Michael Cox Read Online Free PDF

wanted for nothing, lacked no bodily comforts or stimulation of the mind; I was loved, knew that I was loved, and loved in return. How, then, should I have been sad or unhappy?

    WHEN I WAS quite young, Madame would often take me to the little Cemetery of St-Vincent, to show me where my mother and father were buried, side by side, under two flat granite slabs, in the deep shadow of the boundary wall. My hand held tightly in hers, I would stare down at the slabs, fascinated by the stark brevity of their inscriptions:
    MARGUERITE ALICE GORST
1836–1858

    EDWIN GORST
DIED 1862

    My mother’s inscription would always make me sad: such a beautiful name, and – as I one day realized, when I had learned my numbers – so young to have been taken into Death’s arms.
For my father’s, I felt a strange and fanciful curiosity; for the presence of a single date made it appear to my child’s mind that he had somehow never been born, yet had contrived to die. This, of course, I simply could not comprehend, until Madame told me it meant that the year of his birth was unknown or uncertain.
Often, standing with Madame silently regarding the graves, and having no portraits or photographs of them to feed on, I would try to picture what my parents might have looked like – whether they had been short or tall, dark or fair – and wonder, as far as my limited experience of life and the world was able to inform my juvenile speculations, what circumstances had brought them to this, their final resting-place; but I never could.
Throughout my childhood, Madame had often told me that my mother had been beautiful (as all mothers must of course be in the imaginations of orphaned children who never knew them), and that my father had been handsome and clever (as all fathers of such children must also be), for she had known my father before his marriage, and, later, when he and my mother had lived with her for a time in the Maison de l’Orme.
This much, together with the bare circumstances of their first coming to Paris, their taking up residence with her in the Avenue d’Uhrich, my birth there, and their subsequent deaths – my mother’s soon after I had been born, my father’s a few years afterwards – was all Madame would tell me about my departed parents; and for the duration of my childhood this was all I needed to know. As I grew older, however, I became greatly curious to learn more about them; but Madame would always – in her gentle but immovable way – evade my questions. ‘One day, dear child, one day,’ she would say, kissing away all further importuning.
Thus I had grown up in Madame’s tender care, knowing little more about myself than that my name was Esperanza Alice Gorst, born on 1st September in the year 1857, the only child of Edwin and Marguerite Gorst, both of whom lay in the Cemetery of St-Vincent.
    II
The Heir

    A KNOCK AT the door roused me from my reverie. Running back to my bed, I quickly pulled on my robe and went to answer it. It was the head footman, Barrington, tray in hand.
‘Breakfast, miss,’ he said, gloomily.
After placing the tray on the table, he gave a little cough, as if he wished to say something more.
‘Yes, Barrington?’
‘Mrs Battersby sends to know, miss, if you’ll be taking your meals in the steward’s room from now on.’
‘Is that the custom here for my Lady’s maid?’
‘It is, miss.’
‘And Mrs Battersby is my Lady’s housekeeper?’
‘She is, miss.’
‘Very well, then. Please send Mrs Battersby my very best compliments, and tell her that I shall be pleased to take my meals in the steward’s room.’
He executed a meagre bow, and departed.

JONAH BARRINGTON

Footman. Tall and wiry, straight-backed, military bearing, hollow-cheeked, doleful of aspect, full head of stiff grey hair. Large ears with peeping tufts of white, like caterpillars. Fifty years of age? Small pursed mouth giving the impression that he exists in a state of surprised disapproval of the world in which he