Read Online Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online Page B

walked and who never stopped talking about how unfortunate she was.
    ‘Why did the Lord pick on me , of all people? What did I ever do to deserve such wretchedness?’
    It was a chilly morning but the sky was clear, apart from a long thin streak of cirrus cloud, and already the plane trees were budding green.
    ‘You fell asleep in the sermon,’ said Jeremy.
    ‘I did not,’ Beatrice retorted. ‘I simply closed my eyes so that I could give all of my attention to what the Reverend Bute was saying instead of watching you pulling all those foolish faces at me.’
    ‘What was it about, then, the sermon?’
    Beatrice tilted up her nose and didn’t reply.
    ‘Go on, then,’ Jeremy persisted, ‘if you were concentrating your mind so hard, what was it about?’
    ‘It was about shepherds.’
    ‘No, it wasn’t. It was about lepers.’
    ‘Well, there’s an echo in that church. Lepers, shepherds. Shepherds, lepers. They both sound nearly the same.’
    ‘They don’t at all. And shepherds’ fingers don’t fall off. Well – perhaps in the winter, if they get frostbite.’
    They rounded the corner into Bell Street, and as they did so they found that a party of twenty or thirty people was obstructing the pavement – men, women and children. They had all just come out of a large house overlooking the main market square and they were talking and laughing and shaking hands. Beatrice thought she had never seen people look so cheerful on a Sunday morning. Perhaps it was because they hadn’t been to St Philip’s and had to sit through the Reverend Bute’s interminable sermon about lepers.
    ‘ He put his hand inside his cloak, and lo! when he pulled it out, it was leprous like snow. And God said, “Put your hand back inside your cloak,” and lo! when he pulled it out a second time, it was restored like the rest of his flesh .’
    Beatrice and Jeremy had to walk around these people, into the road, and Beatrice could hear cousin Sarah tutting loudly behind her and saying, ‘Really! They have no consideration for the church, and no consideration for others, either.’
    One of the men heard her, because he stepped aside to let cousin Sarah pass and said, ‘My deepest apologies, Mistress Minchin.’
    Beatrice turned around, and when she did so she became aware of a tall young boy standing next to the man who had just apologized. He was staring at her, this boy, as if he knew who she was and exactly what she was doing here. Not only that, he looked as if he was upset because she hadn’t chosen to acknowledge him. He was dark-haired and very thin, and dressed entirely in black except for the tight white knotted handkerchief around his neck. Beatrice thought he was really quite handsome, but very gangly, as if his arms and legs had suddenly grown longer overnight but his body hadn’t yet caught up with them. It was the expression in his eyes, though, that really caught her attention. Saintly, almost. She could almost believe that he understood everything she was feeling: how lonely she was, how much she was grieving for her mama and papa, and yet how hard she was trying to make the best of her new life here in Birmingham with cousin Sarah.
    ‘Who was that?’ she asked cousin Sarah, looking back over her shoulder.
    ‘Geoffrey Scarlet,’ she snapped. ‘He owns the bookshop in the High Street and lives over the Swan Tavern. He publishes a weekly newspaper, the Birmingham Journal . Tittle-tattle, most of it.’
    ‘I meant that boy who was with him.’
    ‘Don’t turn round, girl. We don’t want them to think that we have the slightest interest in them – which, of course, we don’t. They’re Nonconformists. That means they don’t agree with the traditions of the church, or respect its authority. There’s far too many of them in Birmingham. It’s a hotbed . We have more Quakers than you can shake a stick at, and Radical Dissenters, too. I can’t think what the world is coming to.’
    Beatrice looked over her shoulder