“What’s all this ’bout, yelling y’r head off! Should o’ et y’r bread last night what I told you to do. Anyways, you gets a second chance at it this morning. But you hurries up! Us has to get the coal for the stove ’fore the morning is half over.” Yawning hugely, Tilly stumped out of the room.
Morning half over? How could it be morning at all when it was still black outside the sliver of a window? Was morning going to be the middle of the night from now on? Emily shivered as her toes touched the cold, damp, stone floor. She envied the ugly grey wool robe Tilly was wearing.
All Emily had in her travelling bag was a second silk dress, no more suitable for carrying coal or scrubbing dishes than the first. As it was also no warmer, she decided to wear the same dress again and save the other, though for what she could not imagine. But at least she now had her shawl out, and in time her trunks would come.
Trunks! Suddenly Emily remembered something Mrs. Leslie had packed in them—all Mama’s jewels! What would happen if Tilly should see the diamond rings, the gold brooches, and Mama’s beloved necklace of true pearls? Shouldn’t they be hidden as well as the gold coins? But Emily had no time to think about that now. Fingers still aching from a hurried visit to the icy washroom, she quickly pulled on her clothes.
“Them white kid shoes and white stockings again!” said Tilly with disgust when she saw Emily. “Ain’t you got nothing better to wear for work?”
“Not yet,” Emily replied.
“Kid shoes and white stockings for carrying coal! Hmmmph!” grunted Tilly. “What a waste!”
They picked up empty tin buckets at the foot of the stairwell and clanked their way down the passageway to the coal room. This turned out to be directly next to the room Emily had tried not to think about all night.
“Is someone still in there, do you suppose?” she whispered to Tilly as they shovelled coal into their buckets.
“I don’t got to suppose nothing,” shouted Tilly in reply. “I knows it’s in there. If it ain’t out by night, then it gets to wait until after breakfast. If y’r in the kitchen, you might even get to see it brung out by Mrs. Meeching.”
Emily wasn’t at all excited about witnessing still another sideshow featuring one of the pitiful residents of Sugar Hill Hall. She was curious, however, about what kind of old person it might be who had dared to steal (accepting that Tilly was right about it) a peppermint. No, not a, but two peppermints! It would have to be someone much bigger and bolder than any of the others, she was certain.
“Quits y’r daydreaming!” Tilly’s angry voice broke into her thoughts. “You ain’t got more’n twenty coal lumps in y’r bucket. Oh well, that’s probably more’n you can carry.” Tilly sniffed. “Us might as well leave.”
Aunt Twice was already in the kitchen starting up the stove when Emily stumbled in with her coal bucket behind Tilly. Preparations for the morning meal were underway. Although Emily had tried to strengthen her mind for the menu, she still suffered the same sinking feeling in her stomach when she saw on the stove the large graniteware pot filled now with a thin, colorless gruel, and on the table the familiar basket with the all-too-familiar lumps of last night’s (if not last month’s) bread.
She tried to keep her attention firmly away from the eggs, tub of yellow butter, pitcher of rich cream, and bowl heaped with oranges, bananas, and grapes, and crowned with the crisp green spikes of a fresh pineapple, all laid out on the second table. But when the fragrances of bubbling coffee, sizzling bacon and sausages, and cinnamon buns baking in the oven wafted through the kitchen, there was no way that she could strengthen her mind to any of it. It was the first time in her life that she remembered being really hungry, and yet the moment she looked at the gruel and the bread lumps, her appetite vanished.
As for the old people’s morning meal, enhanced by Mrs. Meeching’s icy presence and a fog as gloomy as the one of the day before drifting past the windows, Emily felt it to be equally as dismal as their evening meal. Her own courage, which she had tried so hard to build up the night before, crumbled when Mrs. Meeching appeared.
Their dining room duties over, Emily again was only able to pick at her meal, although Tilly poured down three bowls of gruel and at least as many lumps of bread, which appeared to have grown even moldier overnight. And when Emily stood before the sink facing the piles of pots and pans, she felt as if she had never left them the night before.
“Do we get to rest now?” she asked hopefully when she finally climbed down from the lettuce crate.
Tilly turned disbelieving, dishwater-pale blue eyes in her direction. “What you gets to rest now is y’r knees on the kitchen floor whilst you rests y’r hands on a scrub brush. Then after that, you gets to help me with cleaning upstairs whilst y’r aunt does up for Mrs. M. and Mrs. P. This afternoon, by way of entertainment, you might say, you gets to do the laundry. After that, you la-de-das about waiting on table and scrubbing up, and then you falls into y’r cot. Whether you rests there or not’s up to you!” A cast iron frying pan went heaving into a cupboard with a crash at this final pronouncement.
It wasn’t long after that Tilly and Aunt Twice left the kitchen armed with brooms, mops, dust pans and sponges, and Emily was indeed down on her white-stockinged knees beside a bucket filled with grey, soapy water that looked astonishingly like the soup of the night before. Wearily, she began to scrub
