Mood Indigo Read Online Free

such as you deem yourself capable of judging character? You insensitive swine, you haven’t the slightest knowledge of me or what forces me to come—”
    The fine weather lines about his black-flecked eyes gathered to narrow the deep, thick-lashed lids, and the brows lowered over a nose that most certainly had been broken. “Thee needs to be humbled, mistress, and I would take great delight in the task, had I the time.”
    He pivoted from her. “Follow me, Betsy—Jonah,” he said to the slight, shabbily dressed woman and rail-thin boy whom Jane had failed to notice standing next to him. Only then did Jane spy the indenture papers the Quaker held rolled in his hamhock hands. He strolled off with the middle-aged woman and child dutifully trailing him.
    Jane, her spirits drooping, watched the crowd swallow up the three. She had let her pride get the best of her. She turned back to the guildhall’s open doorway. Before a board the people who could read pressed to study the public notices posted.
    “A Pennsylvanian colonist desires a tutor,” someone near the front called out.
    Jane’s eyes swept over the list:
    Men: tanners, coopers, shipwrights, sawyers, ropemakers, carpenters, wigmakers, millers, iron workers, bricklayers, ship chandlers, binders, bookkeepers, cardswainers .
    Women: seamstresses, cooks, domestics.
    The paucity of occ upations on the women’s list explained why so many men were gathered at the guildhall. Apparently few in the colonies wanted maids. They wanted craftsmen to build the New World.
    “You be needing help,” a haggle-toothed woman said to Jane.
    “No—no, I don’t,” she murmured, backing away from the men and women who suddenly encircled her with hope- filled faces. She hurried away to the comparative safety of the coffee shop.
    Yet the dawn of the next day found her slipping through London’s fog-shrouded streets. No one would have recognized Lady Jane Lennox as the frowzy wench who took her place in the line that formed before the guildhall’s as yet unopened doors.
    Her heart pounded erratically against her rib cage. What ever was she about? She could still change her mind. Yet when the double doors were thrown open and business began, she willed her feet to cross to the caged counter along with the other men, women, and even children— most of them looking as if they had recently come from the countryside in the hope of finding employment in the already overcrowded metropolis. The burgeoning malt shops and gin joints that flourished in the slums and now jostled for elbow room in t he middle-class districts testified to the hopelessness of gaining employment in London.
    When she neared her turn at the cage, the freckle-faced boy ahead of her hunched himself down, much as she used to do as a young girl, and piped, “Ye got chimney sweep work here in the city?”
    “Nothing,” the old clerk muttered, not even bothering to look up from the paper he wrote on. “Only in the colonies. Ship sailing next week. Mark an X on the line, boy. Then take the paper over to the magistrate in the next room and swear you have not been coerced into signing.”
    Parliament had passed a law requiring the signature before a magistrate the year after the Earl of Anglesey’s son had mistakenly been kidnaped for indentured service in the Barbados. But men were still gang-pressed into service; women abducted, never to see their families again; children and infants often indentured to serve until their twenty-first year.
    Jane took the boy’s place, and the clerk, busy again writing, asked without looking up, “Well—what qualifications?”
    She hesitated. With her education, she could tutor. But that was a man’s job. And her father’s wealth had made it unnecessary to learn a vocation like cooking or sewing. Maids had done everything for her. She naturally knew needlepoint, but how many positions were open for that fine craft? “I am afraid I have none,” she finally got out.
    The clerk’s