Joan Wolf Read Online Free

thought of a child playing in that small enclosed space, in the way of those murderous iron-shod hooves, turned my blood cold.
    “My lady!” Mrs. Fenton was at the farmhouse door, wiping her hands on her apron. I smiled at her, dismounted, tied Elf to the front gate, and went inside.
    Susan Fenton was a few years older than I, the daughter of one Weston tenant farmer and the wife of another. She took me into the kitchen to brew tea, and her expressed sorrow about Gerald’s death was undoubtedly sincere. I thanked her and we took our tea into the small, chilly sitting room that was used only for “company.” Susan Fenton placed the teapot on a gateleg table and gestured me to an oak chair whose seat was softened by a blue-and-white embroidered cushion.
    I arranged the full skirt of my gray riding habit. “I’ve come to apologize about the shrubbery,” I said.
    Her pretty face, with its fresh apple-blossom skin, was very sober. “I know you’ll make good on the shrubbery, my lady, that isn’t my concern. But my Robby often plays out there by himself. It’s protected, see.” She sipped her tea. “Leastways, I thought it was.”
    “I was looking at it from the road. The horse came right through it?”
    “Aye. Fair scared the heart out of me.”
    I could see how it would have. “It wasn’t one of the hunt members, Susan,” I assured her. “It was some fool of a visitor on a horse he couldn’t handle.”
    “It don’t matter to me who it was, my lady,” Susan said very firmly. “I know this is Weston land, but Fenton has a lease on it, and I don’t want no hunt coming near my house again.”
    The grandfather clock in the room chimed the hour, and I waited until it was finished before saying, “They aren’t supposed to come near the houses, Susan. Sir Matthew says that the rest of the field was a mile away.”
    “Small comfort it would have been to Robby’s grieving mama and papa that the horse wasn’t supposed to come near the house,” Susan retorted swiftly. “He was near the house, my lady, and he could have killed my baby.”
    Perhaps I should explain here that Susan and I do not have the sort of relationship that usually prevails between a countess and the wife of one of her tenants. She had known me since first I came to Weston Hall as a lonely and unhappy child. She had taken me to pick blueberries and had taught me to plant a vegetable garden. It was Susan who had first told me about a woman’s monthly flow.
    “You’re right, of course,” I said with resignation. The delicious aroma of baking bread wafted into the room from the direction of the kitchen, and I sniffed blissfully. “That bread isn’t finished by any chance, is it, Susan?”
    Susan knew how much I loved her bread. “It will be finished in a few minutes, my lady, if you can wait.”
    “For your bread, Susan, I would wait an eternity “ Isaid.
    She looked pleased, and reluctantly I returned to the business that had brought me. “You have never had any problem with our own hunt members, have you?”
    Susan frowned thoughtfully at the row of pewter plates arranged decoratively on her oak sideboard. “No,” she finally admitted.
    “Suppose I recommend that in the future no one will be allowed to hunt with us except members?”
    She looked uncertain.
    “You know all our members, Susan,” I said reasonably. “There is no one among us who can’t be trusted to stay away from houses.”
    The Sussex Hunt was remarkably democratic, and Susan did indeed know all our members. Several of the more prosperous tenant farmers hunted with us, as well as the owner of the King’s Arms in the village. It was the disapproval of this last personage, Harry Blackstone, that probably weighed the most with Susan. If Harry’s hunting was spoiled by Bob Fenton’s wife, Bob would find himself unwelcome in the taproom of the King’s Arms. This would not sit well with Bob.
    “There will be a great deal of ill feeling toward you and Bob if you