In Pale Battalions Read Online Free PDF

before replying. “You are entitled to contest the will. But, as a minor, you could only do so through your guardian—Lady Powerstock.”
    So that was it. Mayhew drove away and left me, alone and at Olivia’s mercy. Such rights as I had were hers to dispose of. Lord Powerstock had consigned to her the future and to me—nothing at all.
    What that future might hold was not long in becoming apparent. When I returned to Meongate a month later, for the Christmas holiday, a party was in progress. I walked up alone from the station in the chill of a December afternoon to find lights blazing from

I N P A L E B A T T A L I O N S
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    every window of the house, sounds of music and laughter wafting out into the dusk. Fergus greeted me with a warning that I should be prepared for the worst. Olivia had given instructions that I was to join the party as soon as I arrived.
    There were a dozen or so guests, foregathered in the drawing room, logs piled and roaring in the grate, jazz blaring from the gramophone, gin fumes and cigarette smoke hanging in the air, Sidney Payne red in the face and laughing loudly at a joke he had just told. Some I recognized as Payne’s business associates who’d been to Meongate before, hard-drinking, coarse-voiced men with women twenty years their junior goggled-eyed and giggling on their arms; others were newcomers. I don’t think any of them noticed me come in.
    Except Olivia. She had been reclining on a chaise-longue , smoking a cigarette in a holder, and rose now, arrayed in crimson silk, to greet me with a watchful smile. “Welcome home, Leonora,” she said, loudly enough to arrest the conversations nearest her. “You’re just in time to drink a toast. Sidney, a small glass of champagne for Leonora.” Payne stepped forward and handed me a glass, breathing cigar smoke over me as he did so. I did not look at him. My eyes remained fixed on the gloating triumph I could read in Olivia’s face.
    “Sidney and I have announced our engagement,” she said. “I’d like you to drink to our happiness.”
    “I’ll be one of the family now,” said Payne, somewhere on the fringes of my awareness.
    I drank—or, rather, sipped—and asked if I might leave, but Olivia insisted that I remain. So I sat, still in my school uniform, on a hard chair, clutching but never finishing the glass of champagne, and watched and listened as the party proceeded.
    One couple began to Charleston in the centre of the room, another to kiss passionately on a sofa in the corner. Voices grew louder, faces redder, laughs more hysterical. Drinks were spilled, cigarettes trodden into the carpet. My eyes began to water, my ears to throb.
    And through it all Olivia remained where she was, drinking little and laughing less, watching me as I endured the flagrancy of her strangely joyless victory. For it was more than merely a party, more than an announcement of her engagement. It was a declaration of intent.
     
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R O B E R T G O D D A R D
    Towards the end, Payne became very drunk. I noticed him back one of the girls against the wall and whisper something in her ear which made her laugh. As I watched, he lifted the hem of her dress and slid a five-pound note into the top of her stocking. And she laughed again.
    Then I looked at Olivia and saw that she too had been watching him. When her gaze shifted back to me, it bore the expression of the woman in the painting, as I so clearly remembered it. With no other hint of her reaction, she left the couch, walked over to me and took the glass from my hand.
    “You may go now,” she said.
    By Easter, they were married. Payne’s son by his first wife served as best man. I was not required to come home for the ceremony, which took place at a register office in Portsmouth and was followed, so Fergus later told me, by a weekend-long party at Meongate.
    In my self-centred way—for at sixteen who is not self-centred?—
    I convinced myself that Olivia had contracted a loveless and repugnant