Mistress Pat Read Free Page A

Gresham…and his aunt do be married to an earl.”
    â€œIs he a belted earl?” demanded Cuddles. “A belted earl sounds so much more earlish than an unbelted one.”
    â€œOh, oh, he’s iverything an earl shud be. I do be forgetting what he was earl of but it was a rale aristocratic name. It was all in the papers whin yer cousin was married. Lady Gresham wasn’t young but she made a good market be waiting. Oh, oh, niver shall I be forgetting the aunts at the Bay Shore whin the news come. They cudn’t be inny prouder than they always were, so they got rale humble. ‘It’s nothing to us av coorse,’ sez yer Great-aunt Frances. ‘She’s a great leddy now and she wudn’t be acknowledging inny kin to common people like us.’ Oh, oh, to be hearing Frances Selby calling herself common people!”
    â€œTrix Binnie says she doesn’t believe that Lady Gresham is any relation at all to us,” said Cuddles, picking up a yellow kitten, with a face like a golden pansy, that came skittering through the ferns, and tucking it under her chin.
    â€œShe wudn’t! But yer fourth cousin she is and it was her uncle the Bishop they did be blaming for staling the silver at the Bay Shore the night he slipt there.”
    â€œStealing the silver, Judy?” Pat had never heard of this though Judy had been recounting her family legends to her all her life.
    â€œI’m telling ye. Ye know that illigant silver hair-brush and comb in the spare room at the Bay Shore, to say nothing av the liddle looking glass and the two scent bottles. That proud av it they was. They niver did be putting it out for common people but a Bishop was a Bishop and whin he wint up to bed there it was all spread out gorgeous like on the bury top. Oh, oh, but it wasn’t there the nixt morning, though. Yer Great-great-aunt Hannah was on the hoof thin…it was long afore she got bed-rid…and she was just about wild. She just set down and wrote and asked the Bishop what he’d done wid it. Back he wrote, ‘I am poor but honest. The silver is in the box av blankets. It was too luxurious for a humble praste like mesilf to use and I was afraid some av me medicine might fall on it.’ Oh, oh, the silver was on top av the blankets all right enough and yer poor Great-great-aunt was niver the same agin, after as much as accusing the Bishop av staling it. Patsy darlint, spaking av letters, was there inny news in the one ye got from Jingle this morning if a body may ask?”
    â€œA very special bit of news,” said Pat. “I saved it to tell you this afternoon when we’d be out here. Hilary sent in the design for a window to some big competition…and it won the prize. Against a hundred and sixty competitors.”
    â€œIt’s the cliver lad Jingle is…and it’ll be the lucky girl that do be getting him.”
    Pat ignored this. She didn’t want Hilary Gordon for anything but a friend but she did not exactly warm to the idea of that “lucky girl” whoever she was.
    â€œHilary always had a liking for windows. Whenever he saw one that stood out from the ordinary run he went into raptures over it. That little dormer one in old Mary McClenahan’s house…Judy, do you remember the time you sent us to her to witch McGinty back?”
    â€œAnd she did, didn’t she now?”
    â€œShe knew where he was to be found anyhow,” Pat sighed. “Judy, life was really more fun when I believed she was a witch.”
    â€œI’m telling ye.” Judy nodded her clipped gray head mysteriously. “The less ye do be belaving the colder life do be. This bush now…it was nicer whin it was packed full av fairies, wasn’t it?”
    â€œYes…in a way. But their magic still hangs round it, though the fairies are gone.”
    â€œOh, oh, ye belaved in thim once, that’s why. If ye don’t belave in fairies they can’t