Leeway Cottage Read Online Free Page A

already curvy?”
    â€œBecause your daddy likes me just the way I am.” She smiled, so Annabee did too.
    Â 
    It wasn’t actually true, though. Candace was not an easy person to like, and James didn’t, much.

W atching Candace Brant arrive at The Elms in the summer of 1926 was like watching the Aquitania dock. She had refused to go to Dundee for more than a week each summer while old Annabelle was alive. Now, however, she gathered Annabee and the nanny, sent the cook, the waitress, and the housemaid ahead by train, and even so took so much luggage that two separate automobiles were required. The social secretary, Miss Somerville, drove Candace and Annabee, and Osgood followed with Lizzie and the trunks. Osgood drove so slowly now that it took him an extra day to get there, but he had been recently widowed and James wouldn’t allow Candace to fire him. She wanted to. She preferred to staff the whole house with colored, whom her mother in Knoxville found for her and sent north.
    Poor Auntie Louisa’s wing at The Elms, with its separate kitchen and rooms for nursing staff, had been closed since her death. Candace ordered it opened and prepared as a nursery wing for Nurse Lizzie and Annabee.
    â€œIt will be so much better for Lizzie and Velma, Jimmy,” Candace explained. Velma, the cook, found a thousand ways to make her displeasure felt at home when Lizzie used “her” kitchen to prepare the nursery’s meals. Nurse Lizzie was what Candace called a “high yellow,” and the rest of the staff resented her.
    â€œBut we’ll never see Annabee if she’s way over there. I like having her right down the hall.”
    â€œIt won’t make any difference if she’s down the hall or not. Could we just live like grown-ups for a couple of months a year? Do you think?”
    When James arrived to join his family at The Elms, he found all the bedrooms on the second floor of the main house had been “freshened up” by a decorator from Knoxville he didn’t remember being asked about. A great deal of chintz and chenille was involved. James walked from one to the next—this one in blues, mostly aquamarine, the next in shades of intense yellow, the wallpaper a mass of buttercups.
    â€œNow when we have guests there will be at least a minimum of comfort,” Candace said.
    â€œWhen was there ever not?” James countered, but at once regretted it. Candace gave him The Look.
    â€œI couldn’t invite my family, with the rooms the way they were.”
    â€œI see,” said James. “I think I’ll go down now and see how Osgood is getting along.” He did the rest of his tour of inspection at another time, and by himself. He said nothing about the changes except to order that a leather chair that had been his father’s, which Candace had sent to the servants’ sitting room on the third floor, be brought back to his study.
    â€œI’ve asked Lizzie to bring Anna in to say good night, before we go out to dinner,” said Candace that evening. He’d been there for some six hours and still hadn’t been given a chance to see his daughter.
    â€œWho is Anna?”
    â€œYour little girl, my silly.”
    â€œAnnabee?”
    â€œDo you know that that woman at the post office with the grande poitrine is known as Nellabee to one and all?”
    â€œNella B. Foss?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYes, I know it. I’ve known her for donkey’s years. And …?”
    â€œDoesn’t it strike you that the ‘Annabee’ business is a little…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œCould you help me with my little pearls, please, lovey? The catch is hard, it’s so tiny.”
    He put on his glasses and went to her at her dressing table. “The ‘Annabee’ business is a little…?” He wanted to hear her finish the sentence. She wanted him to read her mind and agree with her. He fastened the clasp