Free The Windflower by Laura London Page B

if he had been there, where he must have been tripping backward over the tea table. "Dear Major Moneybags," she said grandly, sweeping a full court curtsy, "1 shall agree to your obliging proposal on the one condition that you will keep yourself a woman and climb on her more often than you will on me!"
    Aunt April smothered a smile. "Such nonsense. We aren't discussing this with the proper gravity, and I don't know what people would think if they were to hear us. Really, sometimes I fear that we get a little batty, living here like this, two women alone." A strange look came over her features. She went to her lap desk and thoughtfully stroked her hand in a wavy pattern across its highly polished surface. "We don't get out enough."
    Through the ages women had been making the same kind of statement, but Merry had never, never expected to hear it from her aunt! Aunt April, who hated to travel, who detested American social life. With disbelieving senses Merry heard her aunt ask, "Merry Patricia, would you like to come with me on a trip to
New York
?"
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
    For more than two centuries New York City had been spreading across the rocky island that had once been nibbled by glaciers and later had served as the fertile hunting grounds of clever Indian trappers, before the Dutch had come, and the British with their guns and liquor and lust for empire. The city that Merry found was tame, dirty, and crowded. Pigs wandered at will, munching on garbage and street dirt which the citizens diligently piled in the alleys to be hauled away twice a week by the Department of Scavengers. Milch cows meandered between neat gabled houses, dining on the bark of the Lombardy poplars, planted with well-meaning innocence along the narrow walkways. Within a brisk walk of the carpeted homes of the rich were the Five Points slums, where more than thirteen families might share a single privy. Everything here seemed remarkable to Merry: the vast markets that fed so many, the sobering bulk of the prison, the libraries, the almshouse, the botanical garden. There was not a street you could pass without seeing evidence of the city's awesome complexity, where misery rubbed shoulders with grandeur in no more wonder than the pauper and the banker have when they pass each other on the pavement.
    Today
New York
was celebrating Evacuation Day, commemorating that proud memory in the First War of Independence when the British had been forced to take their scrambled leave from the city before General Washington's triumphal entry.
    It was
noon
, and Merry's gaze caught the gleam from a church tower as its great bell began to dance. The voices of other bells joined in. From the Presbyterian Church, the Trinity, the Dutch Reformed, French Episcopal, and Baptist came brilliant thunder that laced the cool air between the hard claps of cannon salute.
    In front of Merry the parade was retreating down the straight stretch of Broadway. A unit of dragoons had been the last of the military that would pass them. The workers came next, under bright printed banners that snapped in the shifting breeze. The hat makers, the pewterers—and the blacksmith trade with a wonderful float that carried a working anvil and red fire, where three men stood forging an anchor, even as six horses pulled them along.
    What a day it was, what a parade! Merry glanced to her side, at Sir Michael Granville, wondering how the tall British man could remain unruffled in the face of a patriotic display that commemorated a humiliating defeat for his own nation. His expression was much as it might have been if he were watching the hunting dance of tribesmen in loin cloths and feathers—as if it were to him a colorful, primitive spectacle full of naive and pretty drama and simple symbolism. He was too well-bred to have said anything to confirm her suspicions, but condescension has its own particular odor, detectable like a yard where goats have been, even if one walks through it with closed