Eden Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

brighter.
    ‘Mmm,’ said Henrietta, through her food. Unlike her sister-in-law, she ate with gusto – always had. She was tall and strong and hungry, and made no apology for her appetite. Also, since her mother’s marriage to the Duke of Plymouth there had been no one at home to upbraid her about it. ‘You’re being fearfully slow, Thea. This year the Russian emperor is to sail to the Isle of Wight on the imperial yacht to visit the king. Absolutely everyone will be there.’ She paused and laughed, including both Eugene and Thea in the joke. ‘There’s not an aristocrat in England, nor a royal in Europe, who isn’t all of a sudden a passionate sailor.’
    ‘Gee,’ Eugene said. ‘Don’t throw eggs at the tsar, Henrietta.’ She humoured him with a small smile.
    Thea replaced her knife and fork on her plate to indicate that she had finished. Her face had the glow that came and went with her moods; Eugene regarded her through his painter’s eyes and thought how lovely she could look, and how unlovely: how to capture that in oils?
    ‘Toby didn’t tell me all that,’ she said. ‘It sounds fun.’
    ‘Oh good, you’ve cheered up,’ Henrietta said.
    ‘Well, Toby didn’t tell me the best part.’
    ‘You didn’t exactly encourage him, did you?’ Eugene said. ‘You told him to buy another car instead. You were very disagreeable.’
    ‘Well. He started it.’
    She sounded like a five-year-old, thought Henrietta. She looked at Eugene, who was licking his knife. He winked at her and she almost wished her mother were with them; she would have so detested this evening. Thea raised an arm and snapped her fingers at a footman.
    ‘More wine, Thomas,’ she said, and then: ‘So, Henry, what do we wear?’
    ‘The art at Cowes,’ Henrietta said, ‘is to dress very simply, at huge expense.’
    ‘Like Marie Antoinette’s shepherdess period, but nautical?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    Thea sighed contentedly. How pleasant to have a scheme. She wished now that Tobias were still here, so that she could be pleased with him. Still, at least she had Eugene at her beck and call, and he was much better than nothing at all.

Chapter 3
    T here was a garden for the residents of Bedford Square and, though it was small, it was green and peaceful, at least until the city roused itself and began to bustle and roar. Today had dawned like a blessing: soft sun, gauzy mist and the trees blurry at their edges in the half light. Anna Sykes had woken just before dawn and left the sleeping house to walk under the canopy of fresh spring leaves and look back at her lone footsteps in the dew. Once, not so long ago, she’d lived in a house on the edge of Netherwood Common and had grown accustomed to stepping out of the door and onto grass; here, in the heart of the city, she could almost do that still.
    She loved this London home and the square in which it sat. She could think and paint steadily here, rarely lacking ideas or inspiration, and the sober flat-fronted house they rented seemed possessed of a steady creative influence, unusual and precious. In Ardington, at their constituency home, people knocked on the door and made demands, and were quite within their rights since Amos was their Member of Parliament and she his wife. She never tried to sketch there or try out her ideas on canvas, or even think, much. In Ardington her sense of self was informed entirely by her husband’s success rather than her own. Here, in London, Anna Sykes was someone else, with a successful business and an income that supported Amos’s life at Westminster as well as paying the rent and the wages of a housemaid and a governess. These two different Annas weren’t contradictory or incompatible: they rubbed along with each other very well, as long as each had space to breathe.
    Now, alone in the sleeping square, she strolled through the grass for a while then took up a stick and wielded it like a golf club to strike the dead, dried head of a late daffodil, watching