Sugar in the Morning Read Online Free

liked the warm smell of her and the hard muscular feel to her arms.
    “I’m Camilla,” I began hesitantly.
    “You is!” she agreed. “I’se Patience. Ain’t got no other name, not so’s I remember. Everyone calls me Patience.”
    “She runs the house and things,” my uncle put m helpfully.
    “I sure does!”
    I wondered what to say. In the end I compromised by grinning broadly back at her, and apparently this was all she wanted, for she disappeared into the house again, yelling for my two cousins.
    They spilt out on to the street still pulling on their clean shirts and smoothing down their exuberant hair. They were quite fascinatingly good-looking and they knew it. The elder, whom I judged to be closer to thirty than to twenty, held out his hand to me. “ Welcome to the family homestead, Cousin Camilla,” he drawled.
    “ You’re surely welcome!” echoed the younger brother.
    My uncle turned on them furiously. “And what do you suppose she’s going to think of you if you speak that way?” he demanded.
    “What should she think?” the elder son returned.
    Uncle Philip sighed heavily. “They’ve had no mother to soften their ways,” he apologised. “This is my elder son, Wilfred. Cuthbert is the younger one.”
    “If you’re good you can call me Bert,” Cuthbert added in an undertone. I sympathised with him. They were neither of them names that I would have chosen, but I knew they had both recurred in the family from time to time and I supposed that my uncle had more family feeling than I had at first suspected.
    “It’s lovely to meet you all !” I exclaimed. It was so long since I had had any family that my voice broke, but I caught myself up and managed a smile. “I didn’t know I had such a handsome family !”
    “Nor we that we had such a tall cousin,” Wilfred returned coolly.
    “Now, now, boys !” my uncle put in warningly.
    “Oh, I don’t mind,” I assured him hastily. “I am tall, I know, taller than any of you.”
    My uncle went into the house and ushered me in beside him. He shook his head at me and smiled, his eyes twinkling in the gloomy hall. “Mebbe you are tall for a lass, but you’re not taller than that Daniel Hendrycks, are you now? But then,” he went on sarcastically, “there’s no one in the whole island that’s taller than he!”
    The brothers stiffened at the mention of his name. “Daniel, did you say?” Wilfred drawled. “Now how did you get to know our Daniel?”
    I was determined not to take them too seriously. “I booked his passage out here, as a matter of fact,” I said casually. “It was my job, you know.”
    “But—” Cuthbert began. His brother cut him off sharply with a look. “But,” he said again, “you were released from having to toil for a living by your good fortune. Lucky you!”
    I shrugged my shoulders. “It makes a nice change being a lady of leisure,” I agreed. “But I don’t think I’d like it for ever !”
    I began to take in my surroundings with an increasing sense of awe. The heavy Victorian furniture and multitudes of pictures, of the Royal Family, dubious ancestors, and even of film stars, littered the walls wherever I looked. Large, healthy pot plants stood on every window-sill and the tables were all neatly covered with burnt orange coloured squares of cloth, as useless as they were hideous.
    “How long have you been living here?” I asked in hollow tones.
    “A few years,” Uncle Philip admitted. “Patience keeps the house going. She likes it the way it is, so we’ve never bothered to change it. Besides, we’re not as modern in our ways as you are in England.
    “No,” I agreed. “As a matter of fact Victoriana is all the rage now.”
    “But you don’t like it?” he prompted me.
    “I didn’t say that,” I said.
    He laughed. “You didn’t have to. Never mind, my dear, do what you like with the place. I give you a free hand to make any alterations you care to. Is that fair enough?”
    I liked him