To Have and to Hold Read Online Free PDF Page A

occasionally by the strangeness, the enormity of what he'd just done. Since he couldn't justify it, he decided to put off thinking about it.
    They were facing each other on opposite seats of the brougham. Once their knees bumped when the carriage swung round a curve, and Mrs. Wade shrank back as if from a sparking fireplace. To keep from meeting his eyes, she looked out the window and watched the village go by, then the newly plowed fields, then the greening oaks and alders bordering the carriageway to his house. Her one and only possession, a tapestry bag, lay on the seat by her thigh; she kept a protective hand on it at all times, seemingly out of habit. She'd been robbed in Chudleigh, he recalled. He studied her sharp, clean-edged profile, in pale relief against the dark seat cushion. Shafts of the blinding sunset struck her in the face, making her squint. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes, and he saw that the nails were short and broken, the palm calloused. Her shabby dress had a faint stain on the bodice that looked as if it had been washed, futilely, more than once. The constable had said they'd found her in a barn, surviving on stolen apples. Impossible; it was a picture he could not make his mind form. Even with her derelict clothes and deplorable hair, she looked like someone's upper-class governess fallen on hard times. Or ... a nun. That was it, she looked like a nun, who'd suddenly been yanked out of her dark, safe cloister and shoved into the chaos of real life.
    Lynton Great Hall came into view through the carriage window. Her pale-eyed gaze sharpened and her face lost its shuttered self-consciousness. Sebastian tried to see the house through her eyes, the three E-shaped stories of weathered Dartmoor granite, mellowed to the color of honey in the waning sunlight. It wasn't particularly grand, and the interior, as Mrs. Wade would soon find out, was a minefield of domestic inconveniences. But it had a rough-and-ready elegance that he liked, as if it couldn't make up its mind whether it was a manor, a fort, or a farmhouse. Lili had ridiculed it—which had instantly enhanced his fondness for the old pile. Steyne Court, his father's estate in Rye, was much bigger, a palace compared to Lynton. Sebastian would inherit Steyne, too, one day, but in the meantime Lynton Great Hall was perfectly adequate. Especially since he didn't plan to spend much time here.
    They rolled over the short, graceful bridge spanning the Wyck, not fifty yards from the west front of the house, and for a second he thought he saw pleasure on the face of his new housekeeper. But when she glanced at him and thenquickly away, no hint of a smile leavened her somber features. The carriage passed under the gatehouse arch and clattered into the weedy flagstone courtyard, upsetting a flock of rooks roosting on the battlements. Sebastian jumped down and reached for the woman's hand to help her negotiate the step. She looked confused for a second; then her face cleared and she took his hand, as if remembering something old and long forgotten.
    "This isn't the formal entrance—that's on the other side; we passed it in the carriage—but it's the door everyone uses," he told her, gesturing to the studded oak portal with "a.d. 1490" chiseled in the stone block overhead. Inside, one of the maids—Susan, he thought her name was—was lighting the lamps in the hall. She looked startled, as well she might; a couple of hours ago he'd left the house with one woman, and now he was back with another. She dropped a curtsy and began to turn away. "Wait," he ordered, and she halted. "It's Susan, isn't it?"
    "Yes, sir." She curtsied again; she had a pretty, freckled face, and bright orange hair under her mob-cap.
    "Mrs. Wade, meet Susan, one of your charges. This is the new housekeeper," he informed the maid. "You'll report to her, just as you used to do with Mrs. Fruit."
    A comical look of amazement came over Susan. She stared at Mrs. Wade, at Sebastian, back to