Cynthia Bailey Pratt Read Online Free PDF Page B

the work still to be done.” Wiping her face with a handkerchief, she only spread the blackness farther down her neck. “You kept Arnold so quiet. I never even knew he was in the house.”
    Jocelyn flushed guiltily. Mrs. Luckem did not remark it. Having lived with her uncle and his wife for most of her life, Jocelyn knew their blind spots. They were in another world when evidence of early people was before them. Chances were good that Mrs. Luckem would never hear of Arnold’s poaching. She certainly would never know that Jocelyn connived with Granville to aid Arnold in an escape from justice, unless some unhappy circumstance brought it forcefully to her attention.
    Jocelyn wished she could have told her aunt all about her day’s adventures. The air of mystery about the man who called himself Hammond intrigued her almost to the exclusion of worrying about Arnold. However, to tell about Hammond would mean betraying not only Arnold’s escapade but also revealing her shameful behavior.
    “It must be getting near the dinner hour. Aunt Arasta.”
    “Is it?” Mrs. Luckem looked vaguely at the clock ticking cheerfully above a cold fireplace. They believed the influx of hot air and smoke would damage their specimens, as the damp spoiled the books. Even in February’s Great Cold, when it snowed for six weeks without stopping, they worked contentedly in coats and gloves, rather than expose their treasures to the hazards of a fire.
    “Go and see if dinner is ready, will you, Jocelyn? I can’t spare even a moment. We must get away tomorrow. I can see that this and the packing will take half the night.” Her gaze was drawn irresistibly down, as she covered the shield on the table with paper, and began to rub lightly with her stick of lead. Her husband, with an expression of enlightenment, wrote three words of his speech, to be delivered in London at the great Preservation Society dinner in three days.
    Leaving the library, Jocelyn crossed the Great Hall and passed down the nine wide steps behind the screen in the dining room. Entering the kitchen, she found no fire, no smells of cooking, and no cook.
    Jocelyn sighed and squared her shoulders. She opened the door to the pantry and found a cold joint of boiled beef and most of a salmon pie (without lobster), as well as some preserved asparagus and a large spice cake. She would serve the boiled beef reheated, with her own mushroom ketchup.
    On the back of the stove sat a kettle of what appeared to be hotchpot, stone-cold and with a thick skin on top. Whether their most recent housekeeper stayed long enough to put in all the ingredients could only be told when it warmed. After setting the beef down on the scarred table in the middle of the kitchen, Jocelyn went to collect kindling to light the iron stove, huge in itself but looking very cowed in the center of the cavernous mouth of the monks’ old fireplace.
    A pile of sticks and larger pieces of wood was stacked handily outside the door. She paused to look around the kitchen garden. Snow had hidden in the shadowed comers until almost the last week in May. Although now the second week of June, spring seemed determined to have its moment before summer came. A green haze covered the garden as though the plants were eager to escape their over-long imprisonment in the ground. At the end of the garden the line of cedars screening the back of the house seemed fresher and greener than they had for months.
    Jocelyn caught the scent of a pipe and looked for the Luckem family’s gardener and man-of-all-work. “Good evening, Mr. Quigg,” she said when she saw him standing beneath the old elm by the garden gate.
    “Good e’ening. Miss Burnwell. Can I be bringin’ in that little bit o’ wood for ye?” Even as he asked, he stooped, his smoke-colored pipe never varying from its outthrust position between his teeth.
    Jocelyn found it difficult to tell how old Mr. Quigg might be. He had been there when her grandfather bought the house. His