Free Havisham: A Novel by Ronald Frame Page A

the small park to where our neighbours’ began.
    Why did she smile?
    ‘“She”?’
    ‘The one who’s destined to be the mistress of the Chase one day.’
    *   *   *
    I waited.
    What else was I supposed to think? W’m was honour bound to act, wasn’t he? But I was aware that now there often wasn’t a vacant seat next to mine which he could fill. Or a fourth was required for cards at the next table, and would I or W’m care to oblige?
    He had caught a cold somewhere, and wasn’t able to sing, although I didn’t see why that should prevent him from turning my pages as I played the Broadwood. He was lent some gun dogs, and when we all went walking it was necessary for him to keep them in order, going off to whistle after them. Even in the dining room: Lady Chadwyck had had draughts on the brain since Bath, and her son exchanged places with her, while experiments continued with rolled sausages of felt under the doors and putty in the window frames. All, so far as I could tell, quite legitimate, but no less frustrating, because no apology was ever offered to me.
    My mind wandered off. I found myself thinking of someone else: the stranger. The mysterious Mr Compeyson. (Christian name unknown.)
    His ready attention. His unsubscribing spirit as he’d mocked our dancing partners with his eyes. His amusing contrariness as he exchanged politesse with people he knew no better than I but pretended he did.
    The sense that we were engaged, just briefly, in some mutual conspiracy.
    The way his voice had dropped, warmly, into my ear.
    The aviary birds inside my head, and the muffled commotion he’d set up in the pit of my stomach, another little whorl of excitation.
    *   *   *
    I had to lay the canvas on my lap, set out my colours on the little folding table, and paint the view.
    ‘Paint what is there ,’ Signor Scarpelli had instructed me. ‘Only what you see.’
    What I saw, was that what was present? How similar was it to what Sheba saw, or Mouse?
    Signor Scarpelli had demonstrated the grid; the boxes; he had told us about meet proportions, about ‘pair-spect-eev’. But it didn’t make the job of representing, of turning a presence into its image, any easier.

T WELVE
    I pulled my skirts in as I passed Arthur. I could smell the drink on his breath again.
    ‘What? I offend you, do I?’
    I didn’t reply.
    ‘You’re too grand now to speak? And I’m not worth an answer?’
    He grabbed my arm.
    ‘Sister Catherine –’
    ‘Let go of me!’
    He was tall, nearly six feet already, but he didn’t have the strength of mind to resist me. I shook him off.
    A sum of money was missing from my father’s quarters. He summoned the staff, one by one. They left the room looking more shocked by the questioning than indignant, as I felt they had a right to be.
    ‘It was bound to happen,’ I told my father.
    ‘Why so?’
    ‘It’s not something that’s ever happened before.’
    ‘Exactly. What’s changed, then?’
    Then we didn’t have Arthur living under the same roof as ourselves. I didn’t need to say it. My father’s eyelids dropped with the realisation, he made a little funnel for air with his mouth.
    Arthur seemed to have no compunction about helping himself. He ordered clothes without telling my father, but expected him to pay for them. He took my father’s horse one evening when we had guests to dine in the house. At three o’clock one morning he was found feeding his friends from the larder. He was revenging himself for the obscurity he’d had to suffer while living with his mother.
    Other thefts were taking place, from coffers and sideboard drawers and the backs of presses, and we only discovered because a colleague of my father came across for sale in Canterbury a small silver dish engraved with a style of ‘H’ he recognised. I didn’t know how many addictions he was having to finance: tobacco (his fingers were yellowing at the tips), snuff (his nostrils had a raw red look), wine (he only drank