Read Online Distant Choices by Brenda Jagger - Free Book Online Page A

Maud either, until now, in this too public place, with Letty absolutely relying on her to deal with it, Evangeline hoping smugly that she could not, the parlourmaid, who had just come in with the tea-tray, standing there all agog. And that dark, Kessler stare asking her, all over again, the same question.
    â€˜I don’t think I will go to my room. And if that’s what I decide, how can you compel me?’
    And for good measure Kate got to her feet, reminding Maud that although not tall and with no weight anywhere about her, she was, nevertheless, too strong now at just eighteen, too agile, too fierce , perhaps, to be picked up – screaming, she well remembered – and carried upstairs to be locked away, without a candle, behind her bedroom door. Or to be led there, blanched by temper and horror – since she was afraid of the dark – with Maud’s hard fingers pinching her ear.
    She put her hand to her ear now, recalling the tugging pain: and smiled.
    â€˜I rather think – Aunt Maud – that I shall go where I please.’
    Because not even Maud Stangway, in all her wrath, could really order the footmen to take, one by the shoulders, one by the ankles, their master’s only legitimate child and bear her – kicking, no doubt, and caterwauling – away. They all knew that.
    â€˜I pity you, child,’ Maud hissed at her, goaded by the sheer weight of her mortification, to cruelty.
    â€˜No – no – Aunt Maud. I don’t think so.’
    But Maud, seasoned campaigner, came back at her now like a whiplash. ‘ Anyone would pity you, Kate. In fact everybody does so. Burdened as you are by such an inheritance …’
    And as Letty caught her breath in alarm – for Quentin’s sake – at this reference to Eva Kessler’s madness, and Evangeline fanned herself with a leisurely hand, Kate shrugged her thin shoulders and did one more thing not expected of a young lady. She grinned.
    â€˜Ah yes – my inheritance – you mean this house, of course, don’t you, Aunt Maud? And the pit. And all my mother’s money.’
    Steadily rather than defiantly she gathered up her torn skirts and left the room, not oversetting anything but leaving behind her the impression that she had.
    â€˜You have done your best with her, Maud dear,’ said Letty. ‘You have nothing with which to reproach yourself.’
    â€˜My word.’ said Evangeline archly. ‘How very fortunate this makes me feel, since my daughter has never caused me one moment of anxiety.’ And crossing the room in high glee she sat down with a sudden shriek of alarm on the pin-cushion, sharp side up, left by Kate in what everyone knew to be Evangeline’s favourite chair.
    Oriel retrieved the pin-cushion and, a while later, came upon Kate in the empty November garden, sitting like a cat in a pool of late sunshine, her back against a mossy wall, her knees tucked up to her chin. A schoolroom pose of dreaming into a guarded nursery fire had it not been for the sharp little breeze stirring through dry leaves, the low grey aspect of the winter sky.
    â€˜Kate …?’
    â€˜So it is.’
    Had she been crying? But Oriel knew better than to ask any such thing.
    â€˜Are you not well?’
    â€˜Oh – a headache, I think. Unless the evil of my disposition is slowly poisoning me. Or Aunt Maud.’
    Nothing, of course, could have induced Miss Oriel Blake, in her pale blue woollen dress, to sit on the ground. Nor did she particularly like the look of the low wall with its covering of slippery moss. Yet just the same, not liking to tower above Kate who was smaller and thinner and far more vulnerable than her calm and careful self, she gathered her own skirts together gingerly and sat, in silence for a while, until Kate, very abruptly, said, ‘Did I win a victory just now, Oriel? Or make a fool of myself?’
    â€˜You may have done yourself