A Mistletoe Kiss Read Online Free Page A

Miss Preece. Is this the young person who wanted to become a member but …’
    â€˜Yes, that’s right, but we’ve sorted the matter out,’ Miss Preece said rather hurriedly. She handed Hetty a large and imposing tome. ‘Bottom shelf, next to the red book with gold lettering,’ she said briskly.
    It was a good walk from the library to Salisbury Street, but Hetty was used to walking. Grandpa’s barge was still pulled by Guinness, the big piebald cob, so when she was living on the canal she walked long distances leading him, and of course lacking a penny for trams she walked a good deal in Liverpool as well.
    She had emerged from the library with considerable caution, just in case the boys might still be hanging about, but there was no one she knew on the crowded pavement and presently she forgot all about her cousins and the telling-off she would probably get for not offering to do her aunt’s messages before she had set out for the library.
    All Hetty could think about as she trudged alongwere the wonderful books she had read and handled. She was sure her essay would win her a star, possibly even a gold one, and really and truly if her work was commended, it would be thanks to Miss Preece. Hetty thought about the older woman’s strange boot and heavy limp, and now that she seriously considered it she realised that this might be the cause of Miss Preece’s bad temper. She herself had been caned several times at school for inattention and knew how difficult it was to concentrate when your palm was red raw and stinging whenever you moved your fingers.
    Hetty glanced at her school as she walked along William Henry Street, but of course on a Saturday the only people in the building would be the cleaners and the caretaker. She headed for the jigger that ran between the houses on Salisbury Street and those on Stitt Street. She reached the back gate of No. 7, hurried across the tiny paved yard, ducked under her aunt’s washing hanging on the line and went through the back door and into the kitchen. Her aunt was ironing and the room smelt pleasantly of starched linen. Hetty smiled at her aunt. ‘Sorry I slipped out early this morning, Aunt Phoebe, but me teacher told me to go to the library so’s I could get my holiday task written up before I join Grandma and Gramps on the Water Sprite . I thought Bill and Tom would probably get your messages for once, if I weren’t about to do it.’
    Her aunt looked up and gave Hetty an absentminded smile. Her face was very red and her light brown hair hung over her damp forehead, for it was a hot day and though Aunt Phoebe was always sayinghow much she would like one of the new-fangled electric irons she was still using the old-fashioned flats. You needed to be ‘on the electric’ as they put it before you could use an electric iron, so Aunt Phoebe would have to wait until the happy day arrived when electricity came to their part of the city.
    In the meantime, she had to do her work the hard way. Two or three times a week she did the rounds of small cafés and restaurants collecting tablecloths, napkins and tea towels, which she then bundled up and took along to the washhouse on Netherfield Road. There she would wash all the linen she had collected, using starch when necessary, and hang it to dry on the indoor lines which criss-crossed the large space. Later she would bring everything back to her own home when it was still just damp enough to iron. She was always careful to see that all the linen, right down to the tea towels, was marked with the owner’s initials so that her customers knew she could be trusted to return exactly what she had taken.
    But how much quicker and easier the task of ironing such large quantities of linen would have been had she owned an electric iron, Hetty thought now, eyeing her aunt’s red and sweaty face with real sympathy. Once, when her aunt had been ill, Hetty had undertaken the