Free Angelmonster by Veronica Bennett Page B

triangle. Shelley, whose poetic output was great but whose talent as a salesman was not, published little, and we sank daily into further debt. I learned to cook and keep house, as we could not afford a servant. Jane trimmed her bonnets and hems, and dressed her hair, and bemoaned the unfairness of life. To my relief she did not return to her notion that Shelley preferred her. But, as if to confound me, she suddenly began to indulge a different fantasy.
    “I no longer wish to be called Jane,” she announced one day at the breakfast table.
    Shelley and I stared. The obvious question was on my lips, but Jane answered it.
    “From this moment everyone will call me Claire. It is my new name.”
    “Is there a reason for this change?” asked Shelley.
    “You will do as I ask, will you not?”
    Shelley nodded, and raised his eyebrows in my direction. I did not return his signal. Jane’s, or rather Claire’s, tendency to self-reinvention was as wearisome to me as it was to him, but in my case was tinged with sisterly indulgence. She was still the child who had played our “The man I marry will…” game. Although I was no longer such a child, I understood.
    When Shelley had gone out, and Claire was in her room, I pushed myself to my feet and knocked on her door.
    “Come in, Mary!” she called.
    She did not rise from her dressing stool. She was putting on her best bonnet.
    “Claire…” I began, experimenting with her new name, wondering if she would respond to it.
    She turned brightly. “Yes?”
    “Where are you going?”
    “Shopping.”
    “May I come with you?”
    Turning back, she began to tease out little black curls around her temples. Her face was as smooth and expressionless as a doll’s. “Oh, Mary … you walk so slowly these days!” She tied her bonnet-strings and picked up her gloves. “And now I’ve hurt your feelings!”
    “No, you have not.” I smiled, to show her I was not offended. “Will you talk to me awhile, though, before you go?”
    She sat down on the bed, looking at me carefully. “Are you unhappy?”
    “No,” I assured her. “But it is lonely, waiting in this comfortless place, day after day, for the child to be born.”
    “And of course I
always
want to talk!” she trilled. “How well you know me!”
    I
did
know her well. Or perhaps, as the friend and conspirator of her childhood, I knew only Jane. How well would I come to know this bolder, more calculating girl who had rechristened herself Claire?
    “Come, sit down,” she said with her artless air, patting the bed.
    It sagged a little beneath my weight. “The child grows fast,” I said ruefully.
    “It will be a boy,” predicted Claire. “And Harriet will have another girl.
You
, not she, will be the mother of Shelley’s son.”
    “I would like that,” I told her.
    “It will be so,” said Claire, taking my hand. She looked at me with unexpected affection. “After the child is born, my dear Mary, you shall have a new gown. A beautiful one, more beautiful than the one you ruined by soaking it in water. Do you remember that night? What fun we had!”
    “It seems long ago.”
    “A great deal has happened since. But you and I are still those two merry people, are we not?” She gripped my hand tighter. “We have not grown so old and important that we cannot enjoy ourselves, have we?”
    “No, indeed.”
    Smiling meaningfully, she took my other hand. “And we shall be merry again, Mary, I promise you. Merrier than we have ever been, and wealthier, and admired by all. We have escaped from Papa’s interminable dinner parties! Do you think that means we may never again have any sport with gentlemen, and laugh ourselves sick when they have gone?”
    I withdrew my hands. “I do not understand you.”
    At that moment we heard the door slam downstairs. Shelley, having taken the stairs three at a time, plunged into Claire’s room. He looked sweaty and red-faced; he had been drinking or running, or both.
    “I have a son!”