Free The Secretary by Meg Brooke Page A

glanced quickly around the flat. It was small but serviceable. The wallpaper and furnishings had clearly seen better days, but everything was clean and orderly, including Miss Martin, spare and trim in her pink day-dress. But spare and trim seemed to suit her. She looked perfectly at ease as she handed him his teacup.
    After he had taken a few sips, he said, “I wanted to express my condolences in person, Miss Martin, on the loss of your father. He was a great man and I admired him very much.”
    Miss Martin looked evenly at him, but it was an expression he recognized. She had lost her lodestone, and she was holding the pieces of her life together with both hands. He had seen that same expression on Leo’s face when his friend had lost his father five years earlier. It was a long, slow climb up from such a loss. “Thank you, My Lord,” Miss Martin said. “It was very sudden. I still find myself thinking that I will walk in the door one afternoon and see him waiting here for me.”
    “You lived here when he was still alive?” Anders asked without thinking. “Forgive me,” he said immediately. “That was an impertinent question.”
    “No offense taken, My Lord,” Miss Martin said, and the corners of her mouth lifted in a little smile. She had an alluring mouth, Anders thought. “We lived in Piccadilly when my father was still alive, in a townhouse near the Quadrant. I moved here after his death.”
    “He did...forgive me, Miss Martin, but I am going to ask another impertinent question.”
    “There is no need to ask, My Lord. I know your question, and I am not ashamed to answer it. My father left me enough to live on. I am quite comfortable here.”
    He could see that she lied, but there was nothing he could do about it. “And your mother is gone as well.”
    “She died when I was an infant,” Clarissa said. She stood and disappeared into the other room for a moment, and when she returned she had a miniature in her hand. “Here is her portrait.”
    Anders studied the picture, though he saw little resemblance between the subject and the woman before him. Neither of her parents could take credit for her beauty, then. “Do you see Mr. Ford often?” he asked.
    “Often enough,” she said. “He is my connection to the world of politics, now that my father is gone.”
    “Your father was a law professor at one time, was he not?”
    She nodded. “He taught at Balliol for fifteen years before being elected to Parliament.”
    “An Oxford man,” Anders scoffed.
    “Ah,” she said, wrinkling her nose in a way that made her look young and carefree. “Cambridge, I take it?”
    “Yes,” he laughed, “though now I rather regret it. When I say I was an admirer of your father’s, Miss Martin, I mean it. I would have greatly enjoyed having him as a teacher.”
    “That is kind of you to say.”
    “It is also the truth,” he insisted.
    “Perhaps,” she said, laughing, “this is one of those rare instances when it is kinder to tell the truth. But you are right. He was an even better teacher than he was an MP, My Lord. He raised me on the law, on its beauty and purpose.”
    “Did he teach you other things as well as the law?”
    “Oh yes,” she said, and she gestured to a narrow bookshelf on which sat several volumes that had clearly been very well loved. “He was a great lover of Shakespeare, though only the dramas. I had to sneak the comedies up to my room. And he taught me to read Greek and Latin and to speak French, though with rather a terrible accent, I think. The Greek books are gone, however,” she added mournfully. “There is nothing like one of the Greek plays in the original language.”
    “You’re better off than me,” Anders said. “I speak Russian and a smattering of Danish, thanks to my mother.”
    “She was Danish?”
    He shook his head. “My grandmother. She would have wanted me to say she was Norwegian, actually.”
    “Well, one of these days Norway will gain its independence again