The Ragged Heiress Read Free

needed.
    ‘Have you any proof of identity?’ Sister Demarest demanded. These two ruffians might have fooled the almoner, but then Miss Parry was an innocent and thought the best of everyone. Sister Demarest folded her arms across her flat chest. ‘Well, have you?’
    ‘All lost when the ship went down, Sister,’ Stranks said, meeting her stern gaze with a straight look. He was good at lying. He had learned to lie as soon as he could talk. With a drunken scoundrel of a father and a mother who was no better than she should be, life had been hard in the slums of Hoxton, and Norman Stranks had existed on the streets since he was eightyears old. Cheating, lying and stealing had come easily when it meant the difference between survival or the less attractive alternative. A brief spell in the workhouse had further hardened him and a year in Pentonville prison had completed the process. It was there that he had met the simple-minded Guthrie and for good or ill they had been accomplices in crime ever since. Now he could see a way out of the vicious circle of reoffending, capture and imprisonment and he was going to grab it with both hands. The only problem was that the answer to all their problems lay close to death on the bed before them.
    Stranks fell on his knees and buried his face in the snow-white coverlet. ‘Don’t die, little Lucy. Oh, my duck, please don’t leave us.’ He looked up at Sister Demarest and the tears that trickled down his cheeks were real. ‘Get her better, Sister. Us wants to take our little angel home.’
    The girl’s eyelids fluttered and her lips parted in a long sigh. Her eyes opened and she stared uncomprehendingly at Stranks. For a moment it seemed that the fever had abated and Sister Demarest pushed Stranks aside so that she could take the patient’s pulse.
    ‘You must leave now,’ she said firmly. ‘You are disturbing my patient.’
    Stranks scrambled to his feet, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. ‘Is she coming round, Sister? Is she going to get well?’
    ‘I can’t say, but she must be allowed to rest. If you don’t leave I will have to summon a porter to escort you from the ward.’
    Guthrie took Stranks by the arm. ‘Come on, mate. Do as she says.’
    ‘All right, but we’ll be back later,’ Stranks said grudgingly. ‘But you ain’t going to keep us from our sister now we’ve found her.’
    ‘Keep your voice down, and go,’ Sister Demarest said, pulling the curtain around the bed. ‘Come back tomorrow and with God’s grace you might find that the fever has broken and the patient will be able to recognise you.’
    In the dim recesses of her fevered brain, Lucetta could hear the murmur of vaguely familiar male voices and an inexplicable fear seized her. Then there was the unmistakeable clink of brass rings as the curtains were drawn around her bed and she forced her heavy eyelids to open, but a shaft of fear ran through her body. Everywhere was white, except for the flower print on the curtains. She had no idea where she was – or who she was. She closed her eyes and drifted off to another place and another time. A place of safety and calm – somewhere achingly familiar – somewhere else.

Chapter Two
    The scent of the Spice Islands was not the sweet, nutty aroma of cinnamon and cloves or the spicy tang of pepper, cardamom and ginger that Lucetta had romantically expected it to be. The cloying odour of rotting vegetation, hanging like a steamy mist in the tropical heat, had come as a shock after months at sea with nothing to breathe but the cool salt-laden air. The first sight of the mountainous, palm-fringed island, bright with exotic blooms of frangipani and hibiscus had hit her senses in a flood of colour. Everything here was so dramatically different from the pale northern watercolour landscape of England or the sepia tints of London that it had left her breathless with wonder.
    Now, after three months in this island paradise, she was used to the strange smell of the