Читать книгу The American Boy - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 33

‘I AM A bastard,’ Miss Carswall said to me on the Monday evening after Mr Frant’s funeral.

I was so shocked by her immodesty I did not know how to reply. I glanced at the door, fearing it might be open, that her words had been overheard. At the time Miss Carswall and I were alone in the drawing room of her father’s house in Margaret-street; Charlie had run upstairs to fetch a book.

She fixed me with her brown eyes. ‘Let us call things by their proper names. That is what I wished to tell you in Albemarle-street. The day when Charlie interrupted.’

‘It is of no significance,’ I said, feeling I must say something.

She stamped her foot. ‘Had you been a bastard yourself, you would know how foolish that sounds.’

‘I beg your pardon. I did not make my meaning clear. I did not mean that it was of no significance to you, or indeed in the general scheme of things. I – I meant merely that it was of no significance to me.’

‘You knew, sir, admit it. Someone had told you.’

Miss Carswall glared at me for a moment. She had the fair, almost translucent skin that so often goes with auburn hair. She looked captivating in a passion.

‘My papa does not choose to advertise the circumstances of my birth,’ she went on after a moment’s silence. ‘Which in itself has been a matter of some inconvenience to me. It can lead to situations in which people – that is to say – they may approach me under false pretences.’

‘You need not trouble yourself on my account, Miss Carswall,’ I said.

She studied the toes of her pretty little slippers. ‘I believe my mother was the daughter of a respectable farmer. I never knew her – she died before I was a year old.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. When I was six, my father sent me to board at a seminary in Bath. I stayed there until I was fifteen, when I went to live with my cousin, Mrs Frant. Papa and Mr Frant were then on friendly terms, you see. Mr Frant was in America on the bank’s business, so there were just the three of us, Mrs Frant, little Charlie and me. I wish …’

‘What do you wish?’

‘I wish I could have stayed there. But my father’s wife died, so there was no longer an obstacle to my living with him. And he and Mr Frant had quarrelled, so it was not convenient for me to stay in Russell-square. So I came here.’ She spoke jerkily now, as though pumping the words from a deep reservoir of her being. ‘As a sort of companion. A sort of housekeeper. A sort of daughter. Or even – Ah, I scarcely know what. All those things and none of them. When my father brings his friends to the house, they do not know what I am. I do not know what I am.’ She broke off and sat down on the little sofa by the fire. Her bosom rose and fell in her agitation.

‘I am honoured you should take me into your confidence,’ I said softly.

She looked up at me. ‘I am glad the funeral is over. They always make me hippish. No one came, did they, no one but that American gentleman. You would not think it now but in his life Henry Frant had so many people proud to call him friend.’

‘The American gentleman?’

‘Mr Noak. He knew Mr Frant, it appears, and Mr Rush the American Minister introduced him to Papa and me a few weeks ago.’

‘I have met him, I believe. Mr Noak, that is to say.’

She frowned. ‘When?’

‘He was at Russell-square once, just after his arrival from America. I saw him later, too, in Albemarle-street on the night Mr Wavenhoe died.’

‘But why should he come to the funeral? They do not appear to have been intimate friends, and Mr Frant’s crimes have turned his other friends into strangers.’

‘I do not know.’ I looked into her face. ‘Can you not ask him yourself?’

She shook her head. ‘I scarcely know him. We were introduced, but he has no conversation. Anyway, why should he wish to waste his time talking nonsense to a chit of a girl?’

I made no reply, for none was needed, or not in words. The question hung in the air between us and she blushed. Our eyes met and we smiled at each other. Flora was never beautiful but when she smiled it made your heart leap.

‘Poor dear Sophie – Mrs Frant,’ she said suddenly, perhaps eager to steer the conversation elsewhere. ‘She has nothing, you know, nothing left at all. Mr Frant even took the rest of her jewels. She had given him most of them already but on the day he went away he broke into a drawer of her dressing table and took what was left – the ones that were especially dear to her, that she hoped to save from the wreckage.’