Nell Read Online Free Page B

want.”
    Frankie looked incredulous. None of the women he knew shared Lady Fitzgerald’s philosophy of mothering. “What about your da and Nell’s mother?”
    â€œNell doesn’t have a mother.” Jilly sat down on a bale of hay and crossed her legs beneath her. “My father won’t care, either. I don’t see him much.”
    Again, Frankie was shocked at her cavalier attitude toward authority. Imagine not seeing your father, not bumping into him around every corner, in the too-small kitchen, on the way to the loo, in the tiny bedroom where they shared a mattress so as to give Kathleen the privacy a girl needed. What kind of life was it where a little girl never saw her da? He looked at her again, racking his brain for another excuse to be rid of her. Not that he wasn’t grateful. But it terrified him to think of yesterday’s scene. She could have been killed, and he would have been blamed. He knew the fight was his own fault. It wasn’t unusual to expect that a tenant lend an occasional hand in the stables. Frankie liked horses, especially the way their coats gleamed in the sunlight and the soft, velvety feel of their nostrils against his palm. But he wouldn’t lift a finger for Terrence Fitzgerald. Jilly’s brother was a braggart and a bully.
    Those character flaws in themselves weren’t enough to arouse the flame of Frankie’s temper. It went deeper than that. He didn’t trust Terrence, not since he’d seen him talking with Kathleen out by the henhouse. There wasn’t a reason in the world for a girl who scrubbed latrines to be talking with a boy who would inherit half of County Down.
    Kathleen said he’d brought a message from the housekeeper, but Frankie doubted if Terrence Fitzgerald even knew he had one. He was an aristocrat, born into old wealth, one of those who assumed his clothing would be automatically pressed, his sheets changed, and his Christmas dinner served hot and on time without once considering the men and women who left their own families to meatless meals while they trudged through bogs and along dirt roads to perform domestic services for the pitiful wages that kept them a hair’s breadth on the other side of starvation.
    Kathleen was sixteen, with a red-cheeked, full-figured appeal that made grown men turn around for a second look. Terrence wasn’t grown, and although Frankie couldn’t be sure, he didn’t think Terrence was much to look at, either. But he was the Fitzgerald heir, and for Kathleen, who had nothing to look forward to but a husband who would spend half his life on the dole, he was pure gold.
    When Frankie hinted that Terrence might want something more than she was prepared to give, Kathleen brushed aside his warning with an evasive shrug, insisting that it wasn’t like that. He gave up when his father called him a “meddlesome lad gettin’ too big for his breeches.” Who was he to put the fear of God into Kathleen when her own father wouldn’t? He only hoped they wouldn’t all live to regret it. Meanwhile, he continued to regard Terrence with suspicion, which led to the scene yesterday morning.
    Jilly was looking at him, her eyes wide on his face, waiting to be told what to do. She was a strange little mite, all eyes and hair and legs, with the patience to sit still for extended periods of time. It was her patience that intrigued Frankie. In his world, the young weren’t patient. They were too busy scrubbing and washing and cooking and birthing and scratching to make ends meet. Only old men who’d earned their time in the sun were patient, and young men who spent their Friday dole in the pubs and were loath to go home.
    Frankie knew Lady Fitzgerald wouldn’t approve, but he saw no way out other than to hurt the tike’s feelings, and he didn’t want to do that. “You can help me, if you like.”
    She clapped her hands. “Tell me what to