Read Online The Importance of Being Ernestine by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online Page A

revamping of his study into the background where it would molder and perhaps never be properly addressed, thus leaving a permanent scar. There was, it must be admitted, another reason for my keeping quiet. Knowing all, Ben would insist on my keeping my nose out of the Krumley affair. And I wasn’t sure I could do that. Not because of how Mrs. Malloy would feel about my defection, but because I felt a certain responsibility to her ladyship. I wished now that I hadn’t said anything to Freddy. But more than anything else I wished Ben would look as though he was thrilled out of his mind to see me.
    â€œSo you’re back,” he smiled at me. A pleasant enough smile. But one that reminded me of the vicar’s benign bafflement at the sight of someone with whom he had been talking not five minutes before.
    I could feel myself sinking waist deep into despondency. Freddy in an unusually tactful attempt to ease into the background went clanking up against one of the suits of armor. Ben didn’t blink let alone glance in the direction of the ensuing cacophony. Neither did he relax that fixed smile. Which set me to babbling about not having expected to be gone so long and my need to check on the children.
    â€œNo need for you to worry. I looked in on them several times, Ellie.”
    I was consoling myself that he hadn’t blocked me out to the point of forgetting my name when Freddy corrected him. “You talked about going up, but remember . . . I went instead?”
    â€œSo you did.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter which one handled the spot checks,” I responded heartily. “So long as they’re snugly tucked in for the night.”
    â€œHow about I make us all a cup of cocoa?” My cousin’s helpfulness was truly heartwarming, but I wished very much that he would trot back down to his cottage and leave me to try put things right with Ben. It was no use. Upon his offer of a night-cap being declined he followed us into the drawing room and planted himself in a chair with every appearance of remaining there until a van showed up to collect him for one of Kathleen Ambleforth’s charities.
    It was, in my opinion, a lovely room with latticed windows at each end, a rose and turquoise carpet in the middle of the parquet floor and a pair of ivory damask sofas and several Queen Anne chairs grouped around the fireplace. Above the mantel hung a portrait of Abigail, who had been mistress of Merlin’s Court almost a century ago. Her restful pose and serenity of expression added to the tranquility of the muted color scheme. Even when the children were fighting over a ball that bounced off the secretary desk onto the top of the glass-fronted bookcase or playing hide and seek under the coffee table or behind the brocade curtains I felt anchored in this room—to its history and my present life. This evening was different. I was cast adrift, buffeted by waves of unease, sinking ever deeper into a whirlpool of uncertainty. Ben was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. Once or twice he glanced to where I sat on the edge of a chair, but he had yet to ask how my evening with Mrs. Malloy had gone. Nor had he said a word about the study.
    Freddy shifted his feet onto a footstool, yawned hugely, scratched his beard and closed his eyes. I waited a few moments for him to start snoring and plunged into a garbled apology of the sort that would have brought a husband in a romance novel to his knees with a rose from the nearest flower vase between his teeth.
    â€œI’m so sorry, Ben! I was completely out of line in bringing in all that new stuff and getting rid of the old. You were quite right in saying I was thinking about how I wanted your study to look. I didn’t see that at the time, but I should have done if I’d taken the time to consider how you felt about that dear old typewriter and the easy chair and the . . .”
    â€œDarling, don’t give it another