My Sweet Folly Read Online Free

ignored such disrespect toward the Prince Regent. “The papers say it is merely that he fell and sprained his ankle,” she said. “He has taken to his bed to recover.”
    Mrs. Couch began to argue that this certainly proved the regent’s mind to be weak, since any sane man of his enormous bulk must know that he could not accomplish a Highland Fling with any degree of safety. Folie watched the postman wander from door to door of the village’s main street, his collar blown up against his neck and his scarf tails whipping in the spring wind. She did not expect him to cross to her door. When he did, her eyebrows lifted.
    She stood up. “Now where is that Sally with more hot water for the tea? Do pardon me while I find her!”
    Closing the drawing room door on Melinda’s look of inquiry, she ran down the stairs in time to find the housemaid bidding the postman good day. There were two letters in Sally’s hand, a thin one and a fat packet.
    The cook, just coming up from the kitchen, gave Folie a dry look. “You make good speed on the stairs, ma’am, for a lady of your age.”
    Folie stuck out her tongue. “Just because I am thirty today! And refused to have a great number of cakes and a party, so that you have no opportunity to tell me that I eat too many sweets for my mature widow’s digestion!”
    “Perhaps there is a special birthday greeting, ma’am!” Sally said, proffering the post shyly.
    “Perhaps it is! From our solicitors!” Folie gave the packet a mock grimace. “Always so attentive, dear Mssrs. Hawkridge and James.”
    She looked down at the address on the letter. For an instant she held the paper between her two hands, frowning at it. Then her face grew still. She slipped the letter into her pocket, grasped the banister, and ran up the stairs. She paused at the landing and whispered, “Pray, Sally—tell Mrs. Couch that I’ve taken a blinding headache and must lie down!”
     

     
    Four years and three months it had been since she had seen that particular handwriting, that blue seal, the unmistakable Mrs. Charles Hamilton, the distinctive curl of the F in My dear Folly. She sat at her desk overlooking the red tulips and peeking green leaves in the back garden, smoothing open the paper.  
     
    My dear Folly.
     
    She stared at her own name for a moment. For some reason, she hardly knew what, tears blurred the letters. She sniffed and blinked, looking up at the tulips. “Really, ma’am,” she murmured reprovingly to herself.
    It was nostalgia. It took her back so vividly. Four years ago, she had been just out of mourning for Charles. Good kind steady Charles, gone much too early at sixty-one. For five years before that, a married woman, she had smiled whenever she’d seen this handwriting in the post; smiled and grown as breathless as if she were falling from a high cliff, and run up the stairs to this desk just as she had today.
     
    M y dear Folly,
    I have left you languishing on your lilypad for a criminal length of time, princess. Can you forgive me? A dragon distracted me, just a small one, nothing to worry about, but I pursued him into an uncommonly sultry desert (you know how India is) and seem to have lost my way there. To be candid, I recall very little of it — I have no sense of direction, which is a great trial for a knight errant—but in the end I seem to discover myself in England. I think there was a magic door or a key or something of that sort involved. At any rate, I am at Solinger and you and Miss Melinda are commanded to repair here directly. On the instant. I am her guardian, you know, since my father’s death. So I may command these things. And I do.
    Your Knight,  
    Robert Cambourne
     
    Folie shook her head. She read it again, and laughed angrily, giddily, to herself. “You must be mad!” she whispered.
    An investigation of the fat packet and its contents showed that the travel plans and expenses had all been arranged by the efficient and attentive Mssrs. Hawkridge