The Sacred River Read Online Free PDF Page A

often home. Her mother, Amelia, felt poor and lonely all her days and longed above all for a son. Louisa was her fourth daughter, after Beatrice, Hepzibah, and Lavinia, but before Anna. Before poor Antony.
    Even prior to the tragedies that later befell their family, a family that Louisa grew to see as precarious as a gull’s nest on the cliff side, she grew up resolved that her life would not be what her mother’s had been. She would not marry a sailor, would not be poor, would not give birth to a row of daughters like Russian dolls, the female endlessly spawning the female.
    The dinner gong sounded downstairs. Dragging a chair to the open wardrobe, Louisa climbed up on it and reached inside, felt for the box hidden at the back of the shelf at the top. She found it and lifted the lid, tentatively, her hands exploring until they met a compact, cold weight. Lifting it out, she stepped down from the chair, holding the gun at arm’s length. She laid it gingerly on the dressing table, pointing at the wall, lying between the ivory-backed brushes, the pots of cold cream. The gun was loaded with a cartridge, Blundell had told her when he warned her not to touch it.
    Picking it up by the carved wooden handle that emerged from the holster, Louisa wrapped the pistol round and round in the old shirt. She slid it under a folded nightgown at the bottom of the trunk and closed the lid. They would be three women, traveling alone, without male protection. She would protect them. Death would not get anywhere near them.
    As the brassy sound of the gong floated up the stairs for a second time, she repinned a falling coil of hair and prepared to join the others in the dining room. They were eight for dinner. Blundell and Harriet. Harriet’s elder brother Tom, and his wife, Flossie. Lavinia and her husband, John Day. Mrs. Heatherwick, their widowed neighbor, who often joined them for supper. And herself.
    It pleased Louisa to see every section of the octagonal table occupied.

FIVE

    Harriet fitted her face to the porthole by the pillow. On the other side of the thick glass, the land glided by, steady and fluid, as if the warehouses and sheds and cranes of the docks passed by in a stately procession, as if England was on the move, floating away, and they on the ship were anchored amidst a traveling world.
    She lay down again. Beyond the sawing sound of her own breath, she could hear boots treading along the passageway outside, shouted commands between men, the pulse of an engine. The bunk vibrated underneath her, and over her head her journal, in its cotton bag, swung from a peg.
    They’d left the house in London at first light, Harriet keeping the dog under her cloak as the carriage jolted toward Waterloo. The fog thinned as the train steamed through the outskirts of London and had cleared entirely by the New Forest, puffs of black smoke from the engine trailing over a landscape of skeletal trees and frozen ponds, drifts of steam striping a pale sky. All of them stared out of the train windows, mesmerized by being able to see distance again. Harriet’s father and eldest brother were coming to the port to see them off.
    Louisa was against bringing Dash.
    “It’ll be nothing but a nuisance having him with us,” she said.
    “He’ll be no trouble, Mother. I’ll look aft—”
    “I refuse to quarrel with you, Harriet.”
    “A dog deters rats,” Yael remarked to no one in particular as the train pulled into Southampton and in the rush of alighting nothing more was said on the subject.
    Standing on the deck of the steamer, Harriet’s father had intervened. “Let the little chap come with you, Louisa. It’s a companion for Harriet.”
    The words were barely out of his mouth when a voice announced through the speaking trumpet that non-passengers should disembark. Her father had opened his arms and hugged Harriet to his chest. Feeling his solid presence, the rough brush of tweed on her cheek, she experienced a sharp and dismaying sense of