Read Online Morning Song by Karen Robards - Free Book Online Page B

hall below.

    59

    VII

    You may kiss me, Jessica, as we're to be family now." Miss Flora Edwards presented her crumpled cheek. Jessie, doing her best not to scowl, had no recourse but to give it a peck.
    "You may kiss me too, if you like, Jessica," Miss Laurel Edwards said as Jessie straightened away from her sister. Jessie took a deep breath and gave the other elderly lady's cheek a peck. Then Miss Laurel took her hands, and both ladies beamed at her while Jessie did her best to smile back. It was an effort, and she did not doubt that her smile looked halfhearted.
    The picnic supper that the Misses Edwards had put on in honor of their nephew's engagement had concluded as darkness had fallen. The party, which included all the nearby neighbors and some of the ones farther away, had then moved indoors. The picnic had been bad enough, but when Jessie had discovered that dancing was the next order of the evening, she had ducked into a rear parlor to escape. There, to her horror, she had run into the old ladies, who were arguing spiritedly about whose fault it was that the ices had melted before they could be served. She'd known Miss Flora and Miss Laurel from birth, but vaguely, as one did neighbors separated by several miles. Certainly they had never expressed any particular fondness for her before this moment. But, as they proceeded to tell her in great detail, since their nephew was marrying her stepmother (dear Celia, wasn't she just the sweetest creature?), that made Jessie (more or less) their grandniece by marriage.
    Frequently digressing from the point, and more frequently interrupting each other, the Misses Edwards gave Jessie to 60

    understand that their dearest wish was to see their nephew, who was their closest living male relative, settle down near them. To that end, they had invited Stuart to visit, not once but many, many times. Imagine their delight when he had at last shown up on their doorstep! And he so charming, and the spitting image of their baby brother, who had been his father!
    Of course Tulip Hill would be his one day, when both Miss Laurel and Miss Flora had passed on to their reward. Although their family (except for their baby brother, who had died in an unfortunate accident at the age of forty-two, leaving little Stuart without a father during his growing-up years) was quite longlived—their mother had lived to be ninety-one, and her mother had passed on one month short of her hundredth birthday! So Miss Flora and Miss Laurel concluded, with a titter shared between them, that it might be some few years yet before Stuart inherited, as Miss Flora was in her, um, sixties, with Miss Laurel some three years younger.
    "And why aren't you dancing, miss?" Miss Flora demanded of Jessie at last with a mock frown. With her masses of silky hair, which had presumably been dark like her nephew's but was now somewhere between white and silver, she must once have been the beauty of the family. She was taller than her sister and not quite as plump, but both had silvered rather than grayed and had the fine white skin prized by all Southern women. Age had wrought fine lines in Miss Laurel's face; Miss Flora's was frankly wrinkled. But still, the sweet scent of powder and lotion emanated from their skin at close range, both complexions were carefully tended, and both ladies were beautifully dressed.
    "I—I don't—" Jessie stuttered, caught by surprise. The truth was that she didn't know how to dance. Worse than that, she 61

    didn't expect to be asked. She'd grown up with the boys; she knew each and every one of them by name, and they knew her, too. As a child, she'd met them on their own ground—throwing rocks, climbing trees, giving as good as she got in everything from fist fighting to daredevil horseback riding. But now—now she was a young lady, and they were gentlemen. To them, she seemed to be invisible. With them, she had no idea how to act. As for the girls, they might as well have been from a different