The Kidnapped Bride (Redcakes Book 4) Read Online Free

knowing she couldn’t afford it on her own.
    The maid hefted her laundry basket with beefy arms and went up the next flight of stairs. The MacLeods lived on the top floor. Beth didn’t know how they could stand the rain both at the windows and on the roof. It would be enough to drive her mad.
    Mrs. Shaw lived on the second floor. She opened the door when Beth knocked and gave her a pat on the arm before taking Hester. “Could I trouble ye to pick up two potatoes for me, dear, and a bit of oats?”
    “Of course,” Beth said, taking the coin the old lady offered. She wondered how long that food would have to last the old woman, especially now that she fed Hester sometimes. “I’ll knock on your door in an hour or so.”
    “Not a day to be outside,” Mrs. Shaw agreed. “Beastly weather.”
    “We should be used to it, but it seems so cruel in the spring.”
    “At least it is a bit warmer,” the lady said, clutching her shawl with bony, arthritic hands. Hester bit her finger and rested her head on Mrs. Shaw’s shoulder. “Take your time, dear. We’ll be seeing ye.”
    Beth kissed Hester and continued on her way, wishing she could afford to pay for Mrs. Shaw’s food. Before they had bonded over orphaned Hester, she had caught Beth in the halls twice a month or so and asked her to do her marketing. Until the twin blows of Gertie’s death and Freddie’s disappearance, Beth had always been able to afford to buy her double what she asked for and then say the merchant gave her a good deal. Not anymore, though.
    A cacophony of sounds and smells followed her as she walked through the market near South Bridge, buying sparingly to save her ravaged funds. She ignored the loitering men who called out to her, keeping her nose in the air. While she’d lost much of her lady’s airs over the past year, they came in handy in the market. It made her nervous, the way some of the men watched her, the lust she saw in their eyes, but she had to shop. Sometimes, lately, she’d felt as if someone was following her home, but when she darted into shops, she never recognized anyone on the street. She laid in her supply of porridge for the week, mindful that, to save funds, she needed to start eating it twice a day, like a poor person. One coster offered a good deal on potatoes, so she bought five pounds, which saved her and Mrs. Shaw a little money. She walked by a butcher with longing, but resolutely turned to a vegetable hawker and bought kale.
    To think she had often dined on seven-course meals when her mother had been alive. Soup, salad, fish, meat, sorbet, meat, pudding. Saliva pooled in her mouth at the mere thought, despite the lip-chapping weather. The coming of her sister-in-law, Alys, changed all that. Alys, despite being a cake decorator by trade, had cut the pudding course entirely. Her mother had been in a state of battle after that, but an infection had taken her not long after the wedding. Beth had thought Alys’s table abstemious, but she’d had no idea how most people really lived. At least in a city like Edinburgh. In Heathfield, where she’d grown up, farm families ate better, even if they were poor.
    Her real problem, though, wasn’t feeding herself, it was feeding Hester. Gertie hadn’t left much of an inheritance for her daughter, only a couple of pounds and some scattered belongings. Beth suspected she’d been a prostitute. Hester had no father she knew of. No one had visited Gertie in her final days or had come to collect the child. Hester ought to be eating bread soaked in milk, not porridge, but fresh milk was hard to come by.
    With a sigh, Beth twisted her skirts to get some of the rain out of them and set a course for home, hauling her heavy basket. It took longer than expected, walking through the clogged streets, trying to manage the basket and umbrella while many did the same on a busy Monday morning. She knocked top hats aside with her unwieldy umbrella and carefully protected her possessions from