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Chapter Nine
“Bridget? Bridget!” Lucy Galloway sang her name, and Bridget blinked and turned from her view of the bare, brown fields out the window. The snow had finally melted, but the gray skies and skeletal trees made The Farm look gloomy and forlorn.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
Lucy nibbled a bite of toast. “You have been quite distracted the past two days. Hasn’t she, Margaret?”
“She has.” Margaret didn’t look away from the book she held in her hands.
“Any particular reason?” Lucy widened her eyes with interest.
“I’ve been busy.” That was an understatement. After Callahan Kelly had told her what the Irish agent said, she had gone straight to Baron. There were few words that struck fear into her heart like Innishfree. Baron had nodded but said nothing more about it. In the meantime, she’d tried not to wonder too much about what it all might mean. It wasn’t her place to wonder. She was still only a secretary.
“It couldn’t have anything to do with that dance you shared with Cal, could it?”
“Cal?” Bridget asked.
“He asked all of us to call him Cal. He claims none of us pronounce Callahan correctly.”
Bridget would have thought the ladies at least would call him Mr. Kelly, but she supposed that spending every day together for the better part of two weeks created intimacy. And she was not jealous of that intimacy. At least, she did not want to be jealous. She didn’t know what she felt when it came to—she couldn’t think of him as Cal—Callahan. She knew how the kiss they’d shared had made her feel, and she had better not dwell on that overly much.
“I hardly remember the dance,” Bridget said. It was true. Everything before that kiss seemed fuzzy in her mind.
“I remember it,” Lucy exclaimed. “I wish I could dance like that. Where did you learn?”
“Oh, here and there.” Bridget wanted to talk about her family even less than she wished to talk about Callahan. She distributed the mail. Lucy and her brother had received a letter from their parents almost daily. She imagined their childhood had not been filled with their father’s drunken rampages at midnight or holding a cold cloth to her mother’s black eye while her grandmother wept and her father slept off his overindulgence.
“Did your mother teach you?”
Bridget should recommend Lucy for interrogation work. She had a dogged determination.
“My grandmother.”
“Was she Irish?”
“Lucy!” Margaret finally interrupted, looking up from her book. “Don’t pepper the poor girl with questions. If she wants to talk about it, she will.”
Lucy frowned then peered at Bridget. “Will you?”
Margaret rolled her eyes, and Bridget was saved from answering when she heard someone call out in the entryway. “Excuse me.” She jumped up and departed the dining room, spotting Mr. Slorach in the entryway.
“Miss Murray.” He nodded. “Professor Tattle sent this note for you.”
Her chest clenched. A note from Tattle could mean only one thing—another lesson in dialect. If Callahan was there, Bridget didn’t know how she’d survive the mortification of facing him after that kiss.
“Thank you.” She took the note and noticed Slorach was looking past her, toward the dining room. “Is there anything else, Mr. Slorach?”
“Oh. No. That’s all.” But his gaze drifted back to the dining room door.
“Have you already broken your fast?”
“I have.” He looked disappointed about it. “Goodbye.”
***
AS NOTHING EXPLODED and no fires began, Bridget was able to spend an hour with Professor Tattle. She felt as though she made good progress with her Irish accent, and he seemed quite complimentary, saying at one point she had an ear for it.
She supposed she did since she’d heard her father and grandmother speak with Irish accents most of her early life.
