Then the encounter was over, for the stout woman who had come out of the kitchen door was hustling the lady, her escort, and two other passengers through the low gate and around to the main door at the north end of the tavern.

Suddenly she saw Lyddie. She came over to the wall and whispered hoarsely across it to her. “What are you doing here?” She was looking Lyddie up and down as she asked, as though Lyddie were a stray dog who had wandered too close to her house.

Lyddie was aware, as she might not have been minutes before, that she had no bonnet and that her hair and braids were dusty from the road. She crossed her arms, trying to cover her worn brown homespun with the gunnysack. The dress was tight across her newly budding chest, and it hung unevenly to just above her ankles in a ragged hem. Her brown feet were bare, her outgrown boots still slung over her shoulder. She should have remembered to put them on before she got off Luke’s wagon.

Self-consciously, she raised her sleeve and wiped her nose and mouth under the woman’s unforgiving stare. “Go along,” the woman was saying. “This is a respectable tavern, not the township poor farm.”

Lyddie could feel the rage oozing up like sap on a March morning. She cleared her throat and stood up straight. “I’m Lydia Worthen,” she said. “I got a letter from my mother …”

The woman looked horrified. “You’re the new girl?”

“I reckon I am,” Lyddie said, clutching her gunnysack more tightly.

“Well, I’ve no time to bother with you now,” the woman said. “Go into the kitchen and ask Triphena to tell you where you can wash. We keep a clean place here.”

Lyddie bit her lip to keep from answering back. She looked straight into the woman’s face until the woman blinked and turned, running a little to catch up with the guests who were waiting for her at the main door.

The cook was as busy as the mistress and not eager to involve herself with a dirty new servant just when she was putting the meal on the table. “Sit over there.” Triphena shook her head at a low stool near the huge fireplace. Lyddie would rather have stood after the long, bumpy ride in the Stevenses’ wagon, but she chose not to cause a problem with the cook as well as with the mistress in the first ten minutes of her employment.

The kitchen was three times the size of the whole Worthen cabin. Its center was the huge fireplace. Lyddie could have stretched out full length in front of it and her head and toes would have remained on the hearth with room to spare.