Carla Kelly by One Good Turn Read Free Book Online

remember that I am still alive and I have a son to raise. People depend upon me.
    She contemplated the man in the next room and his butler. I do not even really know his name, she thought. I know he has a title of some sort; perhaps it is even exalted. He did appear startled when I addressed him as an equal. “But you are, sir,” she said softly, “even if you have already judged me and found me wanting. I wonder if you have moments that you prefer not to remember? Do you judge yourself with so little information?”
    She woke early, dressed, and went to the window and peeked out on a glorious day, something rare in her brief tenure in England. She had suffered through a long gray winter with one or another of Sergeant Carr’s relatives, shunted from house to house as they tried to oblige his final plea, then gave it up as a bad business. His last wish had been that she be taken care of. “Liria, they have farms in Suffolk,” he had told her, before the infection from his injury took over his mind, turned him inward, and then killed him. “I will write them a letter that you will take to them, and they will be kind to you and Juan.”
    They weren’t. For two years they merely suffered her presence. The last relatives—cousins of some degree, as she was sent farther and farther down the family tree—did attempt to find her a situation in Huddersfield. They tell me the mill owner is kind, and there is a school for the young ones, she thought. Perhaps we may even stay together. Her next thought was the relentless one: and if we cannot? What then?
    Sophie stirred then, and muttered in her sleep. Liria touched the child’s head, grateful for the distraction, and yet not entirely able to put the other matter from her mind. She observed Sophie in her careful way and saw no hurt beyond the temporary discomfort of chicken pox. You will feel better soon, she thought, and climb those trees on your uncle’s property that he promised would wait for you. I wonder, do you have a mother? And if you do, how could she allow you to leave her?
    She heard footsteps outside the door, and then the knock she had been half expecting. Liria opened the door on the man whose butler rescued her from a long walk yesterday in the rain. “Good morning, sir,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Do come in.” She ushered him into the small sitting room, amused at his appearance. She had already decided that he was not a man who stood much on ceremony, and who was probably the despair of his tailor, if he employed one at all. He had stuffed his nightshirt into his breeches, and possibly run his hand through his hair; she could not be sure. He had pulled his shoes on without the benefit of stockings, and hadn’t bothered with the detail of lacing them.
    “‘I see before me a desperate man,’” she quoted in Spanish before she thought.
    It was from an obscure comedy by Cervantes, and he astounded her by replying in the same language, “‘. . . and he is ready to throttle old ladies,’” continuing the line of the story. She stared at him in surprise.
    He held up his hand. “I spent one winter convalescing from a pesky fever in the house of a merchant near Ciudad Rodrigo who adored Cervantes, and thought I should, too. Amazing way to learn Spanish, won’t you agree?”
    She nodded, too surprised to speak.
    “The Gypsy Priest?”
he asked.
    Liria nodded again. “Your butler is ill,” she said. “He did not look well last night.”
    “How did you know he had the chicken pox?”
    “I took a good look at him last night,” she said, then wondered if she had angered him, because he was silent for a long while.
    She must have had a wary look on her face, because he clapped his hands on his legs. “Oh, bother it,
dama!
I was going to come in here and complain and whine because my butler had the temerity to throw out spots and blight my life. Your expression tells me rather that I should be concerned about him and not me.”
    She had no