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She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

Chapter 2

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The children of St. Anne's had a name for the person who left the parcels: they called her the Blue Star. Soon the whole town called her that too. People said it in the bakery and at church. Who is she? Is she rich? Is she a lady? Nobody ever guessed the girl in the hat shop.Only one person knew: a boy named Sam. Sam was eight years old, small with big ears and bigger eyes. One cold Friday the winter before, he had sat up all night by the back door because he had to know. And when Lucy came up the step in the dark, there he was.She knelt down in the snow in front of him. "Can you keep a secret, Sam?"He nodded hard."Then this is ours. No one else's. Promise?""I promise," said Sam, and he held his new mittens against his chest as if they were made of gold.He had kept that promise for a whole year. And Lucy might have gone on like that forever: a quiet girl with sore fingers and a happy secret.But that winter, a carriage came down the high street, and in it was a man who had been looking for the Blue Star for twenty-five years.His name was Henry Blake, and he was the new Earl of Wexley. The great house of Wexley stood on the hill above Millbrook. It had been empty for a year since the old Earl died. Now the town was full of talk about the new one. He was thirty-three, people said. He was not married. He was very rich, and he was strange. He did not go to parties. He did not hunt. No one knew where he had been as a boy; some said abroad, some said at sea. Nobody knew for sure.Every mother in Millbrook with a daughter began to plan. And no mother planned harder than Mrs. Pratt.Mrs. Pratt was the richest widow in town. She had a big house, a loud voice, and one daughter, Cordelia, who was nineteen and very pretty and very bored. Mrs. Pratt ran every good cause in Millbrook: the church flowers, the poor box, the Christmas fair. She liked good causes very much, as long as her name was printed at the top.On a cold Monday morning, Mrs. Pratt came into Mr. Pike's hat shop with Cordelia on her arm."A new hat," she said. "The best you have. The Earl is coming to church on Sunday, and my Cordelia must be seen."Lucy brought out hat after hat. Cordelia tried them all on and liked none of them. Mrs. Pratt talked the whole time and never once said thank you.
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She Knitted for the Orphans in Secret for Five Winters — Then an Earl Showed the Whole Town

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