . . . we have good, hard-working people, but none of us have ever done without electricity, or running water, or all the other things that we have on developed worlds. It’s not just me—it’s all of us, just about. We can’t learn all this out of books or teaching cubes.”
“Let’s start with you, then. There’s room in this house; we can experiment—” She was proud of using that new word, of being able to think of it. “When we know what you need, we’ll know what the others need.”
The next day, work began in earnest. Ruth Ann had a clear picture in her mind of what the kitchen needed to be, so she and the others could work there without falling all over each other. She couldn’t believe it . . . she was directing men. “Make the counter this long,” she’d said, and they were making it that long. They didn’t seem to mind, and she was enjoying it. So were the others. All those months of being told how backward they were, all those months of being confused by the humming machines, feeling awkward and uncertain. And now—
“If you arrange your beds so the tall plants don’t shade the low ones, you’ll get more yield,” Becky was telling Raffaele. “See, you’ve got them crossways . . . if the plant rows went the other direction—”
“Oh . . . well . . . look, Becky, why don’t you tell me how it should be, and I’ll draw a plot of it for next season’s planting.”
“Fine—”
Terry had gone upstairs to work on the bedrooms—although they’d slept last night, Ruth Ann had been very aware of the clutter and dust. The boys were at work in the front courtyard on simple furniture: rope-strung bunks to get them all up off the floor. When Ruth Ann looked out the tall dining room windows, she saw a crowd of men standing watching. It was backwards, men learning from boys, but it was right that the boys and men were together. She carefully ignored the two women wearing pants in the same group.
By dinnertime that day, the shuttle had brought the rest of their things down from the spaceship, including the pop-up cots Lady Cecelia had bought. The whole house smelled different, and Ronnie had the expression Ruth Ann liked to see on the head of a household. Of course, he wasn’t her husband—she kept reminding herself of that—but she did enjoy watching a man eat with relish.
Cecelia left a few days later. Ruth Ann hardly noticed; she had her worktable in the expanded kitchen, and had also set up a summer stove outside, for preserving.
“What we need is a school,” Raffa said, watching the crowd around the stove as Shelley demonstrated jelly testing. “A really big kitchen, where everybody could come to learn cooking, and maybe a sewing room where they could learn sewing.”
“A weaving shed,” Ruth Ann said. “That fabricator cloth is too harsh. And a really big bread oven.”
Raffa looked around. “This would almost work, if Ronnie and I moved into one of the smaller houses.”
“No,” Ruth Ann said firmly. “Your husband’s the governor; you need this house. We’ll build one.”
More quickly than even she had hoped, the school went up. The engineering cubes Cecelia had brought, and the bundles of reinforcing whiskers, made it possible to pour solid walls quickly. One of the other colonists, who had been a hobby potter on her home world, found a lens of good clay in the riverbank, and knew how to make tiles.
“Not really good ones yet,” she admitted. “We don’t have a kiln hot enough. But for starters, better than plain concrete or dirt.” The school was the first building to have locally made tile floors.
A proper school for proper women, with a kitchen in which they could all learn the way she had learned—from watching and doing and being knocked on the knuckles with a wooden spoon when they needed it. A big outdoor oven to handle dozens of loaves of bread at once. A weaving shed—she regretted the loss of the captive women, who had been such talented weavers, but Tertia Crockett—she used Anna now—was almost as good. Sunrooms for embroidery. Gardens for the children.