Free A Man of Genius by Janet Todd Page A

been a monk,’ Ann countered. ‘I think you fancy it.’
    His face creased into a tender smile, ‘Well, a cardinal,’ he said and held out his hand with his fingers splayed for kissing. She knelt down and put her lips to his flesh. ‘You look like a cardinal.’
    â€˜Indeed, yes,’ he said, ‘my other self. To be called sua eminenza and have jewels on my plump white hand. Delicious.’
    She was standing again. ‘And decadent.’ She thought of her cardinal villains gazing at her sobbing girls.
    â€˜You mean Catholic, my little Puritan.’
    â€˜Well yes. Papist.’
    He listened to her – sometimes. It was not perhaps in the way Caroline had described Gilbert doing: listening in rapture, touching hair and skin reverently, looking into eyes whose colour could not be told. She banished this memory with her old childhood scorn, for she’dknown that Caroline’s eyes were dirty green. How despicable to repeat these words to a child! How irritating that she remembered them now in so different a world.
    When with a glass of wine in hand Robert James gave her his attention, she told him what she’d not had time to tell even her cousin Sarah Hardisty, or which perhaps it had been best to repress, for Sarah was conventional regarding the church. But Robert was encouraging.
    â€˜I lost the little faith I’d found in the community through a fall when no power outside saved me from drowning.’
    He studied her intently, his wonderful grey eyes on her alone, then he exclaimed, ‘Bravo. It’s a good step taken when you see no one’s at your elbow. My mother told me that everyone had a special guardian angel by their bed. I called mine Percy. He was mine alone, though perhaps he’d had other little boys before me, I didn’t think of that.’
    Had he ever suggested marriage? She wondered this when she remembered the early time, when she went back and back to it as to a heaven glimpsed but on whose threshold she’d somehow missed her footing. She thought he had, but as a throwaway remark to please. But it would have been sincere – for after all he didn’t try to please.
    Much later, very much later, she asked him if he’d said something of the sort and could say it again.
    He could not, he could not repeat himself, he was no lapdog to sit in the same position day after day. He was a passionate man.

7
    T hrough all the turbulent months she felt Sarah’s presence, warm, stable and comforting.
    â€˜I have really met someone special,’ she said once towards the beginning after they’d taken tea with Sarah’s friend Mrs Lymington, and Ann had waited till this bubbly laughing companion left them together alone in the drawing room.
    What a thing to say, how bald a statement! Any moment now, she would answer herself, How delightful! as Robert said when he became the Holborn Lawyer, How exquisite, Madam!
    â€˜You – you, but I thought you were so happy alone,’ laughed Sarah pressing together her chubby hands. ‘I always knew it. It is the giver of the pea-green gown?’
    â€˜No, Sarah, I didn’t say I was. I happened to be alone. I was and still am content.’
    â€˜Oh, more than that. You are so independent. What you said about going to live with those people in Fen Ditton. Wasn’t that a remarkable thing for a young woman to do? We thought you a marvel, Charles and I, when we heard of it – I didn’t tell him quite all, cousin Ann! To leave home alone. I would never dare. But now, how delightful!’
    â€˜I’m still independent, Sarah.’
    A fine thing, independence. Sarah saw housekeeping money. The rest trivial. She wouldn’t trade it for an umbrella held over her head in the last weeks of pregnancy when she had to prop up her sagging belly with her two hands.
    To Ann it was money for warm clothes and snug lodgings. It was the going out and in without asking