Free Stranger in Camelot by Deborah Smith

hatchet to him.
    Agnes shot him a puzzled look. “What’s funny?”
    “The way you’re figuring out my lifestyle.”
    “Was I right about the car and chauffeur?”
    “Close enough.”
    “You’ve got class. Yeah, I can see it.”
    John frowned. If this kindhearted bird saw where he really lived and what he drove, she’d definitely threaten him with the hatchet.
    “Well, class isn’t a matter of fine homes or cars,” he told her. “For example, I think you look very classy right now. As if you should be sitting around a campfire in the mountains with a glass of wine in one hand.”
    Soft peals of laughter came from her. “You are a bonafide sweet-talkin’ man.”
    “Is that good?”
    “The jury’s still out on it.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “I haven’t decided about you yet.”
    “Ah. Hmmm. When you start dropping the g’s off your words and speaking with honey in your vowels, you sound dangerous.”
    “Yeah. It’s a warnin’ sign. Means you’re hearing the real me.”
    He recalled the episodes of The Jones Family he’d watched at the television archives of a university here in the States. Checking out her background had been one of his first goals. The television comedy show had been awful, complete nonsense. But redheaded little Agnes, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine at the time, had been charming. Not a very good actress, but lovable.
    “I assume you didn’t speak with an accent when you worked in television,” he said nonchalantly.
    “No way. No casting agent in California wanted a kid with a drawl.” She put a hand to her throat and drew her shoulders back formally, then spoke in a crisp, unaccented voice, exaggerating the sounds. “So I learned to e-nun-ci-ate and mod-u-late and speak like ev-er-y other me-di-ocre TV kid.”
    “Fascinating. You’re a different person when you do that.”
    She shrugged, melted back into her casual self, and returned to the tree-limb attack. “I was a different person.”
    “But not me-di-ocre, I’m sure.”
    When she glanced at him uncertainly and frowned, he knew she was uncomfortable. “I have to get to my job at the pub in about two hours,” she announced. “We better stop talking and fix this fence.”
    He nodded and went back to work. But he couldn’t stop watching her, and he couldn’t ignore the pleasant sense of friendship growing inside him. And it was great to feel his muscles tighten and flex smoothly. There was something primitive and exciting about working in partnership with Agnes, both of them sweatingand straining around the fence posts, sharing the spring day and the singing insects and the warm, earthy scents of the grassy land.
    He wished she weren’t so intent on seeing him as a pampered London businessman. She would certainly have doubts about his elite background if he told her how to pull the hog wire tighter or why the posts would set better with a little more dirt around them. He wasn’t supposed to know about those things.
    He’d even had to pretend ignorance about the chain saw, looking solemn when she repeated the safety precautions several times. She didn’t know that he’d grown up in a dingy flat over a stable and had spent his boyhood doing the filthiest, hardest work a stable manager’s son could do.
    As Agnes held hog wire against a post and he swung a hammer with what he hoped wasn’t too much skill, a searing pinprick of pain stabbed the back of his thigh. “A bee!” Agnes called. Then he hit his thumb with the hammer.
    The words he said could have made saltwater boil. The hardest man on the hardest street in London couldn’t have expressed himself better; And since John had been that man during his career with Scotland Yard, what he said came naturally.
    Agnes covered her mouth with both gloved hands and stared at him. He tossed the hammer aside and stuck his thumb between his lips. As he sucked it he cursed himself silently and tried not to grimace with the pain, aside from