Free A Fatal Freedom by Janet Laurence Page B

the entrance door to the living room. Ursula thought of the fragile-looking Alice trailing around London with it. No wonder she was exhausted. The radiance the girl had displayed in the menagerie had vanished; she was drained of colour, a waif.
    No one wanted more tea and Ursula went to sit down by the window table but a movement outside caught her eye. Thomas Jackman was unobtrusively descending the basement steps of a house across the square.
    Ursula shrank back against the window curtains. Once again the man had placed her in an invidious position. She had thwarted him at the menagerie. If only he hadn’t revealed his chauvinistic attitudes, his belief in male superiority.
    Alice Peters was a woman being forced to remain in an unhappy marriage. Should she continue to support her own sex or must she allow her former comrade to fulfil his contract?
    ‘What am I to do, Rachel?’ asked Alice.
    Mrs Trenchard rose. ‘You must return to your husband, that is what you must do.’ She seemed to recover some of the authority she had shown at the tea party. ‘I am very sorry, child. It is not a marriage I would have wished on you but you agreed to it and now you must follow your duty. If you cannot do that, I suggest you go to an hotel. I cannot help you.’
    ‘I cannot afford an hotel,’ Alice said desperately. ‘Daniel’s mother might not return to London for some time. What am I to do?’
    Rachel Fentiman looked around her living room. ‘If you stay here, Joshua Peters will find you. Let me try and think of a friend you could go to.’
    Ursula made up her mind.
    ‘I know my landlady has a free room, Mrs Peters. Her charges are far less than an hotel’s. Would you like to come back with me for a night or two? It is not far away, just the other side of Victoria station. Your sister could contact you there when she has arranged other accommodation.’
    ‘Miss Grandison, you have found the perfect solution. You will not mind that, Alice, will you?’ Rachel Fentiman sounded greatly relieved. ‘I am sure in a day or so either Daniel will be back or I shall have found somewhere more … well, a friend you can stay with.’ She asked Ursula for the address of her lodging house and scribbled it down. Then she picked up a chic straw hat from the top of a pile of books. ‘Now, let me put this on you.’
    ‘Miss Grandison, I am sure you mean well but I am not at all sure this is the right solution,’ said Mrs Trenchard.
    Ursula picked up the Gladstone bag. It was heavy but she felt well able to carry it as far as her boarding house.
    ‘Is there a back way, Miss Fentiman, that you could show us? I think it would be circumspect for us not to use the front door. And perhaps Mrs Trenchard could leave with us in the same way?’ For if Jackman believed it was only Ursula that Rachel Fentiman was entertaining in her rooms, he was unlikely to continue his surveillance for much longer and would never know she had left earlier than he.
    Miss Fentiman showed no surprise at this suggestion. ‘What a good idea. Follow me.’
    ‘I will leave the way I came in, via the front door,’ Mrs Trenchard said coldly.
    ‘Aunt Lydia, for once, please just do as someone else wants.’
    Mrs Trenchard stood rigid for several seconds. ‘Rachel, I can hardly believe what I have just heard. To think that … well, what my dear sister would have said. After everything we have done for you.’
    Miss Fentiman coloured painfully. ‘Aunt Lydia, I apologise. I had no right to speak to you like that.’ She took a deep breath. ‘At the moment, though, Alice has nowhere to go and this idea of Ursula’s is the only solution that will do. And as for your leaving with us, it’s just, well, if Joshua is in the habit of engaging detectives, would it not be best to evade any possibility one is even now watching this house?’
    Ursula’s belief in Rachel Fentiman’s intelligence was strengthened.
    Mrs Trenchard looked horrified and glanced towards the