The Shape of Sand Read Online Free PDF Page B

about the missing woman.
    â€œI expect she paints pretty little woodland scenes,” Daisy said carelessly. “What a pity the bluebells are over!” Beatrice widened her sapphire eyes warningly, but chose to say nothing in front of the others, and turned her attention once more to the teapot. Her youngest child was becoming dangerously sharp-tongued. Miss Tempest’s departure had come not a moment too soon.
    â€œDon’t vex your mama, Daisy,” Kit drawled, accepting a cup of tea from Beatrice and watching her from under his lids. “I can vouch for it you will be very pleasantly surprised when
you do meet Miss Jessamy.”
    â€œWill I? Oh, do tell! I had no idea you knew her!”
    â€œWell, as to knowing … it was I who first took Marcus along to the Alpha Workshops – that’s a kind of artists’ commune where she’s been painting and selling her work. She’s regarded as a very talented and most unusual person.”
    An artists’ commune! Beatrice frowned, but only very slightly. After forty, one could not afford that indulgence. She had not been made aware of any communes, artistic or otherwise and, not for the first time, she wondered if Miss Jessamy was indeed going to be the good idea, the solution to Daisy’s companionless state she had seemed to offer at the time. When Miss Tempest had so inconsiderately left, it had hardly seemed worth the trouble of finding a new governess – Daisy was almost seventeen and would be coming out next year, and Beatrice knew only too well the tribulations of finding the right kind of person to guide a young girl, especially one so impressionable as Daisy Look how Miss Tempest had turned out! Inculcating rebellious, quite unacceptable ideas into the girl’s head, a fact which Beatrice had unfortunately only learned after the young woman’s abrupt departure. Yet Daisy could not be left to her own devices.
    The plan to engage Miss Jessamy as a companion for her had come about as a sudden inspiration, born of one of those reckless impulses, of which few people suspected Beatrice was capable, after seeing what this Miss Jessamy had done when making over the London house of Beatrice’s dearest friend, Millie Glendinning. Charnley, unlike the family’s house in London, could not be considered elegant, however well-loved it was. And at that moment, its brocatelles and velvets, antique wallpapers and heirloom furniture, the buhl and ormolu, walnut and mahogany, the mountains of French porcelain collected on their grand tours by those Rodhythes whose heavy, gilded portraits still gazed down from the walls, suddenly seemed to Beatrice to be static and heavy, and lacking in any vigour or newness of ideas. Millie’s daringly new and original decorations on the other hand, the colour and texture of her brightly painted walls, exuded a freshness, lightness and gaiety that was like nothing Beatrice – or indeed most other
people – had ever seen before.
    She rarely allowed her emotions to take control of her common sense, but there were times when she could not help it, and this had been one of them. She was utterly bowled over by the riot of exuberant design that evoked such disturbing ideas and stirred something dormant within her, some longing for change, for distant remembered vistas, some undisclosed awareness that there must be something beyond the safe confines and predictabilities of life as mistress of Charnley, wife of Amory, and mother to his children. Few would have believed that beneath Beatrice Jardine’s marble-cool exterior, there beat this longing for something wild and free – and even, perhaps, something dangerous, which was trying to escape. But there it was.
    When she was told that the remarkable young woman who had effected this wonderful modern transformation was seeking other commissions, she drew in a deep breath and plunged: it was arranged that Miss Jessamy would undertake