Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

fingertips tapping. “Can a person die of boredom, Ruby?”
    Ruby looked up from an apron she was stitching together with tiny, precise stabs of her needle. She was a wizard with a sewing needle and really good with a flatiron. She had an amazingly unsubtle mind, though, and she never laughed at any of Allison’s jests. “No, Miss Allison,” she said now, placidly. “I don’t think so. But then I’m never bored.”
    “Oh, you have to be! Following me around all the time, or Mother? It must be excruciating.”
    “Not in the least. This is a very good position, and I’m happy to have it.”
    Under normal circumstances, Allison would have let that drop as a subject that would only intensify her ennui, but now—there was literally nothing to do but stare at the rain-washed view of trees and water and mountains, all blurred to an anonymous gray by the steady downpour. “You must have hoped for something more,” she prodded the maid. “Some excitement! Didn’t you ever want to be a film star, or a vaudeville dancer, or—I don’t know, something interesting?”
    Ruby gave a prim little tut before she bit her thread neatly in two. “Oh, no,” she said. “I always knew I’d be in service. Mama trained me for it, starting when I was just young.”
    Allison tilted her head, eyeing Ruby’s sallow face. “How young?”
    A bit of color tinged Ruby’s cheeks at the unaccustomed attention. “I was ten,” she said. “Older than some, you know.”
    “Ten! How old do other girls start—what do you call it, training?”
    “Oh,” Ruby said with a little shrug, lifting the apron and scanning the hem for stitches out of place. “Some start when they’re just four or five. They don’t go to school at all. I,” she said, with simple pride, “was in school until the fourth grade.”
    “Oh,” was all Allison could say. “That doesn’t seem fair at all.”
    “It was fair enough,” Ruby said. She spoke in her usual monotone, as if the subject weren’t of much interest. “Mama wanted me to know how to read, so I could follow recipes and read patterns.”
    “Where did you go to school, Ruby?”
    “In the city. But the earthquake, you know. The school fell down.”
    “Oh!” Allison said again. “I was only four. I don’t really remember.”
    Ruby seemed no more interested in this than she was in her own history. She shrugged. “After the school fell down, there didn’t seem to be much point. We had to go to Oakland, because our house fell down, too. And burned,” she added indifferently.
    “So, Ruby,” Allison pressed, her boredom eased by this bit of information, “was your mama a lady’s maid, too?”
    “Oh, no,” Ruby said. She folded the apron neatly, smoothing the sash and tucking it under the bodice. “Mama’s a laundress.”
    “Was anyone hurt in the ’quake? Your family?”
    “My father disappeared, but we never knew if he got killed or just ran off.”
    “That’s fascinating! Tell me about it.”
    But Ruby seemed to have exhausted her supply of entertainment. She got up to pack the apron into her valise, and though Allison tried to draw her out again, she had no success. After a few moments, she dropped her head on the seat back again and stared disconsolately at the rain-blurred view as the train chugged northward.
    Every click and clatter of the wheels seemed to spell out her sentence. Winter in Seattle. Months of rain. The dreary company of conventional relatives, Aunt Edith, Uncle Dickson, Cousin Dick and his wife, Cousin Pres—oh, no. Preston was dead. There had been a fire in Cousin Margot’s clinic. Somehow Cousin Preston got caught in it. Cousin Margot had lost everything, Papa said, and Uncle Dickson was helping her rebuild. Papa thought that was a waste of money, because how was a woman physician going to succeed in a private clinic in a poor neighborhood?
    Allison’s lips pinched at the thought of Cousin Margot. Papa wouldn’t have thought of packing his daughter off to