The Milliner's Secret by Natalie Meg Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

what point did she realise it wasn’t disappointment crushing Donal? ‘Where’s my betting slip?’
    ‘I—’
    Looping her arms round his neck, she kicked his right leg from under him. He went down, herself on top, her knee on his chest. Never mind that people stared in shock. ‘Where is it, you dimwit?’
    ‘Cora, I didn’t place the bet. I thought Mid-day Sun would lose and I could give you your money back and you’d be pleased. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.’
    Disappointed? She swung the olive green handbag, whacking him until somebody shouted, ‘Lay off, love. Only a few shillings, eh? Your brother was only trying to help.’
    She took her rage out on the stranger instead. ‘It’s not a few shillings, it’s everything! Everything! And he’s not my brother. He’s a snotty-nosed git who pushes laundry because his own granny thinks he’s too useless for anything else.’

    She strode blindly away and within minutes was in a country lane, her shoes streaked with the white chalk that surfaced the road. If wrecked shoes was the price of solitude, so be it. She’d honestly wanted to break Donal’s nose when he was on the ground – which frightened her. That was her father’s temper coming out.
    Up ahead, men were clustered around a pair of piebald horses. One horse was rearing while the other squealed and kicked. The men were Gypsies. On Sundays, back in the days when her parents had loved each other, they’d often taken a bus to the Sussex Downs. There’d be Gypsies there selling lucky heather and giving donkey rides. While her dad ran alongside Cora on a jogging donkey, her mother would step into a wagon for a crystal-ball reading. ‘Superstitious tosh,’ was how Jac Masson denounced it, but Florence had held firm.
    ‘They see things, Jac, and you don’t want a Romany curse on you. I don’t, any rate.’
    The last time they’d done that trip, Cora recalled her mother walking back to them, saying, ‘I’m to have another baby, Jac. The old woman said I had two daughters in my palm. What d’you say to that?’
    Her dad had groaned but he’d looked pleased. Maybe he should have popped into the wagon himself. Then he’d have discovered that his palm had just the one daughter in it and he could have worked out a thing or two. Cora wondered if the men up ahead were selling the piebalds, or preparing to race them. A few yards on, she realised she’d walked into one set of travellers buying the services of a stallion from another. The squealing horse was a mare. The rearing one was definitely a lad.
    Cora turned. She’d never got on with horses. In Barnham Street, one long-ago summer, a tinker’s stallion had tried to mount a rag-and-bone man’s mare. Sparks flying from iron shoes, the rag-and-bone man fighting the stallion off with his whip. Donal, no taller than the side of the cart, started trying to help. He’d been dragged twenty yards when the mare bolted.
    Donal would be searching for her. Maybe she’d go and find him. She had to sooner or later as he had their return tickets . . . but instead she walked through a gateway into a field ringed with wagons. Barefoot children scampered around the remains of campfires. Women sat on wagon steps, smoking pipes, knitting. One called, ‘Wait, lady!’ but Cora turned away, only to be brought up short by an extraordinary vision.
    It was an open-topped car parked between two wagons, its radiator grille, headlamps and wire wheels so highly polished that sunlight lanced off them. Paintwork as red as lipstick had lured a group of boys, who stared the way children do, wanting to touch, fearful that the man lounging against a scarlet wing would chase them off.
    She recognised him by the Ascot hat on the car’s bonnet, and the fair hair lifting like feathers in the breeze. Dietrich. First or last name? Did he have a taste for slumming it? And where was his stuck-up friend?
    Just then, her left hand was taken in a business-like grip. Cora spun