The House at Sandalwood by Virginia Coffman

couldn’t imagine what on earth he was thinking, or if he really saw me. I didn’t move a muscle. He said finally, “Have you gotten settled yet?”
    I said I had. “And I really should be downstairs getting acquainted with the staff. I’m afraid I was so comfortable here, I ...”
    “Don’t be so damned humble!” He ordered me so sharply and so unexpectedly, I was roused to a fury that surprised even me.
    “I didn’t know it was in my contract that I should not behumble! What else is there in my unwritten contract that I am forbidden to do? Like losing my temper?”
    He crossed his arms, looked far less formidable and then laughed. “A red-headed Scot! I know them well. May I sit down?”
    “I beg your pardon. Did you want to speak with me about the work here?”
    He pulled up the small chair from the French dresser and straddled the delicate back of the chair, facing me as I returned to my own comfortable armchair.
    “Miss Cameron ... that is to say—Judith.”
    “Yes?”
    “You knew my wife quite well as a child. Probably much better than her parents knew her.”
    “Her father, my older brother, died in a prison camp outside Pyongyang in North Korea.”
    He nodded. “You must have been very young then.”
    Twenty-one years ago. And yet, as a twelve-year-old bobby-soxer then, I took my promise to my brother very seriously. My father had died on Guadalcanal when I was three, and after my brother died almost ten years later, mother seemed to lose her frail grasp on life. She couldn’t believe that life could ever be good again, and when I was eighteen, she was gone, dead in less than ten days after a simple cold turned into pneumonia. But I had learned to manage the house, the cleaning, the cooking, even the hiring of mother’s nurses and the occasional cooks who came and went when we could afford them. Nearly half the time during those years, Wayne’s widow, a stunning blonde, had left Deirdre with mother and me. This was especially true after Deirdre’s bad attack of rheumatic fever when she was five, which left her with a damaged heart that had never quite grown strong again. After mother’s death came the terrible times when Deirdre’s own mother, now an alcoholic with little control over her actions, made life miserable and terrifying for Deirdre and, eventually, for me.
    “I was young.” I smiled. “Once.”
    He waved aside my little joke, which was only half a joke. “Yes, yes, Aunt Judy .” He emphasized the title. “I hope we may accomplish one thing, at least, before you are done with Ili-Ahi. We must persuade you that you are not some ancient crone come to slave away for your keep.” And then came that tiresome question: “Why have you never married?”
    “I have been engaged.”
    He looked far more interested than the question warranted. I felt that he would sit there looking at me until I gave more details, though I couldn’t see what this had to do with my qualifications as a housekeeper. I saw him glance at my hand. I raised it, turned it over. “It was a long time ago.”
    “You stopped loving him?”
    “I went on trial for murder.”
    He didn’t even blink. “In that case, you didn’t lose much. He must have been singularly stupid.”
    “As a matter of fact,” I began hotly, “for all you know, I may have had my heart broken over him.” Something about his expression, his clear gaze, made me backtrack. “But of course, I didn’t. Hearts are very flexible. Mine mended and, as I say, it was a long time ago.”
    “I’m not sorry.” He held out his hand, took mine briefly. “Deirdre is delighted to have her problems loaded onto your shoulders. They look pretty slim to me. Can you handle the load?”
    “Deirdre will do very well, Mr. Giles. Just give her a little time.”
    He worried me by making no reply to this. He got up, set the chair back, and started to leave. I was relieved. I had felt uncomfortably conscious of him ever since he came into the room. In the