A Man of Genius Read Online Free PDF Page A

who pursed her lips as her eyes rested on Caroline’s extraordinary garb, then slid away when they caught Ann’s sullen gaze. Caroline was the daughter of a rector in Hereford but she made nothing of this to the vicar’s supercilious lady.
    Mostly she was content even on Sundays to loll in her chair, sketch flowers and objects brought to her by Martha, and leaf through the Lady’s Magazine .This was intended for her alone. So at dead of night, Ann padded downstairs to read it by a very flickering candle. She looked only at the stories, ignoring the romances but ingesting the monthly monitory tales.
    Through these she learned that to suffer with patience, to rise superior to misfortune and to repay unmerited ill-treatment with benevolence were virtues which provided happiness and recalled the licentious to paths of duty.
    She tried ‘benevolence’ on Caroline for several days. Caroline thought it ‘insolent’.
    Ann believed she failed because ‘licentiousness’ was not her mother’s prevailing fault.
    The impotence of such edifying stories confirmed her preference for Mrs Radcliffe’s monks and brigands. These she found in books from the circulating library which Susan Bonnet, another unpopular but less saucy girl at school, borrowed from her mother and lent to Ann. There was a world to live in, since Putney was so disappointing.
    Once Caroline and Mrs Graves took her to visit Mrs Wright’s waxworks in London. A woman with unlined face stood in antique dress. Ann thought her alive and they laughed. She never went toVauxhall but it was more real in memory than Mrs Wright’s waxworks.
    Of course it was, for Caroline had told her of it: over and over.
    We had supper at nine in a superb box, such an elegant collation, and so expensive. All so fine, even the thin ham, the lights, a thousand glass lamps, and we bathed in a glow so that it became fairyland. I was in my Indian cotton with ruched lace, my crimson-and-yellow shawl and . . .
    Ann had tasted the thin ham. It lingered on her tongue.
    Despite all these memories, Gilbert was, except for his words, largely absent for his daughter. She’d glimpsed him in a faded picture set in a locket. Sometimes this hung round Caroline’s neck, but usually it lay in a silver box patterned with two stags, their noses touching and their antlers fanning out to form silver trees. The box was kept on the spindle-legged table beside a bottle of eau de cologne and a single flower in a china vase.
    The child had been told never to put her fingers on the box for they would tarnish the silver.
    Ann asked to look at the picture in the locket to see if she resembled Gilbert. At this Caroline, usually so sedentary, rose up and stepped towards her, almost as angry as when she’d stood before her open-mouthed. ‘How dare you?’
    But Ann was now fourteen, not ten, old enough and sufficiently well read in cautionary and gothic tales to know that Caroline was not like other Mamas. She stood her ground.
    â€˜I would look like him,’ she said with tears in her voice but not quite in her eyes. ‘Why should not a child look like her father? I must have his hair or teeth or complexion . . .’
    Caroline sat down again and put her head in her hands. ‘You, you are not worthy to speak of him in this way. He was like no one else. How could you resemble him?’
    Martha had once hugged her and said in a voice that came from deep within her bolster of a bosom, ‘Don’t judge your Mama too harshly, Miss Ann. It is a terrible thing to lose a husband and so beloved. The poor mistress cannot even bear to have a portrait of him about the house. She has a broken heart.’
    â€˜But didn’t I lose a father?’
    â€˜You didn’t know the loss, Miss Ann. It’s different.’
    â€˜She hates me.’
    Martha sighed so that her breath rippled from her great bosom and rolled down the folds of her belly.