Read Online On Secret Service by John Jakes - Free Book Online

people such as Margaret or Mr. Spence who were part of a loving family.
    Hanna let herself in. The door was never locked. The neighbors knew the major kept a side arm and a saber close by at all times.
    The small front room, her bedroom, was dark. They couldn’t afford to waste candles. The next room belonged to her father. There he slept, and stored his moldering uniforms, his Clausewitz and other books on the art of war. It too was dark. A light showed in the back room. She moved slowly toward the feeble yellow glow.
    The major slouched at the deal table. The top was scarred and filthy despite Hanna’s efforts to keep it clean. A brick propped up a broken leg.
    Siegel’s cropped blond hair was turning white. His cheekbones were broad, his jaw strong. A long dueling scar from his cadet days marked his left cheek under his eye. He wore old uniform trousers, maroon with a gray stripe, but nothing else. His braces hung below his hips.
    He heard her come in. He acknowledged her by extending his hand until the palm was two inches above the flame of the candle. Neither his hand nor his muscular arm showed a tremor. He was drunk; an empty schnapps bottle stood between his bare feet. A cockroach crawled around the bottle.
    â€œPapa?”
    Siegel withdrew his hand. With a smile he showed his palm, unhurt. Hanna took off her workman’s cap.
    â€œWhat happened in Georgetown, Papa?”
    Because his English was imperfect they spoke in German. “Another got there before me.” He groped under the chair, found the bottle empty, cursed, and threw it against the wall. It bounced and rolled.
    â€œA stupid scarecrow half my age. Served in some rural militia company in Pennsylvania. But of course—of course!—he was an American. My experience counted for nothing. Also, behind my back, someone said I sounded too foreign. I hate this filthy democracy. I hate the mudsills who think they’re equal to people of breeding. They aren’t fit to clean up my shit.”
    Hanna wanted to weep. “Won’t you please put on a shirt?”
    â€œI’m not cold. Go to bed.” When she hesitated, he beat the table with his fist. “Go to bed.” His shout sent the roach scuttling.
    â€œI will if you won’t drink anymore.”
    â€œTend to your own affairs. Close your door and give me some peace.”
    Hanna returned to the front room and shut the door. Before she undressed she went out to the reeking privy where she sat with her drawers around her knees. How she wished she could give her father greater support, greater comfort. But of course he wouldn’t have it from her; she was a woman. She remembered his drunken rages after her mother had died bearing her. “Liesl failed me. Your mother failed me. I wanted a son who could be a soldier. ” Hanna carried a deep wound of guilt and insufficiency, from hearing that so many times.
    A year ago, in a secondhand bin at Shillington’s popular bookshop, she’d discovered an 1844 novel, Fanny, the Female Pirate Captain , authored by some forgotten hack. The heroine was a buccaneer whose lover declared, “By my soul, thou shouldst have been a man.”
    Thou shouldst have been a man. She never forgot the line. In the story, it was ardent praise. Her father would scream it as accusation. She should have been a man. Sometimes she desperately wanted to be. Could that be why none of her short and clumsy love affairs had satisfied her?
    She trudged back to the house and crawled in bed in her undergarments. The house was frigid; she couldn’t buy stove wood until the Canterbury paid her for the week. Every night before sleeping, it was her habit to whisper all of Viola’s speeches, but tonight she was too upset. Through the door she heard Siegel’s mumbled litany of profanity. He cursed his luck, the Georgetown militia, American democracy—and he probably cursed her as well. She pulled a tattered blanket over