Secrets of a Scandalous Heiress Read Online Free PDF Page B

today.
    â€œShall I read to you, Emily?” she offered, noticing the weariness that tugged at the countess’s lids.
    â€œThat would be lovely,” her friend replied, shutting her eyes.
    Augusta rose, picked up the volume Emily had dropped, and settled herself on the floor next to the settee. “It’s William Blake. Is that all right?”
    Emily nodded, a sliver of movement. “Read ‘Infant Joy.’”
    Augusta turned the pages until she found the correct poem. This edition reproduced Blake’s paintings, and the words were tucked within an illustration of a fire-red flower cradling a mother and infant, a haloed angel blessing them.
    â€œ I have no name ,” she read.
    â€œI am but two days old.
    What shall I call thee?
    I happy am,
    Joy is my name.
    Sweet joy befall thee!”
    â€œStop,” said Emily. “Stop. Stop reading.”
    Augusta looked up from the small volume. Emily’s eyes were still closed, but a tear had trickled beneath her lid, tracing the hollow of her cheek.
    â€œI think I ought to go to bed.” The countess’s voice was choked and flat. “I shouldn’t have waited up so late.”
    To repay her friend’s kindness, Augusta refrained from saying I told you so . Instead, she helped Emily to rise to her feet; she pretended not to notice the second tear that followed the first, or the ones that came afterward.
    Emily’s much-wanted daughter had no name, had never drawn a breath. And just as Augusta had held Emily’s hand after the terrible loss a month earlier, she held it again now, leading her down the corridor and settling Emily into her own night-blue room.
    Augusta helped the countess climb the steps to the bed, then drew the counterpane up to her thin shoulders. “I’m here, Emily. If you wish to talk, I shall be glad to hear it.”
    The echo of Emily’s own offer seemed to rouse the countess. “You know why I asked you to accompany me to Bath, Augusta?”
    â€œYes.” Augusta sat on the edge of the bed. “You wanted company during your recovery.”
    A pause followed, though the room was too dark for Augusta to read her friend’s expression. “I did want company. But were it only that, I could have traveled here with my husband and sons. Though I now I miss them terribly, I never considered bringing them along.”
    â€œWhy is that?”
    â€œBecause they remind me of what I’ve lost.” Emily raised herself onto her elbows and stared at the glowing coal fire. “Of all the friends I could have invited, you were the one whose companionship I wanted. Because you understand what loss means.”
    Oh. “Yes,” Augusta said again. Though this fire, like the one in her own room, was built up high, her fingers had gone numb. Her feet, her toes. The stone of her heart.
    â€œYou know,” Emily said, “how loss can make a person feel mad. Or how it can show her sides of herself she never knew she possessed.”
    Augusta felt Emily’s words not as a reprimand, but as a plea for understanding. “Loss can make a person reckless.”
    Loss could slash a person with a grief so deep, she might throw away all the good she possessed and let it burn. Not caring. Not wanting to care. Not wanting to feel anything; willing to pursue any promise of oblivion.
    Yet that promise, along with so many others, had been broken. Oblivion had never yet been hers.
    â€œYou should go to sleep now,” Augusta said, and Emily lay down again without a word of argument.
    Simply revealing what brought them here had been difficult enough. Neither of them was ready to talk about why yet, or how they would move beyond this house, this time away from the world they knew.
    As Augusta crept from the room and back down the silent corridor to her own chamber, the sardonic face of Joss Everett came to mind. He had named himself her ally, yet he had picked at her character.