Read Online Distant Choices by Brenda Jagger - Free Book Online

and torn and coming down. Where had she been?
    â€˜Up a tree, Aunt Maud.’
    â€˜Are you being insolent, child?’
    â€˜I expect so.’
    She usually was. Indiscreet too, unpredictable, full of nervous fits and starts. So like her mother, thought Letty who did not really wish to be unkind, and Maud to whom unkindness came fairly naturally.
    â€˜Can’t stop a moment, Aunt Letty. I’m just off to Arabia on a camel.’
    This , spoken at the top of her voice, in Letty’s drawing-room one day at tea-time, with half the parish gossips looking on, elderly spinster ladies, most of them, with nothing else to do but remember how restless and careless Eva Kessler had been, how prone to sit like an awkward schoolboy, twisting her thick, dark hair in an irritable hand, and then go suddenly rushing off, like Kate, with no proper explanation.
    By camel to Arabia! Letty, shuddering slightly, could well imagine Eva Kessler saying something like that. Could imagine her doing it, if Matthew had not managed, through the years, to restrain her to a point where – at least – there had been no more embarrassing remarks and hectic comings and goings. Just the disconcerting, listening silence into which she increasingly fell, her eyes half-closed, her mouth mutinous, or sarcastic.
    Like Kate. What a terrible, tormenting, tragically essential wife she would be to Quentin.
    â€˜Do sit up, Kate dear,’ Letty reprimanded her one day in the South parlour at High Grange. ‘A lady never leans her back against the back of her chair.’
    â€˜Why not, Aunt Letty?’
    â€˜Oh –’ Letty had never been a match for her. ‘It is just that no lady ever does. It is how one tells a lady apart from someone who is – well – not so …’
    â€˜Oh. I see.’ Kate, in this mood, always sounded agreeable. ‘Thank you, Aunt Letty. I had not realized it was so easy. Being a lady, I mean.’
    â€˜Dearest …?’
    â€˜Yes. What a relief. Knowing all one has to do is not lean on chairs …’
    â€˜Kate.’ They had all known, of course, that Maud would intervene. ‘You are insolent again. Go to your room and stay there.’
    â€˜Oh …’ Kate’s dark, fine-boned head tilted to one side, making a decision where none – surely? – ought to be needed. Since it was a standard punishment, after all, to which young persons in general, and Kate Stangway very much in particular, were quite accustomed.
    â€˜I don’t think I will,’ she said.
    â€˜Are you defying me, child?’ No one – except Oriel perhaps – quite believed it. But once again the dark head tilted to one side, slowly considering.
    â€˜Do you know, Aunt Maud, I believe I am. Perhaps I won’t go to my room. And what I wonder – yes, really I do – is how you can make me?’
    She was not the only one who wondered, Letty appearing shocked and definitely tearful, Evangeline very much amused, Oriel appearing to notice nothing amiss as Maud rose to her feet, her back taut and dangerous as a hot poker, knowing full well – as they all knew – that she could not let this pass.
    â€˜What can I do? I can inform your father, for one thing. In fact I feel I must do so …’
    â€˜Oh Aunt Maud.’ Kate sounded almost disappointed, as if she had expected Maud to do better than that. ‘Tell my father? And what will he do? Tell you to deal with me yourself – as he always has – as you always have …’
    â€˜Yes. And it has never been a pleasure, Kate.’
    â€˜No, Aunt Maud. It hasn’t. I agree with that.’
    No one in the tense, astounded parlour had ever heard a young lady speak with such defiance, such open contempt, to an adult. Letty, indeed, had not thought such a thing to be possible, while Evangeline simply remarked, with some satisfaction, that no one had ever spoken like that to her .
    Nor to