Forget-Me-Not Bride Read Free Page A

pretty woman. Her blue eyes were wide-set and thick-lashed, her heart-shaped face delicately boned. It was bone structure Lottie and Lilli had also inherited, but where their aunt’s finely modelled chin betrayed weakness, their chins bore more than a trace of Irish pugnaciousness.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Lilli answered truthfully. ‘But wherever I go and whatever I do I shall take …’
    It was Lottie who squeezed her hand, silencing her in mid-sentence.
    Their aunt still had one arm protectively around Leo.
    Lilli sucked in her breath sharply. Because of her aunt’s basic good nature and kindness she had forgotten that she, too, was as eager as her husband to rear Leo as her own son. So eager, that if she knew Leo was about to be taken away it was possible she would send a message to Herbert demanding that he return to the house to deal with the situation. Certainly there was more than mere protectiveness in the way she was holding Leo so closely against her. There was flagrant ownership.
    â€˜â€¦ all my belongings,’ she finished adroitly.
    â€˜ You’re not to go ! You’re not to go !’ Leo burst out, anguished. Twisting himself away from his aunt’s hold, he flung himself into Lilli’s arms. ‘Pa’s ghost will haunt you and haunt you if you leave us!’
    Lilli’s heart tightened in her chest as she gently took hold of his hands and removed them from around her waist. ‘I’m not going to do anything that isn’t for the best for all us,’ she said gently, offering him as much comfort as she could without awakening her aunt’s suspicions.
    Lottie’s eyes met hers in complicit understanding. ‘Don’t be such a baby, Leo,’ she said in mock exasperation. ‘Let’s begin packing Lilli’s clothes for her. And do stop blubbing. You’re only making a rotten situation even worse.’
    Thirty minutes later, with a short navy box-coat over her striped pink shirtwaist and cream serge skirt and with her thick cloud of smoke-dark hair piled high in a loose twist on top of her head, Lilli boarded a cable car en route for the commercial heart of the city. It was not a part of the city she was familiar with. The Mosley home, high on Nob Hill, was situated in a superior residential enclave far removed from the rumbustiousness of the areas adjacent to the waterfront.
    â€˜Curve!’ the cable car conductor yelled. ‘Hang on tight!’
    Lilli, a novice where cable car riding was concerned, took his advice as the cable car turned a steeply sloping corner almost at a right-angle.
    Unnerving though the journey was, it was also exhilarating. She could see Telegraph Hill, its slopes thick with the low, balconied houses of Mexican immigrants, while to the right, Russian Hill towered even higher. Far below, in front of her, lay the glorious spread of the Bay, the early summer sunshine glinting on hundreds of masts and sheening the water to a glittering sapphire.
    With a surge of wanderlust she wondered where the many great ships at anchor had sailed from. No doubt many of them had struggled around the roaring hell of Cape Horn while others had probably crossed the Pacific, heavy with spices from the Orient. There were gaunt whaling ships and gaily painted Neapolitan fishing-boats and an armada of private yachts. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Her father would have loved San Francisco. It possessed a raw edge of excitement that would have deeply appealed to his adventurous spirit.
    As the cable car swooped and dipped over other cable car lines, creaking nearer and nearer to the city’s harbour adjacent heart, she removed the newspaper from beneath her arm and shook it open at its front page.
    There was a report from Kroonstad, South Africa, on the progress of the war taking place between Great Britain and the Boers. Nearer to home there was a report of a speech President McKinley had made to a