Sheri Cobb South by Of Paupersand Peers Read Free Book Online

son he supposed he would never have.”
    “I daresay Philip’s appearance put your nose quite out of joint,” James remarked.
    “Oh, indeed!” She smiled at the memory. “I was nine years old at the time, and thought myself very ill-used.”
    “Aha!” said James, cocking an ear toward the schoolroom door. “The usurper approaches!”
    Loud footsteps clattered up the stairs, and a moment later Philip burst through the door.
    “Meg, are you almost finished? Amanda is back with the doctor.”
     

Chapter 4
     
    The interview with Miss Darrington gave James much to think about as he lay upon a narrow cot while the doctor poked and prodded at his sorely abused person. It seemed he was in the employ of a family whose handsome Tudor home concealed from the world a dire financial situation, the solution to which seemed to lie in the marriage of the younger daughter to a man— any man—of fortune. James reminded himself that this in itself was not necessarily a tragedy; he knew there were women (although he could not have stated the source of this knowledge) who would welcome the opportunity to make such a match. Where he himself fit into the picture was less certain. Apparently he had responded to Miss Darrington’s advertisement, and had been engaged at a salary of thirty-six pounds per annum. But where he had come from, and what he had been doing there, remained a mystery.
    “If you would turn your head, please,” adjured the doctor, deftly unwrapping the Darrington ladies’ handiwork so that he might inspect the wound beneath the bandages.
    James obeyed, and found himself facing the open wardrobe in which he had stored his meager belongings. These had offered few clues, as there had been no papers nor anything else which might identify him—nothing, in fact, beyond a ragtag collection of secondhand books; a modest assortment of rather cheerless clothing, including a well-worn evening ensemble shiny at the elbows and knees; and a shaving kit somewhat the worse for its adventures—nothing that might shed any light on the life he had led before he met Miss Darrington in the road.
    “Well now, I believe you’ll live,” pronounced the doctor at last, his nimble fingers replacing the bandage with the ease of long practice. “You won’t be very pretty to look at for the next week or so, but you have excellent nurses in the Darrington ladies. If your aches and pains should keep you awake at night, ask Hattie Blaylock for a drop or two of laudanum in a glass of her blackberry cordial.”
    “Before you go, doctor,” said James, sitting upright and steeling himself to ask the question for which he was not at all sure he wanted to know the answer, “I think you should know that I—I can’t remember the attack.”
    “Can’t remember?” echoed the doctor, his bushy eyebrows drawing together in consternation. “What, precisely, can you not remember?”
    “Any of it. I can’t remember the person—or persons—who set upon me, or what I was doing before, or—” There was more, of course, much more, but something held James back from a full confession.
    “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it overmuch,” the doctor assured him, packing his instruments back into a worn black leather bag. “It’s not unusual in cases like this for the mind to shut out events too unpleasant to remember, particularly when a blow to the head is involved. Depend upon it, you’ll remember it all in another day or so—and when you do, you may wish you hadn’t,” he added with a wink.
    James smiled weakly at this sally, but privately doubted it. He had no time to ponder the doctor’s words, for Philip came up to inform him that Sir Humphrey Palmer, the local Justice of the Peace, had arrived and wanted to question him. Alas, James could contribute little to Sir Humphrey’s investigations beyond a somewhat sheepish confession that he could remember nothing of the man or men who had attacked him. (Of their masculinity, at least, he was