Medicine and Manners #2 Read Online Free PDF

certain?”
    “I am,” Judith said.
    “I confess, I’ve never met your father, but how on earth did you come to such an extraordinary conclusion?”
    Judith didn’t answer. “You’ve never met Papa because he lives in Foulness, as does Thomas Cavenaugh,” she said. “I lived there as well. Before I came to Newton-upon-Sea.”
    Alexandra remembered Judith coming to the parish with her mother when Judith was still a young maid in her teens. Now that she was in her midtwenties, there was much speculation as to why she never married. Alexandra could understand that Judith’s life had kept her too busy for marriage. When her mother had fallen ill with consumption, Judith was no more than fifteen. She’d cared for her mother for the next several years and had taken over her mother’s profession as a dressmaker to provide for both of them.
    Alexandra said, “As I remember, your mother professed to be a widow.”
    “Yes.” Judith looked at Alexandra with a forlorn expression. “It was easier for her to claim widowhood than to admit she’d left Papa.”
    “I see,” Alexandra said.
    “Women have such little control over their own lives.” Judith’s voice took on a note of anger. “No one could imagine how it was for her, trying to live with a man like my father. Oh, no,” she added quickly, “don’t get the wrong impression. She loved him. We both did. I was allowed to see him from time to time, but my mother always insisted that she be present to protect me. He could be violent when he was angry.”
    “He hurt you?”
    “Never me, but he hit my mother simply for disagreeing with him. As if she had no right to express herself. Besides that, he is an impossible man—a dreamer, unwise, incompetent. He was always full of schemes to make us rich. Even after Mama and I left, he’d show up with some irresponsible plan of some sort—a way to crossbreed cattle for more milk, a scheme to grow tea leaves in cold climates. He had all sorts of ideas about using electricity for things like growing larger plants. The money he lost on those ideas! We were barely surviving until Mother and I came here.”
    “I’m sorry,” Alexandra said.
    “You can only imagine how sorry my mother was. Especially since it was her inheritance that he squandered. Her bitterness made her ill, then finally killed her.”
    “Judith,” Alexandra said, “I can understand her bitterness, and perhaps yours as well, but being an irresponsible dreamer and schemer hardly makes a man a murderer.”
    Judith looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. They were well-shaped hands, but a bit too brown to be the hands of a lady. They were the hands of someone who spent time outdoors. More tears fell on her slender fingers. “I wish that were true,” she said and sniffed. She pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve, where she had tucked it, and dabbed her eyes and nose. “But there was another scheme. This one a desperate one because he no longer had access to money. All of his financiers had finally given up on his crackpot ideas.”
    “An idea that involved murder?” Alexandra asked.
    “Not at first. It involved me, though, and Thomas Cavenaugh.”
    “Your fiancé? Whom you don’t love?”
    “Of course I didn’t love him. I told you, it was my father’s last desperate scheme. You see, Mr. Cavenaugh is a wealthy man who once loaned my father money. Of course, Papa couldn’t pay him, so he offered me to him. I am to be Mrs. Thomas Cavenaugh, and Papa will have a source of financing for the rest of his life.”
    “And you agreed to this,” Alexandra said.
    “Yes, I agreed, reluctantly,” Judith said, dabbing at her eyes and nose again. “And before you can ask why, it was because, as I said, I love my father. When I was young, he would weave fantastic stories to entertain me, stories in which I was a beautiful princess or a great queen, or even a fairy with magical powers. He was the one who once took me to a circus, although God