Read Online The Fraud by Barbara Ewing - Free Book Online Page B

We shall be rich beyond our wildest Dreams!’ And he laughed aloud, at life, at his own cleverness, at the world. ‘Oh Grace, London is a place where, if you seize Life by the throat, there is Fame to be acquired and there are Fortunes to be made and I have already started to make mine. And now you are free to assist me, do you not realise?’ And then at last Philip Marshall looked at his little sister very carefully, just for a moment, gave her his whole attention for the very first time: the thin face and body, the figure of a child not yet a woman, the shabby clothes. He had expected perhaps more immediate gratitude for his actions.
    And Grace Marshall in that same exact moment looked at her brother carefully; many, many thoughts raced through her head as she teetered on the brink of her new life. Her beloved brother was alive; she could learn so much from him, he could teach her, as he taught her to read long ago. She clutched her bag that held her precious drawings as she stared at him in his modern wig and his wonderful waistcoat. She would talk of his ludicrous ideas about housekeepers and hostesses later - anyone could do that, but not just anyone could paint. There would be so much that she could learn: she was to join the world of the artist after all, her greatest, greatest dream. She saw herself and Mr Hogarth in the church, her talk of studios and Shining - and here was Philip, shining indeed. Her thoughts twirled and danced and then, at last, exploded.
    ‘Oh Philip!’ she cried, ‘I am so, so glad to see you! I missed you so much, I was so lonely for so long, I thought you had forgotten to come back for me . . .’ And she stopped, overcome for a moment, and he felt quite moved himself. And then she said again, oddly painful, ‘I missed you very much.’ In the first gesture of real intimacy she had made to any person since he had sailed away all those years ago, she put her hand to his face at last, felt the warmth. And at that moment, her hand at her brother’s face, she felt an old, lost feeling: joy and laughter bubbling up somewhere inside her as it used to so easily, long ago.
    ‘There is just one more matter,’ said Philip, but he laid his hand tenderly upon her own, in a gesture of affection also.
    ‘What more can there be than this?’
    ‘Obviously you must become an Italian.’
    She pulled her hand away: he saw her amazed face. ‘But Philip, I cannot, I have not travelled like you, I know nothing of Italians or Italy!’
    ‘But you have dark eyes like me, bella! You must learn - you cannot be my sister in public until you have grasped the essentials of Italian. You, of course, can be my shy Italian sister if you please—’
    ‘I am not shy!’
    ‘If you please, I said. But you must be Italian. And you must dress with -’ he paused, not wanting to be unkind, ‘- more Style than you have at present.’ (She put her scuffed shoes underneath her shabby skirt in embarrassment.) ‘I have told all my Acquaintances that my very beautiful sister - you are a little thin but I am sure that will change - my very beautiful sister is arriving from Florence.’ And again in the rattling coach he clapped his hands like a magician presenting magic: ‘ The Signorina Francesca di Vecellio !’
    ‘ Francesca ?’ She said the name as if she was spitting and then she did laugh at last, at the ludicrousness of it all, at the excitement, and she laughed the way he remembered (startling him with a memory of a merry, urgent, spinning girl who had painted green daisies and been filled with mirth by the outrage of seagulls); her face suddenly became suffused with uncontrollable laughter and how should he know, so far away, how long it had been since she had laughed that way? ‘This is all absolutely unbelievable !’ she said, and her eyes were shining.
    ‘How much can you earn as a milliner?’
    Still laughing: ‘I was receiving five guineas for a year, and my board.’ She did not say she had spent