Listen to the Moon by Rose Lerner Read Free Book Online Page A

family, certainly, and hoped to like and respect his next master. He hoped to achieve excellence in his field. He wanted his talents recognized and made use of to their full extent. But those were entirely different things.
    His parents, on the other hand…they had always behaved as if they were the Dymonds’ tender guardians and not their upper servants.
    “You can’t understand how rare it is for a girl who talks as much as I do to meet someone who holds her own in conversation,” Sukey said ruefully.
    John looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t think Mrs. Dymond talked as much as all that.”
    She laughed. “Not if she don’t know you.”
    Suddenly, he remembered catching sight of Mr. Dymond and his wife walking down the street not long before their marriage, heads together, lost in conversation. It had struck John peculiarly at the time, for he’d known Mr. Dymond since his birth and would not have described him as talkative either. But they had seemed to have a great deal to say to one another.
    “I don’t talk much…” But more than that, he rarely said anything of consequence. He and his mother filled pages with their letters, but it was all news and gossip. That was how they liked it. So now he trailed off, not really knowing how to continue.
    “I noticed.”
    He sighed. What was the use in trying? He’d always be silent witness to others’ conversations, like a statue in a bustling public garden.
    “Was that all?” she asked.
    “I seem to lack the impulse to confide in others. Sometimes I regret that.”
    She didn’t know what to make of that. “You’re lucky,” she said finally. “Talking only gets you in trouble.”
    Another memory, this one much older yet more vivid: the Dymond boys begging food from his mother in the Tassell kitchen, early one morning before breakfast. Young Lenfield had been eloquently persuasive, while little Master Anthony, the baby of the family, had been confidently demanding. Even Mr. Dymond, at seven or eight, had chimed in with a winsome smile and a playful question of some kind.
    Where had John been? In the pantry, to judge by the angle of sight. Polishing something, no doubt, while his mother smiled at the Dymond boys and sliced into a warm jam tart. He must have been almost twenty, too old to envy children, so he had told himself he was annoyed by the noise, and by the disruption of his mother’s orderly kitchen at the only time of day when the servants could hope to work without interruption.
    “Has it got you in trouble?” he asked.
    She looked away. “I’ve lost a couple of places for talking too much,” she said softly.
    Every good servant deplored a chattering maid, and yet he felt hot anger on her behalf.
    “I suppose you think I deserved it.”
    “No. I was merely thinking that when one works as closely with one’s employer as a servant does, it is as necessary for one’s personality to please, as one’s work.”
    She gave him a sharp look. He was sure she was thinking he had solved that problem by not having a personality, but he hadn’t provoked her enough to make her say it.
    Somehow, he wanted her to say it. He wanted to hear the arch note in her voice that would take the sting from the words. He wanted to hear it even if she left the sting in. “Perhaps one day you’ll find a mistress who is glad to have you fill the silence in her life.”
    She stopped walking abruptly. “Here we are.”
    The unleaved tree was beautiful, wide and rambling and perhaps thrice his height. High above them, a few twisted, gleaming branches were yet bowed with clusters of bright yellow-and-red apples.
    Having taken the tree’s measure, John glanced down at Sukey, who was pulling off her stockings. Her boots stood empty—and, he was touched to notice, she had set her bonnet atop them to protect them from rain.
    That flash of bare foot and ankle was a shock. It took several seconds for his thoughts to flow again. “Miss Grimes—”
    “It’s going to