Judas Flowering Read Free Page A

her sister. Talk of Charleston again, I do hear.” He helped pull on the fine silk stockings Cousin Frank had brought back from England, and handed over the detested knee breeches.
    â€œDamn Charleston,” said Hart. “Savannah customs are good enough for me.”
    â€œAnd us,” said Jem succinctly. “Home ain’t been precisely home since the Mayfields came to stay.”
    â€œThat’s enough, Jem.” Hart adjusted the ruffles at his wrists with a quick, angry flick. “Yes, my face looks much better. Thanks. Tell them to dish up in ten minutes, will you? And the French champagne.”
    â€œBut madam said—”
    â€œFrench champagne, Jem.” He left the man gazing after him with a mixture of surprise and delight.
    â€œWell, I’ll be darned.” Jem gathered up the bloodstained shirt. “If it ain’t old Master Hyde come to life again, and that I never did hope to see.”
    In the elegant drawing room, with its gilt-backed, uncomfortable chairs, expensively imported from France, the Hart sisters were making a similar discovery. Given his mother’s maiden name at his christening, Hart Purchis had lost both his father and his younger Uncle Purchis in the last year of the French and Indian War. Inevitably, it had meant petticoat government for a boy left fatherless at five years old. His mother, one of the two rich Misses Hart of Charleston, South Carolina, had run the Winchelsea estates to a marvel, everybody said, and when her ailing sister-in-law died of grief, had merely added Abigail Purchis, two years Hart’s senior, to her family, Hart had been delighted when the debts his cousin Francis had run up in Europe had forcedAunt Anne Mayfield to let her Charleston house and bring him to stay in what she found the barbarous solitudes of Winchelsea. Cousin Francis was a great gun, if ever there was one, with his stories of Oxford capers and his brief experience of Europe. But Aunt Anne was something else again.
    Tonight she was in a very bad temper indeed. Used to being the centre of attention in Charleston, she had never quite settled down to her position in her younger sister’s house. An illness that Martha Purchis had recently suffered had been the last straw. Mrs Purchis’ heart trouble, brought on by overwork, had been the signal for serious spasms of nerves on her sister’s part. Any breach of household routine would be the signal for one of these, and Hart was not surprised to find her fanning herself angrily and talking of her “poor nerves.”
    â€œMadeira, Aunt?” He saw that her glass was full, gave his mother her favourite cordial, and poured himself a brimming glass. Then, aware of a bristling silence, “I trust my mother has made my apologies to you, Aunt.
    â€œIt is an explanation that I want,” said Mrs Mayfield in her most quelling tones. “What’s this about some guttersnipe you’ve brought home—and set your Cousin Abigail to wait on? Miss Purchis! And turning the house upside down with demands for this and demands for that, so that, no doubt, we are to wait all night for our supper. And you know what that does to my nerves.”
    Hart looked at his father’s big gold watch, the only ornament he wore. “In fact,” he said, “I told them to serve up in five minutes. I am sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced, Aunt, but we do not turn away those in distress from Winchelsea.”
    It went closer to the bone than he had intended. Seeing his aunt go first white, then red with rage around the rouge she used so freely, he had the answer to a question that had only recently occurred to him. Clearly, Anne Mayfield was not paying anything towards her lodging at Winchelsea, or her expensive son’s. No affair of his. It was his mother who had made Winchelsea rich, first with her fortune and then with her good management. It was not for him to question what she did with her