Read Online Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule by Jennifer Chiaverini - Free Book Online

sweet and melodious. He told her that her voice was the only music he cared to hear, and she glowed from the praise, just as she glowed every night in his arms.
    The steamer docked at Cincinnati on a bright, sunny morning, and as they left the cabin that had been their honeymoon bower for several pleasant days and nights, Ulys almost ran into a lad of about thirteen years who stood smiling cheerfully in the corridor, his flaxen curls and blue eyes rendering him almost too pretty to be a boy. “Hello, Lyss,” the boy greeted him cheerfully, then peered past him to grin at Julia. “Is this your missus?”
    “Orvil,” Ulys exclaimed, clapping him on the shoulder. “Yes, this is my lovely bride, your new sister-in-law. Julia, meet my youngest brother.” Smiling, Julia extended her hand to the boy, who shook it and greeted her respectfully, but with an air of merry curiosity.
    The same stagecoach that had brought Orvil to Cincinnati waited to carry them north. As they rumbled along out of the city, past blocks of handsome buildings that gave way to rolling hills and sweeping meadows, Orvil shared all the news from home—and Julia felt her apprehensions rising with every mile.
    The stagecoach halted at a tavern not far from the Grant family home in Bethel. Word of Ulys’s arrival with his new bride must have spread swiftly, for they were still organizing their luggage when a thin, sharp-featured, handsome man not much older than Ulys appeared and greeted him with a cordial handshake. “This is my brother Samuel Simpson Grant,” Ulys introduced him. Julia hid her surprise as she shook his hand; in the Dent family, siblings embraced.
    Simpson helped them carry their luggage across the street to the Grant residence. Julia’s heart thumped as Ulys opened the door for her, and she took a quick, steadying breath before she crossed the threshold. Her gaze took in first the faces that promptly turned her way—the grave, appraising eyes, the silent, expressionless mouths—and then the subdued simplicity of the furnishings, mirrored in the occupants’ attire. Julia had worn her new black-and-white-striped silk for the occasion, and she knew at once that she had overdressed and that Ulys’s family would assume she was frivolous and worldly. So much could be decided upon a single first glance.
    Fortunately Ulys was there, his hand upon the small of her back, his voice firm and proud as he introduced her.
This is my wife,
he announced with every glance and gesture,
and as you love me, you must love her.
Julia hoped they would take heed.
    “Welcome to Bethel, Julia, and to our home,” the woman who must be Hannah said, her voice low and quiet, her eyes a soft brown behind the small, round lenses of her spectacles. A delicate kerchief tied about her neck relieved the severity of her plain black gown. “I am Mrs. Grant.”
    I am too,
Julia almost blurted, but she caught herself in time. “How do you do? It’s such a pleasure to meet you at last.”
    Mrs. Grant nodded, her expression alert and inquiring, evidently untroubled by the nerves and expectations buzzing about Julia like so many invisible maddened hornets. She was taller than Julia—but then most people were, for Julia stood only five feet tall—with a delicate figure built upon a ramrod spine. She wore a small lace cap over her hair, which, Ulys had confided, had once been ruddy like his own but had turned chalk white during the last six months of the Mexican War, when not one of his letters from the battlefield had reached her.
    “We will have supper later, here at home,” Mrs. Grant said, after a lengthy silence that Julia found awkwardly long but which seemed to bother no one else. “Many of our friends wish to meet you.”
    “I look forward to it,” Julia replied pleasantly. Then, as if Mrs. Grant’s acknowledgment had given the others permission to address her, Ulys’s siblings came up, one by one, to give her welcome. Ulys was the eldest, Simpson second,