Cates, Kimberly Read Free Page A

gnarled hands. One of those military men who would rather face a firing squad than anyone in petticoats. A man who turned brick red and blustered with excruciating shyness around females. She'd imagined him bent over his desk, blotting up a letter to a girl he'd never met, trying so valiantly to get the words right.
    She'd had a hundred questions she'd wanted so desperately to ask about her father's final hours. And she'd wanted with all her heart to thank this generous stranger for caring for her father when he could so easily have turned away. But Adam Slade had never marched up the winding road to the vicarage.
    She'd waited for him while she packed her few belongings. She'd watched for him as she tidied up the only home she'd ever known for the sour-faced new vicar and his prim spindle of a wife. And the instant she'd unpacked her inkwell in the little house she'd bought with her modest inheritance, she'd written a letter to old Widow Widdlemarch telling her where the old soldier could find her should he still come seeking.
    But he had never come.
    Juliet smoothed out the deep creases her fingers had worn into the parchment, an unexpected ache in her chest. Perhaps the old gentleman had grown ill. Maybe he'd even died. She hoped that there had been someone there for him, that he hadn't died alone. But, most assuredly, she was certain that her papa had been waiting to welcome him into heaven.
    Every night, she'd offered up prayers for his soul. But considering the crusty old man's kindness and tender heart, she was certain he didn't need them. He'd doubtless spent his life doing just such good works. And he'd not have allowed anyone to frighten him into behaving otherwise.
    She stiffened her shoulders, her spirits shored up just a little. She'd clean up the glass as she always did, summon a glazier to mend the window.
    Her enemies would never drive her out with shattered glass or crude threats. She'd go on just as she had from the beginning. Marching off about her business, smiling in their faces, and wishing them good day as she passed.
    Nothing like dignity of spirit to put such cowardly foes in a murderous temper. But it was getting harder to keep her chin up every day.
    A timid knock at the door made Juliet straighten her shoulders, her chin bumping up a notch as she smoothed the last ripples of trouble from her lake-blue eyes.
    "Come in."
    The door creaked open, the woman revealed in the opening hovering there like a wary fawn. Huge dark eyes bruised by secret sorrow peered out from a fragile face that looked far younger than her twenty-two years, the soft pink of her lower lip caught between her teeth. A tumble of dark gold hair flowed in a nimbus of curls around cheeks pale as porcelain.
    Juliet felt the familiar urge to hasten over to Elise St. Aubin and shelter her from whatever was draining the light out of her eyes.
    "They—they broke the window again," Elise quavered, eyeing the mess, her hps trembling.
    Juliet hastily scooped the scrawled threat up, crumpling it into the depths of the pocket tied round her waist. "I'm beginning to think that the glazier sends his apprentices around to do it so they can be assured of work. I vow, they must be eating beefsteak seven days a week on what I pay them." She flashed the girl a smile, but it died upon her lips. "Elise, what is it? What's wrong?"
    "Th-they're coming again," the young woman's eyes glistened with tears. "A whole m-mob of them."
    Juliet didn't even have to ask who Elise meant. She raced to the window on the east side of the room, and gazed down into the street below. The distinguished homes of bankers and merchants were closed up tight with disapproval where they faced the brick front of Juliet's Angel's Fall, their stuffy facades seeming puffed up with the righteous indignation of a row of crabbed spinsters.
    It was as if the buildings were drawing their skirts of stone out of the way, so they wouldn't brush the crowd of people jostling its way toward