Free Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton Page A

hair rise up from their head as if they had seen a ghost.
    She took the notebooks up to her room and hid them under her bed, but almost every night she took one out and read it until she was too tired to read any more, or cousin Sarah came halfway up the stairs and called out, ‘Beatrice! Put out that light at once and go to sleep!’
    When she read her father’s words she could almost hear him talking to her, and hear him laugh the way he had done when he surprised her with one of his magic tricks. She touched the lines that he had written with her fingertips and whispered, ‘I love you, papa, wherever you are.’
    *
    One year passed, and then another, and another. As time went by, Beatrice took over more and more of the domestic chores and by the time she reached her fifteenth birthday cousin Sarah often left her in charge of the whole household while she went to visit her sister or her friends, often for two or three days at a time.
    Just before Christmas that year Agnes became pregnant by the son of a local carter, although she told nobody but Beatrice. She begged Beatrice for pennyroyal oil from her father’s stores, in order to bring on a miscarriage, but Beatrice refused to let her have it. She knew from her father’s books that a pregnant prostitute from Bow had once asked him for pennyroyal oil. Even though she had taken only two small spoonfuls of it, it had been enough to poison her and she had died. Agnes kept on begging her, but Beatrice continued to say no, and in the end Agnes fell on the frozen cobbles in the market and lost the baby naturally.
    Beatrice continued to see Francis quite often, although they still hadn’t had had the opportunity to speak to one another. Strangely, it didn’t seem to matter. They would exchange in passing looks that seemed to Beatrice to convey everything they needed to know about each other. There was always an expression on Francis’s face that said, ‘One day, we will be together, you and me, but I can wait for that day.’
    Jeremy was sent off to London to study law under an old friend of his father’s at Lincoln’s Inn. However, he returned less than six months later, with a letter from his father’s friend saying that ‘the process of law should not be regarded, as Jeremy regards it, as an entertainment on a par with bear-baiting’.
    Early one evening in May, after a long day of baking bread and boiling laundry and shaking out rugs, Beatrice wearily climbed up the stairs to her bedroom to wash and to change her clothes for supper. She undressed, hanging up her gown and laying her petticoats on the bed. She filled up her china basin with water from the jug, but before she washed she went to the window and looked down at the garden and the apple orchard.
    The sun was sinking, but it had filled the whole of the garden with golden light, so that it looked like the Garden of Eden in the hand-coloured print that hung on the wall in the hallway. And here she was, standing by the window with the sun shining on her skin, as naked as Eve.
    She wondered if she would ever be happy – as happy as she had been with her father and mother – or whether her life would continue to be an endless succession of daily chores and duties, with church on Sundays. Standing in the sunlight, though, she had a feeling that her future was calling her and that somewhere beyond the hills to the west, where the sun was sinking, she would find the happiness that she had lost.
    It was then that she heard a creaking sound behind her. She turned around and saw that while she had been staring out of the window, her bedroom door had been opened, and Jeremy was standing on the landing outside, looking at her.
    She seized her petticoats from the bed and bunched them up to her neck to cover herself, feeling her cheeks flushing hot.
    ‘Jeremy! What are you doing? Stop staring at me! Go away!’
    Jeremy was clearly embarrassed that she had caught him out, but he shrugged and gave her a lopsided smile