She was just wondering if she could come up with a story that would clear Gregory’s reputation, when the flavour of the jam exploded into her mouth.
‘Oh, goodness,’ she moaned. ‘But this jam is good.’
‘Last year’s strawberries,’ said Madge proudly.
‘I dreamed about strawberries last night,’ she admitted.
‘Well, you can take a pot of this jam, then.’
‘Oh, no, she can’t!’
Prudence saw that the doorway, in which the door had been standing open, was now full of the farmer and Gregory. A distinctly grimy, damp, dishevelled and irritated Gregory.
‘She’s nobbut a hussy, running off with her groom. Should have put her to work—not filled her with jam what’s meant for the market next week.’
‘’Tweren’t meant for no market. That was from a jar I’d already opened!’
As the farmer and his wife launched into a heated argument Gregory jerked his head at her, indicating that she should get up and leave. Which she was only too glad to do.
‘Thank you so much for seeing to my feet,’ she said, edging past Madge just as she was taking a breath in preparation for slinging another pithy remark at her husband. ‘One day you must give me the receipt for that ointment.’
Gregory shot her a look of disbelief, as though he couldn’t imagine ever coming anywhere near this farm again.
The farmer, who’d glanced at Prudence’s feet when she spoke of them, was now glaring at Madge in a very similar fashion.
‘Where’d she get those stockings?’
‘From me, of course, you cloth-head,’ said Madge.
‘Ain’t it enough I caught the pair of them trespassing on our land but you must give ’em the food from our table and the very clothes off our back?’
Prudence had just reached the doorway, and Gregory’s side, when Madge darted up to her.
‘Here,’ she said, pressing the remains of the loaf and the opened jar of jam into her hands in defiance of her husband, who was positively swelling with indignation.
‘My kitchen,’ said Madge, whirling back to him. ‘My jam. I made it. And you swore I could do what I wanted with the money I make from it.’
‘Ar, but I didn’t mean for you to—’
They didn’t wait to hear what the farmer hadn’t meant for Madge to do with her jam, but took off as fast as they could go.
‘What a charming scene of rustic marital bliss,’ said Gregory with heavy sarcasm as they made for the barn. ‘No wonder he came out here in a mood to shoot something.’
‘Here,’ said Prudence, thrusting the loaf and the crock of jam at him. ‘You are clearly one of those men who wake in a bad mood and need something to eat before you are fit company.’
‘It is no longer first thing in the morning,’ he replied, taking the bread and ripping off a hunk. ‘And it is all very well for you to complain of my mood when you have clearly been treated like a queen in that farmhouse kitchen while I,’ he said, dipping the bread into the open jam pot, ‘have been mucking out the cow byre.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘I thought I could smell something.’
He glowered at her.
‘I hope you washed your hands.’
His glower deepened. ‘I washed not only my hands but my boots, my breeches and my hair,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘Under the pump.’
‘Oh.’ Well, that explained why his hair was wet. ‘I did the breakfast dishes,’ she put in, hoping to placate him.
‘Mrs Grumpy Farmer was clearly a decent sort of woman. Mr Grumpy Farmer did nothing but complain and berate me every time he came to check on my progress. And as for the disgusting state of that byre...’ He shuddered expressively. ‘No wonder he didn’t want to clean it out himself.’
‘Oh, dear. Well, I’m very sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have volunteered our services to Mr Grumpy Farmer with the Gun. I just thought it would be better than having to explain ourselves to the local law. When you started telling him what had happened to us it all sounded so implausible that I could see exactly why he wasn’t believing a word of it. Indeed, had I not lived through it I wouldn’t have believed a word of it myself.’
‘Hmmph,’ he said, spraying crumbs down the front of his waistcoat as he stomped across the barn to the mound of hay they’d slept on the previous night.
‘Um...’ she said, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘I can see how much you want your breakfast, but I really don’t want to linger here any longer than we have to. Do you?’
‘Your point?’ He raised one eyebrow at her in a way that expressed many things at once. All of them negative.