Free The Misbegotten by Katherine Webb

saw.
    With a gasp, Rachel stopped abruptly in the street, suddenly unable to breathe. People parted around her, jostling, but none stopped to offer her any assistance. She heard a tut of disapproval, and looked up at an elegant elderly lady, who turned her face aside at once, gazing loftily away. Who are these people? Rachel turned off Milsom Street then, and did not return to it.
    Her route led her past the Moor’s Head, where gulls wheeled above in a rare flood of sunshine, calling out their mocking cacophony. The pavement was crowded with people and tangled with their voices, but then Rachel realised with a start that one voice was calling her name – a name she was still unaccustomed to.
    ‘Mrs Weekes! Won’t you pause a moment?’ Rachel turned to see Duncan Weekes, now her father-in-law, crossing the street towards her on none too steady feet. She almost turned away and pretended not to see him, remembering Richard’s curt statement that his father was lost to him. But should I blank the old man in the street, then, when he is now also my family as well? And after two hours of walking, she couldn’t help but feel relieved to see a face she knew. Duncan Weekes’s brown coat might once have been decent, but it had worn through at the elbows, lost three buttons and had grease stains on the cuffs. His wig was as crooked as it had been the first time she saw him, and his face was ruddy, the nose a pitted ruin of broken blood vessels, knotty and purple.
    ‘Mr Weekes, how do you do?’ she said. A smile crowded his eyes with folds of pouched skin.
    ‘Mrs Weekes! I am all the better for seeing your lovely face, my dear. How do you do? And how fares my son?’
    ‘We are both very well, sir, thank you. I was just out walking . . .’
    ‘Very good, very good. I’m happy to see you again. And how are you finding our fair city of Bath? Is it to your liking?’ As he spoke, Duncan Weekes swayed, just a little. He peered at her closely, his eyes roving her face with a kind of meandering but relentless scrutiny that Rachel found almost intrusive. His breath was sour, and he spoke with a strong West Country accent.
    ‘Oh, very much, sir,’ she said. ‘I’d been here before, several times, with my family. It’s wonderful to become reacquainted with it.’
    ‘And where are your family now, my dear?’
    ‘They have . . . passed, I regret to tell,’ she said. Duncan Weekes’s face fell, and he nodded.
    ‘A sad thing, as well I know. You have my sympathies, my dear. Richard’s mother, my own dear Susanne, was taken far too soon, when Dick was still just a lad.’
    ‘Yes, he told me he scarcely knew his mother.’
    ‘Oh, he knew her well, and loved her better. But he was just eight years old when she died, so perhaps his memories of her grow dim,’ said the old man, sadly.
    ‘What was she like?’
    ‘Well, the handsome face my son inherits did not come from me, I dare say you can divine.’ He smiled. ‘To me she was as lovely as a summer’s day, though she had a temper that could scare the birds into flight five miles away, and a voice to match. So perhaps not a lady as refined as you, my dear, but a lady as dear to me as my own breath.’
    ‘I am not so very refined,’ Rachel demurred.
    ‘Oh, nonsense. Nonsense.’ The old man paused, and his eyes explored Rachel’s face again, full of that strange scrutiny. ‘Tell me . . . where did he find you?’
    ‘He . . . we . . .’ Rachel stammered, given pause by his odd turn of phrase. ‘I was governess to a client of his, outside Bath. It was there that we met.’
    ‘Outside Bath, you say? Well, well.’
    Duncan Weekes paused, nodding in thought. ‘I could not be happier for my son, to have taken one such as you to wife. I have seen him strive to rise above the lowly situation of his birth . . . And he has done it, for certain. For how else would he win such a lady, if he had not made himself worthy?’ Duncan smiled again, but his eyes were full of