My Cousin Rachel Read Online Free PDF Page A

acquaintances would be few, but here at least was a person whose family had hailed from Cornwall in the first place, so they would have that in common too.
    The next letter consisted almost entirely of lists of gardens, which, though not at their best at this season in the year, seemed to have made a great impression upon Ambrose. So had our relative.
    “I am beginning to have a real regard for our cousin Rachel,” wrote Ambrose in early spring, “and feel quite distressed to think what she must have suffered from that fellow Sangalletti. These Italians are treacherous blackguards, there’s no denying it. She is just as English as you or I in her ways and outlook, and might have been living beside the Tamar yesterday. Can’t hear enough about home and all I have to tell her. She is extremely intelligent but, thank the Lord, knows when to hold her tongue. None of that endless yattering, so common in women. She has found me excellent rooms in Fiesole, not far from her own villa, and as the weather becomes milder I shall spend a good deal of my time at her place, sitting on the terrace, or pottering in the gardens which are famous, it seems, for their design, and for the statuary, which I don’t know much about. How she exists I hardly know, but I gather she has had to sell much of the valuable stuff in the villa to pay off the husband’s debts.”
    I asked my godfather, Nick Kendall, if he remembered the Coryns. He did, and had not much opinion of them. “They were a feckless lot, when I was a boy,” he said. “Gambled away their money and estates, and now the house, on Tamar-side, is nothing much more than a tumbled-down farm. Fell into decay some forty years ago. This woman’s father must have been Alexander Coryn—I believe he did disappear to the continent. He was second son of a second son. Don’t know what happened to him though. Does Ambrose give this Contessa’s age?”
    “No,” I said, “he only told me she had been married very young, but he did not say how long ago. I suppose she is middle-aged.”
    “She must be very charming for Mr. Ashley to take notice of her,” remarked Louise. “I have never heard him admire a woman yet.”
    “That’s probably the secret,” I said. “She’s plain and homely, and he doesn’t feel forced to pay her compliments. I’m delighted.”
    One or two more letters came, scrappy, without much news. He was just back from dining with our cousin Rachel, or on his way there to dinner. He said how few people there were in Florence among her friends who could really give her disinterested advice on her affairs. He flattered himself, he said, that he could do this. And she was so very grateful. In spite of her many interests, she seemed strangely lonely. She could never have had anything in common with Sangalletti, and confessed she had been hungry all her life for English friends. “I feel I have accomplished something,” he said, “besides acquiring hundreds of new plants to bring back home with me.”
    Then came a space of time. He had said nothing of the date of his return, but it was usually towards the end of April. Winter had seemed long with us, and frost, seldom keen in the west country, unexpectedly severe. Some of his young camellias had been affected by it, and I hoped he would not return too soon and find hard winds and driving rains with us still.
    Shortly after Easter his letter came. “Dear boy,” he said, “you will wonder at my silence. The truth is, I never thought I should, one day, write such a letter to you. Providence works in strange ways. You have always been so close to me that possibly you have guessed something of the turmoil that has been going on in my mind during the past weeks. Turmoil is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say happy bewilderment, turning to certainty. I have made no quick decision. As you know, I am too much a man of habit to change my way of living for a whim. But I knew; some weeks back, that no other course was