A Winter's Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

rather surprisingly, had agreed. Benedict! To her own considerable alarm Eunice Hartwell realized she was grinding her teeth with a tight and very painful fury. Benedict. Oh yes, he had agreed to that unnecessary wedding and all the implications and expenses it entailed. But nothing could persuade him – at least she could not – to pay Toby a salary in keeping with their requirements, so that she might be spared these dry-mouthed trips to High Meadows whenever she discovered a demand for payment, as she had done this morning, in Toby’s pocket or stuffed into the copper vase on the hall table. School fees, this time and a particularly sharp-spoken letter from a wine merchant with the threat of legal action hovering behind every word. She had never realized wine could cost so much. Nor those ‘extras’ for the boys at Porterhouse, which Toby insisted upon, the riding and fencing and shooting, the gentlemanly pursuits by which he set such store. How was it they had mounted up? Where had the money gone? Benedict would certainly want to know. And wrenching her mind away from him she tried to fix it once again on her younger, sweeter-natured brother Jeremy and his young bride.
    Yes, a pretty girl, a little overawed perhaps, even a little sad, yet, on the whole serene. Not at all like Eunice herself who had been pregnant on her own wedding day, having given herself hastily and absolutely to Toby the moment her father had threatened to withhold his consent. Not that anyone could really have kept her away from him for long. And thinking now of Jeremy’s dark-haired, quiet bride and of what had separated them, she burst out, tears in her voice and nothing but pity and generosity in her heart, ‘We must make her as welcome as we can. Poor soul – how can she bear it?’
    â€˜What?’ enquired Nola.
    â€˜Good Heavens – you know very well,’ said Eunice, astounded. ‘And apart from everything else, how sad – how dreadful – to be a widow at twenty-three.’
    Nola smiled, blinked her long eyes, inhaling tobacco in a languorous, lounging manner neither Eunice nor Miriam recognized as sensual although it made them both uncomfortable. ‘How sad,’ she murmured, ‘or – on the other hand – how merry.’
    â€˜Nola!’ Eunice, who could not even contemplate the loss of Toby without a shudder of cold fear and had pushed him into a reserved occupation at the first hint of military conscription in 1915, was badly shocked. ‘What a terrible thing to say.’
    But Nola, shrewd, unsentimental, merely raised her thin shoulders.
    â€˜Do you think so? What I think, Eunice dear, is that she has been a widow for some time – four years isn’t it? – ministering to wounded soldiers, which may have aided her recovery. And one forgets.’
    â€˜ I do not forget,’ said Miriam.
    â€˜Of course not, mother.’ Eunice was all sympathy and contrition and, as so often, quite wrong for Miriam was not thinking of Jeremy as her daughter supposed but of Aaron, her husband. A thought, in fact, so tender that it took her completely unawares, filling her eyes most unusually with tears.
    What could be the matter? She had married him for money, she had never lost sight of that. She remembered, very clearly, her jubilation at the prospect of being so rich, her lasting delight in its fulfilment. But what always escaped her memory was just when she had grown so fond of him. What precise event had given rise to it? Had it been a gradual, imperceptible conversion of gratitude into affection? And if she herself had only perceived the true extent of it now, so late in their day, had Aaron ever really been aware of it at all? Once again, for just a moment, the eyes of ‘pretty Mimi’filled with tears.
    But she had always known how to shake off her sorrow. Like two of her children, her youngest daughter and her lovely, wasted Jeremy, she had been