Seduction In Silk: A Novel of the Malloren World (Malloran) Read Online Free PDF Page B

an angel to rival Gabriel at the Annunciation. Amused by that image, he walked up to the warped door and rapped on it with the head of his riding crop. He’d soon be back in Town.
    In the week since Giles’s death, he’d received two reproaches about tasks abandoned when he’d obeyed Cousin Giles’s summons. One was indirectly from the king. There’d also been a fuming letter from his father. As usual, his father fumed to no purpose, for there was nothing to be done about Perriam Manor other than this.
    He was about to knock again when the door was opened by a maidservant so short he thought her a child until he saw the wrinkled face. Sixty if she was a day, though when she smiled her teeth all seemed sound.
    “Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”
    “Is Miss Mallow at home?”
    “
Miss
Mallow, is it?” the maid asked, seeming surprised.
    “Yes.” Was she married after all? No, for then she’d not be a Mallow.
    “She’s in the garden, sir. Would you mind going round, for I’m swabbing the floor.”
    He could see the truth of that behind her. The door opened into a front room with an uneven flagstone floor that was awash with water. A mop was propped against the wall. Oddly, the room contained a large table and shelves of jars and bottles.
    A stillroom?
    Potions?
    The curse returned unsettlingly to mind.
    Clarrie had laid a curse on Giles, and her sister, Nora, had claimed to know how to raise it. Nora was Claris Mallow’s mother.
    Would he be marrying into a family of witches? Witches who knew how to cast curses?
    Even so, it must be done.
    “A shame to bring Miss Mallow indoors on such a lovely day,” Perry agreed. “The path to my left?”
    “That’s right, sir. She’ll likely be down the end.”
    Whatever that meant. Perry headed for the path.
    The cottage was in a poor state, but it had some rural charms. The path was bordered on the right by a bed bursting with colorful flowers, worked over by bees on this sunny afternoon. To his left lay a hedge, twitteringly full of birds.
    When he came to the end of the path, he found a contrast. Far less color here, because the garden was devoted to herbs. He had little interest in horticulture, but he was sure everything here had its purpose for cooking or healing, even the brash marigolds crowding along some edges.
    Cooking, healing—and magic?
    He looked around for other evidence of witchcraft but found none.
    A bench sat in one corner with a wooden table in front of it in a position that would catch the afternoon sun. Behind it, a line strung from house to tree carried a full load of white laundry, stirring in the breeze. His life rarely involved lines of laundry, and there was a simple beauty in the movement.
    Then he noted the simplicity of the undergarments and that some were patched or darned.
    Impoverished.
    Excellent.
    So where was his bride?
    Down the end.
    He circled the herb garden and realized that a trellis covered by climbing flowers wasn’t the end of the garden but a partition. He went behind to find a gated fence, and beyond that a vegetable garden being pecked over by hens.
    Still no sign of Miss Mallow.
    Then a movement drew his eye behind a tall frame covered by scarlet-flowered vines. He went through the gate and walked down a side path.
    A sturdy woman was hoeing between rows of cabbages as if weeds were imps from hell. She wore a wide hat from which straw escaped around the edge and from which dark hanks of hair escaped down her back. Her shabby black gown was kirtled up to show battered leather shoes and six inches of dirt-splashed white stockings.
    Another servant, so Claris Mallow couldn’t be in truly dire straits, alas.
    Where was she?
    As he approached the woman to ask, she straightened. Some hair must have fallen on her face, for she brushed it away, taking a moment’s rest and turning to look around. At the sight of him, she stared, and something about her manner alerted him to the astonishing truth.
    He bowed. “Good day