Read Online Lavender Morning by Jude Deveraux - Free Book Online Page B

Edilean Manor—left the house and strolled across the lawn
    to sit with Sara. He knew how she felt. Sara was a magnet for people and had been since they were children.
    Sara always cared, and always had time to listen to other people’s problems. He well knew that half of the
    reason women called her to repair their clothes was because they wanted to talk to Sara.
    Last summer he and some of the cousins, Charlie, Rams, and Sara, were having dinner in Williamsburg
    when Charlie said she should put out a shingle and get paid for all her hours of listening to people about their
    problems.
    “I couldn’t stand all those years in school,” she said.
    “Who said anything about school?” Rams asked. “Just put up the shingle. Luke here will carve it or paint it
    or whatever for you.”
    “And you’ll draw up a contract and charge her more than she makes in a year,” Luke shot back.
    “If you two start going at each other tonight I’ll walk out,” Sara warned. “I want a nice, quiet dinner without
    you two playing one-upmanship.”
    When all three men were quiet and looking as though they planned to stay that way, Sara shook her head.
    “All right, go to it. Tear each other up for all I care. Charlie, order me another one of these drinks.”
    “You sure?” Charlie asked. “You’ve never been one to hold your liquor.”
    “Then one of you will have to hold my hair while I throw up, and another one will have to carry me to the
    car.”
    Luke pulled a quarter from his pocket and looked at Ramsey. “Heads and I get the hair. Tails and you get
    the rest of her. She’s put on too much weight for me.”
    “You two are disgusting,” Sara said, but she was laughing.
    Now, Luke sharpened the blades of the lawn mower on the whetstone as he looked out through the little
    round window in the brick wall. He was in what used to be the stables of the old house, but most of it had fallen
    down long ago. While old Bertrand lived there, the house had been taken care of, as per Miss Edi’s instructions,
    but the outbuildings had been allowed to fall into ruin.
    “You didn’t put the care of them in the contract?” Luke asked Ramsey. “You just took care of the house
    and not the grounds?”
    “Are you implying that I made out the contract in 1946?”
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    “Okay, then your dad.”
    “He was one year old.”
    “Whoever, whenever, it is your job to look after the place,” Luke said when he’d returned to Edilean and
    seen the state of the outbuildings.
    “Maybe you should have stayed here and taken care of them,” Ramsey said, unperturbed by his cousin’s
    anger. “Maybe you shouldn’t have run off to the far ends of the earth and done whatever it is that’s made you so
    damned angry.”
    Luke opened his mouth to say something, but closed it. “Go away. Go do whatever you do in your little
    office and let me take care of this.”
    It had taken Luke months to restore the old buildings. He only rebuilt part of the stables, but he used
    materials from the time the house was built. He dug old bricks out of the ground, even dug up a well that had
    been filled in with bricks that had been handmade and fired when Edilean Manor was the center of a plantation.
    It had been hard, physical labor, something that Luke needed at the time, and he’d enjoyed the solitude of
    working alone. No one was living in the house then, as old Bertrand had died. There was a housekeeper who
    came every day, but she was so old she could hardly climb the stairs. When Luke saw her hobbling about, too
    feeble to accomplish much, he’d taken over. He got her a fat chair and a radio, and he set her up in the living
    room. When Ramsey, as the lawyer in charge of Miss Edi’s estate, saw what he’d done, he said he’d write Miss
    Edi and tell her the housekeeper should be put out to pasture. But Rams looked hard at Luke as he said it. They
    both