Free Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton

again. She could see that the boy had stepped out into the road in order to watch her as she walked up the street.
    ‘Do you know his name?’ she asked cousin Sarah.
    ‘Whose name? What are you talking about?’
    ‘The boy.’
    ‘I said don’t turn round! He’s Geoffrey Scarlet’s son, Francis. Why on earth would you want to know that?’
    ‘She’s smitten!’ hooted Jeremy. Then, to Beatrice, ‘You are smitten , aren’t you? Smitten with Francis Scarlet! Of all the noddies!’
    ‘Of course I’m not,’ said Beatrice. ‘He did stare so, that’s all, and I was wondering why.’
    Jeremy tapped the side of his nose with his finger and winked. ‘Perhaps he’s smitten with you , young Bea! Not that I’d wish you such bad luck!’
    *
    Over the months that passed, Beatrice saw Francis almost every Sunday. As soon as he saw her walking home from St Philip’s after communion he would step out of the crowd of Nonconformist worshippers on the corner of Bell Street and stare at her until she reached Lea Lane. She would glance back at him now and again, over her shoulder, and give him a quick, coy smile.
    Cousin Sarah would catch Beatrice glancing behind her and would turn round herself, to see what she was looking at.
    ‘Beatrice? That Scarlet boy isn’t giving you the eye again, is he?’
    ‘I’ll go back and lamp him, if you like,’ said Jeremy, turning round, too.
    ‘Oh, Jeremy, don’t be foolish!’ Beatrice told him. ‘I was turning round because I couldn’t hear Mrs Shelley talking to your mother and I thought we might have left them behind.’
    ‘Now then, Beatrice!’ cousin Sarah admonished her. ‘There’s no call for cheek!’
    Now and again, Beatrice saw Francis in the town, too. He was always with his father, or his mother, or one of his sisters, so they couldn’t stop to talk to each other. Beatrice usually had Jeremy with her, too. She was beginning to like Jeremy, but he hardly ever left her alone. If cousin Sarah sent her to the grocer’s for salt, or butter, or down to the butcher’s for pig’s liver, Jeremy would insist on coming with her. He would even carry her basket, ignoring the derisive hoots of his friends. ‘Going shopping, Jere- mary ?’
    Wherever she was in the house, upstairs or downstairs, he always seemed to be there, too, offering to help her with whatever she was doing, whether it was cleaning the cutlery or changing the beds or shaking out the rugs. Either that, or he was simply watching her.
    He was funny, though, and most of the time he was cheerful. He showed her how to play the Game of Goose, on a coloured board with sixty-three squares.
    ‘If you land on a goose, you’ll be rich and successful,’ he told her. ‘If you land in a bad place, like an alehouse, then you’ll be miserable and poor. Like me, I always end up in the alehouse.’
    ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ said Beatrice.
    Jeremy shrugged and smiled. ‘When you’ve been living here with my mother long enough you’ll probably come and join me. Better to be drunk than downtrodden.’
    *
    One morning in mid-July, when cousin Sarah was attending a church meeting, and Agnes was out in the garden hanging up the washing, Beatrice took the key from the hook in the kitchen and went down to the cellar. All her father’s equipment had been stored down there – his jars of dried spices and glass retorts and bottles of poison and vitriol – but it was his notebooks that Beatrice was looking for.
    She found them in a wooden box at the very back of the cellar, wrapped in sacking. There were five books in all, bound in brown leather, and each of them was crowded with her father’s neat, tiny writing. He had described in detail all the preparations that he had mixed up for hectic fever or milk leg or lupus vulgaris . Not only that, he had written up all of his ‘mysteries’, his scientific experiments, such as making dead mice run across the room, or chicken feathers spontaneously catch fire, or a person’s