“Yer best trews are as ugly as yer face. I did ye a favor!” Annys snapped back.
“Stop it, the pair o’ ye!” a loud, imposing voice demanded, and the two eight-year-olds immediately stopped in their tracks.
The farmer hadn’t noticed that Angelica Humphries was in the room with the twins, but it gave some relief. After all, the cook could get good behavior from anyone.
“Sorry, Mrs. Humphries,” Annys said meekly, obviously trying her best to seem entirely angelic. “Jamie started it.”
“Annys started it,” Jamie protested. “She always does, Mrs. Humphries, ye ken she does!”
“Enough!” The cook was in her forties, plump and pleasant, red-cheeked with sandy hair and big brown eyes. She’d served the family for longer than the twins had been alive, sending most of her money back to help her widowed father, Old Ewan, who still lived in the village. “What would the farmer say at such a sc
ene? I have half a mind to go out to the village now an’ tell—”
Usin’ me as a threat, are we? Ha!
“Oh, dinnae!” Annys said, suddenly panicked. “Dinnae tell Cil we’ve been naughty, please. We’ll be good. I’ll even clean the milk off o’ Jamie’s trews.”
Well, what do ye ken. It worked.
Cil—Cicilia—had run the farm since the death of their father last year. As a woman, she had gone to all sorts of lengths to protect her family and their land. She knew that O’Donnel Farm should, by law, be in the hands of some distant male cousin or the other, but…
Well, she’d lost her mother eight years ago, and her father even more recently. She would not lose her farm, too. She wouldn’t let anyone take away the only home her little siblings had ever known.
Jamie nodded frantically in agreement with his sister, his red curls bouncing as he did. Cicilia saw Annys glare at him a little, and couldn’t help but smile.
Annys had always been jealous of her brother’s lovely curls and the bright orange mop that both Cicilia and Jamie sported, though Cicilia’s was much wilder than Jamie’s. Annys’s own hair was long and straight, always worn in pigtails, and jet black. No matter how often Cicilia told her it was pretty, she’d huff that she was the only one without Daddy’s hair.
“It’s our mammy’s hair,” Cicilia had told her when she’d asked about it once. “Just like how Jamie’s got her brown eyes. But look, Annie, ye and me have Da’s special green eyes wi’ the wee gold fleck that marks us as O’Donnels.”
That was a bit of comfort to them both, especially after Daddy had died half a year before, leaving Cicilia alone with the twins and the farm. When she looked at Annys, sometimes she saw her father smiling back at her.
“Why’s Cil in the village, anyway?” Jamie asked Angelica. “Nae breakfast wi’ us today?”
Annys rolled her eyes. “Because it’s tax day, ye bampot. It’s time to give Mr. Jenkins our fee to pass on to the Laird. We got told this yesterday.”
Aye, so tha’ nae body else learns me secret. Thank God the villagers rallied to help me.
“Dinnae call yer brother a bampot,” Angelica scolded. “But aye, in the village. The farmhands are handlin’ the milkin’ an’ the feedin’ this morn. Ye two have to get out and collect the eggs after breakfast instead, mind.”
Annys groaned. “Betsy doesn’ae like it when I take her eggs. She only lets Cil do it. She’ll peck at me!”
Jamie chuckled. “Better than Cil peckin’ at ye if we dinnae do it,” he pointed out.
It sometimes made Cicilia a little sad to hear her siblings talking about her that way. She adored the twins, both of them, and wanted nothing more than to spoil them whenever she could. But running a farm required strictness, and so Cicilia couldn’t tolerate laziness, even while taking on most of the work alone.
“Ye’re right,” Annys said, reaching for her bread and hastily chewing on it. With her mouth full, she added, “I bet I can collect more eggs than ye, Jamie.”
“Aye?” Jamie asked with a teasing smirk. “Well, I bet ye slip in the mud and fall on yer backside!”
As they started to bicker again, Cicilia saw Angelica roll her eyes and mutter a prayer on her way out of the room. She quickly stepped away from the door and down the corridor, out of sight before Angelica entered the hallway.
Annys and Jamie would be fine, as always.
An’ now it’s time to deal wi’ the taxman.
Thomeas Cunningham stood as Alexander entered the office, and he bowed low until the Laird told him to stop. Alexander appreciated the formality, but it felt a little odd, even now. He’d known Thomeas since childhood, when the man had first come to work for his father.
An’ he’s been invaluable since the accident. Without him, I dinnae ken how we could o’ survived, much less flourished the way we have.