Read Entertaining Angels: A Christmas Novella Page 4

  He’d fainted, that was all. They picked him up and Het worked her wonders and he perked up, made no sense at all at them for a good quarter-hour by the clock, and then fell asleep sitting up.

  The girls, who didn’t remember him at all, clustered round, staring. The lad looked like he’d just been cut down off a gibbet, or summat to frighten birds with. “Is he catching?” - and that was pretty much all Hollie needed to know.

  Het shook her head, only half attending. “No. No, I don’t think so, dear. Though I warn you, it is Thankful, and I would have had him stay regardless.” She gave him a bright, severe glance over the glasses she wore for sewing, now. “I am guessing, by the look of him, that he has fallen on hard times. We would help him, of course? Do we lack for labour on the farm, that he might be - we might offer him some employment? He could lodge with Mattie, perhaps, or in the village?”

  “Not sure you’d get much work out of him, lass,” Hollie said dryly, touching the tip of his finger to Russell’s bony shoulder gently. “There’s nowt to him, poor whelp. He should have come sooner.”

  “I would have seen him decently fed, at any rate, the poor lamb. What can have happened to him, to be so reduced in the world? He was always so particular!”

  Hollie could guess. Rather not say it, though, before the little wenches - that Russell could not bear to be crossed, that he’d always took it bad, without fail. He’d been on his best behaviour for Het. Hadn’t took to drinking and brawling and trying to get himself killed, while he was here that time. But no, Hollie could see that, all too easy, that he might not have took to Army discipline again. Might have drifted, homeless and purposeless but always downwards, losing his commission, his reputation, his dignity -

  Aye, that’d fit. Ten years was a long time.

  “Come on, then, Hapless,” he said, and the lad’s eyelids fluttered at the sound of his old Army nickname, but he did not wake. “Let’s get you to bed. That’s an order, lad.”