Free The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly Page A

taking it a bit easy. Instead, he’s working all hours. It’s absolutely inhuman.”
    “Aunt Eddie . . . ,” Albie protested, smiling embarrassedly.
    “It’s true, Albie. You never rest. Never have a nice long lunch. Never go for a ramble. You’re as washed-out-looking as a pair of old knickers. You need a holiday. I know you’re the country’s leading and most exalted boffin, Albie dear, but surely England can wait another month or two for whatever it is that you’re working on?”
    “No, Aunt Eddie, England can’t,” Albie said. He was still smiling, but there was suddenly an edge to his voice and a grim look in his eyes. Seamie stared at his old friend, startled. Albie never spoke in anything but polite and measured tones.
    As quickly as it had come, though, the hard edge was gone, and Albie’s voice was mild again. No one else seemed to have noticed the lapse and Seamie wondered if he’d only imagined it. Frowning slightly, he decided he would get Albie out of the house this week for a hike across the fens, no matter how much he protested.
    Prodded by his aunt, Albie told them all a bit about his work, and about the current preoccupation of physics professors the world over: the rumor that Albert Einstein would soon publish a set of ten field equations that would support a new theory of general relativity. Albie was in the process of trying to explain geodesic equations when the butler appeared in the doorway and said, “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but dinner is served.”
    “Oh, thank God!” Eddie said. “My head is spinning!”
    The party rose. Eddie led the way out of the drawing room and down the hallway to the dining room.
    As they reached the dining room, Lawrence stopped suddenly and placed a hand on Seamie’s arm. “Never mind Clements Markham,” he said to him quietly and with feeling. “Come out and visit me, Mr. Finnegan. You’re not too old for adventures; you can’t be. Because if you are, then I am, too. And if I was, I shouldn’t know what to do. I shouldn’t know how to live, and, frankly, I wouldn’t wish to. Do you understand that feeling?”
    Seamie nodded. “I do, Mr. Lawrence. All too well.”
    “Then do come. Bake your cold bones in Arabia’s desert heat for a while.”
    Eddie, who’d been standing inside the doorway to the dining room listening, said, “Tom’s right, Seamie. Sod Markham and Shackleton, too. Go to the desert. Bake your bones in Arabia.” She smiled, then added, “And thaw your heart while you’re at it.”

CHAPTER SIX
    “Fourpence, mister. You won’t regret it,” the girl in the red shawl said, smiling seductively. Or trying to.
    Max von Brandt, head down, shoulders hunched against the cold, shook his head.
    “Two, then. I’m clean, I swear. Only been on the game a week.” The false brazenness was gone. She sounded desperate now.
    Max glanced at her face. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. A child. Thin and shivering. He pulled a sixpence from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Go home,” he said.
    The girl looked at the coin, then at him. “God bless you, mister. You’re a good man, you are.”
    Max laughed. Hardly, he thought. He opened the door to the Barkentine, hoping the girl had not seen his face, or that she would not remember it if she had. The Barkentine, a den of thieves in Limehouse, on the north bank of the Thames, was the sort of place Max von Brandt occasionally had to visit but was careful never to be seen doing so.
    He had done his best to blend in. He’d worn the rough clothes of a workingman, he hadn’t shaved for three days, and he’d hidden his silvery blond hair under a flat cap, but it was harder to hide his height, his sun-bronzed skin, or the fact that his legs weren’t bowed from rickets. These things came from good food and fresh air, and in the East End of London, there was precious little of either.
    Once inside the pub, Max approached the bartender. “I need to see Billy Madden,” he said to