Page 38 of Miss Ashbury and the Anatomy of Mending a Heart

“Want muffin now!”

“If you behave…” Vera began again.

“Where’s muffin?” the girl shrieked.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a little water⁠—”

But the girl howled, “Don’t want bath. Don’t want.”

“I’m sorry, but you simply must. You’re very dirty.”

“No!”

“Anne,” Vera tried again. “I’m sorry but –”

“Oh, enough of this,” Hortense said briskly. She strode over to the squalling girl and, in one fluid motion, yanked the foul tunic from her body.

The howling didn’t abate; it was only muffled for a moment while the tunic passed over the girl’s face.

Vera was surprised to find the little girl naked beneath the shirt. She had no bloomers, no pelisse. Hortense lifted the girl and deposited her into the water.

Her yowling increased by what felt like a hundred decibels. Instead of one angry cat, now there was a chorus of them.

“Vera,” Hortense prompted. “The soap, please.”

Vera did as she asked—Hortense was in no position to reach for anything. She had one hand firmly on the wiggling girl’s shoulder, and the other dumped mugfuls of water over the screeching girl’s head.

Vera gathered the soap and a small rag and dunked them both into the water—which was already growing cloudy. She knelt and briskly chafed the soap with the rag. Vera took courage from Hortense’s gentle but firm ministrations and soaped the girl’s legs and feet. The little girl squirmed in their grasp—with the addition of the soap, Vera thought it was quite like trying to wrestle a greased piglet.

Hortense doggedly kept pouring mugfuls of water over Anne. The sheer volume emitting from the girl didn’t seem to flummox her in the least. Vera wished she could say the same. Her heart pounded.

“Perhaps a toy—” she murmured to herself.

Her own governess had given Vera a rubber ball to play with in the tub, in order to distract her. Vera glanced around, but the closest thing she could find to a toy was a wooden spoon.

She lunged for it and offered it to the little girl. “How about this, then?”

Anne opened her eyes long enough to grab the spoon, then flailed and whacked Vera upside the head with it. Hortense let out a little huff that sounded suspiciously like a laugh—Vera frowned at her while she wrestled the waving spoon from the girl’s strong grip. She finally succeeded and tossed it, clattering, against the stones.

In an instant, the girl’s yelling ceased, replaced instead by deep, bone-wrenching tears. Vera looked at Hortense with wide eyes, but Hortense was determinedly focused on the task at hand. The maid’s unspoken stance was clear—they would deal with Anne’s emotional upset once she was clean.

Vera finished soaping her quickly from head to toe while the little girl sobbed. Unbidden, tears of her own pricked at the corners of her eyes. Who was this girl? How had she ended up here in the home of Mr. Douglas, who had no children of his own? And why was she so terrified of water?

Vera set to her job grimly as a new round of wailing began. She prayed that Stephen would ask the questions of Mr. Douglas that Vera could not ask the little girl.

When they rinsed her with a fresh bucket of warm water that Vera brought to sit alongside the pot, the girl began to scream again, but they persisted until her face and hair were as clean as the rest of her.

Vera unwrapped a worn, clean towel, and Hortense lifted her. Vera swaddled Anne tightly, took her upon her lap, and sat in the lone rocking chair that faced the fire.

There she rocked her, making soothing noises and offering encouragement. “See? That wasn’t all that bad, and now it’s over and you’re clean. It’s important to be clean. You smell nice and pretty and now you can have a clean something to wear and something good to eat.”

As she rocked the girl, the crying tapered off into a sad sort of hiccuping, then slid all the way down to a periodic sniffle. Vera ran her arms up and down the child’s whole body, drying her as best she could while she was on her lap.

Hortense emptied the tub out the back door with a splash that sounded upon the stones. Then she bustled about, wiping up the deluge on the floor and cobbling together a tea tray from the mismatched pottery in Mr. Douglas’s small kitchen.

“It isn’t the royal silver, but everything’s clean,” Hortense said, finally setting the tray on the little table next to them.

Vera chose a biscuit and handed it to Anne. The girl gripped it with ferocity and began to gnaw it. Her eyes went wide. The crying cut off sharply, soothed by the alchemy of butter and sugar.