Read Online Tea Cups & Tiger Claws by Timothy Patrick - Free Book Online Page B

ever included any sort of friendliness between the Newfields and her sisters, especially with the young prince Billy, most especially of the romantic variety.
    Not that she entertained romantic fantasies about Billy Newfield herself, because she didn’t. At this point in her life, Dorthea’s romantic fantasies revolved around money and power and revenge. She didn’t dream about sweet nothings whispered into her ear, she dreamed about whispering them herself, into the ears of her enemies, as their heads lay on chopping blocks. Billy, as with all the Newfields, occupied her fantasies as no more than a means to that end.
    She stepped out into the middle of the path and started marching. There would be no turning back until the identity of this particular Billy had been discovered.
    As the girl’s voice grew loud and giggly and talked about dance cards and ugly sideburns, Dorthea noticed that the scenery at the end of the path had begun to change: the streaky browns, endless greens, and pale yellows of nature turned into the canned blues, billboard greens, and fantasy yellows of the human hand. Fuzzy borders became straight and exact. Accidental patterns turned into geometric shapes that Dorthea’s human eye easily recognized from thirty yards out as three large playhouses in a clearing, each brightly painted and ornate, just like Toomington Hall. Even the trees and bushes around the playhouses looked unnatural, having changed back to the rigid, perfectly shaped specimens Dorthea had seen up at the house. Still mindful of the voices, but not seeing anybody by the playhouses, she continued down to the opening of the clearing where she once again stepped behind a tree and studied the surroundings.
    Almost immediately she saw the boy and girl. In another clearing down past the playhouses, on the other side of a small footbridge that spanned the little stream, they sat on a bench under a willow tree. Their backs faced Dorthea but the girl looked at the boy as she talked and Dorthea saw the side of her face. He had his arm behind her, resting on the back of the bench. Despite the distance, and the fact that she wore a modern hat with a big brim which drooped stylishly down and hid part of her face, Dorthea recognized her sister, though which one she couldn’t say. She talked fast and bobbed her head as the words dropped from her mouth. Of her dress, partially hidden by the bench, Dorthea only saw that it matched the rose color of the hat and that it was sleeveless. But it didn’t matter if she saw it clearly or not. It was perfect. It had to be because it belonged to her perfect sister who sat under the perfect weeping willow listening to the gurgle of the perfect stream. But what about the boy, who wore a flat cap and a biscuit colored tweed coat, was he perfect too? Was he more than perfect?
    Dorthea knew Billy Newfield from pictures in the newspapers and glimpses around town. The boy on the bench looked like him but she needed to get closer to make sure. Waiting for the right moment, when her sister looked forward, she scrambled down to the front of the playhouses.
    From their narrow width, they looked normal enough—playhouses for rich kids—but from their height they looked like more than that; the front doors looked almost as tall as the real thing, and they each had second story windows. Definitely big enough to hide her from view.
    With her back to the first house, she crept to her left until coming to the end. In between the end of this house and the beginning of the next, she saw smallish shrubs on both sides of a walkway. She stood and listened to their voices shoot through this gap like voices from a gramophone. The girl did most of the talking, at a mile a minute.
    “I have ways of finding out, you know I do, and all I’m saying is that if your name is still on her dance card tonight at seven o’clock, Herbert is going on mine…three times.” She giggled like a chipmunk.
    “ Three for one, that’s not a