The Last Broken Promise by Grace Walton Read Free Book Online Page A

did she have such giants for children? I ask you, why?” She was getting agitated.
    “Dylan says Papa was a tall man. That’s where my brothers get their height, I imagine.” Yes, she thought abstractly, those stains on the ceiling remind me of something.
    “Well, thank God above, you take after the right side of the family. You’re the spitting image of Mariah.” She looked at her niece and smiled. The child really was a beauty. Griffin said she had an angel’s face, but eyes that could bewitch old Nick himself. Those came from Mariah too, those tilted, emerald cat’s eyes. “The boys, poor things, they all take after that English devil she married.”
    “Papa was Scottish not English,” the girl said.
    “Scottish, English, they’re all the same. Why couldn’t she have married a normal sized man from the Auld Sod? Lord knows she had the chance. But does Mariah choose a civilized Irishman? No child, she casts her heart after the devil himself.” Dorcas’s glare challenged her niece to dispute the statement.
    “Papa was not a devil,” Jessamine took her eyes off the ceiling to argue. “I finally asked Dylan when I was ten because I was frightened. You said it all the time and I was getting worried. Nobody wants to have a devil for a father. I was afraid I’d wake up one morning with two tiny horns sprouting out of my head.”
    “What did Dylan tell you, Jess?” Dorcas used the girl’s nickname. She’d never thought the child paid any attention to her remarks about David St. John. They were a camouflage for her true feelings for the long dead man. For all her bluster, she’d never do or say anything that would hurt Jess or the boys.
    Jess rolled back over to study the ceiling some more before speaking, “He said Papa was a man who loved too much. And that I must guard against doing the same.”
    An inelegant snort from the older woman sitting on the opposite bed was the start of her answer. “Dylan would say something as asinine as that. That boy had a heart of stone. Though I think his pert wife has softened it a bit now. David St. John didn’t love my sister too much. They were made to love each other, child. I used to envy her. The look in his eyes when he caught sight of her coming into a room could send hot shivers up an old maid’s spine. It was a beautiful thing to watch, the way they cherished each other.”
    “I thought you said he was the devil,” Jess argued.
    “Oh aye, he was that, girlie.” She cackled. “Before he married your sainted mother, he was a rake of prodigious proportions on both sides of the Atlantic. I heard it said he’d sampled the charms of every woman between sixteen and sixty in London and then came to America to see what could be found here. Being the second son of a duke didn’t hurt. Of course, Mariah wouldn’t have cared if his father had been a beggar. David St. John was as handsome as homemade sin with all his parts put together just as God intended. Lord Jessamine, his shoulders would fill a whole doorway. And his tight breeches left little to the imagination.”
    “Aunt Dorcas!”
    “Well darlin’, I’m a woman and no saint. That’s God’s own truth. He was a magnificent man.” She clucked her tongue remembering. “They were so happy, Mariah and David, and then they were gone.”
    “And it was my fault,” Jess said painfully. She laid a delicate long-fingered hand across her eyes.
    “I know that rascal Dylan didn’t tell you such a whopping great lie.” There was concern in her aunt’s voice.
    “No, he didn’t tell me.” The sad voice was muffled. “I heard the housemaids talking when I was little. They said I’d killed Mama, and Papa had died from unbearable grief. I didn’t know what unbearable meant at the time, but it wasn’t hard to figure out they’d both died because of me.”
    “Well, you figured wrong, you daft child,” Dorcas said tenderly. “Your mother was a tiny thing, much smaller than you. And she’d had those