With This Ring Read Online Free PDF Page B

other hand, if ladies were like the ones in stories, all fainting pale in peril, why, his lordship didn’t stand a chance of reforming his gambling nature!That would be a pity.Edith saw glimmers of a fine man beneath the gambler.A man, perhaps, who sought the warmth of home fires and the welcoming bed of a wife.
    It could be that a chancer was just a man who hadn’t found his home yet.
    The other maids at the inn had swarmed the man, hoping for his notice, to what end Edith couldn’t imagine.A man like that could only want one thing from a common serving girl.She knew that one or two of the other girls didn’t mind tumbling the occasional guest and receiving a trinket for their troubles, but Edith couldn’t bear the thought.
    She might be only a chambermaid, but she had her pride.Indeed, she had little else!But she was hardworking, she could read and write a bit, and she had her mother’s wise-woman skills.Her mother had been respected in their village.People had come knocking, begging her healer’s skills, offering money or their last pullet.Her mother would take a coin to pay the butcher, then hand back the rest.Healing was her calling, a sacred ability, and not to be sold at high price to the desperate.
    But when her mother had passed, lost to a wasting disease that had been far beyond Edith’s skills, she couldn’t bear to stay in that village.Impulsively she’d set out to journey to London, where she had a cousin or three, according to family legend.
    Unfortunately, there hadn’t been much coin left to travel on and Edith’s adventure had come to a halt at the Green Donkey, where she might be able to put away enough to finish her journey.
    So she cleaned up after the guests and kept her head high, for she was an honest and virtuous girl.She didn’t advertise her healing skills, for this was a superstitious region, the sort her mother had warned her about.“Them that don’t understand our ways like to blame us when crops fail and livestock dies.Be careful.Stay small and quiet, keep the Knowledge to yourself until you’re sure it’s needed.”So Edith’s skills were a fact she kept to herself because she’d prefer not to be hunted for a witch next time there was a grain blight, thank you very much.
    However, now, here at the Green Donkey, his lordship needed her.The rest of them thought he would soon recover from his chill but Edith knew the signs.She could hear the faint whistle in his lungs, see the fever in his eyes, the tremble in his hands.Pneumonia awaited his lordship, ready to enfold him like a deadly lover.
    Edith meant to prevent this.She leveled her tray on one palm and straightened the small pot of her special unguent.Then she took a deep breath and tapped on the door of his lordship’s chamber.
    *   *   *
    Lord Aaron Arbogast had seen a bad morning after or two in his wayward youth.A decade of scrupulously clean living had not dimmed the memory of a dry mouth, a pounding head, and eyelids of sand.He held very still and waited for the swirling nausea that was surely on the heels of such a hangover.He had drunk—
    Nothing.Not a damned thing.Not a drop of brandy, not a whiff of whiskey.
    Furthermore, he was not in a bed, nor even in the hayloft of the inn.No, he was sitting in a chair, entirely unable to move.Without opening his eyes or making a sound, he carefully flexed the muscles in his arms and legs against his prison.Ropes?
    Keeping his breathing calm even in his alarm, he inhaled slowly, trying to sift clues from the scents about him.Fire smoke, real fire made from wood, not coal.Candle wax.A draft crossed his face—no, it smelled of fresh, damp nature.A breeze?Yet he didn’t have the sense that he was out of doors.He smelled moldy furniture … and damp plaster … and jasmine.
    Jasmine?No, that wasn’t possible.He was no longer on the plantation on the isle of Andros.He was in England, damp, fusty, smoky England.He was home.
    “Oh, for pity’s sake, open your