Jewels Read Online Free PDF Page B

numbness about Sarah now, an emptiness, and her eyes were filled with silent anguish. She had grown frighteningly thin since she’d lost the child, and that worried Jane too, but she also felt that Sarah was doing everything she could to avoid her.
    “What’s happening to you?” Jane asked her finally in May. By then she herself was six months pregnant, and she had hardly seen Sarah in months, because Sarah couldn’t bear seeing her sister pregnant.
    “Nothing. I’m fine.”
    “Don’t tell me that, Sarah! You’re like someone in a trance. What’s he doing to you? What’s going on?” Just looking at her, Jane was frantic. She also sensed how uncomfortable Sarah was with her, so most of the time she didn’t press herself on her sister. But she didn’t want to leave her to her own devices now. She was beginning to fear for Sarah’s sanity, or her life, at Freddie’s hands, and somebody had to, stop it.
    “Don’t be silly. I’m fine.”
    “Are things better than they were?”
    “I suppose so.” She was intentionally vague, and her sister saw right through it.
    Sarah was thinner and paler than she had been right after the miscarriage. She was profoundly depressed, and no one knew it. She kept assuring everyone that she was fine, that Freddie was behaving. She had even told her parents that he was looking for a job. It was all the same old nonsense, which no one believed anymore, not even Sarah.
    And on their anniversary, her parents tacitly agreed to continue the farce with her, by celebrating their first anniversary with a little party for them at the house in Southampton.
    At first, Sarah had tried to discourage them, but in the end it was easier just to let them do it. Freddie had promised her he’d be there. In fact, he thought it was a great idea. He wanted to go to Southampton for the entire weekend, and bring half a dozen friends with him. The house was certainly big enough, and Sarah asked her mother if it was all right, and her mother was quick to tell them that their friends were always welcome. But Sarah warned him that his friends had to behave if they stayed with them, she didn’t want them embarrassing her with her parents.
    “What a dumb thing to say, Sarah,” he berated her. In the past month or two, he was slowly becoming increasingly vicious. She was never sure if it was due to the alcohol he consumed, or if he had truly begun to hate her. “You hate me, don’t you?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. I just don’t want your friends to get out of hand at my parents’.”
    “Aren’t you the prim, prissy little thing. Poor darling, afraid we can’t behave at your parents’.” She wanted to tell him that he didn’t behave anywhere else, but she refrained. She was slowly resigning herself to her lot in life, knowing full well that she would be miserable with him forever. There would probably never be another baby, and even that didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did. She just lived day by day, and one day she would die, and it would be all over. The thought of divorcing him never even occurred to her, or never more than fleetingly, in any case. No one in her family had ever gotten divorced, and in her wildest dreams, she would never have thought of being the first one. The shame of it would have killed her, as well as her parents. “Don’t worry, Sarah, we’ll behave. Just don’t annoy my friends with that long, sad face of yours. You’re enough to spoil anyone’s fun at a party.” It had only been since being married to him, and losing the baby, that she seemed to have lost all her color, all her life, all her joie de vivre and excitement. She had always been lively and bright and happy as a young girl, and suddenly she seemed like a dead person, even to herself. It was Jane who always commented on it, but Peter and her parents told her not to worry, Sarah would be all right, because they wanted to believe that.
    Two days before the Thompsons’ party was to take place, the Duke of