Read Online A Christmas Hope by Anne Perry - Free Book Online

haveoverspent themselves for Christmas,” he said doggedly. “Then what’ll you do, eh?”
    “Go out and find some money, of course,” she told him tartly. “As I always do.”
    “Very right an’ proper,” he nodded. “So go do it.”
    “By then Dai Tregarron could be in jail waiting to be hanged!”
    Always literal when he wanted to be, Squeaky gave her a long, cold stare, and spoke very clearly. “It is December; Christmas is in less than a fortnight. They haven’t even caught him yet. They’ve got to try him and give him three weeks’ grace before they hang him. You’re good at sums—that’s more than a month, at the very least. He has time. We don’t. We need more money.”
    “No we don’t!”
    “Everybody needs more money,” he said reasonably.
    “You really won’t help me?” She felt despair well up like a dark cloud filling the sky. She had tried to do something like this once before, and Squeaky had had to rescue her. The memory was so humiliating she refused to let it enter her mind.
    “No, I won’t,” he said flatly.
    She felt ridiculously as if she were going to weep. Sheswallowed hard, a loneliness crowding in on her from every side: in society, at home, now even here. It had been absurd, even pathetic, that a woman of her age and station should find her only real friendship in a clinic for women off the street! And now even at the clinic she was alone.
    “Then I shall have to do it by myself,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage. She turned and walked out of the office, leaving him sitting at the desk, a pen in his hand and a look of baffled frustration on his face.
    Claudine walked the length of Portpool Lane and turned onto Leather Lane, moving south briskly but without purpose. She was angry. She was afraid of doing this alone. Mostly she was afraid of failing.
    She realized how perverse she was being. She knew almost nothing about Dai Tregarron, except that he had a poet’s vision and the music of words in his brain. He might very well be guilty of having beaten Winnie Briggs and given her the blow that had been the immediate cause of her death, at least in law. He might not have meant to kill her, but it was a foreseeable result—and a wrong and brutal thing to do. Yet he hadn’tseemed like a man who would do such a thing. How could one person hold such violent and terrible contradictions within their nature?
    Why was she wasting her time at all? And it was a waste. Squeaky was only speaking the truth when he told her she would be far better employed raising money for the clinic. He had not observed that she was on this mission largely to defy Wallace and all the people she knew who were like him. Did she even know why? Yes, she did. Dai Tregarron had called her Olwen, had spoken to her as if she were a creature capable of escape from the commonplace, not the pedestrian, middle-aged woman everyone else saw, incapable of imagination, even less of passion. He had seen who she wanted to be and given the dream a moment’s life.
    Someone dug hard fingers into her arm. She gave a cry of fear because the grip was strong enough to pull her to a halt. She struggled, looking around the gray street for anyone who would help her, but she saw only vehicles passing by, people hurrying, collars turned up. She swiveled around to lash out with her free hand as hard as she could.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Squeaky demanded shrilly. He had to let go of her and step back smartly asshe swung her arm, stumbling forward with the impetus when there was nothing close enough to strike. “Who the hell did you think I was?”
    She was furious, and horribly embarrassed. A man in a morning coat and top hat was staring at them as he approached. He moved aside quickly, as if she might attack him, too.
    “Why didn’t you say something?” she shouted at Squeaky.
    “I did!” he shouted back. “I called your name. You’re so busy in your daydreams you didn’t hear me. And