Fortune Favors the Wicked Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Barrett? Why are you hanging the washing? I thought my parents hired this out.”
    A cap-covered head with a pair of dark eyes peered above the makeshift line. “Miss Perry! I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
    Not that Sarah Barrett had reason to expect Charlotte to act in any particular way, since this was Charlotte’s first visit to Strawfield in four years. But she and Barrett were almost of an age, and the sturdy, frank maid had grown up alongside the two Perry sisters.
    â€œMrs. Fancot,” Barrett said in a tone of great scorn, her Yorkshire accent thick as pudding, “forgot to take down the vicarage washing before last night’s rain shower. Sent it over t’us today all damp and said she’d charge for another week’s washing if we wanted it done over.”
    â€œHow extortionate,” Charlotte said, as she was clearly expected to do.
    â€œThat’s what I thought. So I tol’ her never to mind, and that she wasn’t the only washerwoman in Strawfield.”
    â€œIsn’t she?”
    â€œNo, she isn’t.” Barrett sniffed. “And it’s time she remembered. Mrs. Reverend, she gave me a free hand to see to these matters, and see to them I will.”
    Charlotte took up a handful of wooden pegs, handing them to the maid as needed. Barrett wrestled sheets with an easy grace Charlotte could not achieve.
    Now that she thought about it, she really didn’t know how to do anything useful.
    But Barrett had done well for herself. The vicarage and its living were too small to support a housekeeper, but Barrett was the nearest thing. She had the help of a lower housemaid and a few kitchen servants, and she had always known everything that passed in the vicarage.
    â€œHow is my father today?” Charlotte ventured.
    Barrett dropped the clothes-peg she was holding. “Oh! Sorry, Miss Perry.” She disappeared behind a bath sheet. When she stood with the recovered peg, her cheeks were flushed. “His health is fine. He just worries; that’s all. You know how he does.”
    â€œYes, I know.”
    â€œIt’s this guest coming; he wants everything perfect.”
    â€œHe is doomed to disappointment, then.”
    â€œAnd he’s been horrid busy with all these new people about, looking for that gold. Someone tumbled over the Downfall this morning—”
    â€œGood God.” The local waterfall was not large, but it threaded through crushed and scattered rock.
    â€œâ€”and his friends were all set to have dragged him into the front parlor for the vicar to pray over.”
    â€œThe doctor gets the cases with hope, and the church gets the hopeless ones,” Charlotte said. “I trust you did not allow a corpse to be dragged into the house.”
    â€œWell, he weren’t quite a corpse. But no, they took him into the stable and your father went out to ’im.”
    This made sense. The vicar could afford to keep no carriage, no horses. The stable was nothing but a box for storage of all the oddments of vicarage life that fit nowhere else. The tools given to the church because they could no longer be sharpened; the cracked vases donated because they could hold no water. Each gift, no matter how useless, had to be accepted with thanks.
    â€œIs . . . ah, the man still in the stable?”
    â€œNo, his friends dragged him off again. Might be that he’ll live after all. Power of prayer and whatnot.”
    â€œRight,” murmured Charlotte. “I don’t suppose the friends gave the vicar so much as a shilling for his trouble?”
    â€œThey seem to have forgotten that part,” Barrett said through teeth clenched around a wooden peg.
    The influx of reward hunters was a boon for those in Strawfield with something to sell. For those with something to give—like the vicar, like the church—it was nothing but a rip in an already threadbare life.
    â€œI wish they’d take