Free The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace Page B

says it’s impossible too. How many times do you chew things, Mrs. Palmer?”
    Anna laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve never counted.”
    They went through the gate and on in the direction of the lake. Catherine began talking about an Indian man she’d read about in the Illustrated News, who fell in love with an elephant. She could understand it because she had fallen in love with Italy—“The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy”—even though she’d never been there. But she supposed falling in love with a country wasn’t the same as falling in love with an elephant. Or a man. She stopped, turned her head toward Anna.
    “Is it?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t have the time to think about that kind of thing.”
    “What do you think about, Mrs. Palmer?”
    Anna glanced around. She couldn’t see Lovely or hear her but it didn’t mean she was not near. The fog clothed everything.
    “Since I was brought here, I have found it difficult to think of anything, Miss Abse, except how to get away.”
    “Call me Catherine. Please.”
    *   *   *
    The edge of the lake presented itself suddenly, its surface still and black, dotted with white feathers, the clean, muddy tang of it penetrating through the fog. Anna stepped down a shallow bank and pulled off her glove; the water was soft and cold, lapped around her fingers,magnified them. The white bridge gleamed through the vapor from farther down the lake, the far side of it vanished in the mist. She gestured toward it and made her voice casual.
    “What a pretty bridge. Where does it lead?”
    “Nowhere.”
    Catherine tossed something out of her umbrella. It splashed into the water and two dim shapes nosed their way to the surface. Anna heard Lovely’s voice calling from a distance. She had a sense that she had been given another chance, in place of the one Higgins denied her.
    “Catherine!” She put her hand on the girl’s arm and met her eyes. “I know we’ve only just met but I need to ask for your assistance. Would you help me escape?”
    “Why should I? Oh—I suppose you miss your husband too, too desperately, Mrs. Palmer.”
    “Not really, I …” Anna lapsed into silence, looking at Catherine’s eager expression, the sympathy on her face. “Yes, I do. Miss him. Of course, I do—most terribly.”
    “But how could I help you?”
    “You might speak with your father. Persuade him that I am perfectly well. Do you have any influence with him?”
    “No,” Catherine said, abruptly. “He never listens to me.”
    Anna cast around in her mind.
    “Could I pass as one of your friends, next time you go somewhere? Slip out of the gates with you? Or hide in a corner of the carriage?”
    “I don’t go out. Except to church, sometimes. And we don’t keep a carriage anymore.”
    “I’ll think of another way, then. But you don’t refuse?”
    Catherine leaned on a silver birch, resting the back of her head against the peeling trunk, picking at the side of one of her nails. Her skin was as pale as the bark, her hair lank where it emerged from her bonnet. She looked like a woman, where a moment before she had appeared a child.
    “It would be an adventure,” she said. “I long for adventure. A quiet life isn’t life at all, don’t you think? Who was it that had you locked up? Was it a jealous sister? His mother?”
    Lovely’s outline approached, slow and steady, growing more definitewith every step. Anna and Catherine stopped speaking as she appeared in front of them, rubbing her bare hands together, her shawl pulled up over her head.
    “There you are.” She looked from face to face. “Thought I’d lost the pair of you.”
    They began to move back through the trees toward the field. Catherine told Anna how her brother was teaching boys from the slums of the Rookeries, instructing them in reading and arithmetic, how she planned once she reached twenty-one to change her name to Aurora, like her heroine, Aurora Leigh, and go to live in Italy. She intended