“Get your clothes on, Stevie, and we’ll do the barn chores,” Jude suggested. “The work always goes faster when you help me, son.”
With a grin, Stevie took off through the front room. As his footsteps thundered in the stairwell, Jude approached Leah with Betsy. The baby had stopped crying and was resting comfortably on his broad shoulder. “Want to hold her, Leah?” he asked softly. “The only thing you need to be careful about is supporting her head with your hand—like this.”
Leah focused on clipping the candy thermometer to the side of her pot, momentarily flummoxed. When she saw how Jude was gently stretching Betsy along his forearm so her tiny head rested in his hand, she knew a new definition of strength. Her husband wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was muscled from working with livestock all his life—she’d watched him hang on to frenzied horses and cows that outweighed him two or three times over, with just a tether and his own powerful grip. Yet he’d never seemed stronger than at this moment, when he held Betsy’s life in his hands.
“Go ahead and hold her, honey. You won’t drop her.”
Leah exhaled nervously. Slowly she accepted Betsy, holding her the same way Jude had. “Oh my, she hardly weighs anything, compared to a fawn or a foal,” she murmured.
Jude stroked Betsy’s forehead, his fingertip following the rim of her knitted cap. “She’s so tiny and innocent,” he whispered, shaking his head sadly. “She knows she’s among strangers, and she might even sense that her mother has abandoned her. It’s up to us to give her our best until we can get to the bottom of her situation. I know she’ll be in gut hands while the girls and I borrow what we’ll need from the neighbors and visit with Jeremiah.”
Leah’s heart fluttered at the depth of his trust in her. “I—I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all any of us can do,” Jude said, kissing her cheek. “And for all we know, Betsy’s mamm feels she’s done her best by bringing her child here. Life can take some unexpected detours, so we shouldn’t judge a mother who’s desperate enough to entrust her precious child to strangers.”
Leah thought back to the brief note in the clothesbasket. “What if we’re not strangers? What if Betsy’s mother chose us because she knows us?”
Jude shrugged. “I can’t think of any women—or young girls—in our church district who’d be in such a predicament. That’s why I want to chat with Jeremiah. Sometimes he learns of these situations through the grapevine of bishops and preachers in other districts hereabouts, and he can put out the word about Betsy with those men, too. The fact that she used the word mamm in her note suggests she’s from a Plain community, even if she drove off in a car. We’ll figure it out.”
Jude wrapped an arm around Leah and placed his other hand beneath hers, enfolding her and little Betsy with his warmth. “At least that young woman understood the value of bringing her baby to be cared for by a family. No matter what my daughters seem to believe these days, only our love for God matters more than love for our family. I’m a blessed man because you’re my wife, Leah.”
When Stevie burst into the kitchen, dressed and ready to do chores, Jude placed Betsy in the laundry basket on top of her folded clothes. He slipped into his barn coat, kissed Leah’s cheek, and went outside with his son just as the milk began to bubble and steam.
Leah watched the thermometer. When the milk had reached one hundred sixty-one degrees and boiled for more than twenty seconds, she removed the pot from the stove. As she was pouring the milk into clean metal canisters, Alice and Adeline returned. Dressed in their matching purple cape dresses and white kapps, they cast wary glances at the baby in the laundry basket before taking a skillet and a large bowl from cabinets near the stove.
“I still think it’s odd that somebody would drop a baby here,” Adeline remarked with a shake of her head.
“Jah, who would do that?” Alice asked. She wrinkled her nose. “And who would want to drink goat’s milk? It smells awful.”
Although Leah once again suspected the twins knew more about this situation than they were telling her, she decided not to press for ideas about who Betsy’s mother might be. “It does smell a little gamy, compared to cow’s milk,” she agreed. “But I know a lot of babies who’ve thrived on it when their mothers couldn’t feed them breast milk. It’ll smell better after it cools.”
Leah carried the canisters to the sink in the mudroom. She fetched a large bag of ice cubes from the deep freeze and arranged the ice around the canisters so the milk would cool quickly. Betsy was beginning to fuss, and the girls were focused on frying bacon and mixing biscuits, so Leah went to stand beside the laundry basket. The baby’s face was pink and puckered as she let out a squawk. Her flailing limbs were so tiny and thin compared to other infants’ that Leah wondered if the poor thing had been neglected and underfed.
“Just pick her up!” Adeline challenged from the stove. “Don’t let her start bawling again.”
“Jah, she’s a little kid—not a rabid dog that’ll bite you,” Alice chided as she rolled out biscuit dough. “Don’t tell me you’ve never handled a baby.”
Leah lifted Betsy tentatively and rested the baby against her shoulder. It occurred to her that the girls would’ve been about eleven when Stevie had come along—old enough to help Frieda with his care, even though they showed no interest in this abandoned child. She walked into the mudroom to test
