over some little something for her with Kathleen, and she wanted desperately for them to like her. She wanted Kathleen to like Duncan, too, and she hoped, prayed, that Nick behaved himself tonight. It had been his idea to have Doctor Fell bring the new doctor over for dinner, along with Kathleen and her parents. She was unclear as to his motivation in this, though he swore it was just for the purpose of introducing Duncan to some of the people he would be taking care of. Though why he had wanted to introduce the man around when the very mention of his name made him clench his teeth together, she certainly did not know.
Ned and Tommy were going to eat with them, too, over Tommy’s initial protests, but Nick had stood firm and insisted that Tommy eat with the company. Maggie had been right behind the swinging doors that led from the kitchen to the dining room during the argument, and she had heard every word of their conversation. She had cracked the door open just a bit and watched unashamedly as Tommy shifted from foot to foot and tried to talk Nick into letting him eat in the kitchen by himself, instead of at the dining room table with the other guests.
“You are part of this household, not a servant. You do not think of Ned and Kathleen and Maggie as servants, do you?” Nick had raised one black eyebrow and waited sternly for Tommy’s answer.
Tommy had hung his blond head. “No,” he mumbled. “But my ma, and you know . . . “
”I would not give a damn if your mother was a sow from the pigpen,” Nick had said bitingly. “That has got nothing to do with the way I feel about you, and nobody else who really knows you is going to care about that, either. You already know the Donaldsons and Doctor Fell, and I have a hard time believing they have ever looked down on you. And if the new doctor shows any signs of doing so, I will boot his backside out of my house so fast that he will not have time to eat any dinner. Got it?”
“Got it,” Tommy had said, a grin splitting his face. Nick had thumped the boy on the back, then put an arm around his shoulders and they had gone off to the stables together, and Maggie had stared after them with tears in her eyes.
She had made a huge centerpiece of dried and fresh flowers and put it on a lace doily in the center of the mahogany table. She had decided against a tablecloth; the table was just too pretty to cover up. The table and matching chairs had been polished until they gleamed, and she admired the smooth flowing lines of the massive furniture. Whoever had made these pieces was a master craftsman.
The china had belonged to Nick’s mother, and the blue flowered pattern was echoed on
the linen napkins and that same blue was repeated in the large oil painting that dominated one wall of the dining room. Maggie smiled fondly over at the canvas. The painting was a rendering of wildflowers growing alongside the roiling, brown depths of the Mississippi river, and it had been painted by Maggie’s mother. Nick had not realized that his parents, through Ned, had commissioned the painting until Maggie had pointed it out to him, and he had mentioned it to his head stableman. But that was certainly understandable; her mother’s signature was nearly unreadable, and the painting had been hanging in the dining room ever since he could remember, he said.
Maggie had found the painting the second week that she had been here, and had stood in front of it for nearly an hour, tears dripping from her eyes. The reminder of her mother’s talent had struck her heart like a blow at first, but now she took comfort in it. It was something that her mother had created, and it would last for generations. As long as it lasted, so, too, did Suisan O’Roarke.
Maggie had found a rosebush still blooming around the side of the house, and she had carefully snipped some blooms and kept them wrapped in a damp cloth in the cool of the storeroom all day. She retrieved them now, and carefully laid each tight bud across the table setting of each guest. It added a beautiful, elegant touch to the table, and she looked at her work with approval. It