Читать книгу Captivity - Deborah Noyes - Страница 12

The Widow Bray might be a general for all her strategy. It’s weeks before she insinuates herself again, with Clara’s guard down.

When her father knocks, he finds her sketching. Her room is open to the elements, honey-lit, all breeze and bird chatter. He enters tentatively, crossing to a seat on the edge of her bed, and Clara feels the point of her fountain pen straining on the page, her fingers pinching hard. Father never intrudes this early in the day. When at last he states his purpose, his voice sags with apology. “You’ll recall the girl we hired on to help with the party?”

Clara regards him blankly.

“Elizabeth, the younger of the two—daughter of Mrs. Fish?”

“I wouldn’t know Mrs. Fish from Mrs. Fowl.” Clara’s disdain for the architect fast closing in on her father’s affections is vast. Best keep mum, she thinks, or risk slandering Mrs. Bray. “I wouldn’t know one girl from another,” she manages. “I didn’t employ them. I never saw them.”

“This Elizabeth,” he continues, “‘Lizzie’ … apparently her relations are experiencing … difficulties in Arcadia. Mrs. Fish’s maiden name is Fox. I thought I’d catch you up, as you may hear of it when young Lizzie returns this week.”

“Difficulties,” Clara says vaguely—though her real concern is when young Lizzie returns—“is a euphemism for scandal, in my experience.” Her hand speeds over the page. By now Clara’s avian subject has long eluded her, like everything else. She looks up, and her father seems so earnest, so hopeful that she can’t but smile back at him. “And how would such gossip find me?”

“I’m an old squirrel,” he admits, lifting her chin, “eager for chatter. But you are curious?”

Her jaw tenses, and Father’s palsied hand settles at his side again. To admit curiosity is to admit defeat. Clara mustn’t relax her guard. She’ll lose, but gracefully, with her pride intact.

“It’s said these girls can communicate with the dead,” he adds wryly.

Clara replies with deathly silence, and he doesn’t press. She can be as vile and childish as she likes these days, and Father, a man made audacious by secrets, intolerable ones, carries on unmoved. She’ll tolerate. She always has.

“This leads me to other business.” He clears his throat. “I’ve decided to keep her on … hire Lizzie Fish on permanently if very part-time … and perhaps her young aunt, too, when the girl arrives. It’s been discussed. Mrs. Fish supports the idea.”

Clara needn’t ask who else supports it. Who discussed it with Mrs. Fish.

“Both girls come highly recommended by the Little family and the Posts. I guess in that few short days I grew reacquainted,” he adds, “with … domestic niceties.”

“Did you.”

He leans in collusion. “You’ll grant we’re an austere pair, you and I.”

How he can afford to transform the household this way with commissions scant and his “sabbatical” extended through the fall is not her concern. It’s not her place to ask. “They won’t fix a decent cup of tea,” she complains. “Americans don’t, you know.”

He smiles back at her. Patiently.

Clara opens a drawer in her writing desk, and the sketchpad vanishes inside. Lacing pale hands in her lap, she sits back resolutely. “As you please.” Her pencil rolls to the floor.

“You disapprove?”

“Is it within my rights to?”

Silence. The widow’s influence, then, is certain, insidious. There is no undoing it. First will come the servants, Mrs. Bray’s personal selection. A housekeeper to boss and batter Clara with lists and expectations courtesy of the incoming mistress. The trunks will follow, chintz and frippery, and of course the wedding dress, well dusted for a second run. At length, Clara will be shipped off to strain plums for a great-aunt she didn’t know she had. “So be it,” she almost croaks, for her throat has screwed up, cutting her breath.

“You might find their young company amusing. Given the chance.”

“And bless you and Mrs. Bray for giving it to me.”

“Clara?”

She looks at him directly, mournfully, and away. Down at her folded hands. “Sir?”

“Trust me now.”

“I will not.” Her voice is a fierce whisper, and when she lifts her eyes again, her father’s shine with the sting.