The Courage Consort Read Online Free PDF

lineaments of gratified desire.
    It was partly to save her from having to figure out what such terms as 'lineaments' could possibly mean that Catherine had originally allowed Roger to pluck her out of St. Magdalen's College.

    'Are you still listening to me?' he prompted now, in the vacuum of the noiseless night.
    'Yes,' she assured him. 'I was just thinking.'
    'Thinking what?'
    'I can't remember now.' She giggled in embarrassment.
    Roger lay still for another few seconds or minutes, then rolled onto his side—facing her. Not that she could see his face, but she could feel his elbow digging into the edge of her pillow and could sense, in the centre of the bed near her own thighs, the warmth of his … well, his desire.
    'You're still a good-looking woman, you know,' he said in a quiet, deep voice.
    Catherine laughed out loud, unable to control herself. The faint praise, offered so solemnly, so seductively, at a time when neither of them could see a bloody thing, struck her as unbearably funny somehow.
    'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' she whispered, mortified lest Julian hear them through the wall. 'It must be the antidepressants.'
    Roger slumped onto his back with an emphasis that rocked the bedsprings.
    'Maybe you should stop taking them now,' he suggested wearily. 'I mean, have you felt suicidal lately?'
    Catherine stared out of the window, relieved to see a pale glow of moonlight seeping into the sky.
    'It comes and goes,' she said.
    Hours later, when he was asleep, Catherine began to weep in the silence. She wished she could sing to herself, something sweet and tuneful, a little Schubert
lied
or even a nursery rhyme. 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' would do fine. But of course it wasn't possible. Her throat was sore from singing
Partitum Mutante,
and she lay in dread of waking her husband, in a strange bedroom in a forest in Belgium, with that wicked Julian Hind listening through the wall for her every snuffle. Oh my God, how had things come to this?

    Suddenly, she heard a short, high-pitched cry from somewhere quite far away. It wasn't Axel, she didn't think; that boy slept like an angel all night through and, during the day, hardly uttered a sound unless you set fire to a slab of Belgian bread right near his nose.
    Catherine's skin prickled electrically as the cry came again. It didn't sound human, or if it was, it was halfway toward something else. She wished she could slide across the bed, into the big protecting arms of someone who could be trusted to do nothing to her except keep her warm and safe. Such people were hard to find, in her experience.
    Instead, she drew the bedclothes up to her mouth and lay very still, counting the cries until she fell asleep.
    ***
    I N THE MORNING , she didn't manage to make an appearance at breakfast. She'd hoped to be there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, each morning before Roger, but the previous night's insomnia caught up with her and she slept till midday. Roger was long gone by the time she awoke. Score—Roger: one; Catherine: zero, then.
    The sun was pouring in through the window, its heat boosting her body's metabolism to an itchy simmer. Just before waking, she'd been having a nightmare of suffocation inside a humid transparent sac; anxiously conscious at last, she fought her way out of the clammy bedclothes and sat up, drenched with sweat.
    She showered and dressed, hearing nothing except the sounds she was making. Perhaps the others were sitting around downstairs, waiting to sing, but lacking their soprano. Perhaps they'd gone exploring together, leaving her alone in the Château de Luth with its spinning wheels and antique recorders and a bed she didn't know if she could bear to lie in again.

    She needn't have worried. Arriving in the kitchen, she found Ben still in his XXL pyjamas, looking slightly sheepish as he sat alone at the sunlit bench, browsing through a four-year-old
Times Literary Supplement.
    He was such a strange man, Catherine thought. The oldest of