A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Read Online Free PDF

late spring and Bronwyn could feel the sun on her skin as it penetrated the light fabric of her gaily-patterned cotton frock. She sat on the cool, close-cropped grass by the water’s edge, hugging her long legs, her firm, square chin resting on her knees. After much relunctance, she had finally adopted the current fashion of going stockingless in the spring and summer, at least when dressed casually. Even though her skirt covered her prolonged legs to a point somewhat lower than mid calf, she still felt self-consciously overexposed, a relic of her puritan upbringing. She thought it vaguely indecent to see her toes brazenly revealed at the end of her sandals, wriggling with an abandon she seldom felt herself. These inhibitions were not a little mitigated by the congenial caresses of warm sun and faint breeze on her skin. She had recently begun to allow her hair to again grow long and it was now just greater than shoulder length; as she looked down into the water, it was as from within a terra cotta grotto. The grotto smelled of sandlewood soap. Even though she was sitting in the open, within plain sight of one or two hundred people, depending upon how many cared to notice and who one chose to count, she felt as though she were hidden within that fragrant grotto, invisible as a sigh, a daydream or a heartbeat. Blackie cruised by like a patrolling ironclad, trailing blue ripples like silken pennants.
    Here I go, feeling lonely again; how can I be so damned maudlin? Can nothing go so right for me that I cannot eventually find some fault with it? There’s not a reason in the world why I shouldn’t be as happy as anyone has any right to be. Maybe more so. It just seems that some part of me is convinced that somewhere in all of this contentment there’s a scab and that if I pick at it enough I’ll discover the original wound underneath.
    She sighed and wondered where Gyven was. She had been seeing him less and less often and, as was her wont, outwardly vilified him for his inattention while inwardly wondering what she had done to drive him away. It was becoming habitual to assume that the blame must fall on her broad shoulders: an old habit to which she had not reverted for a very long time, a remnant of days in the old palace at Blavek where she had grown up, trained as carefully and callously as a kind of human bonsai. There she had been assiduously and meticulously molded to fit her traditional place in the world, the rôle of royal princess, an occupation that required little in the way of intelligence, talent or competence: a perfect woman in the eyes of Musrum. At the same time she was forced to watch her brother Ferenc, the future king, inept both morally and intellectually, treated with the deference and attention she knew in her heart she deserved and that he received solely by virtue of his sex and birthdate. Her natural contrariness and conceit had acted to protect her from completely absorbing and sharing in a generally accepted image of herself that was both degraded and degrading, much in the same way that a duck’s oily feathers shed water from its body, but a dozen and a half years of relentless indoctrination nevertheless had its inevitable effect, wearing down even her adamantine ego as surely as the waves will erode a cliff face, or drop of detergent will sink a duck. Even today, years after she had fled her homeland, many of the old ingrained uncertainties would periodically resurface, like malarial fevers, popping up to disturb the placid surface of her ego like fetid bubbles of methane percolating from the decaying vegetation at the bottom of a pond.
    It would be nice to have had Gyven around when she was feeling like this; he was as solid as a rock, predictable, safe and secure. He made her fears and shakey self-esteem seem trivial and inconsequential; they shattered against his rocky flanks like breaking waves. But as she compared herself to an ocean, it never occured to her that a sea had no need for