Read Online Endure My Heart by Joan Smith - Free Book Online

ma’am,” he answered, “as soon as ye’ve signed for it.” I was back to ma’am, in deference to my fit of pique. I stood by to sign the voucher he was scribbling up. I rather expected to see him surreptitiously counting up the price on his fingers as Mrs. Owens does, but he jotted down the right sum pretty quickly. Two times fifty is hardly an impossible sum, however. “It’s a grand little place, Salford,” he said, looking up between strokes of the pen.
    “Where are you from, Mr. Williams?” I condescended to inquire.
    “I get around a good bit,” was his answer.
    “Where is your home, I meant?”
    “Devonshire,” he answered.
    “I have an aunt from Devonshire. Whereabouts in Devonshire is your home?”
    “It’s just a wee place. Ye’d never have heard of it. I left when I was a lad. I’ve been living in London since.”
    “How nice. You will find Salford quiet after the city.”
    “Not too quiet, I hope,” he said, and smiled up at me in a bold, assessing way. “There must be routs and assemblies, even in Salford. Do ye attend the assemblies, miss?”
    The “miss” was a definite step down in this case, and I lifted my brows to show him how disagreeable I found his encroaching ways. “Very seldom,” I told him. Before Papa’s death I went as often as I could get Andrew to accompany me, but had not been to a party since that time.
    “What would a young lady like yourself be doing of an evening then?” he went on brazenly.
    “I am busy, Mr. Williams, with church and school work.”
    “Betwixt your teaching and charity works ye must be fair frazzled, but are ye busy every evening?” he insisted, with amazing brass.
    “No, sir, some evenings I help my brother, Reverend Anderson, copy out extracts that he has published in ecclesiastical magazines, and some evenings I just sit home quietly and play the piano, or read Shakespeare. I particularly enjoy Shakespeare.” I felt these exalted pastimes would give him the notion he was aiming too high to aim at me.
    “I prefer Milton myself. I have just been agonizing over Samson Agonistes,” he replied.
    I stared, astonished that he had ever heard of Samson Agonistes, let alone be swift enough to tell me so in a clever manner. “Indeed!” I said, with a peep down to the counter, where a book of Milton rested unopened by the open ledger. Still, I knew well enough Mr. Owens did not keep such reading material at hand. It was certainly his book.
    “Oh yes, I do read something other than ledgers,” he said. “But I prefer to attend a play.”
    “I thought it was assemblies you preferred.”
    “Aye, so it is when I’m in stout form, but I’ve wrenched my ankle that bad it howls when I make a leg.”
    “I wonder what boundaries you were overstepping to have given it such a turn, Mr. Williams,” I asked in a polite tone, then I signed the voucher without another word. I strode from the shop with the feeling I had got the last word in, but as the door closed behind me, there was an unmistakable bark of amused laughter. I didn’t satisfy him to look over my shoulder, but went straight home to tell Edna that Mr. Williams was a very bold, underbred fellow, and she wanted to be stiff with him when she went tomorrow to get a look at him.
    “Bold?” she asked, astonished. “I have already met him. I was over this morning to pick up a few woolens to mend Andrew’s stockings. I found him extremely civil. He has made himself very popular within the space of a day. Why, he is walking out with Sally Trebar this very evening, and they, you know, are very nice people. Her uncle a solicitor in the city, and…”
    “And her brother a smuggler,” I reminded Edna, with a little burst of annoyance that Williams had been rolling his eyes at all the girls, and not only myself. Quite the pink of courtesy, this Williams.
    “As to that, who are we to talk?”
    “Hush, Andrew is in the next room.”
    “Only in body,” she replied, then used the time to