Beggars and Choosers Read Online Free PDF

receive anyone.’ The housekeeper’s disapproval of Morgan Davies’s edict was evident from her pursed lips.
    â€˜But you saw Mr James.’
    â€˜You know Mr James. He could see that Tomas was in a state, so he went around to the kitchen door to ask if there was anything he could do to help. He said he had a letter for you, but your uncle walked in on us before he could give it to me. I told Mr Davies that Mr James had called because Mrs James had offered to lend us her cook for the funeral tea but –’
    â€˜Uncle Morgan has taken a lot upon himself,’ Sali interrupted bitterly.
    â€˜I thought you knew about his orders, Miss Sali.’
    Sali shook her head. She should have realised that the absence of callers was down to her uncle. He had taken on the mantle of master of her father’s house before she and her brothers had even reached home.
    â€˜Mr James spoke to the rescue party that went down after the explosion, not that there was anyone left for them to rescue.’ Mari sniffed back her tears and straightened the chair in front of her. ‘From the state of the drift, he said the end would have been too quick for any of them to have suffered. Your father, God bless him,’ Mari pulled her handkerchief from her pocket again and clamped it over her reddened nose, ‘wouldn’t have known what hit him any more than the others. And that is why none of the coffins were left open.’
    Sali closed her eyes against an image of her father’s long, lean body blown apart. His clean-cut, classical features scorched beyond recognition. ‘Has anything been done for the men’s families?’
    â€˜Not that I’ve heard, Miss Sali.’ As Mari wiped her eyes again she wondered when the young miss was going to shed a tear for the father she had so loved and adored. ‘But your uncle ordered a fire to be lit in the library this morning. Mr Richards will be staying to read the will after the funeral tea so I expect something will be done for the families then.’
    Sali opened her eyes and stared blankly at the under-house parlour maid, who was smoothing creases from a damask cloth she had unfolded over the massive oak table. Turning her back, she walked restlessly to the window and looked right, up Taff Street in the direction of Penuel Chapel. Snow lay over the road and pavements, a thick strip of virginal white where it met the buildings, liquefying to a dirty grey slush, pockmarked with the glossy black imprints of footsteps on the pavements. A criss-cross of narrow lines on the road gleamed dark and icy where cart and carriage wheels had cut through the snow and an old woman draped in shawls slipped, only just regaining her balance as she reached the safety of the pavement.
    Masculine voices raised in song, echoed faintly and sonorously through the closed window and Sali tried not to envisage the scene being played out in the burial ground behind the chapel; her father’s oak coffin being slowly lowered beneath the frozen ground into the family grave alongside that of her grandfather. It wasn’t fair; he should have had so many more years ...
    â€˜It’s not right, Miss Sali,’ Mari observed, as if she had read her thoughts. ‘A good man like your father who always put himself out for others, going before his time when there’s those ...’ a momentary hesitation told Sali exactly who Mari meant, ‘who wouldn’t lift a finger to help a soul in need. Living nasty, selfish lives ... Polish that spoon,’ she ordered the under-house parlour maid brusquely, spotting tarnish on the bowl of a silver soup spoon the girl had set out on the cloth.
    â€˜Yes, Mrs Williams.’ The maid bobbed a curtsy before scurrying off to the butler’s pantry.
    Mari cast a critical eye over the napkins the maids had folded into fleur-de-lis. ‘Perhaps cockscombs would have been more appropriate for a funeral, after all,’ she