Revived Spirits by Julia Watts

shrugged.
    The queue-breaker opened the door and leaned down to enter his ill-gotten ride. A blue-veined hand clenched his arm and, catching him off-guard, spun him around, where he faced two very angry old ladies.
    “You should be ashamed of yourself! Taking advantage of a nice family that way. And with a baby! What’s the world coming to?” They pressed in fearlessly, like mongooses standing down a cobra. They had to be in their eighties, and the taller one’s curly white head was barely higher than Liv’s shoulder.
    The cab poacher began to stutter an excuse, but was immediately shouted down by the shorter woman, who brandished her cane perilously close to his nose ring. “Didn’t your mum teach you any manners? I wager it’d break her heart right in two if she could see you now.”
    The young man had clearly lost both battle and dignity, and he turned to leave the way he’d come. But the octogenarian avengers weren’t through. “Oh, no, you don’t! We won’t have any of that, sneaking back to break the queue again after we’re gone. All the way around to the end for you. That’s right, step lively, that’s better.”
    Their victory complete, they stepped back to wait their turn.
    The queue burst into applause. The cab driver removed his cap and bowed to the women. The Wescott party stood frozen, watching, a little afraid to move.
    The old lady with the cane pounded it impatiently on the sidewalk, and her friend shouted at Mr. Wescott, “Well, go on— don’t just stand about. Get in! You’re holding up the queue!”
    “Nothing like a bit of drama to start your morning— welcome to London!” The driver secured the luggage, nodded at the address given to him, and merged the cab into the stream of traffic. “Beautiful day to be in London, right? But then that’s always true for me. No sir, nowhere else I’d rather be—right here in the middle of things, driving my cab.” Liv found his accent delightful. It sounded down-to-earth, friendly. He continued, “And what brings you folks to London—business or pleasure?”
    Mr. Wescott inclined his head toward his family and Cal. “Pleasure for them—I’m afraid I’ll be working most of the time.” Liv noted that her father didn’t reveal what kind of business. He was proud of his work, but he didn’t like lawyer jokes, which strangers often felt astonishingly free to share when they learned he was an attorney.
    The cabbie braked for a red light. “Well now, if you love your job half as much as I love mine, it won’t be a burden to do it.” The light changed to green, and he tapped his horn to encourage a car dawdling at the intersection.
    “And if you hate it, at least you’ll be doing it in the greatest city in the world.” He left it at that, just short of asking what Mr. Wescott did for a living. The silence grew. Anthony filled in the gap. “Dad’s a lawyer. He’ll be working with a barrister here this summer.” Mr. Wescott’s smile never faltered, but Liv saw the muscles in the back of his neck tighten.
    The cabbie glanced over his shoulder at Mr.Wescott. “Guess you’ve heard the old proverb about two farmers who each claimed to own the same cow, right? One pulled at the head, the other pulled at the tail, and the cow got milked by a solicitor.” He threw back his head and laughed with his whole upper body, a guffaw that shook the front seat.
    Noticing that no one was laughing, he peered in the rearview mirror and caught Mrs.Wescott’s wide-eyed stare, then pulled his cap lower on his face. “That’s the trouble with solicitor jokes,” he grumbled. “Solicitors don’t think they’re funny, and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.”
    This time, it was Mr. Wescott’s turn to belly-laugh. The ice broken, he and the cabbie began to chat about the weather, the traffic and who was likely to win the World Cup. Mrs. Wescott’s smile returned, and she pointed out sights to Anna and her bunny as they passed them. The driver gave