Part 2
Tamsin did not answer him.
She put the envelope down on the table, very carefully, beside the pudding. Then she put her hand in her apron pocket and took out the letter from Cincinnati.
She had not meant to. Her hand did it before she had decided.
"I'll tell you about my sister-in-law," she said. "Since you've all been so kind as to ask."
She unfolded the letter. It was one sheet, in a neat slanting hand.
"My dear Tamsin," she read aloud. "We were so very sorry to hear of Jory. You will of course understand that with Harold's mother now living with us, and the girls grown, we have no room at present, though we think of you often and you are always in our prayers. Perhaps in the spring. Your affectionate sister, Louisa."
She folded it again.
"There's the room always waiting," she said. "And the parlor organ. I've been telling it to you since November because it was a comfort to say. I'm sorry. It was a lie."
The candles flickered.
Big Ike Trevenna's face had gone dark red.
"Mrs. Pascoe," he said, "we didn't know."
"How could you? I didn't want you to." Tamsin smoothed the letter flat against her apron. "A woman doesn't like to say there's no place for her. Not out loud. Not even to herself."
She looked down the long table.
"But I'll tell you something I do know," she said. "Mr. Gaskell means to close this dining room Christmas week. He told me so this morning. You'd all be eating at the chophouse on Harrison Avenue, or not eating at all. And that boy there," she nodded at Davy Holm, who went scarlet, "has had a cough for three weeks that I don't like the sound of, and he's sixteen, and his mother is in Minnesota."
She picked up the envelope again. She took the tickets out and the four ten-dollar bills.
"So I'll make you a bargain," she said.
The next morning, Tamsin Pascoe walked down Chestnut Street to the stage office with Big Ike Trevenna at her elbow and sold back the tickets to Cincinnati.
The agent grumbled. Ike stood behind her and looked at him, and the agent stopped grumbling.
Then she went to see Mr. Gaskell.
She put the money on his desk. All of it. The ticket money and the four ten-dollar bills.
"That's for the flour," she said, "and the candles, and the coal, and whatever else comes over the pass on a mule. You'll keep the dining room open Christmas week. And I'll cook."
Gaskell looked at the money. He looked at her. For a moment Tamsin thought he would refuse out of pure meanness.
Then he counted it, and scratched his chin, and said that he supposed he could see his way.
She started on the twenty-second, because up here everything took longer and you had to start early.
The miners brought what they could find. Ike came back from the market with two turkeys that had come over Mosquito Pass frozen solid in a freight wagon and cost more than a week's wages each. The Swedes brought a sack of potatoes and a crate of dried apples. Somebody found raisins. Somebody else found a bottle of brandy that Tamsin confiscated for the pudding and most of which actually went in.
She boiled the plum pudding for eleven hours, in a cloth, in the big copper, because water two miles up does not get properly hot. She set the bread to rise by the stove. And every evening she made Davy Holm sit in the kitchen with his feet in a mustard bath and a towel over his head, steaming, while she cooked around him and told him about Cornwall.
By Christmas Eve, his cough had loosened. By Christmas morning it was nearly gone.
They sat down at two o'clock on Christmas Day. Twenty men at the long table, with their hair slicked down, and the candles lit, and the sprig of spruce in its bottle, and Mr. Gaskell himself at the far end in a clean collar, looking surprised to be there.
Tamsin brought in the first turkey.
The whole table stood up. Nobody had told them to. They simply did it, twenty chairs scraping back on the plank floor at once, and stood there with their napkins in their hands.
"Sit down, you great fools," Tamsin said. "It'll get cold."
They sat. Big Ike said grace, badly, in a Cornish accent so thick that only Tamsin understood all of it. Then they ate.
Halfway through the second turkey, Mr. Gaskell stood up at the far end of the table with his cup of cider. The room went quiet out of pure astonishment.
"To Mrs. Pascoe," he said, a little stiffly, "who runs this house, whatever the deed says."
Then he sat down again, very red, and helped himself to more potatoes, and twenty men pounded the table until the candles jumped.
Late in the afternoon, when the pudding was gone and the candles were low, Davy Holm came into the kitchen where she was washing up. He stood beside her at the dishpan with a towel, drying plates, not saying anything.
"Mrs. Pascoe," he said finally. "Are you sorry? That you didn't go?"
Tamsin looked out the kitchen window at the white mountains and the smoke going up from a thousand stovepipes into the cold blue sky.
"My lover," she said, "I am home."