Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

their fields. Instead, she nodded to them soberly, the picture of sorrowing rectitude in her widow's weeds. Inside, her heart danced. She passed the parish church, too late this morning to stop in and see how Anthony did. She blew him a kiss as she passed his gravestone. "Anthony, it won't be as good as it was, but it will be better than it could have been," she whispered as she hurried by.
    The girls and Meggie Watson were waiting at the table for her when she hurried to the breakfast room, flinging aside her bonnet and pelisse. Felicity, brown eyes bright, looked up from an earnest contemplation of her cooling porridge.
    "Mama, you are toooo slow," she chided. "Didn't you remember that I am hungry in the morning?"
    Roxanna laughed and kissed the top of her younger daughter's curly head, still tousled from a night of vigorous sleep. Like herself, Felicity did nothing by half turns.
    "Silly mop," she said, her arms around her daughter's shoulders. "You are hungry at every meal. Helen, you seem to have all the family patience."
    "Papa and I," Helen corrected gently. She smiled briefly at her mother, a smile that went nowhere, and then directed her gaze out the window again.
    Roxanna released Felicity and put her arms about Helen's shoulders. How thin you are, she thought. And how silent. She rested her hands on her daughter for a moment more, thinking of the many whispered conversations that Helen and Anthony had granted each other in those last few months, when he was in continual pain and scarcely anything soothed him except the presence of his older child. Did you absorb all that pain? she thought, not for the first time, as she touched Helen's averted cheek, then sat down at the head of the table.
    "We were wondering if a highwayman had abducted you, Mrs. Drew," Meggie Watson said.
    "And what would he do with me, Meggie?" Roxanna teased. "I have no money and no prospects."
    "Mama, perhaps a highwayman would give you something?" Felicity stated as she picked up her spoon.
    Roxanna laughed out loud for the first time in months. Tears welled in Meggie Watson's eyes at the refreshing sound, and Helen looked around, startled. Roxanna took her hand and kissed it. "My dear, we do need to laugh. But now, let us pray over this porridge, and then I have such news."
    She waited until Felicity was well into her bowl of oats, and Helen had taken a few bites, then put down her spoon. Roxanna picked up Helen's spoon again and put it back in her hand, wishing, as she did at every meal, that she did not have to remind her daughter to eat.
    When Helen had taken a few more bites, Roxanna put down her own spoon. "My dears, I have rented the dower house at Moreland Park for us. We will move in a week."
    Meggie stared at her in surprise. "Mrs. Drew, didn't that burn down several years ago?"
    "It is most emphatically standing, but it does need considerable repair. Tibbie Winslow assures me that the roof will be repaired by this time next week, and the windows replaced."
    "Good God," Meggie exclaimed, her voice faint. "Next you will tell us that the floors have rotted away and the walls are scaling."
    "I was coming to that," Roxanna said, wondering for the first time at the wisdom of her early-morning rashness. "We'll have to walk carefully until the floors are repaired, but there is nothing wrong with the walls that I cannot fix with paint and paper."
    "Mama, I know that Uncle Drew promised us a place at Whitcomb," Helen said. "He told me I could have a pony," she added as she pushed away the rest of her porridge.
    He promised me a great deal more, Roxanna thought as she regarded her daughter, but it is nothing I dare tell anyone. "I know he did, my dear, but I want so much for us to have a home of our own."
    "We can stay here," Felicity declared as she finished her breakfast and eyed Helen's bowl. "This is where my pillow is," she added, with a four-year-old's unassailable logic.
    Roxanna smiled at her younger daughter. "We can move your bed to