Read Online Singer from the Sea by Sheri S. Tepper - Free Book Online

stepped off the stage and engaged her attention at a level that was completely new to her. They had seemed real to her, especially the Colonel, for he had made her want to touch him, even before they had danced, the way she sometimes wanted to hug Barbara, though she never did, for it would be an unpermitted sensuality. The Colonel’s arms had felt strong and safe, and his questions had not, truthfully, been all that strange, though he had seemed too casual about the first one and too oddly intense about the others. But then, he was quite young. Thirtyish. And very good looking.
    Outside, in the garden, Barbara, still in her ball gown, leaned against the stones of the wall while Willum watched her from four inches away, his hands on the wallon either side of her head, his eyes boring purposefully into hers.
    “Glorieta is my friend,” she said weakly. “This wouldn’t be right.”
    “If you’d really cared about that, you wouldn’t have sneaked out to meet me,” said Willum in his slow, slightly arrogant voice.
    “Your father won’t allow you to marry me, Willum. You’re already betrothed.”
    “Father will allow whatever I want. He thinks two brothers marrying two sisters sounds very nice but may lead to unpleasant complications. He was here tonight; he saw you. He’s quite impressed. Besides, Father’s getting elderly. He’s sixty-four. He doesn’t want me to wait ten years to give him a grandson, and Glorieta is set on having her full youth before getting married.”
    “Well,” Barbara said in a teasing voice. “If you’re sure …”
    He pulled her to him and put his lips over her own, holding her tightly. Slowly, her arms went around him. When he released her, she was panting, her eyes were softened and glazed looking, as though she had gone blind in the instant.
    She murmured drunkenly. “You’ll have to break your betrothal to Glorieta first. I won’t have her saying that I broke up her betrothal …”
    “Oh, you didn’t,” he murmured, his lips at her ear. “Believe me, you didn’t.”

TWO
The Library
    “D O YOU THINK I WAS TOO FORWARD ?” G ENEVIEVE ASKED a day or two after the soirée, when her friends had questioned her again and she had given them an abbreviated version of her conversation with the Colonel. “Was I too … unfeminine?” At Mrs. Blessingham’s school, girls were taught to be concerned about such things.
    “You did rather spout,” Carlotta agreed. “And you know what Mrs. Blessingham says about spouting.”
    Mrs. Blessingham went to some pains to teach her girls that when a man of the aristocracy asked a woman “What do you think?” it was almost certainly a rhetorical question. The covenants that governed the nobility, the covenants on which the world was founded, specified with absolute clarity that there should be no conflicts among noblemen and no stridency among noblewomen. Stridency among slaves, inferiors, and women had been tolerated during the human rights struggles of predispersion times, but on Haven, stridency was eschewed, as it made people uncomfortable.
    Therefore, said Mrs. Blessingham, young ladies would behave like young ladies, not like political agitators. It was uncovenantly to question men’s business or one’s own status. If one’s husband or father struck a horse or servant or child, or even oneself, the proper response was to retire, to see that injuries were attended to, and to assure that theoccasion of anger was not repeated. Men were actually happier if they believed that women did not think of anything except babies and baubles and other such harmless, female kind of things. Happy men were tranquil men; tranquil men made a tranquil society. A tranquil society was the goal of women; sacrificing one’s own immediate gratifications for one’s family and society was Godly and laudatory; and doing it graciously, with unreserved resignation, displayed perfect purity of soul.
    “Do you think we really have souls?” Genevieve had