muted tones. She was shouting rather ferociously. Before he could even manage to decipher what was being said, an object came hurtling over the wall. There was no time to react, no time to save his delicate and much adored roses and the work he’d devoted to them. The offending object crashed into the urn in front of him. Leaves scattered on the pedestal as the urn tipped back and forth then crashed to the ground. Dark earth spilled out and the tender green shoots lay broken on the paving stones.
It represented months of work, not to mention the loss of a significant amount of money and the swallowing of a healthy dose of pride. Enamored as he was of the unseen woman with charmingly acerbic wit, it did little to quash his temper. He was going to give those children the dressing down of their young lives, and he didn’t much care how their overbearing and hysterical mother felt about it!
CHAPTER TWO
“You’ll have to go and fetch it. At once,” Richard said, a smug smile on his lips and triumph in his cold gaze.
“I most certainly will not,” Percy refused. “We’ve already damaged the man’s property. I will not add trespassing to my list of sins. You will go and fetch it and if you’ve any sense about you, you’ll offer an apology to the man before he speaks to your mother.”
Before Percy could think what he meant to do, Richard drew his hand back and smacked it against his own cheek as hard as he could. Immediately, it raised a red hand print on his cheek. “If you don’t, I’ll tell mother you struck me. I think she’ll be only too eager to economize after that. Don’t you, Auntie Persephone?”
Percy drew back, utterly horrified. It always surprised her when they sank to new levels of evil and yet she knew it should not. “You are a vile and wicked boy.”
“Go and fetch it,” he said, pointing to the wall that separated their small garden from the neighbor’s. “I want my kite back. You can apologize for me.”
“Your kite is likely destroyed anyway!” Percy protested. She did not want to face the ire of the aloof neighbor her sister as desperate to make friends with.
“Then you will fetch the broken pieces and repair them… or you will buy me a new one,” Richard demanded.
She couldn’t afford to buy bread with her meager funds, much less a kite for him. “I wish I’d never come here.”
“If you don’t fetch it, you won’t have to worry about staying,” Peter piped in. He was always at the ready to be his brother’s second in command.
Percy looked at the boys, taking in their gloating expressions and the coldness in them. They were worse than her sister by far. The other children were far from angels, but without the influence of Richard and Peter they were generally just nuisances rather than being truly evil. “I can’t possibly get over that wall and the gates are locked.”
“There’s a tree right there that would give you a more than adequate leg up,” Peter pointed out.
Percy turned to the tree in question. It would. She was stuck. Making a face at them which only prompted them to grin with triumph, she made her way to the tree and raised one foot into the cradle formed between a sturdy branch and the tree’s trunk. With some finagling, she managed to hoist herself up to the top of the wall. Perching precariously there for a moment, she stared down in dismay. The garden on the other side had been terraced so that it dipped perilously below her. But as the only other option was to trust her rather unreliable sense of balance to walk along the wall to a lesser drop, going over there was her only choice.
Twisting about so that she could lower herself feet first, Percy could hear her nephews laughing in a manner that reminded her of a villain in a comedic play. Horrid, wretched boys!
“This is what my life has come to,” she muttered angrily. “Climbing garden walls like some sort of amateur house breaker. Who burgles in pink muslin? Who?”
Fully turned about, though far less than gracefully, she began to inch her way over the edge of the garden wall. The stone snagged her last decent pair of stockings. She felt them rip and wanted to cry. “Why, dear lord? Why must I suffer these indignities? Isn’t poverty enough?”
Carefully lowering herself over the side