The Sleeping Sword Read Online Free PDF Page B

and for the same reasons. We were women. We had no money of our own and no means of earning or otherwise obtaining any. We were dependent, luxuriously but completely, and had the freedom of choice, it seemed to me, merely between the authority of a father or of a husband.
    I found Venetia as I had expected surrounded by her admirers, swaying slightly towards this one and that, almost taking flight in her eagerness to offer them her quick gestures and quick smiles, her swift ripple of laughter, giving a little of herself to each one and then, I soon noticed, turning back—for approval, for pleasure, to make sure he was still watching her—to the same man. No one, of course, of whom her father could possibly approve but a certain Mr. Liam Adair, a relative of mine by marriage, who had long been classified matrimonially as a bad risk.
    I had not consciously thought of Liam Adair for a long time but watching him now, the dark, heavy-featured face I remembered, the merry almost insolent black eyes, I was not surprised. He was the son of an exceedingly witty and resourceful gentleman, now deceased, who had had the great good fortune in middle life to marry his employer’s widow, my pretty little Grandmamma Elinor. But my late grandfather had tied his money up in so shrewd a fashion that no predatory second husband could touch it and Liam Adair had been required to make his own way in the world, an erratic way I’d heard which no lady could be asked to share. He had travelled, gambled, taken chances which, more often than not, he had lost and although for the past year or two he had been employed by Venetia’s father to sell worsted cloth abroad I had heard no rumour that he had settled down. And that alone, coupled with his height, his breadth, his swagger, would be more than enough for Venetia. Was this, then, the ‘unsuitable involvement’ my step-mother’s tea-time ladies had hinted at? Yet Venetia had spoken to me of Liam Adair only a few days ago warmly but too easily as a ‘dear friend’and perhaps I hoped—since it would have been far better that way—that it was the presence of Gideon Chard that was making her so excitable and flirtatious.
    I did not feel my best in the pretty apricot silk which had been Blanche’s choice, but I looked well enough I suppose and there were a few among Venetia’s following who, rating their chances of her favour very low and considering my fortune to be every bit as interesting as hers, began at once to pay me attention, a young member of Rawnsley’s Bank saying all that was needful about my stay in Switzerland, the nephew of Mr. Sheldon MP requesting my opinion of Venice and listening, quite intently, while I gave it.
    â€˜Bit of a pest hole, Venice, if you ask me,’ drawled Gideon Chard from the fringes of the crowd, and although I had not asked him and would have done better to ignore him entirely, the self-assurance of his manner, that accumulation of three hundred years of Chard authority and Chard arrogance at Listonby stung me badly, stirring a certain arrogance of my own that came from another source entirely. For if his ancestors had been privileged and powerful mine had been tough-fibred and long-suffering, had fought hard for their prosperity not tamely inherited it, releasing themselves from the trap of poverty by their own stubborn refusal to stay there. And in actual terms he was only the third son of a baronet while I was the heiress to the whole of Fieldhead.
    He had not changed greatly in the two years I had been away unless it was that he had simply become the man I had always expected of him. He was the youngest of the Chards for whom the estate could make no provision and who would not be needed by that estate for the purposes of procreation or management unless accident or disease—which seemed unlikely—should carry off both his brothers. And perhaps it was because he had been so carefully taught to