Read Online Courtney Milan by What Happened at Midnight - Free Book Online Page B

dignity. Tell me if your knees suffer, will you?”
    She laughed again.
    “There,” he said, “Now that’s what I like to hear. You have the most beautiful laugh, Mary.”
    She pulled away. “Save your compliments for your horses.” But she was smiling.
    Deep inside, she knew that she was only setting herself up for a fall. He would leave. He would remember that he hadn’t really forgiven her. And having tasted friendship once again, having remembered how sweet it was to trust someone else, it would be all the more bitter to have it wrested away. But even knowing that she was being foolish—knowing that this would end, and she would be hurt—she couldn’t make herself push him away.
    She’d been right. She’d missed him—missed the life she had once had—too much to be anything other than very foolish when it came to him.
    “So,” Mary said, as lightly as she could manage, “why did you build a windmill?” As she spoke, she rested her hand against his arm.
    He started walking. “I was sixteen,” he said. “And my father had given me a piece of land.”
    “A gift?”
    “A threat.” He sighed and turned his head to look out over the valley. “He didn’t want me to think so much about farming. There was no money in land anymore, he said. We had some wealth remaining, and he was throwing it all into investment—
that,
he said, was where all the money lay. But I kept coming to him with my head in the clouds, spouting ragged bits of advice I was learning from books and farmers’ magazines. He was sick to death of my hopeful burbling, and so he told me that I could make all the changes I wanted on the farm, if only I could do one thing.”
    Next to her, he smiled in memory. It was a deep, dark smile, one that drew her in.
    “He gave me a piece of land where all the water for miles drained. What wasn’t fen in the plot was taken up by bulrushes. And he told me if I could make a crop of rye grow there, I could do as I wished, instead of going into business.”
    “Didn’t you want to go into business?”
    He shrugged. “Not particularly. It seemed to involve a great deal of sitting around and talking to others. Rather dull, actually. I’ve always liked working with my hands. I gather he gave me that plot of land to beat my misplaced ambitions out of me. To give me an impossible task, just so I could fail at it.”
    When he’d been sixteen, she would have just started in Vienna. She’d been full of hopes about her playing—that she’d become so brilliant that she might play anywhere, despite the unfortunate deficiency of her sex. They’d both taken on impossible tasks. But he’d succeeded at his.
    “I didn’t believe them,” John said. “Not even when all the available choices failed. Tile drains, laid at reasonable intervals, simply covered in water. There was too much mud to manage a proper drainage canal. It took me two years to convince myself that no passive draining scheme would serve. And even then, I wouldn’t give up. That’s when I began to consider an active scheme. I ordered architectural drawings from the Netherlands, from drainage windmills in Kent.”
    “And so you built a windmill and showed them all.”
    “It wasn’t that easy,” he said. “I built it, and it didn’t work. It took me another six months to work out the details. By that time, my father…”
    “Was he urging you to give up, to move on?”
    There was a long pause. “No,” John said softly. “But I remember the moment when I finally got the machinery in the tower to work right. It looked right. I examined it from every angle, and it matched the specifications I had. I took it apart and put it back together three times, and still the bloody thing wouldn’t work. I was beginning to lose the light, and the oil lamp was not bright enough to show intricate detail. I had told myself I was going to finish that day. And that’s how I figured it out—because I was too stubborn to leave. It got so dark I