Free The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue Page B

face powders, eye drops, pink-tinted lip balm.) Her older sisters-in-law wear bonnets with big bows under their multiple chins. At what age will Helen be expected to adopt that dire costume?
    The girls rush into the drawing-room, and the silence breaks like a biscuit.
    "Whatever have you been doing to make yourselves so scarlet?" their father asks, folding up his paper.
    "They've been running around in the square," supplies Helen.
    "In this heat!"
    "We couldn't keep on with geography, the crayons melted all over our hands," says Nell, arranging her gingham skirts as she perches on the padded arm of Harry's chair.
    "So we persuaded Mrs. Lawless to let us release our animal spirits," says Nan, clearly proud of the phrase.
    "Were the Atkins girls in the square?" Helen asks. Both girls shake their heads. "Too hot for them."
    "They'd faint."
    "Like this," says Nell, dropping on the Brussels carpet.
    Out of the corner of her eye Helen sees her husband's long nose turn her way; he's clearly waiting for her to make some show of maternal authority.
    "Get up at once," he says at last.
    "I was only demonstrating, Papa," says Nell, coming to life.
    "Lucy Atkins faints on the least pretence," adds Nan in her sister's defence.
    "Pretext," Harry corrects her gently. "You might have knocked your head on the fender, Nell."
    "Then my brains would have spilled out and stained the hearth!"
    Helen's mouth quivers with amusement.
    "Where do you get your notions, child?" asks Harry.
    "She read that bit about the hearth on a newsboy's sign," says Nan, older and wiser. "It was about a Horrible Murder in Islington."
    "Were you out, earlier?" Harry asks his wife.
    She blinks at him like a doll. "Why do you ask?"
    "Simply expressing an interest in how you spent the day."
    Now Helen rouses herself to be convincing. "I left a sheaf of cards—twenty-nine, I believe," she says with sardonic scrupulousness, "though I'm not sure of the wisdom of letting all our neighbours know, on their return from the country, that we've been unfashionable enough to have had nowhere to go, right through the dog days of the off-season."
    He lets out a short sigh.
    "But custom decrees," she says, "and I obey. It's very cruel of custom, I've always thought, to make wives deliver their husbands' cards as well as their own, and receive all the tedious calls too."
    "Who's custom?" Nell wants to know.
    "It's nobody, you nitwit."
    "Don't abuse your little sister."
    "Sorry, Papa."
    "But you're quite right that custom is nobody, Nan," Helen goes on, yawning. "Or everybody, which comes to the same thing."
    "Don't you think you're batting rather over their heads?" murmurs her husband.
    "No harm, if I am."
    "I'm not so sure about that. Custom, girls, is a civilizing force," says Harry, knobbly hands on his knees. "The rules of behaviour are tested and passed down by each generation."
    "Who's batting over their heads now?" scoffs Helen. "Besides, if we go back more than a few generations, our ancestors bathed only once a year."
    Cries of disgust from Nan and Nell.
    Harry purses his chapped lips. "There's generally a great deal of sense behind the rules. Wives must pay and receive the calls, for instance, because husbands must attend to business."
    Helen snorts mildly. "Not always."
    A beat. "Do you have some particular meaning, my dear?"
    When he calls her my dear, her hackles always rise. "No," she says, unable to stop herself, "I was only reflecting on the fact that lords are often idle between parliamentary sessions, and lawyers are at a loss between cases, and even quite high-ranking naval officers, say, find themselves stranded on shore for years at a time."
    Harry keeps a pleasant expression on his face, but the lines around his eyes have deepened. "As I should have thought you'd appreciate by now, in peacetime the half-pay system allows the Royal Navy to keep a large, qualified force in constant readiness."
    "Readiness for what?" she asks. "The last big battle was