Read Online Devoured by D. E. Meredith - Free Book Online

off the chair, he thrust his bony face close to her dewy skin and hissed in her ear, ‘Go easy, Madame. Go easy with your hateful taunts and your foul, unnatural suggestions. I need nothing more from you. You breathe a word of this to the Duke, a word, I say. You have no understanding of anything, do you? We have order here, madam, not anarchy. Another word, I say …’
    ‘Or you’ll what? You think you know who I am? Where I come from? What drives me? I’m not some silly English girl come up from the country. I know more than you think.’ Her face flashed with anger as she grabbed the old man’s wrist and twisted his arm up behind his back. Ashby heard himself yelp, but she kept twisting, her voice no longer quiet. ‘You’ve got what you came for, and I promise, when you read them, you won’t be disappointed.’ She twisted his bony arm a little further. ‘Now, monsieur, I’ve grown tired of your doglike company and would ask you to leave.’
    She let go of his wrist. Ashby felt sick. His arm was searing.
    He stumbled out of her room, and as he did heard her calling after him, ‘And don’t think this is the end, old man. Ten guineas is just the beginning.’
    Rubbing his wrist, he stumbled past the dressmakers, the folds of silk, back through the darkened hall till he found himself breathless, out in the cold, her words banging against his temples. Not the end of this? He tottered on the ice a little, his arm limp and heavy. His writing arm. Damn that whore. Damn her to hell. Flickers fell about him. Rats scuttled in front of his way. Stumbling on through the stinking allies and narrow lanes, he pounded through the snow, mentally shaking off the weakness he had displayed to that, that magaziniere , that mantuamaker. Isn’t that what they called themselves?
     
    Ashby wound his way round passages and corners, lit by the moon, and then up into Bermondsey Street. Far behind him, the great chimer of St Saviour’s struck one. At a pace, crossing Tyers Gate into Leathermarket Street. Home.
    The street where he lived stunk of cabbages. Debris belched out and discarded by the market traders, whose stalls stood like miniature shipwrecks, half erected, half taken down. Night creatures picked over the frosted scrapings of carrots, skins of onions. Ashby shuddered. The wind was up and sending great flurries of icy flakes into his eyes, blinding him to this poverty, this human flotsam, and still he pressed on. At the end of Leathermarket Street, the clerk opened a door and climbed up the stairs.
    No Mrs Ashby or any children, as such. But the clerk often thought there were. And so he said his hellos to his wife and the little ones, and patted them on the head saying, ‘Oh yes. I’ve had a regular day of it, Mrs A. How’s the baby? He don’t look too well. Wrap him up, woman. It’s perishing outside. And little Johnny? Reading already? Just like his father, eh? A right little scholar. Well, my sweet, I’m somewhat exhausted so I must be to bed. I’ve an early start in the morning.’
    And so Ashby, alone in his bachelor’s lodgings, kissed good night to his armchair and patted his table on the head. He hugged the old pillow and after chatting away to his rickety wardrobe, peeled off his snow-clad coat. Lighting the grate, he stared at the flames.
    The room was bare of ornament save one picture and a fine rosewood cabinet. The cabinet had been his mother’s and had come, like the picture on the wall, from a fine house, far away and long ago. A gift from her employees on starting a new situation in London. It was, he believed, what an auction house would call a secretaire. In the top drawer the clerk kept some odd cutlery, a sharpened knife for fruit peeling, a nut cracker. In the other drawers, all manner of things.
    Opening the top, he took out the knife and cut open an orange with the precision of a surgeon. The flesh tasted sweet and refreshing. He nibbled on a crust of dry bread and, supper finished, got into