Slightly Married Read Online Free PDF

with one foot in 'eaven through all the years 'e was ill,” someone else observed.
    “Done?” Aidan repeated, his interest piqued. He did not bother to correct the man's grammar.
    “Aye,” the man said, shaking his head and sighing soulfully into his ale.
    No further explanation was forthcoming. The conversation turned toward Miss Morris herself and her saintliness, which apparently extended beyond nursing an infirm father for four or five years before his death—a father who may or may not have possessed a heart. Among other things, it seemed, she had started and financed a village school, brought in a village midwife and paid her salary, taken in two orphans to live with her when no one else wanted them, and employed an assortment of undesirable types whom no one else would have touched with a ten-foot pole—or so one of them declared, and no one rushed to contradict him. Miss Morris, it would seem, took the Christian ideal of charity to an extreme. She also, Aidan concluded, must be very wealthy indeed.
    “Too easily taken in she is, though,” the landlord said, shaking his head and pulling out a chair to settle his large bulk at an empty table. “Too soft in the 'ead.” He tapped his own with one finger to illustrate his point. “If you 'ad a penny to sell and a sorry enough tale to tell, she would give you a guinea for it as sure as I am sitting here.”
    “Aye.” One of his listeners shook his head sadly.
    “If you was to ask me,” the landlord said, though no one had, “old man Morris done the right thing before 'e popped off. Women are too soft about th 'eart to 'ave the running of a grand place like Ringwood and to 'ave their fingers in such a deep purse as Morris's was.”
    “I was under the impression,” Aidan said, reluctantly showing open curiosity, “that Mr. Morris left Ringwood to his daughter.”
    “Ah, 'e did,” the landlord said. “But it was to go to Mr. Percival after one year. Now 'e 'as gone and got 'imself killed just before the year is up and Mr. Cecil Morris will get it all instead. I don't expect to see
him
in any deep mourning for 'is cousin.”
    Morris senior had left his property to his daughter for one year only? Now, since her brother was dead, it was to go to another relative? That would be unpleasant for her, Aidan thought, if she had had the running of the place since her father's demise. But at least the new owner
was
a relative. Doubtless she would soon adjust to the new way of things.
    But still, she had lied to him to all intents and purposes. He felt annoyed. She might at least have told him she was about to lose ownership of her home. Except, he admitted with an inward sigh, that she did not owe him that knowledge. She owed him nothing. The debt was all on the other side.
    Protection
was the word Captain Morris had used. Aidan could remember the captain's hand plucking feebly at his sleeve with a dying man's last surge of energy.
    Promise me you will protect her. Promise me! No matter what!
    Damnation! Was there more to all this than was even now apparent?
    The men about him had settled into a lengthy discussion of Mr. Cecil Morris, but Aidan had not been listening.
    “What was Mr. Morris like?” he asked. He hated to pump strangers for information, but he felt the need to know more. “Captain Morris's father, I mean.”
    “Him?” one of the drinkers said. “He was no better nor any of us though he put on airs good enough for the King of England. He were a coal miner down in Wales before he married the mine owner's daughter and got rich. When the old man died, Morris sold the mine, got richer, bought the manor here, and set up as a gentleman. He had his son and daughter brought up as a gentleman and lady, but he was disappointed in them and serve him right too. Mr. Percival went off to the wars and Miss Morris wouldn't marry none of the nobs he trotted out for her inspection.”
    Ah, Aidan thought. The slight Welsh accent was explained. So was the very Welsh