Free The Widow of Larkspur Inn by Lawana Blackwell

eyes with her handkerchief. The maid demonstrated, lifting a corner of the cloth and making a series of folds until a Georgian tea table with cabriole legs was uncovered. “We should go through the sheets later to see if any are worth salvaging. The others we can cut up for cleaning rags.”
    “See?” Julia said with forced cheeriness after blowing her nose. “The rooms won’t look so frightening when the furniture is uncovered. You can busy yourselves with that while Fiona and I decide where we’re to sleep.”
    Aleda’s face fell again. “It’ll take years and years to clean this old house. Why don’t you hire more servants now?”
    “And why don’t you stop complaining!” Julia snapped, her nerves strained to the limit. Immediately regretting her burst of temper, she walked over to put an arm around Aleda’s young shoulders. The girl buried her face in Julia’s side.
    “Yes, in time we will,” she said softly. “But it’s never going to be like it was in London. We’re going to have to learn to do some things for ourselves.”
    “I hate this place! I want to go back home !” Aleda said amidst muffled sobs.
    “I know you do,” Julia murmured as she smoothed the girl’s auburn hair and allowed her to cry while the others looked on with long faces. Close to dissolving herself, she thought, If you could have looked ahead to the future, Philip, and seen the tears of your daughter … would you have thrown our future away so recklessly? “But I give you my word, we’re going to make a home out of this place.”
    When Julia had calmed Aleda somewhat, she and Fiona got the children started on the task of uncovering the furniture. But no matter how carefully they folded the sheets aside, dust scattered into the air. It was Philip who came up with the idea of taking handkerchiefs from the luggage and tying them around their faces highwayman style.
    The ground floor consisted of two main corridors. Along the corridor running west to east and forming the long part of the “L” were the scullery, kitchen, and a sizable dining room ending at the main hall. Facing those rooms from across the same corridor were the pantry, a back staircase, the short courtyard corridor they had entered the house through, the cook’s and housekeeper’s chambers, water closet and lavatory, and a main staircase that ended at the hall again.
    Another corridor ran north to south from the hall. Julia was following Fiona down it when the front bell clanged. Automatically Fiona turned in her tracks, but Julia switched the lamp she was carrying to her other hand and touched the maid’s arm. “It’s about time I learned how to answer my own door.”
    Crunching dried leaves with her feet, Julia hurried back into the hall, where the children were staring with uncertain expressions at the front door. Like herself, they’d been raised to take for granted that servants answered doors without exception. We’ve a lot of habits to unlearn, she thought on her way past them. “It’s all right, children,” she assured them, picking up her reticule from the exposed tea table and taking out her keys. She tried three keys on the chain before one unlocked the front door, but she finally swung it open to find four people standing upon the stoop.
    “Good day, madam,” said an elderly gentleman with fresh pink cheeks and clear blue eyes. He switched the cane in his right hand to his left and lifted a bowler hat from his balding head. “I’m Vicar Wilson, and this is my daughter, Henrietta, our housemaid, Dora, and our gardener, Luke. We’ve come to offer our assistance to Gresham’s newest residents.”
    “But we’ve barely just arrived,” Julia said after a second of stunned silence. “How did you know …?”
    “News travels fast in a small village, madam.”
    The daughter, a sturdily built middle-aged woman with brown sausage curls peeking from her bonnet, nodded down at the basket in her arms. “And we brought you some