Friends and Lovers Read Free Page A

rectory to make way for the new incumbent. As Hettie had married Lord Peter some years before, Menrod took into his head to do something for us, and gave us the cottage at a nominal cost. The place is called Lady Anne’s cottage, and sits on one corner of his vast estate.
    I was disappointed he had not let us have one of his other homes instead. There is a fine Dower House, but he has his dowager stepmother living there; there is also a very nice gatehouse, but the gatekeeper lives there. There are any number of tenant farms, all inhabited by tenant farmers. The only other one we might have come into was a gracious, modern red brick home just at the south edge of his estate, facing the Kennet River. He moved his summer mistress into it at the same time he gave us Lady Anne’s cottage.
    I let on to Mama I am as happy as may be here, but in fact, I have had a plan of escape brewing for a year now, ever since we heard word from India of Lord Peter’s and Hettie’s death in a boating accident. That was a great tragedy for us. Hettie was my only sister, and my dearest friend. Though she had been in India already for seven years, I felt as close to her as ever. She was a marvelous correspondent. I can close my eyes and see her home there, know all the bizarre entertainments she enjoyed, her new friends, the Indian customs.
    When she had her first child, she called her Gwendolyn, after me. Two years later, she had a son, named Ralph, after Peter’s father. It had been agreed between us sisters, though never revealed to Mama, that I would go to India to be with her for her next lying-in. She hinted at a surfeit of gentlemen looking for an English wife. I don’t know that I would have been happy living in India, but I would dearly have loved to see it. I have never been farther east than to London, forty miles away. Living on this small island, surrounded by water, I have never seen the sea. I had a holiday sixty miles west of here, at Bath, one summer when my mother was feeling poorly. An invalid mother is not the jolliest travelling companion.
    My plan for escaping Lady Anne’s cottage centers around Hettie’s children. They are to be shipped home to England. I thought we would have seen them before now, but it was necessary to wait till some suitable person could be found to accompany them home, then to arrange passage, and so on.
    If I were Menrod, I think I would have bestirred myself to go after them, as he enjoys trotting all around the globe, but his lordship did not see fit to do so. He was busy restocking his coverts at the time. When they do eventually return, it is my plan and ardent hope they might be placed with Mama and me. Lord Peter had some money, so a house will be adequately provided. I will be aunt, friend, companion, governess, nanny—whatever they require. It strikes me as a marvelous plan.
    Mrs. Pudge once told me, in a fit of poetry induced by my having lost a beau, that God forgets to be gracious to some of his flock. I feel I am one of His forgotten ones. He showered the daughters’ share of beauty mostly on Hettie, forgetting to give me my dimples and curly hair. He had forgotten to give me either a fortune or a husband with one. What He gave me instead was a fairly short temper, and a reason to wonder why He had bothered to create me at all. Now the wisdom of His plan was revealed. This was why I had been born, to be here when the children needed me. I had a purpose, a need to fill at last.
    The only remaining item to be settled is to discuss it with Menrod, who will be in charge of managing their monies. No doubt he will be greatly relieved we are willing to tend the children. As he likes to be free to dart to Scotland for the trout fishing, Brighton for the water, the Cotswold Hills for hunting, London for the Season, and the continent for chasing women, he will be happy to know the children have a good home.
    The long-awaited letter telling of their arrival came the second day Everett and the