Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page A

there will be some baddish times. People being harassed, more laws to follow.We just need to be as clever as the stoat; we stay out of sight and out of trouble, keep out of the constable’s eye. Don’t try and make ourselves agreeable and don’t be disagreeable. That’s all.”
    She nodded, but he wasn’t quite through. “See now, this is your da, and his story-telling, and this might be a story or it might not. I just try to think things through, like you do when you tell a story. So here is the third thing. It might be Constable Ewynnog isn’t stupid at all. It might be he’s clever. It might be he’s clever enough to act in stupid ways to see what he can stir up.”
    Mari bit her lip, and looked up into her father’s far-seeing eyes. He was clever, was her da. He’d thought not only of the obvious, but the not-so-obvious, and the not-at-all-obvious. “So.… we do the same as we would regardless?” she hazarded. She wasn’t sure she liked that. She wasn’t at all sure she liked being passive. If trouble was going to come, she preferred to meet and fight it.
    “Aye. That we do.” He smiled faintly down at her. “And for right now, lovey, we have some pie.”

    Nan sighed over her best friend and shook her head. Sarah sat quietly at her dressing table while her friend tried to make some sense of her hair. “If you had your way, you’d wear the same two plain linen dresses for summer and the same two plain woolen dresses for winter. Your hair would always be in an untidy bird’s nest of a knot on the top of your head. And you would never wear a hat.”
    Nan had come a very long way from the wild little cockney street-waif who could barely make herself understood. Two things had stood her in good stead in her transformation from mudlark to respectable young lady: a gift for mimicry and the dawning realization that if she sounded like a guttersnipe, she’d be treated like one, no matter what she looked like. After that, it had been an uncanny sense of what she and Sarah looked good in that had guided her. They might be unconventional in dress, but no one could say they weren’t attractive.
    “I don’t like hats,” Sarah protested, as Nan finished combing outher hair, and with deft fingers began to roll it into a fashionable pompadour.
    Nan could not for the life of her understand how someone who was so pretty could be so careless of how she looked. Literally care-less; she simply did not care. So knowing that Lord Alderscroft was coming to dinner, it was Nan who dug into their trunks, Nan who extracted two dresses she rather fancied for the occasion, Nan who ran them down to the laundry and with the help of one of the Indian servants, got them presentable.
    Then it was Nan that turned her attention to the bird’s nest; with a little work, she had wound it into a nice, soft chignon, and when she was done, Sarah looked quite lovely. A bit like one of those artist-women, since they both favored artistic gowns when they got dressed up, but altogether lovely.
    “No lady is without a hat,” Nan said, severely.
    “Are you saying my mum isn’t a lady?” Sarah countered.
    “Oh honestly…” Nan threw up her hands. “You know very well your mum wears hats when she comes to England. Now hurry up and get dressed. I want Lord Alderscroft to see us and realize we aren’t a couple of hoyden girls any more.”
    “Why?” teased Sarah, as she slipped into a flowing gown that completely obscured the fact that she wasn’t wearing any corset. “Have you set your cap for him?”
    In answer, Nan snorted. Neville laughed.
    Sarah’s gown was made of tussah silk and linen, with bands of heavy lace, in warm creams and golds. Nan’s was brocade and damask, with bands of more brocade, in more somber browns. Sometimes Nan wished she could coax her friend into something even frillier, but that would be like trying to put Neville into a christening gown. No one would be happy about the process or the outcome.
    “All