[Primrose Bolger]

Ginger gave a little wave to Mister Andwise as he headed off toward the Inn’s old grounds-keepers’ cottage. She turned away quickly as she saw the five lads looking her way, a small smile on her face. Ferdy had sneaked a quick look her way, then hung his head before she caught his eye. He was sweet on her, she could tell, though he barely spoke to her when her ma would send her over with plum conserve for his old gammer that lived with them.

A mumbled ‘hullo’ was as far as they’d gotten in conversation recently. But she noticed that on Highday (Friday) after market, when her ma would send her by with a basket packed with a small pot of conserve and two loaves of braided bread, that the curtains would twitch, as if someone were watching, and the door would fly open at the barest of knocks. Gammer Banks would be standing there, a smile on her wrinkled face and a gleam in her bright brown eyes. And there holding the door open, half hidden behind it, would be Ferdy, his eyes fixed on anything but Ginger. Old Mistress Banks had taken to tapping him with her cane and telling him to greet their guest. But as she’d noted earlier, the greeting was limited to a low voiced ‘Hullo’ on his part and no amount of pleasant rejoinders on Ginger’s part could urge any further words from him.

Once, on an especially shy day, when she’d worn a blue ribbon in her curls and the new blue skirt and white blouse her ma had made her, he’d been completely tongue-tied and had fled the room before she could say anything back to him. Gammer Banks had eyed his retreating form and shook her head. ‘Hard nuts to crack, these Banks boys,’ she confided to Ginger, seeing the hurt look on the girl’s face. A grin had split the old woman’s face, then, and drawing closer to Ginger has whispered. ‘But well worth the trouble lass!’

From the Inn’s kitchen back door, she heard Buttercup calling to her. Cook wanted help with supper, Ginger was told, as she trudged into the Inn. Ruby and Buttercup were finishing up the cleaning of the upstairs rooms. Ginger would have to be the one to assist Cook tonight.

Nodding her head at Buttercup, Ginger took her apron off the peg by the door and tied it round her. There were scrubbed taters from the garden to be quartered, she saw, in a pile on the kitchen drainboard.

With a sigh, she picked up the paring knife where it hung on a nail on the wall and began attacking the task with vigor.