Read Online The Bridal Veil by Alexis Harrington - Free Book Online Page A

and her face washed, but the damage to her dress
was another matter. Smeared with chicken muck, dirt, and feathers,
she wasn’t sure if she would be able to get it clean. Crepe didn’t
wash well. She had only one other black dress besides her traveling
suit, and four more months of mourning to satisfy. She’d have to
mix up a batch of Japanese cleaning cream and hope for the
best.
    Going to the washstand, she washed her
face, and once the blood had been rinsed off, she was glad to see
that the scratches on her hands were only superficial. Then she
noticed the pink ribbon.
    It lay on her bed as if thrown there,
rejected and forlorn as Emily had sometimes felt. Crossing the
floor, she reached out to pick it up. No note of explanation
accompanied it, but there was no need, really. Its return spoke
volumes. Emily swallowed hard against the knot in her throat, then
gently folded the length of satin and put it away in her trunk. She
wasn’t sure if Rose had returned the gift on her own or if Cora had
made her do it.
    Cora is the only one who
knows how to handle that mean old biddy.
    She’d probably trained the accursed
thing herself—what a dreadful example to set for a child by playing
that dirty trick on Emily.
    And that Luke Becker. When
he’d stood over her, practically wagging his finger in her face
about going into the henhouse, if she hadn’t been so rattled from
the experience she’d have been sorely tempted to kick him in the
shins. That very reaction frightened her. Passionate feelings were
to be kept in check, she reminded herself. A lady did not lose her
temper in polite company, raise her voice, or make physical
demonstrations of her anger, no matter how she might long to. Of
course, the term polite company barely fit these people. In civilized society, an
uninvited stranger would receive better hospitality than she had so
far. Luke had made her almost as angry as Cora had, first scolding
her, and then dismissing her as if she were an errant child. He
talked to Rose that way, when he bothered talking to her at all.
God above, would Alyssa have been treated the same? No, she
supposed, probably not.
    Beneath her fear and annoyance,
though, had been a more subtle feeling that he’d stirred in Emily.
When he’d leaned close, she caught a whiff of him, of newly-turned
earth, hay, and soap. They were an altogether distracting
combination that had been enough to make her look up into his eyes
again. She lifted her gaze now and let it stray to the fields
beyond her windows, to the furrows plowed in them. She could
picture him behind the draft team that had brought her here
yesterday, cleaving the soil for planting, his bare back muscled
and straight under a clear April sky. The image in her mind was so
vivid, when she glanced into the mirror she saw the color and heat
it had brought to her face.
    Emily sat upright, appalled at the
direction her thoughts had taken. She had struggled with unseemly
thoughts all her life, ones that no real lady should ever
entertain—jealousy, critical views, fear, anger, impurity,
curiosity. They all were injurious to the spirit, and to one’s
moral and physical welfare. Certainly the copious advice manuals
published on proper behavior warned against these thoughts and
feelings. Her ability to remember these rules and pass them along
to her students had been one reason for her success as a
teacher.
    But sometimes, oh, God, sometimes in
her secret heart, the strictures of ladylike deportment felt a bit
too tight, even to her. Though she’d rather die than admit it,
she’d wondered what it might feel like to walk barefoot through
grass, or lounge in bed for a morning, something a person didn’t do
unless she was ill, or—or, just once, how would it feel to sleep
naked on a hot summer night, with nothing between her skin and the
sheets? But she recoiled from the questions because aside from the
impropriety of the deeds she pondered, they tore at the very fabric
of security around